The biggest recent news for members, especially women, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the introduction in some hot, humid regions of “sleeveless” temple garments. Faithful Latter-day Saints wear temple garments underneath their clothing as a reminder of sacred covenants. They are not meant to be seen, but the style and cut of them have been difficult to conceal under ever-evolving fashions. That is why so many women were delighted by one of the redesign options — labeled “open sleeve” — because it looks more like a tank top than the current capped sleeve alternatives. They also liked the new “full slip” and “half-slip” designs meant to be worn under dresses. For now, these new garments are available in the Philippines and parts of Africa. But the church website shows they will be sold in the U.S. by the end of next year. Discussing the new garments on this week’s show are Laura Brignone, a Latter-day Saint research analyst at Sacramento State University who has assessed current garment cuts and how they work — or don’t work — with popular fashion, and Emily Jensen, a writer and web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

By following an unconventional parenting path, Latter-day Saints Gabrielle and Ben Blair have learned to buck conventional parenting wisdom — and, along the way, remove a lot of the stress that comes with raising kids. On this week’s show, Gabrielle Blair, founder of Design Mom and The New York Times bestselling author of “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion,” and Ben Blair, co-founder and president of Newlane University, discuss what they have discovered on their parental journey. They spell all that out and more in their new book, “The Kids Are All Right: Parenting With Confidence in an Uncertain World.”

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was launched on Aug. 22, 1847, just 29 days after the pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley. After the Tabernacle on Temple Square in the heart of Salt Lake City was completed, the choir performed there for more than a hundred years. Millions have heard the group’s music via a weekly devotional radio program, “Music and the Spoken Word,” which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started in 1929, making it the longest continuously running network broadcast in history. The show is inspiring to insiders and outsiders but never dogmatic. Ronald Reagan called the troupe “America’s Choir.” The famed choir has sung at six U.S. presidential inaugurations, 13 World Fairs, as well as the 2002 Winter Olympics, and toured in dozens of countries. In 2018, the choir changed its name to The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, and, in 2020, it was sidelined by the global pandemic. On this week’s show, former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, former Health and Human Services secretary and the choir’s current president, talks about how the choir navigated those changes and challenges, the group’s mission, and what’s in the future for the church’s most visible goodwill ambassadors.

More than three-fourths of Latter-day Saints say they revere nature and feel a responsibility to protect it. Classes on Earth stewardship at Brigham Young University are filling up as young members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wrestle with the dangers caused by climate change and feel inexorably prompted to act — to do something. What if the church went all-in on protecting the planet, proposing concrete plans to be adopted in every region? Would being involved in an urgent global effort — much as the food storage mandates prepared members for lean times — give more young people a reason to stay in the fold? On this week’s show, Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at church-owned BYU, discuss environmental issues, his faith, and the activism and idealism he sees in his students. He also makes the case that safeguarding the Earth and fighting climate change are part of Christian discipleship.

Two federal appellate courts. Two historic hearings. Two tithing lawsuits. One overarching allegation: namely, that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days has misled its members — whether about its finances or its history. In one case, prominent former Latter-day Saint James Huntsman insists top church leaders misrepresented how they spent $1.4 billion of the faith’s funds to build the for-profit City Creek Center shopping mall in downtown Salt Lake City. Topics ranging from religious autonomy and the U.S. Constitution to outright fraud and even a Beatles classic surfaced last week before a full panel of judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the other, ex-members accuse church authorities of hiding important details of Mormonism’s beginnings in order to persuade the faithful to pay their tithes. Oddly enough, founder Joseph Smith, his “seer stone” and translation of the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, were openly discussed before a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. So where do these lawsuits go from here? What are their prospects? And how do they fit into the continued media attention on the church’s wealth and a potentially expansive and expensive class-action case? On this week’s show, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Tony Semerad, who has reported on these lawsuits from the get-go and brought to light other aspects of the faith’s financial empire, helps us wind through this legal maze.

Next week, Jewish adherents across the globe will begin the annual 10-day examination of their lives and deeds. It starts with Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) on the evening of Oct. 2 and concludes with Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) on the evening of Oct. 11. It is a time for self-reflection, for commemoration, for celebration and for recommitment. It is a chance to think about forgiveness and to make amends to those they have harmed. This year’s High Holy Days are especially fraught for the world’s Jewry with so many eyes are on Israel and its ongoing battles against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There’s also a war in Ukraine and deep divisions in the United States during this election season. On this week’s show, Rabbi Samuel Spector, leader of Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami, discusses the importance of these holidays at this particular time.

Latter-day Saint Jenna Carson, who became the first member ever to serve as a chaplain in the federal prison system, was a student at Harvard Divinity School when, she said, God called her to become a military chaplain. That was 2015. And although Carson did not yet know it, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not at that time grant women the all-important endorsement required by the Defense Department. Female Latter-day Saints could obtain endorsements to serve as chaplains in hospitals, education, hospice care and prisons — but not, it turned out, the military. Nevertheless, the feeling persisted. And so did she. Setbacks followed, but, in 2021, she won Salt Lake City’s go-ahead. The next year, she was on her way to boot camp. Two years into being an Air Force chaplain, Carson has more than a little to say about what it’s like to be a female spiritual authority operating if not within the LDS Church, then with its approval.

In 2014, Neylan McBaine wrote a groundbreaking book, “Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact.” Even given the patriarchal structure of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, McBaine argued that there was much more the global faith could do to see, hear and include women. “At that time, there were many who felt discussing these facts was unfaithful or dangerous,” McBaine told an audience of 4,000 at last week’s Restore conference. “We swim so entirely in the waters of patriarchy that many of us do not see the extent to which our organizational structure, the language we use, our understanding of God, our quoting of spiritual authorities, our visual representations in our meetings, and the stories of our scriptures center the experiences and viewpoints of men.” Now McBaine hopes Latter-day Saints will call out “patriarchy” and acknowledge how different its goals and rules are from other systems that exist in the U.S. On this week’s show, she discuss where women in the church are now and how it has — or has not — changed in the decade since she published her book.

Like Salt Lake City’s mayor, he oversees a major Western municipality founded by 19th-century Mormon pioneers. Like Salt Lake City’s mayor, the heart of his diverse, dynamic and growing city features a historic temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint bounded by a sparkling mixed-use development built by the Utah-based faith. And like Salt Lake City’s mayor, he supports Kamala Harris for president. But unlike Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, Mesa Mayor John Giles is a Republican and a Latter-day Saint — and that’s why his support of the Democratic ticket is grabbing national headlines. A graduate of Brigham Young University, Giles is a lawyer serving his 10th and final year leading Arizona’s third-largest city. He also has run dozens of marathons, but it’s his stance in 2024′s presidential race — in a swing state that could determine who wins the White House — that catapulted this moderate Mormon mayor into a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. On this week’s show, Giles discusses his decision to buck Donald Trump and instead back Harris, along with his desire to see the reemergence of a more-centrist Republican Party and a less-polarized political climate.

In 2017, a Utah family began discussing some of the challenging questions facing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From those modest beginnings, a multidimensional platform emerged called Faith Matters, which defines itself as a “space in which an expansive, radiant approach to the restored gospel can be considered.” The effort now includes a popular podcast, book publishing, online courses, and, coming next week, its third in-person “Restore” conference. The giant gathering at the Mountain West Expo Center in Sandy has attracted more than 3,000 paid registrants and will feature speakers, poets, musicians and artists — including Astrid Tuminez, Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, Jennifer Walker Thomas, Terryl and Fiona Givens, Mauli Bonner, Neylan McBaine, Allison Dayton and Eboo Patel. It is, organizers say, meant to “inspire, enlighten and nourish faith.” On this week’s show, Zachary Davis, executive director of Faith Matters, editor of its Wayfare magazine and co-director of the conference, discusses this organization, the upcoming conference and how they appeal to, help and inspire a range of Latter-day Saints.

The occasional updates to the online General Handbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often routine, addressing relatively mundane policies, practices and procedures within the global faith of 17.2 million members. Not so this week. The new guidelines spelled out for local lay leaders and their approach to transgender individuals have created a firestorm among LGBTQ members and their allies not seen, perhaps, since the hotly disputed — and now-discarded — exclusion policy of November 2015 against same-sex couples. The new rules state, for instance, that members who have transitioned in any way — whether surgically, medically or socially — cannot receive a temple recommend, work with children, serve as teachers in their congregations or fill any gender-specific assignments, such as president of the women’s Relief Society. They cannot stay at most youth camps overnight. And they are urged to use single-occupancy restrooms at church meetinghouses or station a “trusted person” outside to keep others from entering when they use a restroom that aligns with their personal gender identity. Discussing these new policies and their potential impact on members are religion scholar Taylor Petrey, editor-in-chief of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and author of “Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism,” and Michael Soto, a transgender and queer man who grew up in the church and now serves as president of Equality Arizona.

A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wants to invite her daughter’s friend to join them for their congregation’s annual Halloween trunk-or-treat. But it’s being held in the parking lot of the church, and she worries the parents will think the invitation carries ulterior motives. Across the street, a couple plan a neighborhood dinner party. They want to throw the invite open to everyone, but there will be alcohol, and they fear offending their teetotaling Latter-day Saint neighbors. In the end, they opt to play it safe and invite only a few (non-Latter-day Saint) couples. The Salt Lake Tribune heard stories like this and more when, nearly a quarter century ago, it undertook no small task: an in-depth exploration of Utah’s religious divide. And we heard them again when, this year, we solicited feedback from readers about how the dynamic shapes their neighborhoods. On this week’s show, Latter-day Saint LaShawn Williams, a licensed clinical social worker with a doctorate in education, and Bob Goldberg, a U.S. historian, member of Utah’s Jewish community and former director of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, discuss this “unspoken divide.”

Religion, in general, has prompted believers to have a more positive view of their bodies, and Mormonism specifically teaches that Heavenly Parents are embodied, that humans are created in their divine image, and that the body is a temple. Why, then, do some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggle with their body image? Why do many turn to cosmetic surgery to “improve” their bodies? Two researchers from Brigham Young University have just completed what they say is the largest study ever done of how Latter-day Saint doctrine and culture may affect body image. On this week’s show, study co-author Lauren Barnes, a licensed therapist and professor in BYU’s School of Family Life, discuss the findings — and suggestions for improving body image.

Last August, nearly 20,000 Latter-day Saint young single adults came together to sing, dance, play, pray, run and worship over three weekends. By all accounts, it was a smashing success. They’re back again this weekend for a three-day festival to celebrate their membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to strengthen their faith, and to feel a sense of belonging. And, they say, to try to break a mark recognized by the Guinness World Records for “the most contributions to a birthday card” — for President Russell M. Nelson, who turns 100 in September. Earlier this month, the Utah-based faith raised the age limit for “young single adults” from 30 to 35, while the term “single adults” now describes unmarried members ages 36 and older. Here to talk about the coming event and the changing demographics is Sara Sumsion, a young single adult who is working on a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy at Northwestern University, and Richard Ostler, who has served as a bishop over a YSA ward, or congregation.

For many Latter-day Saints, church is a place of solace, service and spirituality. Some folks, though, find their participation in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be painful, a source of inner conflict. These days some members, especially younger ones, feel betrayed to discover that the faith’s history is not as pure as the simplistic narrative they were taught as children. Or they wonder about men called to be prophetic who have said hurtful things about people of color or LGBTQ believers. They challenge the church’s vast wealth and what they see as its ethical failings. They have a hard time seeing any value in organized religion, which leads some to question the existence of God, who seems absent rather than consistently present in their lives. Tyler Johnson, an oncologist at Stanford who has served as a bishop in a young single adult congregation, has heard and wrestled with all of these issues. On this week’s show, Johnson, author of “When Church Is Hard,” offers a road map to developing a more nuanced, understanding, empathetic approach to the questions of today.

Claudia Bushman was 40 years old, a mother of six and working on an advanced history degree when she, essentially, was volunteered to become the first editor-in-chief of Exponent II, an independent feminist magazine for Latter-day Saint women. That was 1974. Rachel Rueckert, a 30-something novelist, career woman and the magazine’s current top editor, wasn’t even born then. Despite the age difference, the two share an important passion: giving voice to women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As the magazine celebrates its 50th anniversary, Bushman and Rueckert discuss their feelings about the magazine, the personal stories it has shared, how it has changed over the decades, what it has accomplished, and why they believe it remains relevant — and crucial — today and will stay that way well the future.

