Mormon Land

LDS singles sing, dance and rock out. Will such connections keep them in the church? | Episode 301

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Nearly 20,000 young single adult members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sang, danced, played, prayed, served, ran and worshipped over three weekends in August for a Utah YSA Conference.
Events, all under the theme “Together in Christ,” included a concert at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center, a dance at a Sandy convention hall, a 5K run at the new Saratoga Springs Temple, devotionals, games and other activities at Salt Lake City’s Salt Palace and Brigham Young University’s Marriott Center in Provo.
The conference came at a time when many millennials and younger generations are leaving the church and even religion altogether. Can events like this one help reduce that exodus?
On this week’s show, University of Utah student Carly Clark, who was a co-chair of the planning committee, and BYU student Josh Newman, who attended, discuss the conference, its purpose, appeal and success as well as whether such gatherings should be duplicated and repeated.

All about the tithing lawsuit facing the church | Episode 300

A multimillion-dollar fraud lawsuit against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appeared dead and buried nearly two years ago after a federal judge threw out the case.
But a divided appeals court revived part of James Huntsman’s suit this month, flatly stating that “a reasonable juror” could conclude that the faith’s top leaders, including then-President Gordon B. Hinckley, misrepresented how they spent $1.4 billion in church funds to build the for-profit City Creek Center mall in downtown Salt Lake City.
Did the money come from members’ tithing — intended for church and charitable operations — as alleged? Or did it come from the faith’s commercial enterprises and “earnings” of invested reserves — as the church has maintained? Or are those arguments, in the end, “distinctions without a difference.”
Where does the case go from here? What are its chances? What’s at stake for the global faith of 17 million members? And how does it fit into the ballooning media attention on the church’s wealth?
Salt Lake Tribune reporter Tony Semerad — who has reported on this lawsuit since it was first filed, along with a multitude of other stories about the church’s finances — answers those questions and more on this week’s show.

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.