Mormon Land

Finding love in today’s Latter-day Saint dating scene | Episode 325

Ah, Valentine’s Day, a holiday full of hearts and hopes, cards and candy, roses and romance. It’s a time couples seek their favorite table at their favorite restaurant and view their favorite rom-com from their favorite couch.
What does it mean, though, for young members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Are they on the lookout for more than gestures — indeed, eternal marriage — or do they just want to have a good time?
On this week’s show, two young single adult Latter-day Saints, Sara Sumsion, who is working on a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy at Northwestern University, and Matt Judd, a health statistics consultant, discuss what the Latter-day Saint dating scene is REALLY like.

How Latter-day Saints can add other Christian traditions to Easter | Episode 324

Easter is the most significant holiday on the Christian calendar, celebrated in solemnity and song, pageantry and prayer, rituals and rejoicing, “hosannas and hallelujahs.”
While members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe deeply in Christ’s resurrection, they have not participated as a church with the rest of Christendom in immersive traditions like waving palms on Palm Sunday, washing feet on Maundy Thursday or carrying a large cross for Good Friday. So, many Latter-day Saints have joined with other Christians on these holy practices.
Last year, though, top Latter-day Saint leaders encouraged members to find ways to better commemorate the sacred moment when they believe Jesus rose from the dead.
Eric Huntsman, a Brigham Young University professor of ancient scripture, has spent his career reading biblical texts in their original languages. Last year, Huntsman, who is currently on hiatus from his position as academic director at BYU’s Jerusalem Center, co-wrote a book with Trevan Hatch, “Greater Love Hath No Man: A Latter-day Saint Guide to Celebrating the Easter Season.”
As many Christians prepare for next week’s Lent, Huntsman offers other tips on how Latter-day Saint individuals and families can better remember the “climax of the gospel story.”

Abuse and forgiveness — How gender imbalances sometimes protect LDS predators | Episode 323

Chelsea Goodrich was a returned missionary pursuing a graduate degree in California when she came forward with allegations that her father, John Goodrich, had molested her throughout her childhood.
(In a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, John Goodrich has denied the accusations of sexual assault.)
The alleged abuse, the subject of a recent Associated Press investigation, is not the reason, however, that Chelsea, now a 38-year-old licensed counselor, no longer identifies as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She attributes that shift to the response she received when she tried to protect children.
Friends and family, many from the tightknit Latter-day Saint community of Mountain Home, Idaho, where she grew up, discouraged her from continuing to press the matter, urging her instead to forgive her father.
In this week’s episode, she joins Deidre Nicole Green, a Latter-day Saint and theologian at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., to discuss how church leaders, members and others sometimes “weaponize” forgiveness, silencing survivors and preventing justice.

Why can’t Latter-day Saint girls pass the sacrament? | Episode 322

Every year, a new crop of young Latter-day Saints turning 12 by December will graduate from Primary, the faith’s program for children. The boys will get a new title — “deacon” — and start passing the bread and water of the sacrament (known as Communion in other Christian faiths and mostly distributed by priests and pastors), while the girls will start attending the Young Women’s program and get no new identity.
Why is there such a gender difference around the sacrament in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Tradition, says Sam Brunson, a Latter-day Saint tax attorney in Chicago who often writes about church issues on the blog By Common Consent. Or, in other words, “policy choices that church leaders made decades ago.”
Yes, the church has an all-male priesthood, but is passing the sacrament really a priesthood function? And if the Utah-based faith allows young women to carry those trays, does that mean they have to open up the priesthood to women?
On this week’s show, Brunson talks about how such differences came to be in the church and why he thinks some of them could be revised — without formally giving women the priesthood.

Benjamin Park on a fresh take of 200 years of Mormon history | Episode 321

Scholar Benjamin Park’s new book, “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” tells the sweeping saga of the rise, rifts and resilience of the nation’s most successful homegrown religion.
“The Mormon story,” he writes, “is the American story.”
Under the guidance of founder Joseph Smith, this new movement was cradled in upstate New York and nurtured in the heartland. But mounting persecutions and prosecutions left leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints feeling so abandoned by the country that gave the faith birth that they abandoned the country itself.
Out West, Brigham Young and his band of beleaguered believers built a remote religious empire. In the decades that followed, though, successive generations of Latter-day Saints slowly but surely returned to the arms of the American fold, eventually becoming among the nation’s most passionate, even partisan, patriots.
But like the country it once battled and now embraces, this global faith of 17 million members finds itself caught up in polarizing culture wars. Former frictions — between church and state, faith and intellect, obedience and dissent, patriarchy and feminism — regularly resurface even as new conflicts emerge.
On this week’s show, Park talks about some key players and moments in Latter-day Saint history, along with the tensions that persist to this day.