Few groups exist in the world like missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They may be assigned to different countries or speak different languages, but for 18 months to two years, tens of thousands of these mostly young proselytizers share the same strict schedule, routine, identity and purpose: namely, to share the good news of — and seek converts to — their religion. More than a million have served in the church’s history, so missionary stories are practically as ubiquitous in the 194-year-old global faith as are soaring steeples, crying babies and tiny sacrament cups. Some stories are inspiring. Some are scary (with odes to devilish humans and even Satan himself). Some are funny. And some are, well, tall on tale and short on truth. Talking about these narratives, some of which are cataloged at church-owned Brigham Young University, on this week’s show are folklorist Christine Blythe, executive director of the Mormon History Association, and her husband and fellow folklorist, Christopher Blythe, author of “Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse.” Together, they host the Latter-day Saint podcast “Angels and Seerstones.”

In 2014, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published an official essay detailing Joseph Smith’s marriages to multiple women. After decades of insisting otherwise, the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, has since conceded that the faith founder did participate in polygamy. Highly regarded scholarly works have documented Smith had at least 33 wives, and most historians widely accept that the church leader preached — albeit privately — and practiced plural marriage. So why is this issue gaining increased attention in various Mormon circles and why are so-called polygamy deniers arguing that Smith had but one wife, Emma, while pinning the practice instead on perhaps the Western world’s most famous polygamist, Brigham Young, and his associates? What does the evidence really show? Why is this debate springing up now? And what do the competing factions stand to win or lose? Answering those questions and more on this week’s show are Brooke LeFevre, a doctoral candidate at Baylor University who has written about the experiences of 19th-century Latter-day Saint women in plural marriages, and Matthew Bowman, chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University who penned a recent Salt Lake Tribune column on the topic.

Janette Petersen, a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had been attending Sunday services with her wife, Tammy, as faithfully as her job would allow for nearly five years when her membership was withdrawn. Although the letter she received informing her of the decision did not state a reason, Janette told The Tribune her local lay leader, known as a stake president, had pinned it on her marriage. The church teaches that while being attracted to individuals of the same sex is not a sin, physical intimacy is and that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. Ryan and Liz Giles, on the other hand, have been faithful members of two congregations — one in Houston and their current ward in Washington state — since the two women tied the knot in 2021. They have yet to have their membership challenged. All three women join us today to talk about their church experience as individuals in same-sex marriages, and what they believe is behind the inconsistency playing out when it comes to treatment of couples like them.

For 115 years, the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, has been advancing the cause of justice for Black Americans. For 111 years, the Anti-Defamation League has been doing much the same for Jewish Americans. And for 104 years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been safeguarding the constitutional rights of everyone in the United States. So which group is protecting, advocating and advancing the rights of Latter-day Saints? While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints certainly looks out for its own interests and apologetic groups defend church teachings, no independent organization is dedicated to civil rights for members. It’s time to change that, argues Public Square Magazine. In a recent staff editorial, the online publication written from a Latter-day Saint perspective, called for the establishment of a civil rights organization to advocate for the rights of members in “political, legal and cultural spaces.” On this week’s show, Public Square Managing Editor C.D. Cunningham and Associate Editor Brianna Holmes discuss why such a group is needed, how it could operate and whom it could benefit.

Jeff McCullough took a trip to Utah in 2020, and it changed his life. No, the evangelical pastor didn’t convert to the state’s predominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he didn’t launch a virulent campaign to explore what some have seen as Mormonism’s heresies. Instead, he felt a divine call to launch a YouTube channel, titled Hello Saints, to, as he put it, “fight criticism with curiosity.” “Most of my Christian friends didn’t say very nice things about the people from the LDS Church,” McCullough says in his introduction, “and I don’t really like that.” So the 43-year-old Hope Chapel minister from the Bible Belt, who calls himself a “recovering Mormon basher,” set about exploring the beliefs and practices of the Utah-based faith, eager to build bridges between that church and evangelical Christians. McCullough now lives in the Beehive State and has produced more than 90 short videos comparing and contrasting “the lifestyle, culture and beliefs of Mormons and mainstream Christianity,” including questions like these: Are Mormons Christians? What do Christians and Latter-day Saints agree and disagree about? On his journey to familiarize himself and his audience with this unfamiliar faith, he has viewed General Conference, attended Sunday services, read the Book of Mormon and toured a Latter-day Saint temple. His Hello Saints channel, which operates as a nonprofit, has 60,000 subscribers and nearly 7 million views. He is currently hosting a virtual summit with interviews and presentations by Latter-day Saints and evangelicals on topics ranging from Jesus and marriage to politics and heaven. On this week’s show, McCullough discusses his online efforts, his approach and what he hopes to accomplish.

Forty-six years ago this month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, under then-President Spencer W. Kimball, lifted its prohibition preventing Black men from entering the all-male priesthood and Black women and men from participating in temple rites. This historic shift, the most significant since the faith stopped practicing polygamy, abruptly ended this racist ban, but it hardly ended racism within the church. After all, 126 years of theological justifications for the ban remained, including influential works such as “Mormon Doctrine” by apostle Bruce R. McConkie. Cleanup still needed — and needs — to be done. Building on President Gordon B. Hinckley’s outreach efforts, current church leader Russell M. Nelson has called on members to lead out against racism and has cemented ties with the NAACP. Matthew Harris’ new book, “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” explores the history of the priesthood/temple ban, from its racist roots under Brigham Young to its removal and its aftermath, with an eye especially on its effects on Black Latter-day Saints. With unprecedented access to the papers of Kimball, McConkie, Hugh B. Brown and Joseph Fielding Smith, Harris offers an insider view of the decision-making process among the church hierarchy regarding issues of race and this momentous move. Join us for this conversation.

For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is much to celebrate in its latest statistical report: The worldwide growth rate in the 17.2 million-member faith is growing. The expansion of congregations is expanding. And the number of U.S. states with declining membership is, well, declining. East Africa, meanwhile, is booming, the U.S. is rebounding, and many growth measures have met or surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Still, there are causes for concern: West Africa, unlike the continent’s eastern and central regions, has seen its Latter-day Saint growth slow. While the U.S. enjoyed an increase in net membership, it once again had the largest net decrease in wards and branches. California continues to bleed Latter-day Saints and growth rates in Utah, home to the global faith’s headquarters, remain near historic lows. On this week’s show, Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, dissects all this data and deciphers what the numbers say about the state of the church.

Since shortening its Sunday services and refocusing its curriculum more than five years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has trumpeted a home-centered, church-supported approach with an emphasis on covenant-making and covenant-keeping. This shift has some members worried about a loss of community. Gone are roadshows, pageants, sports leagues, cultural celebrations and more. While there has been an explosion of temple building, there has been a slowdown in chapel building. The church meetinghouse of today has become just that — a house for staid and stiff meetings, mainly on Sunday — and not the buzzing and bustling community centers of yesteryear. Would a return to some of that past help not only the church’s present but also its future? Candice Wendt, a staff member of McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing editor at Wayfare magazine, wrote about the church’s evolution from community to covenants in a recent blog post for Exponent II. She joined us for this week’s episode of “Mormon Land” to talk about what she feels is lost in the church’s efforts to emphasize individual covenants over community building. As she put it “I find when community connection and belonging get weak, motivation to be engaged in the faith tradition falters and religious life actually becomes a lot less relevant to people.”

Born in West Germany, Ralf Grünke has been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for most of his life. But it was complicated. And, among his Catholic and Lutheran peers, that meant he sometimes keenly felt his “otherness.” Still, being “an ugly duckling between the swans,” Grunke has written, was a “blessing in disguise.” He studied his own faith deeply, reading everything he could find, pro or con, as well as other faiths, and developed a strong foundation spiritually and scholarly. He now enjoys a spectrum of friends and contacts among all religions, while representing the Utah-based church. Grunke is the church’s assistant communication director for Central Europe, headquartered in Frankfurt. He joined “Mormon Land” for a special on-location podcast in Hamburg about the faith’s status on the Continent.

Without a doubt, says writer and scholar Caroline Kline, Latter-day Saint leader President Camille Johnson would have heard former church presidents telling working mothers to “come home” and focus on their families. Instead, she pursued a 30-year career as a corporate lawyer. In this episode of “Mormon Land,” Kline, assistant director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University, explains just how radical it is that the top brass of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are lauding her as a role model — and why their decision to do so may be a tough pill to swallow for some. The author of “Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness” also breaks down what she sees as an increased anxiety by church leadership over female members’ activity and level of devotion, why their current efforts to reverse worrisome trends could backfire and what they could do instead to make women feel more at home.

The role of women in any patriarchal faith is always fraught. It is especially confusing in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which celebrated women who led the charge for suffrage while also practicing polygamy. Past Latter-day Saint women like Eliza Snow and Emmeline Wells held high-profile positions in the hierarchy almost until their deaths — Susa Young Gates, an influential daughter of church prophet Brigham Young, was even dubbed a “13th apostle” — while today’s top female leaders are in and out in just five years. Earlier general presidents of the women’s Relief Society were well known to members and wielded wide personal power, but, like the current high-level female leaders, they never held offices as “general authorities.” Now comes word that, unlike yesteryear, today’s General Relief Society Presidencies don’t even meet weekly with an apostle “liaison” to the governing First Presidency. On this week’s show, April Young Bennett, a blogger and essayist for Exponent II who has seen the evolving changes for Latter-day Saint women, discusses where top female leaders stand in today’s church, what could or should be done to elevate their status, and whether women’s ordination is the only way to truly balance the gender scales in the global faith.

All kinds of believers and nonbelievers have described brushes with death in which they briefly left their bodies to see and feel otherworldly elements. While most scientists say these “near-death experiences” are the product of neurons firing in particular ways under particular stress, many who are religious view them as objective encounters, occurring in space and time. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seem particularly intrigued by the way such experiences affirm their teachings of the afterlife and have rushed to buy the many books on the topic, including Betty Eadie’s 1992 bestseller, “Embraced by the Light,” and, more recently, John Pontius’ “Visions of Glory: One Man’s Astonishing Account of the Last Days.” While Eadie’s book tapped into New Age Mormonism popular in the 1980s and ‘90s, “Visions of Glory” — and the writings of Chad Daybell, a Latter-day Saint writer in Idaho who has been accused of murder — seems to draw on apocalyptic and political speculations. On this week’s show., historian Matthew Bowman, director of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California and author of “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America,” discusses this genre and its implications in Latter-day Saint culture.

Few conversations are as fraught as those among family members who disagree about ideas they hold dear, and none more so than religion. Such exchanges can be especially painful for believers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith that can be all encompassing with strong teachings about here and the hereafter, especially about family relationships, and practices that reflect those teachings. So what happens in families when some hold firm to the faith and others walk away? How do parents, children and siblings respond to those who have chosen a different path? Can they still love one another or does judgment make that impossible? Do they talk about it or do they slink away in silent agony? Utah Valley University’s Kimberly Abunuwara, director of the humanities program, came up with an unusual way to explore these questions. She enlisted a group of students to interview various families about how their attachment to — or distance from — Mormonism affected their connections and communications. The team then staged a performance, titled “In Good Faith,” in which student actors used those firsthand accounts from members and former members to reveal these wrenching experiences. In a special “Mormon Land” episode, recorded live at Orem’s UVU, Abunuwara and two of the student performers — Brielle Szendre and Caleb Voss — are discuss what they discovered, how the experience affected them and what others can learn from this effort.

The recently completed 194th Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may merit no more than a mere mention in the history books of Mormonism. There were no theological breakthroughs, no major policy changes, no sweeping shake-ups among the top echelons. But the sessions did feature significant speeches, memorable moments and notable nuances. A British church leader delivered his debut conference sermon as an apostle. A longtime apostle returned to the conference pulpit after an extended absence. A Black general authority rose in the ranks to a historic level. Speakers publicly addressed the private wearing of so-called temple garments by the faithful. And the church’s aging senior leadership, led by a prophet-president inching ever closer to the century mark, made conspicuous accommodations to conference procedures. On this week’s show, Emily Jensen, web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, look back at the conference and what it may mean to the church and its 17.2 million members moving forward.

