Mormon Land

Fighting hunger among Latter-day Saints in developing nations. Can the church do it? | Ep. 299

Last week, officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a combined donation of $44 million to a number of nonprofit organizations dealing with global hunger.
“No humanitarian effort is more foundational to Christ’s church than feeding the hungry,” Relief Society President Camille Johnson, head of the faith’s global women’s organization, said in a news release. “We are grateful to have the means to collaborate with wonderful organizations and provide relief to children and young mothers in dire need.”
But what about starving Latter-day Saint children, specifically, in developing countries?
After seeing hungry kids at church during his Latter-day Saint mission to Ecuador, Las Vegas physician Brad Walker returned decades later and launched the Liahona Children’s Foundation to provide a “caloric and vitamin supplement” to those suffering from malnutrition.
It began small but now his nonprofit — which changed its name two years ago to the Bountiful Children’s Foundation — actively serves “nearly 20,000 children and many of their mothers in 16 countries,” according to its website, and is working with the church’s division over humanitarian services for members. Walker says church brass also asked Johnson, the women’s leader, to tackle the problem worldwide — without giving her a staff, budget or direction on how to do so.
So those needs remain great. Walker says, with emotion, that some six children a day die of starvation somewhere in the world.
On this week’s show, he explains those needs and how this new collaboration with the church is working — and sometimes not working.

Is ‘Barbie’ an allegory of Mother Eve in LDS theology? | Episode 298

On the face of it, the blockbuster “Barbie” film seems like a light romp through gender-swapping universes — the first where women rule (Astronaut Barbie, Nobel Prize winner Barbie, President Barbie) in perfect harmony and the second where men dominate.
But some, including an author at Christianity Today, see it as a reverse allegory of the Christian Garden of Eden story with Barbieland as the world untouched by human tragedy. The heroine must commit “original sin” to travel to the “real world” to discover the knowledge of “good and evil.”
This telling echoes Mormon theology of a “happy fall,” in which Eve makes the right choice, even though she disobeys God, and persuades Adam to follow her. “In addition to introducing physical and spiritual death,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explains, “[the fall] gave us the opportunity to be born on the earth and to learn and progress.”
So what does the movie, which has attracted Latter-day Saints and millions and millions of other theatergoers, have to say about women and men, the need for choices, the all-male priesthood, patriarchy and perfectionism?
On this week’s podcast, Rachel Rueckert, an award-winning author and editor-in-chief of Exponent II, a magazine for and about Latter-day Saint women, discusses those questions and more.

From temple divorce to a thriving interfaith marriage | Episode 297

Carolyn Homer, a Latter-day Saint attorney in Washington D.C., expected her life to be the epitome of Mormonism’s teachings on marriage and family. She planned for a temple wedding and didn’t expect to work outside the home after children were born. But that marriage failed (“It was just a disaster”) and thrust her into an all new spiritual journey, since “everything that supposed to happen wasn’t happening.”
Now married to a Catholic and a relatively new mother, Caroyln and her husband, Brad are charting a rich path with both faiths as they rear their young son as 66% Catholic and 33% LDS. In this week’s podcast, Homer talks about her experience with marriage, divorce and interfaith parenting — and how they negotiate complex theological issues like the Book of Mormon and the LDS sacrament versus the Eucharist.

Meet Eli McCann — lawyer, writer and humorist on LDS culture | Episode 296

You might know Eli McCann as The Salt Lake Tribune’s guest humor columnist and storyteller. But there’s a lot you probably don’t know.
Eli, let’s just call him that, is an attorney who discusses religious freedom cases while teaching at the University of Utah’s law school. He served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ukraine and became a vocal supporter of helping that country after Russia attacked it last year. He’s an LGBTQ advocate and a board member of Equality Utah.
He is married to Skylar Westerdahl and lives in Salt Lake City with, as he puts it, their “two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs.”
Eli McCann joins us today in studio to explain how he puts all that together with his love of canning, knitting and marathon running.

Gordon Monson talks tithing, politics, patriotism and his new beat: religion | Episode 295

Paying tithing at a time when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has tens of millions of dollars in surplus assets. Lauding the faith’s explicit neutrality stance in U.S. partisan politics — along with its implicit call for more Democrats in the pews — and then seeing the church’s Utah Area Presidency embrace an effort to celebrate the Constitution by endorsing a group with multiple far-right ties.
Add to that senior apostle Dallin Oaks’ plea for young members to stop delaying marriage and child rearing while acknowledging the sometimes-crippling barrier of housing costs.
Yes, there has been no shortage of topics of late to which Salt Lake Tribune columnist Gordon Monson could add his voice and views.
On today’s show, a little more than year since he became a regular faith columnist, Monson discusses his latest pieces on tithing, politics, patriotism and marriage — and shares what has been most rewarding and most distressing about his new assignment.

