A few weeks ago, while walking through Julietta Market at Lexington’s Greyline Station, I stopped for a few minutes at a used bookstore at one of the stalls and walked away with a copy of Thomas Merton: Passion for Peace. I haven’t gotten far into it yet—later that week, a book by a French theologian that I’d ordered arrived in the mail, and that’s taken up most of my reading attention since. However, I did manage to explore the introduction to the book the same day that I purchased it, and I was impressed by this passage:

Steve Shields does good work and has an interesting perspective on things. It’s fun to hear from him.

One of the highlights of the summer has been getting an article accepted in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This article takes as a starting point Cragun and Nielsen’s argument (also published in Dialogue) that:

what is really at play in the debate over the use of “Mormon” is legitimacy.

Cragun and Nielsen are writing in 2009, at a time when Big Love is on the air and the April 2008 FLDS Temple raid is (or was recently) on the news. The resurgence of Mormon fundamentalism into the American shared consciouness has led The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reclaim the word “Mormon,” which stands in contrast to its efforts since the 1990s to downplay that nickname and emphasize its full name. Indeed, it’s not long after this that the I’m a Mormon campaign is launched and that mormon.org gets a major corresponding redesign. However, if this leaning into the word “Mormon” stands in contrast with Latter-day Saint leaders’ previous efforts to distance themselves from the name, Russell Nelson’s August 2018 decision to abruptly reverse course and go further than any previous Latter-day Saint leader in distancing the church from the word “Mormon” felt downright jarring.