Latter-day Saint leaders seem to be concerned about what they believe is the causal, even “cavalier” wearing of religious underclothing by devout members. Indeed, in a recent speech, a general authority Seventy reportedly condemned women who wear temple garments only on Sunday and to the temple and the rest of the week can be seen in “yoga pants.” He warned that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was planning to issue stricter rules about the wearing of garments. The standard instruction has essentially been for women and men to wear them “day and night.” According to a recent survey, though, some women are donning them when and where they want — and they don’t, it seems, view that as disobedience or inappropriate. At the same, it is getting tougher to find clothing, especially for women, that completely covers garments. On this week’s episode, author Kristine Haglund, former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and Laura Brignone, a Latter-day Saint research analyst at Sacramento State University, discuss the challenges in wearing garments, what some members are choosing, and what it means for their faith.

A decade after the Ordain Women movement within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made national news, another feminist issue is getting lots of media attention. During a March 17 meeting to celebrate the creation of the church’s Relief Society, J. Anette Dennis, first counselor in the faith’s global women’s organization, declared that “there is no other religious organization in the world that I know of that has so broadly given power and authority to women.” Dennis went on to say that “other faiths ordain women to roles like priest or pastor, but those individuals represent a small minority when compared to the total number of women within their congregations.” In the Utah-based church, all women “who choose a covenant relationship with God in the House of the Lord are endowed with priesthood power directly from God.” It is a sentiment that has been expressed previously by Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the church’s governing First Presidency, and by Sheri Dew, a former counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. But when the church posted Dennis’ quote on Instagram, a flood of responses from women ensued — more than 15,000 comments. And, in an unusual acknowledgment, the church’s social media team promised to share the “thoughts, feelings and experiences” with the faith’s leaders. On this week’s show, discussing this speech, the overwhelming response it generated and the role of women in the church, are Julie Hanks, a Latter-day Saint therapist in Utah, and Amy Watkins Jensen, a Latter-day Saint middle school humanities teacher in Oakland, California, who created the Women on the Stand letter-writing campaign in the wake of women’s leaders being removed from the stand at worship services in the Bay Area.

In the past, historians and preservationists were not always pleased with how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints treated its treasured buildings. Bulldozing Utah’s Coalville Tabernacle and gutting the Logan Temple led to cries of anguish from insiders and outsiders alike. These days, though, the same groups are lauding the painstaking and resplendent renovation of the faith’s pioneer-era Manti Temple, which is now open to public tours. And they are reassured by the Salt Lake City-based church’s plans for its recent purchase of Mormonism’s first temple, in Kirtland, Ohio. On this week’s show, Matthew Grow, managing director of the church’s History Department, and Emily Utt, a curator of Latter-day Saint historic sites, discuss these preservation efforts.

The recent acquisition by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of Mormonism’s first temple — in Kirtland, Ohio — along with historic buildings in Nauvoo, Ill., similarly tied to founder Joseph Smith and his band of believers thrilled the global faith’s members. For followers of the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the longtime diligent, devoted caretakers of these properties, the sale, which that faith’s top leaders acknowledged was “painful,” brought sadness, heartache and tears. While grateful for the good the $192 million purchase price will do for the Community of Christ’s future, they lament losing ownership of these cherished pieces of their past. On this week’s show to discuss that past and that future is David Howlett, a Community of Christ historian, visiting religion professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and author of “Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space.”

Money talks. It makes headlines, too. Just ask The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Utah-based faith’s finances have become a source of discussion, debate and, yes, dissent among insiders and outsiders. In recent weeks, the church’s chief investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, has seen its publicly reported stock portfolio shoot past $50 billion, helping to propel the global faith’s total wealth to an estimated $265 billion. Days ago, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed the church a mini-victory, agreeing to rehear the fraud lawsuit brought against it by a prominent Utahn, James Huntsman, who has accused Latter-day Saint leaders of misleading members about how the faith spends tithing funds. In addition, the church has been targeted in at least five states by a string of what it has called “copycat” tithing lawsuits seeking class-action status. On this week’s show, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Tony Semerad, who has been tracking the church’s finances and legal entanglements for a number of years, helps sort out all this money maneuvering and courtroom drama.

Even in the 19th century, Brigham Young Academy (later Brigham Young University) welcomed students of both sexes, all nationalities, religions, races and colors. Nearly from the start, it included women, which made it distinctive among other American higher-education institutions. And the school — owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — had a small but consistent nonwhite student population. That included the school’s first Black graduate, Norman Wilson (not a Latter-day Saint), who earned his degree in 1939. Grace Ann Soelberg curated a BYU exhibit honoring Wilson. She also explored how Black students were treated at the school, and how they were depicted, including examples of blackface, in its yearbooks from 1911 to 1985. On this week’s show, Soelberg, now a graduate student at the University of Utah, discusses her findings.

What most Latter-day Saint historians and other scholars know about D. Michael Quinn is that he was, by all accounts, a remarkable researcher who could assemble disparate dots into a colorful mosaic. They may know that he was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as part of the “September Six” for his discussion of post-Manifesto polygamy and other controversial topics or that he was an expert in the faith’s financial dealings and hierarchy. But now, nearly three years after his death at age 77, the public will hear for the first time of his inner struggles as a gay man in the church that for most of his life preached that homosexuality was a sin. Signature Books has now published Quinn’s heartbreaking autobiography, titled “Chosen Path: A Memoir,” described as a “relentlessly episodic” look at the deeply personal agonies and ecstasies of his life and work, while offering his perspective on significant church events that occurred while he was writing about Mormonism. Three themes are thread through his entries: his relationship with himself as a closeted gay man, with his oft-absent and secretive father, and with his church. On this week’s show, Moshe Quinn, his son, who wrote a foreword, and Barbara Jones Brown, who edited the volume Quinn gleaned from his multiple journals, discuss the revelations in his memoir.

Ah, Valentine’s Day, a holiday full of hearts and hopes, cards and candy, roses and romance. It’s a time couples seek their favorite table at their favorite restaurant and view their favorite rom-com from their favorite couch. What does it mean, though, for young members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Are they on the lookout for more than gestures — indeed, eternal marriage — or do they just want to have a good time? On this week’s show, two young single adult Latter-day Saints, Sara Sumsion, who is working on a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy at Northwestern University, and Matt Judd, a health statistics consultant, discuss what the Latter-day Saint dating scene is REALLY like.

Easter is the most significant holiday on the Christian calendar, celebrated in solemnity and song, pageantry and prayer, rituals and rejoicing, “hosannas and hallelujahs.” While members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe deeply in Christ’s resurrection, they have not participated as a church with the rest of Christendom in immersive traditions like waving palms on Palm Sunday, washing feet on Maundy Thursday or carrying a large cross for Good Friday. So, many Latter-day Saints have joined with other Christians on these holy practices. Last year, though, top Latter-day Saint leaders encouraged members to find ways to better commemorate the sacred moment when they believe Jesus rose from the dead. Eric Huntsman, a Brigham Young University professor of ancient scripture, has spent his career reading biblical texts in their original languages. Last year, Huntsman, who is currently on hiatus from his position as academic director at BYU’s Jerusalem Center, co-wrote a book with Trevan Hatch, “Greater Love Hath No Man: A Latter-day Saint Guide to Celebrating the Easter Season.” As many Christians prepare for next week’s Lent, Huntsman offers other tips on how Latter-day Saint individuals and families can better remember the “climax of the gospel story.”

Chelsea Goodrich was a returned missionary pursuing a graduate degree in California when she came forward with allegations that her father, John Goodrich, had molested her throughout her childhood. (In a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, John Goodrich has denied the accusations of sexual assault.) The alleged abuse, the subject of a recent Associated Press investigation, is not the reason, however, that Chelsea, now a 38-year-old licensed counselor, no longer identifies as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She attributes that shift to the response she received when she tried to protect children. Friends and family, many from the tightknit Latter-day Saint community of Mountain Home, Idaho, where she grew up, discouraged her from continuing to press the matter, urging her instead to forgive her father. In this week’s episode, she joins Deidre Nicole Green, a Latter-day Saint and theologian at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., to discuss how church leaders, members and others sometimes “weaponize” forgiveness, silencing survivors and preventing justice.

Every year, a new crop of young Latter-day Saints turning 12 by December will graduate from Primary, the faith’s program for children. The boys will get a new title — “deacon” — and start passing the bread and water of the sacrament (known as Communion in other Christian faiths and mostly distributed by priests and pastors), while the girls will start attending the Young Women’s program and get no new identity. Why is there such a gender difference around the sacrament in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Tradition, says Sam Brunson, a Latter-day Saint tax attorney in Chicago who often writes about church issues on the blog By Common Consent. Or, in other words, “policy choices that church leaders made decades ago.” Yes, the church has an all-male priesthood, but is passing the sacrament really a priesthood function? And if the Utah-based faith allows young women to carry those trays, does that mean they have to open up the priesthood to women? On this week’s show, Brunson talks about how such differences came to be in the church and why he thinks some of them could be revised — without formally giving women the priesthood.

Scholar Benjamin Park’s new book, “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” tells the sweeping saga of the rise, rifts and resilience of the nation’s most successful homegrown religion. “The Mormon story,” he writes, “is the American story.” Under the guidance of founder Joseph Smith, this new movement was cradled in upstate New York and nurtured in the heartland. But mounting persecutions and prosecutions left leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints feeling so abandoned by the country that gave the faith birth that they abandoned the country itself. Out West, Brigham Young and his band of beleaguered believers built a remote religious empire. In the decades that followed, though, successive generations of Latter-day Saints slowly but surely returned to the arms of the American fold, eventually becoming among the nation’s most passionate, even partisan, patriots. But like the country it once battled and now embraces, this global faith of 17 million members finds itself caught up in polarizing culture wars. Former frictions — between church and state, faith and intellect, obedience and dissent, patriarchy and feminism — regularly resurface even as new conflicts emerge. On this week’s show, Park talks about some key players and moments in Latter-day Saint history, along with the tensions that persist to this day.

Grant Hardy is among the preeminent scholars of the Book of Mormon. The North Carolina history professor has produced two volumes on Mormonism’s sacred text: a study edition from Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, and a reader’s edition from the University of Illinois Press — and now, from Oxford University Press, a third, The Annotated Book of Mormon. His latest effort is hailed as “the world’s first fully annotated, academic edition of the Book of Mormon.” Indeed, its 900 pages have almost as many footnotes and commentary as the text itself. Hardy lays out the narrative like a series of stories, not as short verses, with extensive commentary and analysis about important themes, biblical connections and symbolic meanings. At the end, he adds essays to explore various ways of thinking about the Book of Mormon — as literature, ancient history, fiction, revealed scripture and world scripture. On this week’s show, he talks about this massive undertaking; what Latter-day Saints often get wrong about their foundational text; why context matters when reading it; how the Book of Mormon compares and complements the Bible; and why, as a believer in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as a scholar, he finds the book “amazingly coherent and consistent.”

At every spring General Conference, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers a glimpse of its growth by reporting worldwide membership statistics, including the number of converts and children added to the faith’s rolls the previous year. A more reliable barometer for tracking church expansion, however, can be found in the congregations created (or subtracted). So when the governing First Presidency recently announced new requirements for establishing wards and stakes, or clusters of congregations, insiders and outsiders naturally wondered what impact the changes would have. For instance, stakes in most of the world previously needed 1,900 members; now they need 2,000, or 5% more. While stakes in the U.S. and Canada also need 2,000, that’s 33% fewer than the previous 3,000. On its face, this appeared to make it easier to form new stakes in much of North America and, in essence, inflate the church’s congregational count. But experts say that may not be the case. In fact, Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, argues the overall rules could result in fewer stakes and wards coming on line. On this week’s show, Martinich discusses the recent changes and other trends in church membership, including a newly released study showing self-identifying Latter-day Saints make up 42% of Utah’s adult population.

This is a war story unlike any other. It’s about a fighting force of nearly 500 men who were drafted, in a very real sense, not by the president of their nation but by the prophet of their faith. Though they were prepared to die for a country they were fleeing, they labored to live for the families they were supporting. Though they were armed and marched through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, they never fired a single shot against their enemy. Though they never tasted death from combat, they endured casualties from foes just as dangerous and deadly: thirst, fatigue, hunger and sickness. Though they never recorded a military victory, they achieved a triumph perhaps far greater. So why is the Mormon Battalion — a ragtag band of hundreds of reluctant riflemen, along with dozens of women and children, most of whom trekked nearly 2,000 miles from Iowa to Southern California — remembered not only in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also in the annals of the American experiment? Discussing those questions and more and is Brent Top, retired professor of church history and doctrine at church-owned Brigham Young University and now president of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site.