Why believers and critics miss the complexities of the Book of Mormon | Episode 320

Grant Hardy is among the preeminent scholars of the Book of Mormon.
The North Carolina history professor has produced two volumes on Mormonism’s sacred text: a study edition from Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, and a reader’s edition from the University of Illinois Press — and now, from Oxford University Press, a third, The Annotated Book of Mormon.
His latest effort is hailed as “the world’s first fully annotated, academic edition of the Book of Mormon.” Indeed, its 900 pages have almost as many footnotes and commentary as the text itself.
Hardy lays out the narrative like a series of stories, not as short verses, with extensive commentary and analysis about important themes, biblical connections and symbolic meanings. At the end, he adds essays to explore various ways of thinking about the Book of Mormon — as literature, ancient history, fiction, revealed scripture and world scripture.
On this week’s show, he talks about this massive undertaking; what Latter-day Saints often get wrong about their foundational text; why context matters when reading it; how the Book of Mormon compares and complements the Bible; and why, as a believer in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as a scholar, he finds the book “amazingly coherent and consistent.”

A look at LDS Church growth and what the membership stats really reveal | Episode 319

At every spring General Conference, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers a glimpse of its growth by reporting worldwide membership statistics, including the number of converts and children added to the faith’s rolls the previous year.
A more reliable barometer for tracking church expansion, however, can be found in the congregations created (or subtracted). So when the governing First Presidency recently announced new requirements for establishing wards and stakes, or clusters of congregations, insiders and outsiders naturally wondered what impact the changes would have.
For instance, stakes in most of the world previously needed 1,900 members; now they need 2,000, or 5% more. While stakes in the U.S. and Canada also need 2,000, that’s 33% fewer than the previous 3,000. On its face, this appeared to make it easier to form new stakes in much of North America and, in essence, inflate the church’s congregational count.
But experts say that may not be the case. In fact, Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, argues the overall rules could result in fewer stakes and wards coming on line.
On this week’s show, Martinich discusses the recent changes and other trends in church membership, including a newly released study showing self-identifying Latter-day Saints make up 42% of Utah’s adult population.

The LDS army that made its mark in history without firing a shot against a foe | Episode 318

This is a war story unlike any other.
It’s about a fighting force of nearly 500 men who were drafted, in a very real sense, not by the president of their nation but by the prophet of their faith.
Though they were prepared to die for a country they were fleeing, they labored to live for the families they were supporting. Though they were armed and marched through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, they never fired a single shot against their enemy. Though they never tasted death from combat, they endured casualties from foes just as dangerous and deadly: thirst, fatigue, hunger and sickness. Though they never recorded a military victory, they achieved a triumph perhaps far greater.
So why is the Mormon Battalion — a ragtag band of hundreds of reluctant riflemen, along with dozens of women and children, most of whom trekked nearly 2,000 miles from Iowa to Southern California — remembered not only in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also in the annals of the American experiment?
Discussing those questions and more and is Brent Top, retired professor of church history and doctrine at church-owned Brigham Young University and now president of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site.

Remembering a Latter-day Saint humanitarian who truly lived his religion | Episode 317

Lowell Bennion was among Mormonism’s greatest humanitarians, while also being one of its most prominent thinkers and teachers. Indeed, he was among the few non-general authorities or officers ever to speak in General Conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As the first director of the church’s Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, Bennion spoke powerfully and courageously against the church’s former priesthood/temple ban on Black members — which may have cost and encouraged students to see science and religion as complementary rather than contradictory paths to truth.
But he did more than teach or preach. Bennion, who died in 1996, created the Community Services Council in Salt Lake City to aid poor and marginalized populations. Eventually, a center for service was created in his name at the U., integrating outreach to the disadvantaged into the curriculum. Of the service he rendered, he once said, “I used to teach religion; now I practice it.”
Yet Bennion’s life and work remain largely unknown to today’s Latter-day Saints.
On this week’s show, George Handley, professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University and author of “Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator,” discusses the life and legacy of the legendary scholar, considered by many to be one of the founders of Mormon studies.

What to expect from Patrick Kearon, not your typical LDS apostle | Episode 316

Newly named Latter-day Saint apostle Patrick Kearon brings an unusual biography to second highest leadership council of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A British convert, he joined the faith at age 26. Kearon has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United States. He does not have a university degree, but, having been trained in communication, his speeches are earnest, eloquent and evocative.
He is the second European in the current Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the third born outside the United States.
What will the 62-year-old Brit’s background, passions and personality bring to the apostleship and how might he influence the global faith?
On this week’s show, Patrick Mason, Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, addresses those question and more.