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.

As I continue to digitize old journals and documents by copying them into Day One (which is a great app, though I wish it hadn’t been acquired by Automattic, given all the drama currently happening there), I am regularly confronted with tensions between past-Spencer and present-Spencer. Maybe “confronted” and “tensions” aren’t the right words, because it’s good and natural for people to change, and I get some benefit out of making these observations, but there are ways that noticing these things can be difficult.

I. With Siblings in a Sibling-Only Chat Separate from the One with Parents and Partners

We process the news together (I’m not the one to start the conversation but glad for the sibling who did). It’s not a deep processing, but I’m not sure we would have done this much even a few years ago. We plan to send flowers to the widow, decide who’s going to write the note, and settle up over Venmo. We coordinate flights and talk about travel logistics, especially while our parents are waylaid with a surprise surgery that is making a hard week even harder. We talk about how other family members are doing. It shows that we’re all well into adulthood now, and that sometimes we even act like it.

I’m bookmarking this episode for later because it does a better job than I’ve ever heard of talking about how messy and complex and difficult it can be to have Mormon roots in Community of Christ—and it doesn’t even get into some of the “outside Utah” vs. “in Utah” dynamics that I personally think get overlooked.

I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.

This article speaks to a deep tension in Mormon theology: You can pray to God to tell you what is right, but you shouldn’t expect it to tell you something different than what church leaders say. To what extent, then, does prayer become subordinated to obedience?

Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background.

There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service. Well, not really—I had hoped to be there 30-45 minutes early and was only 20 minutes early, so I was later than I meant to be, but I wasn’t late late. The point that I want to make here still stands, though: I was later to the service than I had planned to be largely because I was coming from a family outing.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).

In some ways, I can’t at all relate to Dumbing of Age because my college experience was so wildly different. Yet, it’s funny how I can relate so much to parts of it now, well after my college years. I don’t know that I would have wanted to have this freshman year (especially not the melodramatic bits or superhero fights), but I do wish I could have learned some of the lessons in the story earlier in life. Anyway, it’s a great comic.

A lot of Mormons¹ have a persecution complex that isn’t really well founded, but it is true that a lot of people don’t really get Mormons. One of my favorite stories from my time as a Latter-day Saint missionary is when a well-meaning friend of ours told us to get rid of our distinctive nametags, because they made us look too much like Jehovah’s Witnesses (the joke here is that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t wear nametags—it’s Latter-day Saint missionaries who do that). I’ve really enjoyed the first two entries in Cory Doctorow’s Martin Hench trilogy, but I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about the third volume, which will feature a Utah-based computer scam involving a Latter-day Saint bishop. I’m not concerned about negative portrayals of Mormons, but it takes some real familiarity going beyond superficial cultural understandings to write Mormons correctly, and it will bug me if he gets the details wrong (that said, Doctorow’s casual reference to White Horse Prophecy Doomsdayers” in a recent book of his has given me reason to hope that Doctorow’s done his research).

Way back in August 2019, I copied into my journaling app a post by Katie Harmon-McLaughlin on the Community of Christ website. I’m glad I did so, because a recent website redesign has deleted this post and a lot of other old content! At the time, I was slowly but thoroughly exploring Community of Christ, trying to figure out if it was the place for me in the context of my changing faith. In that context, the first paragraph of the post was really welcoming to me:

Over the weekend, Nancy Ross published an interview with Kerry Pray about her new book The Book of Queer Mormon Joy on the Exponent II blog. One thing that stood out to me about the interview is the way that Pray’s feelings about the word “Mormon” echo my own:

“Ex-Mormon” never felt quite right because you don’t actually stop feeling Mormon when you have been one your entire life! It’s your culture and your heritage and where you come from. I tried post-Mormon for a while. But after Nelson made “Mormon” a forbidden word it got a whole lot easier because Mormon no longer necessarily referred to membership in the institutional church, which I no longer consider myself a part of.

I’ve written a few posts recently trying (somewhat awkwardly) to express an idea that’s been on my mind a lot over the past few years: That I want to respect someone’s right to hold a particular belief while being more skeptical about their right to insist that others hold that belief. A few days ago, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature, I found to my delight that I had written something to this extent a few years ago and then forgotten about it since.

An excellent history. I’ve read enough Mormon history that I don’t know if there was anything new for me in here, but Park does an excellent job of capturing 200 years in a constrained space and in accessible language, too. I highly recommend this to folks who want to learn more about Mormonism.

Just over a month ago, I found and blogged about a Thomas Römer quote that I had been trying to hunt down for quite some time. I’m continuing to listen to Römer’s lectures, and in the one I’m currently listening to, he revisits the idea from before. As before, I don’t want to miss the chance to write it down for future reference, and I figure a blog post is as good an opportunity as any to do so.

Bookmarking for future research. What a fascinating (if frustrating) interplay of social media platforms and religious authority.