Lowell Bennion was among Mormonism’s greatest humanitarians, while also being one of its most prominent thinkers and teachers. Indeed, he was among the few non-general authorities or officers ever to speak in General Conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As the first director of the church’s Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, Bennion spoke powerfully and courageously against the church’s former priesthood/temple ban on Black members — which may have cost and encouraged students to see science and religion as complementary rather than contradictory paths to truth. But he did more than teach or preach. Bennion, who died in 1996, created the Community Services Council in Salt Lake City to aid poor and marginalized populations. Eventually, a center for service was created in his name at the U., integrating outreach to the disadvantaged into the curriculum. Of the service he rendered, he once said, “I used to teach religion; now I practice it.” Yet Bennion’s life and work remain largely unknown to today’s Latter-day Saints. On this week’s show, George Handley, professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University and author of “Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator,” discusses the life and legacy of the legendary scholar, considered by many to be one of the founders of Mormon studies.

Newly named Latter-day Saint apostle Patrick Kearon brings an unusual biography to second highest leadership council of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A British convert, he joined the faith at age 26. Kearon has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United States. He does not have a university degree, but, having been trained in communication, his speeches are earnest, eloquent and evocative. He is the second European in the current Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the third born outside the United States. What will the 62-year-old Brit’s background, passions and personality bring to the apostleship and how might he influence the global faith? On this week’s show, Patrick Mason, Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, addresses those question and more.

For more than a decade, women’s Relief Society leaders were invited to sit on the stand facing the pews during Sunday services among some Latter-day Saint congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was an uncontroversial tradition until October, when an area president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ordered an end to the practice. The move felt arbitrary to many members and was made without consulting any of the women affected, all of whom were devout believers. After a Salt Lake Tribune story about the edict, many women in the region and across the country are writing letters to church headquarters in Salt Lake City, explaining why the tradition had been good for women in a church governed by men as a sign of inclusion and gender equity. On this week’s show, we discuss this issue with two women who have felt the impact personally: Amy Jensen, who has served as a Young Women leader in Lafayette, Calif., and Laurel McNeil, a current Relief Society president in Sunnyvale, Calif. One solution, they suggest, to bring uniformity to Latter-day Saint services: Invite women’s leaders to sit on the stand in congregations across the globe.

Deseret Book has been the church-owned commercial publisher for more than a century, producing landmark theological volumes such as James E. Talmage’s “Jesus the Christ” and LeGrand Richards’ “A Marvelous Work and a Wonder.” It is a sought-after brand for Latter-day Saint leaders, scholars and writers, and remains the go-to retail outlet for rank-and-file members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through the decades, the focus of D.B., as it has come to be known, has expanded to include not only books by and about Latter-day Saint prophets and apostles but also a range of novels and art. The woman overseeing all that is Laurel Day, who rose through the ranks to become D.B.’s president. On this week’s show, she talks about her vision for the global company; the new openness in detailing the church’s unvarnished history; the increasing visibility of women; the part she plays in deciding what is published and what is put on — and sometimes pulled off — the shelves; and Deseret Book’s role in building the worldwide faith.

With senior apostle M. Russell Ballard’s death, church President Russell Nelson’s back injury and apostle Jeffrey Holland’s recent illnesses, the focus has fallen once again on the top men who lead the 17 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Years, even decades, of policy, practice and precedent have established how the hierarchy is ordered — a governing First Presidency, usually made up of the faith’s president and two counselors, at the pinnacle, followed by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presidency of the Seventy and general authority Seventies. But with all the members of the First Presidency in their 90s and increasingly aged apostles, questions are reemerging about a gerontocracy among these men, who must serve for life and are charged with guiding a global religion. Is emeritus status for these leaders an option? Should it be? And what about the general women’s leaders? Does their service, capped at five years, prevent them from having more influence in the church? Historian Matthew Bowman, Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, addresses these questions and more on this week’s podcast.

Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, the former BYU star who earned multiple MVP awards and Super Bowl rings with the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, ranks among the most famous members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Recently, though, Young has turned from tactics for victory on the football field to strategies for winning at life — namely by living his religion, following Christ, helping to heal others, and, ultimately, loving all people, no matter whether they are in their personal journeys, as God loves them. Yes, he does draw on his gridiron experiences in his book “The Law of Love,” but he also reveals much about his own shyness, anxiety and insecurity. On this week’s show, Young discuss a more expansive, more exultant and more exalting kind of love.

No one likes pain or poverty, bigotry or war, frustration or failure, disease or doubt, joblessness or homelessness or loneliness. That includes this week’s “Mormon Land” guest, Melissa Inouye. The Latter-day Saint scholar has endured more than her share of heartache. She inexplicably lost her hair at a young age and then, at 37, the marathon-running mother of four, was diagnosed with colon cancer, an affliction she has been suffering from and through ever since. But as Inouye reminds herself and Latter-day Saints in her new book, “Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance,” a carefree, trouble-free world is not what humanity signed up for. An easy earthly existence, under Mormon theology, was Satan’s plan, not God’s. Divine design, Inouye writes, calls instead for agency, personal growth, compassion and caring for others, and “living a life full of life” — the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, the hopes and the hopelessness — as God’s children learn to be more like their Heavenly Parents by following and finding Jesus. On this week’s show, Inouye discusses this “sacred struggle” — including how she approaches the sometimes-problematic past found in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, her hopes for women in the faith’s still-present patriarchy, and how she and other members find joy in imperfect lives, imperfect bodies, imperfect families, imperfect communities, an imperfect church and an imperfect world.

Amid today’s polarized political scene, many Americans throw up their hands and say, like Patrick Henry, “‘peace, peace,’ but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.” To some, the partisan divide seems deeper than ever — with no way to bridge it. Even religions sometimes seem to battle with other faiths, as well as those within a faith. Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America and author of “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy,” has done a lot of thinking about how to overcome divisions. He is also an “impact scholar” at the University of Utah and will visit the Salt Lake City campus a few times each year during his two-year appointment. Retired federal Judge Thomas Griffith, a Latter-day Saint convert, also bemoans the toxic divides that poison public debate and rip apart the fabric of U.S. society. Recently, the American Bar Association appointed Griffith a member of a newly created Task Force for American Democracy, whose aim is to push back against authoritarian tendencies in the country. On this week’s show, Patel and Griffith — both hopeful if not optimistic — discuss how to bring peace to our trouble times and how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a vital role to play in that quest, especially if they can become as accomplished at bridge building as they are at evangelizing.

Lots of national politicians are keen to learn how Mitt Romney may skewer them in McKay Coppins’ newly released biography, “Romney: A Reckoning.” Coppins, a Brigham Young University alum who writes for The Atlantic, had access to the journals and emails, as well as candid interviews with the Republican Utah senator, who made history as the first Latter-day Saint to top a major party’s presidential ticket and first senator to vote to remove a president of his own party. But because Romney and Coppins are both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is also a lot of Mormon-speak in the book. In it, the writer explores the way in which Romney’s faith became a political roadblock for him while, at the same time, providing him spiritual strength and comfort. On this week’s show, Coppins share ways Romney’s beliefs shaped the man, how he faced the “Mormon moment,” why he lined up so boldly against Donald Trump, and what church leaders had to say about it all.

As the war in Israel and Gaza rages on with civilians caught in the violent crossfire, those watching from across the globe are asking what it must be like to live in such a conflict-ridden space. What does it mean to face possible violence every day? Sahar Qumsiyeh can offer a firsthand description of how routine activities were affected by such a fraught environment. Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian born in Jerusalem and raised Orthodox Christian outside of Bethlehem. She converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while receiving a master’s degree from Brigham Young University in statistics. She earned a doctorate from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey in the same subject, taught at various universities in the West Bank and worked for four years as a data analyst with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jerusalem. She currently teaches in the mathematics department at BYU-Idaho. She is also the author of “Peace for a Palestinian: One Woman’s Story of Faith Amidst War in the Holy Land.” On this week’s show, Qumsiyeh talks about the current crisis, the tensions that led to it, and what Americans, and particularly Latter-day Saints, should know when discussing it.

For today’s faithful, believing, temple-recommend-carrying members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sipping a Chardonnay with their salmon entree would be unthinkable, off the table, a no-no. They know that the faith’s Word of Wisdom health code strictly forbids consumption of alcohol. But there was time in the church’s history when teetotaling wasn’t the order of the day. In fact, there was a time when Latter-day Saints not only drank wine but also produced it, sold it and profited from it — all with their prophet’s blessing and encouragement. Indeed, southwestern Utah’s pioneer past was home to a church “wine mission.” On this week’s show, Lindsay Hansen Park, a blogger, podcaster and executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation, discusses Brigham Young’s wine mission — its roots, the success it enjoyed, the product it produced, the problems it encountered (and engendered), and the ultimate demise it met.

This past weekend, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held its biannual General Conference in Salt Lake City. In five sessions, held Saturday and Sunday, Latter-day Saints around the world heard sermons, instructions and announcements from their top leaders. Of the dozens to take the pulpit, just three were women: President Emily Belle Freeman, head of the global Young Women organization; her first counselor, Tamara Runia; and Amy Wright, first counselor in the children’s Primary general presidency. This underrepresentation of female speakers isn’t new — or surprising — in the patriarchal faith, where top leadership is almost entirely male. Some longtime conference listeners, however, did point to a shift in the nature of the sermons given by Freeman, Runia and Wright — as well as other recent female speakers. On this week’s show, Kimberly Applewhite Teitter discusses all that and more. Teitter is a licensed clinical psychologist in the Salt Lake City area and assistant director of the Debra Bonner Unity Gospel Choir. She was recently featured in the Deseret Book publications “Every Needful Thing: Essays of the Mind and Heart” and “No Division Among You: Creating Unity in a Diverse Church.”

When a spokesperson for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offered a stinging rebuke of Tim Ballard, a fellow member and the charismatic founder of Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-human-trafficking organization, his defenders went ballistic. They were especially incensed when the statement said M. Russell Ballard, acting president of the faith’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, disavowed Tim Ballard, who is no relation, and condemned the activist for using the senior apostle’s name in his fundraising. It couldn’t have come from the church they love, these Tim Ballard devotees reasoned. They had to believe that it was some kind of fake news, or worse, a deep conspiracy. Latter-day Saint historian Benjamin Park, though, had no trouble believing the church’s condemnation of OUR’s founder. He sees in Tim Ballard’s impressive following a link to many other far-right causes and conspiracy theories — and even possible schism. Park, whose new book, “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” is due out in January, explores the larger issues he has observed within Tim Ballard’s movement and the implications of extreme conservative politics for the church.

In his new book, “Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History,” historian Richard Bushman calls the Book of Mormon, the signature scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a “book about the importance of books.” One could also say that this book, which church founder Joseph Smith said he translated, sprang from plates that were about the importance of plates. In this special live episode, celebrating the more than 300 “Mormon Land” shows, we talk about the “important” role these plates played in the rise of a global religion with the author, who also wrote the highly acclaimed “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.” Joining him is his wife, scholar Claudia Bushman, the founding editor of Exponent II who edited “Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah” and wrote “Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America.” Together, the Bushmans discuss their research on Mormonism, church founder Joseph Smith, the evolution of women’s rights, the threats to Latter-day Saint community, the challenges and opportunities facing the global faith, why they think art is vital in the church, and a range of other topics.

Tickets for Mormon Land Live can be found here: givebutter.com/Vl1q3T In September 1993, six Latter-day Saint scholars and activists were disciplined for their critical writings about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was an extraordinary confluence of events, one that has echoed down through the decades. The censures had a chilling effect on a generation of would-be Latter-day Saint scholars but within 10 years or so the church felt the impact of the internet, with its widespread distribution and democratization of information. Now, 30 years later, many observers are assessing what happened that month and what its legacy has been in the global faith of 17 million members. In her new book, “The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism,” Sara M. Patterson, a professor of theology and gender studies at Indiana’s Hanover College, puts the episode within a much broader, decadeslong cultural and theological debate over the nature of the Utah-based faith and its evolving narrative. In this week’s episode, she shares her findings about those past events, how they continue to affect the present, and what they may portend for the future.

