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Palin Talks Israel in Anticipation of 2012

By Shalom Goldman

…th group with our friends… My siblings and I were baptized together in Big Lake’s freezing, pristine waters by Pastor Paul Riley. I got into the habit of reading Scripture before I got out of bed every morning and making sure it was the last thing I did at night. But we learn much more about Palin’s beliefs regarding Israel from a 2008 story in the conservative, Rev. Moon-owned Washington Times: Mrs. Palin’s brand of evangelical Protestantism is e…

The Psychological Cost of an LDS Mission

By Holly Welker

…first mission president was always asking Salt Lake City to send him equal numbers of male and female missionaries. Instead, elders outnumbered sisters two to one. I have only a few quibbles with the article. One was the rather cursory way that organizations like Ordain Women were dealt with, though the Times absolutely made up for that on March 6, with an article detailing emails from women about changes they would like to see in the church. The…

Glenn Beck Attracts 300,000; Pakistan Floods Impact
17 million

By Joanna Brooks

…eas, with additional shipments from the Humanitarian Relief Center in Salt Lake City forthcoming. And I was especially heartened to see the Church teaming with Islamic charities to provide relief, as it did during the Haitian earthquake crisis, when it partnered with Islamic Relief USA to send food and medical supplies. The Church has its reasons—religious reasons—for being modest about humanitarian efforts, as it has explained here. And I had sus…

Touch Me, Man, I’m Healed, I’m Straight

By Ted Cox

…homosexuality. In 2007, Wyler addressed a group of ex-gay Mormons in Salt Lake City. He said that as part of his healing work, he “found a men’s experiential healing retreat—and discovered a connection to men unlike anything I had ever known before. For the first time in my life, I really felt like a man among men—like I really belonged.” That retreat was the Mankind Project’s all-male New Warrior Training Adventure, which as the Houston Press re…

With the Death of One of the Last Three Shakers, an American Religious Tradition Takes a Step Closer to Extinction

By Ed Simon

…ast three remaining Shakers. Sister Frances was a member of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine who spent her life teaching and writing about her experiences as a member of the ever-dwindling, idiosyncratic Protestant denomination. Brother Arnold Hadd, one of those who survive her, reported that Sister Frances died “surrounded in love, tears and Shaker songs.” Sister Frances Carr A Shaker since the age of 10, Sister Frances…

Should Romney be Asked about Mormon Women’s Issues at the Debates?

By Joanna Brooks

…ange of Mormon women’s voices in this important August article in the Salt Lake Tribune. Ask Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Mormon feminist Laurel Thatcher Ulrich who in Stack’s article calls the past decades in Mormon women’s history the “Great Disappearance” for Mormon women. When one recalls that Mormon women in the late 19th century were national suffrage activists and in the early 20th century were building hospitals and other major soc…

What’s Eating Mitt Romney?

By Joanna Brooks

…ign, Peggy Fletcher Stack, an award-winning religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, interviewed members of the Mormon congregations (or “wards”) Romney led in Boston. They remembered him, Stack recalls, as a full human being: someone who gave his time generously to church service but had trouble remembering names; he couldn’t tell a joke, but he did attempt a Michael Jackson-style moonwalk. On issues of gender, Romney made some mistakes, but…

NBA Player Jason Collins Comes Out

By Peter Montgomery

…to new things, religious and cultural. In Utah, we visited the Mormon Salt Lake Temple. In Atlanta, the house of Martin Luther King Jr. That early exposure to otherness made me the guy who accepts everyone unconditionally. Of course it didn’t take long for religious right leaders to bring a different Christian persepctive to the conversation. Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber tweeted that it was “sad” that Collins was being treated as heroic for admit…

Dear Mitt, Young Mormon Families Need Medicaid Too

By Catherine Jeppsen

…e elderly, the unemployed, and veterans—but it also includes a significant number of young Mormons like me. Last year the Salt Lake Tribune reported that “44 percent of births to parents who listed ‘student’ as their occupation” in Utah in 2008 were funded by Medicaid. About 39 percent of those births occurred in Utah County, home to a population that’s about 80% Mormon and to LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University. As the wife of a BYU graduat…

How Many Ways to be Mormon and Gay?

By Joanna Brooks

…e to negotiate being gay in the Mormon tradition. And this weekend in Salt Lake City, Mormons from across the sexuality and orthodoxy spectrums will gather for what organizers are describing as a potentially historic gathering: the Circling the Wagons conference. The historic question at the heart of this enterprise: can such a diverse group of people find common grounds for mutual acknowledgement and respect? According to conference co-organizer…