I think this is dumb, I feel strongly that “Mormonism” is larger than LDS institutions, and I’m pleased that the EFF has weighed in on this.

I have been meaning to read this book for months and was happy to have an uninterrupted couple of hours on a flight so that I could finally get to it.

It covers familiar ground but without feeling repetitive. I expect to cite it frequently in the future—in fact, I ought to work it into some slides I’m presenting tomorrow!

I backed this Kickstarter project several years ago, when a comic about Mormonism felt like it was right in the center of the Venn diagram of my interests. That’s still not far from the truth, but my relationship with Mormonism—and my experience as a Latter-day Saint missionary—is a lot more complicated than it was then.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about rereading this for ages but have bounced off of it a few times. I have big theological disagreements with some comics in the anthology, and I’m not a huge fan of the implicit queerphobia in at least two comics.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

Bookmarking this so I can point to it if anyone asks why I’ve shifted my research from ed tech to right-wing Mormonism.

I mostly skimmed this book, and I would have some quibbles with it if I got more into the details, but I found it really good. Musical theater is far, faaaar outside of my research interests, but this book articulates a fascinating “theology of voice” within Mormonism that will be helpful as I look to write something on Ellul and Mormon Studies.

Good read and worth bookmarking for later.

Hadn’t heard about this, and it feels like an invitation for a new research project of some kind.

I’m being a little hard on this book because it wasn’t quite was I was expecting. There’s a lot of good stuff in here despite not having some of what I was hoping to find. I do wonder if it would have been better as the original lecture it’s based on: You could hear some of the audio, and I think some of the fat could be trimmed from the manuscript. I enjoyed reading it, I just wasn’t wowed by it.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to read this—not that I wasn’t interested, but so many books, so little time, etc. However, a friend introduced me to NetGalley, where she was reading it prior to publication, and that pushed me into following her example.

I did wait until the end of my time limit with the book to really make progress, and between that rush and my familiarity with Smith’s life, I still wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it. In the end, though, it was a fascinating read. Like his take on Brigham Young, Turner is unsparing in his description but without being unsympathetic.

This is a big story, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more news, even if it is a recent development.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I think the “biography” subtitle is misleading), but it’s good! It’s organized around specific understandings or depictions of Jesus in Mormonism, and while it isn’t afraid of exploring the weird and controversial (I may be citing this at some point for a paper that touches on arguments about a polygamist Jesus), it’s also good about contextualizing Mormon beliefs within broader trends, thereby making (some) things (slightly) less weird. I’ve had this book for a while and am glad to have finally read it!

Beautiful story!

I like traditional hymns a lot, but yesterday’s service included two amazing Congolese choirs, and I’m starting to suspect that everything Mormonism taught me about guitars and drums not belonging in church is wrong.

This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!).

If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!) could make the case just as well and with fewer digressions.

I may no longer be a practicing Latter-day Saint, but this is the kind of cultural artifact that keeps me thinking of myself as Mormon. Peck’s writing—see also Heike’s Void, which I’d love to reread—depicts a beautiful Mormonism that I still feel connected to and that represents what the religion can be at its best.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints about these stories. They’re very male-centered (I’m not sure any of them pass the Bechdel Test), and even though it’s one of my favorites in some ways, the story of the crafting of the Liahona bugs me for the way that it imposes Mormon theology on first temple Israelite religion, as Mormons tend to do.

I admit to having peculiar tastes in fiction, but I’m completely serious in my belief that one of the best things Mormon literature has produced is a short story about unicorn-riding knights on Mars.

As far as I can remember, EVERY situation in which I’ve experienced multiple “Spencers” in a group and we’ve had to distinguish ourselves from each other has been in a Mormon-adjacent context. (“Greenhalgh” is also a disproportionately Mormon name, but that has fewer practical consequences.)

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take.

That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book. It’s a fun listen in most of the ways that count, there’s a clear love for 1980s San Francisco that comes through, and I can believe it as Marty Hench telling the story of how he got started in his career.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies.

I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this. The details of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormon history are sometimes sparse or ambiguous; more importantly, they’re hotly contested. I don’t mind at all a critical take on Smith, but even though the author is clearly respectful of the historical figure even with his warts and all approach, there’s a deeply ingrained Mormon skepticism in me that wonders if any of the choices verged on the salacious. That’s not a critique of the book so much as a personal observation and a wish that I could have enjoyed the story while setting aside the instinct to be skeptical of non-LDS tellings of the history (which is all the more ridiculous given that I’m going on 5 years of not practicing in that faith).

Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service. Before fast forwarding to my cameo, I actually ended up watching most of John’s homily, which I thought was excellent.

I love having a co-author who can provide the theoretical framing to turn my weird data from a dark corner of the internet into an interesting argument.

I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.