Tickets for Mormon Land Live can be found here: https://givebutter.com/Vl1q3T Kolob, the star “nearest” to where God dwells. “Worlds without number.” And “worlds [plural] are and were created.” Yes, these Latter-day Saint scriptures seem to affirm that, in Mormonism, we are not alone in the universe. Given that theology, it appears there is space, so to speak, for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to believe or have an interest in alien beings, intergalactic travelers, extraterrestrial visitors and, well, UFOs. Add to that the fascination, curiosity and intrigue surrounding such unidentified anomalous phenomena that have swelled in recent weeks since Congress staged hearings in July on the subject. All of this makes Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman’s new book all the more timely, topical and telling. Titled “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America,” the volume explores the beginning of the UFO phenomenon, its intersection with U.S. society and its implications for religion, particularly Mormonism. On this week’s show, Bowman talks about how these otherworldly encounters affect our world.

Tickets for Mormon Land Live can be found here: https://givebutter.com/Vl1q3T 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many faiths feature clothing they consider part of their religious identity or obligation. Muslim women don headscarves. Jewish men wear yarmulkes. Sikh men cover their hair with turbans. Married Hindu couples sport sacred threads. These are all visible symbols of commitment. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have adopted religious clothing known as “temple garments” to remind them of covenants they have made. But they are worn under street clothes — and are meant to be invisible to others. This spring, Larissa Kindred, a former Latter-day Saint and recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, created an online “snowball survey” to reach out to Latter-day Saint women about what they like — and dislike — about wearing garments. On this week’s show, Kindred discusses her research, the responses and conclusions. She also focuses on the challenges Latter-day Saint women face spiritually, physically, emotionally and socially in wearing the garments — and how the apparel affects their body image.

Young Latter-day Saint couples are delaying marriage and having fewer children nowadays, according to recent statistics cited by Dallin H. Oaks, a top leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While acknowledging that the financial climate can be difficult for this generation, Oaks, first counselor in the faith’s governing First Presidency, nonetheless urged a global gathering of 18- to 30-year-old members to fight those trends. “Marriage is central to the purpose of mortal life and what follows,” he said. “We are children of a loving Heavenly Father who created us with the capacity to follow his commandment to multiply and replenish the earth.” On this week’s show Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, a Latter-day Saint marriage and sex therapist and contributor to “In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents: A Couples Guide to Creating a More Divine Marriage,” discusses Oaks’ speech, the pluses and minuses of marrying “early” or “late,” what children bring to the mix, and how the faith can help members make wise marital choices.

With the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly in the rearview mirror, worldwide membership for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints topped 17 million by the end of 2022, a 1.17% increase from the previous year. But that growth was hardly wall to wall. Some places grew much faster, some much slower, and some saw their rolls shrink. There were encouraging signs. Africa, for instance, led the way — again — boasting eight of the 10 nations with the fastest rates of membership growth. There were troubling stats, too. Ukraine, not surprisingly, saw its Latter-day Saint totals fall as members fled the war-scarred nation, and Russia’s ranks — reported for the first time in years — cratered, plunging by nearly 80% since 2017. In the United States, Southern states enjoyed the quickest gains, while the Northwest’s numbers continued to slide. And Utah, home to the faith’s headquarters, experienced stunningly anemic growth. On this week’s show, we dig into these figures — the whats, whys and wherefores — with Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com. We also discuss post-pandemic expansion, how church growth aligns with temple building, and just how many members can be considered “active.”

The infamous and inexcusable Mountain Meadows Massacre lives on as the bloodiest stain on the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The 2008 book “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” offered modern readers the most complete look to date at the atrocity, when, on Sept. 11, 1857, Mormon settlers deceived a wagon train of emigrants on their way to California through southern Utah and then slaughtered about a hundred men, women and children. Now comes the eagerly anticipated follow-up volume, titled “Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath.” On this week’s show, co-authors Richard E. Turley and Barbara Jones Brown explain how church leaders in southern Utah tried to cover up the crime, how investigations were thwarted, and how justice was delayed and denied. (In then end, only one perpetrator, John D. Lee, was executed.) They also explore a key Watergate-like question: What did church prophet-president Brigham Young know and when did he know it?

In 1998, a Utah publisher released “A World of Faith,” a children’s book by The Salt Lake Tribune’s award-winning religion writer, Peggy Fletcher Stack, with illustrations by celebrated Latter-day Saint artist Kathleen Peterson. Praise for the volume was wide and deep, including from former President Jimmy Carter. A commemorative version followed in 2001 to celebrate Salt Lake City’s hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics. The book’s approach is simple: Take many of the world’s major faith traditions, write a one-page explanation of their history and beliefs, make the text easy enough for youngsters but interesting enough for seasoned readers, and pair each entry with a gorgeous illustration depicting aspects of that religion. Yes, it’s a modest model, but behind it rests a profound pursuit: Eliminate religious bigotry through increased understanding and turn today’s readers into tomorrow’s peacemakers. Now, 25 years later, BCC Press has issued revised second edition of “A World of Faith,” with an additional six non-Western religions added into the mix. The authors join us on this week’s show to discuss the expanded book — what they learned; the challenges they faced (including how to handle the “Mormon” term); the commonalities, differences and beauties in religious diversity; and Latter-day Saints’ awareness of other faiths. With the book’s release, we’re also making this special offer: Join Mormon Land on Patreon by Monday, May 15, and you’ll be entered to win one of five signed copies of the volume. Current patrons will also be entered.

Note • This podcast discusses sexual assault. If you need to report or discuss a sexual assault, you can call the Utah Sexual Violence help line at 801-736-4356. Rabbi Avremi Zippel was 8 years old when his nanny began sexually abusing him in a basement bathroom in his Salt Lake City home. For Zippel, the abuse, which continued for a decade, violated everything he believed as an Orthodox Jew and threw him into a whirlwind of shame, guilt, depression, anxiety and even questions about God. He eventually told his wife, his parents, his siblings, a therapist and the police, which was an agonizing but ultimately healing journey. Zippel, who followed in the footsteps of his father, Rabbi Benny Zippel, a Chabad Lubavitch leader in Utah, tells the harrowing story in his new book, “Not What I Expected: A 20-Year Journey to Reclaim a Child’s Voice.” On this week’s show, Avremi Zippel discusses his book, what he endured and what religious leaders can do in the fight against sexual abuse.

Devout Latter-day Saints don’t, or at least think they shouldn’t, watch R-rated movies. This belief has permeated their religious culture for decades. And while top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have warned about such films, there has never been a general proscription against viewing them. In fact, a popular Latter-day Saint blogger recently argued that some R-rated and TV-MA productions are worth watching, listing titles from “Saving Private Ryan” and “Marriage Story” to “The Passion of the Christ” and “Good Will Hunting.” He stated that swearing off such movies can lead to “consuming disproportionately infantile content.” So where did this supposed blanket ban on such films originate? Does it still have the same hold on Latter-day Saint culture? And are there movies that adult members not only could watch (without any guilt) but indeed should watch? On this week’s show, David Scott, a communication professor at Utah Valley University and an expert on Mormon culture, media and their intersection with religiosity, discusses those questions and more.

In the wake of President Russell M. Nelson’s decree to remove the “Mormon” name from common parlance in person and in publications, the need to replace its use on the internet with the faith’s full name was no easy feat. After all, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were widely known as “Mormons.” The faith even promoted a popular advertising campaign, called “I’m a Mormon,” highlighting the lives and beliefs of its followers. The website mormon.org featured those mini-videos, while lds.org went to the church’s official website. On this week’s show, technology expert Spencer Greenhalgh, who teaches in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky, discusses what it took to get those domain names changed and why church officials when to the time, trouble and expense to do so.

President Russell Nelson, worldwide leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has urged women to be seen and be heard, to speak up and speak out — in their communities, in their homes and in their congregations. That may be happening at the grassroots level, but it isn’t occurring in the patriarchal faith’s highest-profile forum: General Conference. In the most recent gathering, only two of the 33 speakers were women. Even in past conferences, that number rarely reached a handful. Researcher Eliza Wells, a doctoral student in philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied this phenomenon in conferences over a 50-year period for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and discovered an even deeper chasm: Men were at least 16 times more likely to be quoted over the pulpit than women — a gap that holds true even when women were speaking. It’s an inequity that many women and men in the church notice and hope to change. On this week’s show, Wells discusses her findings, the implications, the message sent, how to change that pattern and why it matters.

When President Russell M. Nelson took to the podium at this past weekend’s General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and steadfastly called on members and all others to eliminate contention and become, like the Prince of Peace, peacemakers, Patrick Mason and David Pulsipher had to be cheering. After all, the two scholars wrote a book about that very ideal. Titled “Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict,” their volume explained how “peace is possible” and explored how the Mormon message — along with writings from other faiths and other thinkers — can bring help, healing and harmony to the world, nations, communities, homes and individual hearts. On this week’s show, they discussed Nelson’s address, other conference speakers who also pleaded for harmony and unity, and how true Christian discipleship can end political polarization and cultural conflicts, and convey peace to one soul and all souls.

Depression, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, anorexia, insomnia, scrupulosity, obsessive-compulsive disorder and more. Like people from every walk of life, missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not immune from mental health challenges. In fact, the stresses of full-time proselytizing, with its high demands and high expectations, can exacerbate the unsettling symptoms and the sometimes-crippling complications. As missionaries increasingly encounter mental health challenges, the church is increasingly responding — with better trained mission presidents, mission therapists and mission health councils. On this week’s show, two former missionaries — Cora Longhurst, who served in the Philadelphia Mission, and Michael Skaggs, who labored in Las Vegas and on a service mission at church headquarters — share the struggles they endured during their stints, the help they received and how they are coping now.

In the 1830s, Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, offered Latter-day Saints an expansive view of education. In his mind, temple (a religious space) and school (a secular place) were linked in a joint spiritual and intellectual venture. Smith urged followers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint to gather “every needful thing” to further that kind of learning. Now, writer/editor Melissa Inouye and the late Kate Holbrook, who directed women’s history for the church, have gathered two dozen essays by Latter-day Saint women wrestling with what it means to “flourish in a world of complexity and abundance.” The book is titled “Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart.” On this week’s show, two of the authors, Farina King of the University of Oklahoma, and Tanya Wendt Samu of New Zealand’s University of Auckland, discuss their views of the Book of Mormon, seen by some as an exploration of racism, and their identities as Indigenous scholars and Latter-day Saints as they navigate a life of learning and a life of faith.

It seems to be a common human trait to wonder how others see us. Who among us is most likable? Most respected? Most trusted? It is, of course, of particular value to those in the minority, perceived as outcasts or threats or newcomers to the scene. This may be especially pertinent to faith groups. A new poll from the Pew Research Center found that respondents viewed Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants more positively than they do members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Evangelical Christians, Muslims and even atheists also scored higher than Mormons, as they are referred to throughout the survey. “A quarter of Americans say they hold very or somewhat unfavorable views of Mormons,” the Pew report stated, “while 15% express favorable opinions.” On this week’s show, Brigham Young University political science professor Quin Monson, himself a pollster and co-author of “Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics,” discusses those perceptions, whether they have changed through the years and if it should be a cause for concern in the missionary-minded faith.

Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints complain about the fact that there’s no expansive or universal celebration of Easter in their religion. While much of Christendom builds up to the holiest day on the calendar with preparation rituals like Lent or immersive traditions such as waving palms on Palm Sunday, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, or carrying a large cross for Good Friday, Latter-day Saints have no accepted traditions for Easter. Some have begun to develop their own way of commemorating Easter with prayers, readings and discussions. Eric Huntsman, a Brigham Young University professor of ancient scripture, has spent his career reading biblical texts in their original languages. Huntsman, who is currently the academic director at BYU’s Jerusalem Center, has just published a book in time for the holiday, with Trevan Hatch, “Greater Love Hath No Man: A Latter-day Saint Guide to Celebrating the Easter Season” that explores the scriptural accounts for each day of Holy Week, explains how those events have been celebrated in various Christian traditions and shares suggestions for how Latter-day Saints can commemorate the occasions in their own homes.