Should an ‘inspired’ but imperfect Constitution be celebrated? | Episode 294

The Utah Area Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent a memo last month to the faith’s lay leaders in the Beehive State, urging their congregations to join a September celebration of the U.S. Constitution.
Nothing remarkable about that. Church teachings and culture have long embraced America’s founding and the role its governing document plays. But the missive also endorsed a grassroots group with ties to conservative — some say extremist — causes.
This seemed to run counter to the governing First Presidency’s recently updated commitment to political neutrality and its warning against straight-ticket partisan loyalties.
So what’s happening here? Were these dual directives or dueling directives? Can the church and its members honor the Constitution in some formal way without drifting into partisan polarization?
Discussing those questions and more on this week’s show are two Latter-day Saints with extensive public service backgrounds: Stewart Tuttle, a career diplomat who recently served as chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Panama, and Lew Cramer, who helped found World Trade Center Utah, served as an assistant commerce secretary in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and works as director general of the U.S. Commercial Service.

How British Latter-day Saints swayed their church on background checks | Episode 293

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints repeatedly has proclaimed that it has zero tolerance for abuse of any kind. That’s all well and good, some British Latter-day Saints reasoned, but not enough.
They wanted their faith to do more, to undertake concrete reforms that could help prevent abuse from happening in the first place. So they launched a widespread public and private lobbying effort. They surveyed members. They wrote to their church leaders. They contacted national lawmakers.
All that praying, pleading and prodding finally paid off when, starting this month, the church adopted a new policy mandating, among other measures, background checks for any church volunteers in the United Kingdom who work with children, youths or vulnerable adults.
On this week’s show, Sara Delaney and Jane Christie, who together began the “21st Century Saints” podcast, along with Douglas Stilgoe, host of the “Nemo the Mormon” podcast, discuss their campaign — when they started it, how they structured it, and why it succeeded.

Voice and views of LDS historian Kate Holbook live on after death | Episode 292

Barely a month after Kate Holbrook died, her widowed husband, Dr. Samuel Brown, heard her voice.
He was walking around New York and listening to the Maxwell Institute’s interview with Holbrook, a professional historian with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
During her five decades of life, Holbrook connected to hundreds of Latter-day Saint women in the present and elevated the lives of scores of women from the past.
Now Holbrook’s voice is speaking to a new, even wider audience in a new book, titled “Both Things Are True.”
“My dead beloved,” Brown writes about that Manhattan moment in the book’s epilogue, “reached … all the way to the center of me.”
And at least one of these five essays touches her husband in his grief. The piece on housework “is beautiful and thoughtful and provocative and does really important things for thinking about the shape of relationships with men and women,” he says in this deeply personal and poignant podcast. “But it was also, I think, her making sure I knew she forgave me for having been a pain…for the first 10 years of our marriage.…I had been a busy academic and had not really shown up for housework.”
Though Brown changed and became more involved in helping at home, the essay was his wife’s way of assuring him.
These five essays together “chart a path through the heart of Kate’s faith,” Rosalynde Frandsen Welch writes in the prologue. The pieces speak to history, belief, spirituality, community and the beauty of housework and cooking.
On this week’s show, Brown, an intensive care unit physician and writer, along with Welch, a senior research fellow at BYU’s Maxwell Institute and host of its podcast, discuss Holbrook’s book, their memories and how her words live on.

Deconstructing Carthage — Why Joseph was slain and why it was about more than religion | Episode 291

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints learn early on about the murder of their faith’s founder, Joseph Smith.
They know that, on June 27, 1844 (179 years ago this month), he and his brother Hyrum were gunned down by a mob at a jail in Carthage, Ill. They know that no one was ever convicted of the killings. And they know that the ugliness that took place outside their “City Beautiful” marked the beginning of the end to the Saints’ stay in nearby Nauvoo.
What many insiders and outsiders alike either don’t know or fail to recognize, however, is that Smith’s slaying was not only a religious martyrdom but also a political assassination. They forget that the church leader was a candidate for the U.S. presidency at the time of his death and was the first American to be assassinated while running for the White House.
On this week’s show, with the help of Benjamin Park, author of the acclaimed “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier,” we revisit the mystique surrounding Carthage, how it happened, why it happened, what can be learned from it.

Ben McAdams’ high hopes but low expectations for a politically balanced LDS electorate | Episode 290

For years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has proclaimed its neutrality in partisan politics, a position reaffirmed in the faith’s recently updated policy on the matter.
But in a strongly worded letter to U.S. members, the governing First Presidency added a new wrinkle, denouncing strict party-line voting.
“Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues,” the top leaders warned, “is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards.” They reminded Latter-day Saints that “principles compatible with the gospel may be found in various political parties” and urged them to “vote for those who have demonstrated integrity, compassion and service to others, regardless of party affiliation.”
For decades, Latter-day Saints have been among the most reliably Republican voting blocs with a number of members either overtly casting a straight GOP ticket or, in essence, doing so by simply backing the candidates with an “R” after their names.
Could this blunt message from the First Presidency begin to change that voting dynamic? Will more members, especially in red states like Utah, start to back Democrats or office seekers from other parties? Would a more balanced Latter-day Saint electorate be helpful or harmful for the global church?
On this week’s show, a prominent Latter-day Saint Democrat, Ben McAdams, a former congressman and Salt Lake County mayor, discusses those questions and more.