In 1833, a leading Latter-day Saint, William W. Phelps, published a column under the headline “Free People of Color,” making it clear that, since its founding three years earlier, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exercised no racial barriers. Black members were not only welcome in the fledgling faith but also eligible for all of its rites and privileges. It was a stance that did not sit well with many Missourians at the time and with the racist views scarring much of America in those pre-Civil War days. It’s also a position that did not last inside the church itself. The faith’s second prophet-president, Brigham Young, eventually departed from the ways of founder Joseph Smith and instituted a ban barring Black Latter-day Saints from priesthood ordinations and temple ordinances. That prohibition endured for nearly 130 years, a racist stain that the global faith and its members grapple with to this day. In his new book, “Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood,” from church-owned Deseret Book, W. Paul Reeve, head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, relies on historical records and scriptural passages to examine how and why the Utah-based church shifted from an inclusive approach on race to a restricted one and, ultimately, back to its original universalist theology. In this week’s show, Reeve, who flatly states that he doesn’t believe the former priesthood/temple ban was of “divine origin,” discusses the faith’s evolution on this sensitive topic and the challenges that still lie ahead.

First came a whistleblower’s call for the IRS to punish Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accusing it of stockpiling a reserve fund worth tens of billions of dollars intended for charity but never spent for that purpose. Then came a federal lawsuit, now on appeal, from a prominent and prosperous former member alleging fraud by the Utah-based faith and seeking the return of his tithing donations. In recent weeks, that IRS whistleblower called on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee to investigate Ensign Peak for illegally dodging billions in taxes. And, finally, came word that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Ensign Peak over past investment practices that reportedly concealed the multibillion-dollar portfolio. Will these unflattering headlines about the church’s wealth ever end? What might be the final outcome? Does this global faith of nearly 17 million members simply have too much money? It reported spending nearly $1 billion on charity in 2021. Could it — and should it — be doing more? How can the church avoid such unflattering attention in the future? Would further fiscal transparency — in essence, “showing us the money” — be a solution? Or if members knew the full financial picture, would they stop paying tithes? On this week’s show, Sam Brunson, a popular Latter-day Saint blogger and a tax law professor at Loyola University Chicago, discusses these questions and more.

It’s Valentine’s Day, the time when many American couples turn to romantic thoughts and gestures. (Think chocolates and roses.) What better occasion to think about the nature of Latter-day Saint marriages? Bethany Brady Spalding and McArthur Krishna, authors of the bestselling “Girls Who Choose God” and “Guides to Heavenly Mother” series, have spent years exploring the influence of the divine feminine in the beliefs and practices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now they have turned their attention to a divine couple: Heavenly Parents. They are deeply committed to the idea that marital equality is not just a human construct but also an eternal truth. In their new online workbook, titled “In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents: A Couple’s Guide to Creating a More Divine Marriage” from D Street Press, Spalding and Krishna, as well as Latter-day Saint therapists, explore these religious role models and 12 principles for improving marriages. On this week’s show, the two editors, along with Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, a Latter-day Saint therapist in Chicago, discuss the new book and how earthly couples can build heavenly marriages.

In the wake of drought, climate change and, primarily, human-caused incursions, the Salt Lake Valley’s namesake ecological landmark, the Great Salt Lake, is dying, shriveling up before our very eyes. Experts warn, in fact, that this shrinking body of water could vanish within five years, leaving behind an exposed lakebed and a source of toxic dust storms that could make this place — this place that Brigham Young reportedly declared the “right place” to become Mormonism’s new home — uninhabitable. So the need to save the lake is obvious, and the stakes are huge — not only for Salt Lakers and Utahns but also for The Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints. The faith’s world headquarters is here. Its history is here. Its strength — both in membership and, frankly, money — is here. Its iconic Salt Lake Temple and global offices are here. Thankfully, it’s not too late to preserve the lake, but it will take a concerted, costly and expedited effort, and the Utah-based church — and its members — must play a vital role. On this week’s show, Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at church-owned Brigham Young University, discusses the lake’s precarious present and what Latter-day Saints and their church could do to help secure its future.

There are plenty of people counted as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who don’t necessarily make their memberships count. They’re not all-in, but they’re not all-out either. They may have issues with church’s theology, history, policies, practices, people or any number of other reasons. Some eventually leave, but many stay, clinging to the fringes of the faith. It’s to this diverse and disparate audience that this week’s guest, author Christian Kimball, addresses his new book, “Living on the Inside of the Edge: A Survival Guide,” currently Amazon’s bestselling Mormonism book. A former bishop, Kimball, who describes himself as a “25-year veteran backbencher in a blue shirt and no tie,” doesn’t prod these “edge dwellers” to stick it out — in fact, he says exiting the church may be the best move for some — but he also doesn’t urge these “middle-way” members to bolt. Rather, he offers practical and practicable advice for how adult Latter-day Saints can navigate the nexus of affection and disaffection, doubt and certainty, belief and disbelief, activity and inactivity, and be at home on the “inside of the edge” of Mormonism.

The question of just how church founder Joseph Smith produced the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, continues to be debated. Did Smith “translate” the Reformed Egyptian writing from gold plates or did he invent the story of a Hebrew civilization living in the ancient Americas who welcomed Jesus Christ after his crucifixion in Jerusalem? In recent years, the scholarly consensus in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to be that Smith produced most of the text using a “seer stone” in a hat, where words somehow appeared on the revelatory rock, without really referring to the plates. In a forthcoming book, titled “By Means of the Urim and Thummim: Restoring Translation to the Restoration,” authors James Lucas and Jonathan Neville argue that the evidence for the seer stone is “inconsistent and unreliable.” Instead, they believe the traditional theory that Smith used “interpreters” called the urim and thummim, which the first Latter-day Saint prophet described as “two transparent stones set in the rim of a bow fastened to a breastplate.” On this week’s show, Lucas discusses why he and his co-writer believe their theory is correct.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often assert that the organization in their global religion is the same as in the church established by Christ and his earliest followers, “namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth,” as declared in the church’s Articles of Faith. But are they really the same? In a new book, “Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints,” from Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, scholars describe the early Christian church and how it evolved over the centuries. One of the most intriguing questions is about the role of women in ancient Christianity. Given how much patriarchy dominated all forms of the faith, were Jesus’ early disciples and leaders all men? Not by a long shot, argues Ariel Bybee Laughton, an independent Latter-day Saint researcher and author of a chapter in the new book about women and gender in early Christianity. Jesus’ female followers held significant and vaunted positions in the then-fledgling faith. On this week’s show, Laughton discusses the ancient church and how the modern Utah-based faith is beginning to return to those roots by increasing women’s visibility, leadership and participation.

It’s been an unexpectedly lively five years for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — with institutional changes as well as pandemic shutdowns — and all under the leadership of President Russell M. Nelson. The former heart surgeon became the Utah-based church’s 17th president on Jan. 14, 2018, at 93, the second oldest man to step into that role. No matter his age, Nelson was anything but retiring. With an increased emphasis on these “latter days,” he oversaw ambitious plans to perfect the organization, chart new courses, and shift much of the faith’s spiritual training and development to individuals and families. Now at 98 and the oldest-ever church president, it’s time to examine what has he done. On this week’s show, Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, examines the Nelson presidency — the big changes, the impact, what’s working, what isn’t and whether the church is better today than when he took over.

Growth is essential to the mission of a missionary-minded faith like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In headier times, that expansion seemed to come rapidly and resoundingly, spurring optimistic predictions that the Utah-based religion could top 100 million members by 2020. That didn’t happen, of course. In recent years, the global faith of 16.8 million has grown by less than 1% annually and, in fact, is shrinking in a number of regions. In the United States over the past two years, for instance, 21 states saw Latter-day Saint membership decline. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association, David Stewart, who has been studying Latter-day Saint growth trends for decades, explores why this era of expedited expansion may be at an end. On this week’s show, the independent researcher discusses this slowdown and how the “underperforming” church could reverse it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made national and international headlines during the year — and The Salt Lake Tribune and “Mormon Land” were there for all of them — from the purported discovery of the only known photograph of founder Joseph Smith to a heinous abuse case in Arizona and the church’s stunning support of the federal Respect for Marriage Act. There were many other developments as well: employee layoffs and unease at Brigham Young University campuses; flattening and, in some cases, shrinking church membership; the release of “Under the Banner of Heaven”; more revelations about church wealth; an apostle’s advice on Heavenly Mother; a high-ranking leader’s apology for controversial remarks on the former Black priesthood/temple ban; a new book about Joseph Smith’s wives; and a Latter-day Saint influencer’s push for birth control. And, finally, 98-year-old Russell Nelson becomes the faith’s oldest ever church president. On these week’s show, we discuss the biggest Latter-day Saint stories of 2022, the positive and negative reactions they generated, which ones surprised us, which ones went unnoticed — along with what they meant at the time, why they were significant, and how they may shape the future.

From Mormonism’s beginnings in the 19th century, founder Joseph Smith felt a strong responsibility to care for his burgeoning flock of mostly poor farmers and religious seekers. Waves of immigrant converts came from parts of the East Coast and Europe to form what they hoped would be a new Zion society. More than a quarter of what Smith said were divine revelations contained in the faith’s Doctrine and Covenants relate to economics, according to Warner Woodworth, emeritus professor of organizational behavior at Brigham Young University. And they were all about communitarian economics — equality and care for those in need. Woodworth has spent his decadeslong career urging members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to “follow the prophet” on his drive toward utopian communities. It is what he argued in his first book, “Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order in the Modern World” and is central to his just published, “Radiant Mormonism: Using Our Faith in Christ to Power World-Changing Service.” On this week’s show, Woodworth talks about his book, these principles, how they changed his approach to Christmas and why it truly is “more blessed to give than to receive.”

Despite being taught in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to believe that marriage was the highest goal for women, Rachel Rueckert had lots of anxiety going into her wedding day. Sure, she loved Austin, her husband-to-be, but she had deep ambivalence about the “for time and all eternity” aspect of the Latter-day Saint vows. Could she commit to them? Would that shear her of her career and personal goals? Would she lose herself and her identity? In a captivating and candid memoir, Rueckert details her first year of marriage as she and Austin travel from Peru to India, Thailand and Spain — and what she learned about herself, her relationships, her past and her faith. On this week’s show, Rueckert, editor-in-chief of Exponent II, talks about her just published book, “East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon With Marriage.”

When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced its support of the Respect for Marriage Act, which is designed to codify same-sex marriage while safeguarding religions from embracing such unions in their policies and practices, many members, especially LGBTQ allies, rejoiced. Not all of the faithful, however, agreed with the historic decision. Paul Mero, former president of the conservative Sutherland Institute think tank, for one, says the Utah-based faith’s backing of LGBTQ rights in recent years led to this unwise and unnecessary move. And Stuart Reid, a former Army chaplain, state senator and public affairs representative for the church, says it’s misguided to tacitly endorse civil same-sex marriage when the practice is viewed doctrinally as an “abomination” to God. Both argue that the church would be better off stepping away from politics and the nation’s culture wars. On this week’s show, they discuss why the church should have stayed on the sideline on this topic, how it betrays Latter-day Saint teachings, how it confuses members and former allies, why the approach from apostle Dallin Oaks, first counselor in the governing First Presidency, advocating compromise on LGBTQ rights and religious liberties is ill-advised, and what the global faith of 16.8 million members should be doing instead.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stunned many insiders and outsiders recently when it voiced support for an amended version of the Respect for Marriage Act, a federal measure designed to codify same-sex marriage while shielding religious organizations from fully embracing such unions. While that exemption allows the Utah-based faith and Brigham Young University, for instance, to continue their present LGBTQ policies, the monumental move nonetheless marked the first time the church has acknowledged the legitimacy of civil same-sex marriage, a practice it has famously preached and politicked against. Many members were delighted; some were dismayed. Either way, the announcement represented a sort-of middle-way path that the church and its top leaders, including First Presidency member Dallin Oaks, have been following and advocating for more than a decade. On this week’s show, Erika Munson, a co-founder of Mormons Building Bridges and currently a board member and co-founder of Emmaus LGBTQ Ministry, and Addison Graham, a BYU student who wrote about the church’s move in The Washington Post, discuss what this shift may mean for the church, its members, its teachings, its policies and its place in society — now and in the future.

In the not-too-distant past, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proudly wore the “Mormon” moniker. Starting in 2011, the Utah-based faith produced a global advertising campaign, with the slogan “I’m a Mormon.” It included hundreds of 2-minute video or photographic bios of individual members as a way to show outsiders that Latter-day Saints come in all shapes, sizes and colors. That they’re not so different; they’re your friends and neighbors. Soon after current church President Russell M. Nelson stepped into his role as “prophet, seer and revelator” in 2018, though, he mandated that the term “Mormon” be banned from use by members, scholars, outsiders and media alike. He even had it removed from the faith’s world famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir, now known as The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. In a recent blog post on By Common Consent, Taylor Kerby described feeling nostalgic about the previous ad strategy. He is here via Zoom to talk about what he liked about it, what it did for him and the church and what he misses about it.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a love-hate relationship of sorts with Donald Trump. Many in this GOP-leaning faith love, first, that he’s a Republican. Some admire his unconventional approach to politics. Some embrace his positions on economic and social issues. Many loathe, however, his abrasive personality. Some cringe at his crude comments about women and immigrants. Some detest his unrelenting and unfounded allegations about election fraud. Now, Trump is seeking a return to the White House. He carried the Latter-day Saint vote before, though by far thinner margins than most recent Republican presidential nominees? But where does Trump stand now with members? Will the love side of their Trump equation again win out over the hate side? Or are Latter-day Saints ready to move on? And could another polarizing Trump run put at risk the GOP’s dominance within this American-born faith? Quin Monson, a political science professor at church-owned Brigham Young University and a partner at Y2 Analytics, discusses those questions and more.

The financial dealings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continue to make headlines around the world. We’ve documented its vast landholdings. Its multibillion-dollar reserves. And the ups and downs of its staggering stock portfolio. Now, the latest twist comes from Canada, where “The Fifth Estate,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s version of “60 Minutes,” detailed how the Utah-based faith funneled $1 billion in the past 15 years to its Brigham Young University campuses in the U.S. Most of that tax-free money came from the tithes and donations of the 200,000 or so members who live in Canada. Although Canada’s laws allow the practice, it nonetheless deprives its treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to support services in that country. On this week’s show, Timothy Sawa, the producer and director of “The Fifth Estate” documentary, discusses the expose, how it came about, what else it uncovered, the faith’s financial tangles in Australia, its response and calls for reform and governmental investigations of a church “in crisis.”

“The Family: A Proclamation to the World” spells out the central role marriage plays in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nuances aside, it designates so-called traditional roles, with husbands as providers for their families and wives as nurturers of their children. Yet many if not most, Latter-day Saints don’t live such neatly ordered existences. Their experiences are far more diverse, more challenging, sometimes more messy, often more rewarding and always more real. Getting Latter-day Saint men to open up about their intimate relationships is no small feat. But writer-editor Holly Welker does just that in “Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships,” a collection of personal essays that touches on sexuality, illness, addiction, infertility, infidelity, divorce, sexual orientation, loss of faith, death and much more — all from a male perspective. On this week’s show, Welker talks about what we can learn from these writers who reached beyond the Book of Mormon question of “what manner of men ought ye to be?” and revealed “what manner of men they are.”

The polygamy of Mormonism’s second prophet-president, Brigham Young, is well known. Until the late 1990s, however, many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had no idea that church founder Joseph Smith had taken dozens of women as his plural wives. Unlike with his first wife, Emma Smith, he didn’t live with the women (polygamy was hidden during the early faith’s years in Nauvoo, Ill.) and how intimate he was with them remains in dispute among historians. Scholar Todd Compton was among the first to fully document Smith’s wives in his 1997 book, “In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith.” Now he has come out with a second book, “In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents,” which includes many of the materials he mined to gain a better understanding of the first Mormon’s marital relations. On this week’s show, Compton discusses what he learned about Jospeh Smith, his wives (some in their early teens and some married to other men), what their marriages were like, their level of intimacy, whether any children resulted and more.

In the past year or so, Latter-day Saints have been showcased in a bevy of TV shows and documentaries — from “Under the Banner of Heaven,” about a grisly 1980s murder case, to “LulaRich,” about a pair of multilevel marketers. Recently, moviemakers tackled the purported killings of two children by extremist members in Idaho and a series based on the true-crime documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight.” Why this sudden interest in the church and some of its more bizarre episodes? On this week’s show, Latter-day Saint filmmakers Jared Hess, who co-wrote and directed “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Murder Among the Mormons,” and Greg Whiteley, who directed “New York Doll,” “Mitt” and “Cheer,” discuss the industry and its fascination with Mormonism.

Launched in the 1970s, Affirmation is the oldest support group for LGBTQ members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The mission, according to Affirmation’s website is to create “worldwide communities of safety, love and hope” and to promote “understanding, acceptance and self-determination of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions” as members define “their individual spirituality and intersection with [the church.]” Just as the Utah-based faith has evolved in its understanding of and approach to its LGBTQ members, Affirmation has expanded as well — across the country and around the world. It hosts annual meetings in several nations. Affirmation recently gathered in Utah for its first in-person conference in three years. On this week’s show, President Nathan Kitchen, Vice President Laurie Lee Hall and board member Melissa Malcolm King talk about the 45-year-old group, its expectations for the future, and how it has changed through the years.

All would agree that, at age 98, President Russell M. Nelson, leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, appears to be in incredible health. Still, even this famously fit former heart surgeon made a concession to advancing age during the past weekend’s General Conference, delivering all three of his speeches while sitting on a stool at the podium. “Sometimes even small adjustments, such as a chair,” he stated on social media, “help those of us who ‘age on stage.’” But do the ages of the global faith’s senior leadership pose a bigger problem? After all, two of the three First Presidency members (Nelson and Dallin Oaks) are in their 90s and the third (Henry Eyring) will join them next year. Among the 12 apostles, M. Russell Ballard turns 94 on Saturday, three others are in their 80s, and, starting next month, five will be in their 70s. While this multilayered hierarchy makes allowances for the occasional incapacitated authority, does this collective “gerontocracy” give rise to a stagnant, intractable, out-of-touch leadership? Would switching to a system that brings younger blood into the leadership invigorate the global faith of 16.8 million? Historian Gregory Prince has thought and written about these issues. He joins us today via zoom to talk these, frankly, age-old questions.

In the days and weeks after the reported discovery of the first known photograph of Joseph Smith, a debate erupted: Is this really him? Here’s why it could be; here’s why it couldn’t be. Underneath all the chatter lurked some fundamental questions: What do we know about what the Mormon founder looked like? Why does it matter? Will we ever know if this tiny locket image shows one of America’s most influential religious leaders? Historian Benjamin Park, an associate professor at Sam Houston State University, explored those topics and more in a recent piece for The Salt Lake Tribune. Park, who also is writing a history of Mormonism, discusses the big questions surrounding this small photo.

The International Center for Law and Religion Studies is a global academic leader in the field of religious freedom. Founded in 2000, the center is part of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, the flagship campus of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Religious freedom has long been a key concern of the Utah-based faith. So the BYU-affiliated center’s mission is to “help secure the blessings of religious liberty for all,” through scholarship, networking, educational activities and legal reforms. Scholars at the center who specialize in comparative and international law concerning religion have provided advice to dozens of civil and governmental bodies in more than 50 countries, eager to implement safeguards on religious freedom. Brett Scharffs, the Rex E. Lee Chair and professor of law at J. Reuben Clark Law School, is the center’s current director. In this special “Mormon Land”, Scharffs speaks from Cordoba, Spain with Peggy Fletcher Stack, where he is presenting several papers at a European meeting of legal scholars on the topic “Human Dignity, Law and Religious Diversity: Designing the Future of Intercultural Society.”

Susa Young Gates, the daughter of one of Brigham Young’s many plural wives, may have been just one child among the Mormon pioneer-prophet’s vast brood, but she eventually would stand out among all his offspring. Although gifted at music, she made her name as a writer and editor. She founded the Young Woman’s Journal, became the first editor of the Relief Society Magazine and published a biography of her famous father. A go-getter, she labored for women’s suffrage and rubbed shoulders with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leading feminists of the day. She suffered through a painful first marriage and rejoiced in a happy second one. She delighted in doing genealogy but also endured the deaths of eight of her 13 children. Even though her name appears prominently in the pages of Mormon history, few Latter-day Saints know much about her. Romney Burke, hopes to change that with his new book, “Susa Young Gates: Daughter of Mormonism” — an exploration of her personal, professional and religious life. On this week’s show, Burke notes, among other things, that Susa Young Gates had notable clashes with her distinguished dad but remained devoted to him and spent much of her life trying to please him. She defended the faith’s — and her father’s — practice of polygamy but never entered a plural marriage herself. Though she pushed for women’s right to vote, she was less keen on women running for office. She opposed birth control and was an early proponent of a concept that lives on in some Latter-day Saint cultural circles — that women have motherhood and men have priesthood.

The effects of a reported racist outburst at a Brigham Young University women’s volleyball match continue to ripple across the country. A week after a Duke player said she was repeatedly called a racist slur at the match with the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the coach of South Carolina’s defending champion women’s basketball team pulled out of a home-and-home series with the university. BYU officials say they believe the Duke player and continue to investigate the incident but have so far been unable to find the culprit. Other schools and teams have had racist episodes at athletic events, so why has the Provo incident touched so many nerves? On this week’s show, BYU alum Darron Smith, who teaches sociology at the University of Memphis and is the author of “When Race, Religion & Sports Collide: Black Athletes at BYU and Beyond,” talks about the volleyball match episode, the resulting fallout, the school’s history with Black athletes, and why BYU and Latter-day Saint leaders need to do much more to combat racism on campus and within the faith — starting with an apology for the church’s former priesthood/temple ban for Black members.

An administrator at Brigham Young University removes thousands of LGBTQ resource pamphlets from welcome bags intended to go to new students. Faculty and staff recoil as the school adds language explicitly requiring new hires to waive clergy confidentiality on matters related to employment standards. And, finally, an investigation continues after reports that a Cougar fan repeatedly hurled racist slurs at a visiting Duke volleyball player, igniting a media firestorm. The flagship university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has found itself at the center of a number of unwelcome headlines in recent days — surrounding topics ranging from race and LGBTQ issues to religious freedom — prompting many to ask: What’s going on in Provo? How has this spate of news affected BYU’s reputation? Are these isolated occurrences or part of a larger movement? If the latter, who or what is driving this trend? And what might be the ultimate aim? Address those questions and more on this week’s show are Patrick Mason, a BYU alum and chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, and LaShawn Williams, a Duke graduate and faculty member in social work at Salt Lake Community College.

Ever since The Associated Press published its explosive account of an egregious case in Arizona — where a Latter-day Saint father sexually abused his young daughters for years, even after counseling with his bishop — social media has been lit up by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, asking one another how this could have happened and what, if anything, the church could do to ensure it never happens again. Many commenters have focused on the faith’s “help line,” which bishops can call to find out how to safeguard the victims and what legal obligations the lay leaders must consider. Critics say the help line should focus more on the victims and not legality management. Some members, though, see other areas that could be improved to help victims. On this week’s show, Laura Brignone, a Latter-day Saint visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies technology and interventions for domestic violence and sexual assault, discusses how the church could partner with existing help lines to assist abuse victims and offers suggestions for enlarging the group of helpers and the way they are trained.

Earlier this month, an Associated Press investigation of several child sex abuse cases, including a particularly horrific one in Arizona, revealed that the much-debated “help line” supplied by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its lay leaders failed to protect the victims. The exposé brought responses of dismay, disgust and anger from insiders and outsiders alike — and the reverberations are still being felt. On this week’s show, AP journalist Michael Rezendes, who previously earned a Pulitzer Prize with The Boston Globe for uncovering the Roman Catholic Church’s pattern of covering up clergy sex abuse while part of the team dramatized in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” to talk about his latest story, how came upon it, how he reported it and how it compares to his previous reporting on this sensitive subject. Rezendes also talks about an astonishing amount of document shredding on sexual abuse — for instance, all records of calls to the help line, he reports, are routinely destroyed — within the Utah-based faith and points to a lack of transparency surrounding its handling of these cases.

Marriage in a Latter-day Saint temple is called a “sealing,” which is believed to stretch beyond death into the eternities. So what happens when a couple split up? Well, for devout members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that’s much more complicated than a governmental divorce. In today’s world, that is something called a “sealing cancellation.” But there are different rules for women and men. Men can be sealed to more than one woman without any cancellation, but women can be sealed only to one man so must obtain a cancellation. And rules about who can be sealed to whom in the hereafter via proxy rituals are different from living couples. Many believe this confusion reflects remnants of polygamy. But does it? On this week’s podcast, Nathan Oman, a Latter-day Saint law professor in William & Mary in Virginia, who has been researching the history of the faith’s modern sealing rules, tells how he discovered some startling facts. In fact, sealing cancellations and their gender differences arose in the early 20th century, well after the church officially had abandoned the practice. And Oman speculates about why it happened.

Joseph Smith once famously said, “No man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it.” But Noah Van Sciver did, and the result is his new graphic novel, “Joseph Smith and the Mormons.” In it, the acclaimed cartoonist aims to tell “a more complete story” of the enigmatic religious leader — from his early days as a so-called treasure seeker to his reports of angelic visitations, the unearthing of gold plates, the founding a restorationist faith and his ultimate assassination at the hands of a mob. And while completing the project took more years — and pages — than he originally intended, Van Sciver, who grew up as a Latter-day Saint, said conducting the research for his latest opus helped him come to terms with his religious roots. On this week’s “Mormon Land,” he discusses his work, what he learned, how he feels about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now, and what he hopes members and others take away from his book.

Historians with the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) recently made a stunning announcement: Daniel Larsen, a descendant of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, had discovered the only known daguerreotype of his famous ancestor in a locket passed down in the Smith family. The emerging image was startling to many, who know Smith only from a portrait that was painted of him in 1842, and the photo appeared distinctly different from that. The finding led to a nationwide conversation among members of the larger, Utah-based, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and those in the Community of Christ, which was launched in the 1860s by the founder’s family. Viewers were asking: How do they know it is really him? Lachlan Mackay, a Community of Christ apostle who directs that church’s historic sites in Nauvoo, Ill., and another descendant of Smith, helped analyze the locket, trace its ownership, and research the daguerreotype’s likely history. On this week’s show, Mackay answer questions about the photo, the process historians used to authenticate it and why is convinced it is an image of Joseph Smith.

Few Latter-day Saint families remain untouched by the experience of a loved one who chooses to step away from participation in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And many parents blame themselves for their kids’ choices, asking themselves what they could have done better, how many more trips to the temple they should have made, how many more prayers they should have offered, or how much more they should have read the scriptures. “Feeling like we have failed as parents, that our families should feel ashamed of those who left, or that the very idea of someone leaving the church means we refuse to have openhearted conversations about it and instead cast blame, is fear, plain and simple,” Emily Jensen writes in a recent post on By Common Consent. The web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and her 17-year-old daughter, Cecily, join this week’s show to discuss the issue of parents and their children’s church choices, including: Why young Latter-day Saints leave the faith, how parents should react, and what the church is or could be doing to help.

Green Flake, an enslaved worker and Latter-day Saint, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley with two other Black pioneers July 22, 1847 — two days before Mormon prophet Brigham Young reportedly declared, “This is the right place.” Flake, Hark Wales and Oscar Smith scouted the valley, tilled the ground, planted crops and laid down a trail for their enslavers and vanguard wagons that soon would arrive. The three are memorialized at This Is the Place Heritage Park, near the mouth of Emigration Canyon in the eastern foothills, as “colored servants.” They were, in fact, slaves. And this month — on the 175th anniversary of their arrival — new monuments to them will be unveiled in the same park. This is due largely to the efforts of Latter-day Saint filmmaker and music promoter Mauli Junior Bonner. On this week’s show, Bonner — writer, producer and director of the film “His Name Is Green Flake” — talks about why he launched a drive for the memorials, what it took, and how the effort may help bring healing to racial divides within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Editor's note: Yesterday, "Mormon Land" was published with the wrong episode attached. Though the correct episode was replaced shortly after the error was noticed, some listeners were still unable to access it. We are publishing this episode again to ensure everyone can listen. Thanks for supporting Mormon Land. As discussions, debates and disputes about the recent Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade rage on, it seems that there are few fresh perspectives on the thorny issue. Should pregnant people have the right to make decisions about their bodies or should the state have a vested interest in protecting the unborn, regardless of a pregnant person’s wishes? Gabrielle Blair, a successful Latter-day Saint influencer known as “Design Mom,” says it’s time to shift the focus from women to men. After all, she argues in her forthcoming book, “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion,” based on a 2018 viral Twitter thread, 100% of unwanted pregnancies ultimately are caused by men. Blair, New York Times bestselling author and mother of six, believes the topic must move away from controlling and legislating women’s bodies and turn instead to men’s lack of accountability. On this week’s podcast, Blair, talks about the book and why she wants to reframe the discussion about sex, birth control, pregnancy, abortion and more.

Rusty Bowers, a Latter-day Saint who serves as speaker of the Arizona House, recently captured the attention of the nation when he testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol. The Republican officeholder steadfastly and sometimes emotionally told lawmakers of the intense pressure he received from Donald Trump and his allies to appoint alternate electors in a bid to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election. Bowers refused. Why? One reason he cited was his faith’s teaching that the U.S. Constitution is “divinely inspired” and that he was determined to uphold his oath to remain true to its principles. Where and when did this belief in the nation’s founding document begin? And what are the implications when current constitutional questions arise? Matthew Bowman, Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith” and “Christian: The Politics of a Word in America,” explores those questions and more on this week’s show.

To many white American feminists, the issue of gender equality is paramount. Naturally, their critique of institutions like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its all-male priesthood, is built on women’s lack of decision-making power and absence from the hierarchy. But some U.S. women of color as well as in other countries find liberation and satisfaction in the Utah-based faith — and even in its patriarchal structure. That intrigued historian and researcher Caroline Kline, assistant director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University. On this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast, Kline shares gender insights she gleaned from scores of interviews with Latter-day Saint women of color in Mexico, Botswana and the United States that appear in her just-released book, “Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness.”

For two months, the FX/Hulu series “Under the Banner of Heaven” has prompted riveting conversations about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among members, former members and nonmembers. Like the bestselling book of the same name by author Jon Krakauer, the series recounts the murders of Latter-day Saint mom Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, by brothers-in-law Ron and Dan Lafferty. It also includes flashbacks to violent episodes in Mormonism’s early history and a fictional Latter-day Saint detective — played by actor Andrew Garfield — who undergoes his own faith journey as he uncovers troubling aspects of his religion while investigating the horrific crimes. The writer-producer who put this all together is Oscar-winning filmmaker Dustin Lance Black, who earned an Academy Award in 2009 for his screenplay of “Milk” and was one of the writers for HBO’s “Big Love.” Now that the final episode of “Under the Banner” has aired, Black talks about the project, his artistic decisions, the praise and criticism he has received and what viewers — Latter-day Saints and others — should take away from the show.

A woman who has been part of the Mormon Moms TikTok network, known as "MomTok," recently told her millions of followers that she was getting divorced. The reason? She said she and her husband had participated in what she called “soft swinging.” Though unverified, the video went viral and has been reported widely — and salaciously — on social media. Many questions remain about the story, but whether true or not, it does shine a light on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its teachings about sexuality in marriage. On this week’s show, Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, a licensed therapist in Chicago who specializes in working with Latter-day Saint couples on sexuality and relationship issues, discusses those issues and more.

In recent weeks, the U.S. has seen two more mass shootings — one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and the other at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Though President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made at least one comment suggesting that gun laws are too lax and apostles David A. Bednar and Jeffrey R. Holland have lamented the shootings, the Utah-based faith has not made any official statements about these tragedies specifically or gun violence generally. Is it a moral issue for Latter-day Saints? Should it be? What does Latter-day Saint theology have to say about the issue? Discussing those questions and more n this week’s show are Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University and the author or editor of several books, including “Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion,” and “Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict,” and Janiece Johnson, historian of American religion and the author of books on Latter-day Saint women and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, including the forthcoming “American Punishment: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Mormon Transgressions.”

Five students at Brigham Young University who call themselves the Black Menaces are on a mission to raise awareness about racism and other challenges facing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its flagship school. With iPhones in hand, they crisscross the campus, posing provocative questions to the mostly white students about race, LGBTQ issues and marginalized communities. They then post the two-minute clips on TikTok. On this week’s show, two of the Menaces, Rachel Weaver, from Chicago, and Kennethia Dorsey, of Nashville, Tenn., discuss what they have learned, what they hope to accomplish, and what BYU can do to change.

Growth in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bounced back a bit last year after taking a pandemic plunge in 2020. The global faith saw its overall membership rise by 0.8% during 2021 to top 16.8 million. Africa has led the way, accounting for 10 of the 14 fastest-growing nations in terms of Latter-day Saint growth the past two years. In the United States, from the start of 2020 to the end of 2021, membership increased 0.6% to exceed 6.7 million. South Dakota, Arkansas and Tennessee grew the fastest, while California, North Dakota and Washington were the biggest percentage losers. In fact, 21 states plus the District Columbia actually saw their membership tallies shrink. On this week’s show, Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who dutifully tracks these statistics and more for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, discusses the ups and downs and ins and outs of church growth and how the membership is booming in some places and dwindling in others.

He defeated a popular Democratic senator, arguing that three terms were enough, and then proceeded to serve more than twice as long (seven terms) — longer than any Republican in Senate history. During those 42 years, this conservative loyalist teamed up with a liberal lion, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Americans with Disability Act. He eventually became among the staunchest defenders of Donald Trump, shepherding through a major tax overhaul and helping to shape the conservative majority of today’s Supreme Court. These justices appear poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which gave women a constitutional right to abortion. Through it all, Orrin Hatch, who died April 23 at age 88, often touted his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and championed the cause of religious liberty. In fact, historian Benjamin Park says in a recent Washington Post piece, Hatch helped transform the nation’s Latter-day Saints into one of the most reliably red voting blocs. On this week’s show, Park discusses the late senator, his influence, his politics, his piety and his place in history.

The FX/Hulu television series “Under the Banner of Heaven” has generated a social media storm among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as former members and religion observers. It tells the story of the gruesome 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, at the hands of her husband’s two brothers. The story is built on a bestselling book of the same name by journalist Jon Krakauer, whose thesis is that religion — all religion and especially Mormonism — leads inevitably to violence. Viewers of the first two episodes are debating whether the depictions are true to the faith of the 1980s and whether the actions of the investigators make sense — especially those of the fictional detective, played by Oscar nominee Andrew Garfield, whose faith journey is at the center of the show. Mormon studies scholars, however, may be less concerned with artistic license than with the series’ conclusions. On this week’s podcast, three religion experts offer their views of the show, the book, the history, the premise, the portrayals — what the filmmakers get right and what they get wrong — and how Latter-day Saints themselves can learn from all of this. Join us to hear from Patrick Mason, chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University; writer and researcher Jana Riess of Religion News Service; and Janan Graham-Russell, who recently completed a fellowship in Mormon studies at the University of Utah.

To say that leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often talk about religious freedom would be, well, an understatement. It is a common theme from the top apostles on down and appears to be a favorite topic of Dallin Oaks, first counselor in the governing First Presidency and a former Utah Supreme Court justice. Recently, President Camille Johnson, global head of the children’s Primary organization and herself a high-powered attorney, picked up on the theme as well in an address in Iowa. The church has been calling for a balancing of religious liberty and LGBTQ protections. It succeeded in passing such legislation in Utah and has pushed for similar measures in Arizona and Georgia. It also backs the proposed federal Fairness for All Act, which a number of prominent LGBTQ and civil rights groups oppose. So why all the attention on religious freedoms? Are they really under threat? If so, from where or whom? And is compromise not only possible but also preferable? On this week’s show, Sarah Barringer Gordon, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on religious liberty who has written notably about Mormon history, explores those questions and more. She notes, among other points, that the issue has been politicized in the legislative arena and states that while some perceived risks to faith freedoms may be more imagined than real.

After bursting onto the scene in 2016 by releasing leaked videos of apostles for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints privately discussing a range of topics — from politics and piracy to same-sex marriage and marijuana — Ryan McKnight, with help from his colleague Ethan Gregory Dodge, set up a website called MormonLeaks, which gave way to the Truth & Transparency Foundation, and began exposing the inner workings of the Utah-based faith and, eventually, other religions. Their goal: Push churches to be more open and honest about their practices. They revealed how much top Latter-day Saint leaders were paid. They uncovered headline-grabbing abuse allegations. And they showed slices of how much wealth the LDS Church was accumulating. Now, they’re shutting down but with one last big scoop: the widest and deepest look ever at the church’s vast U.S. real estate holdings, totaling 1.7 million acres and making the faith the nation’s fifth largest private landowner. On this week’s show, McKnight and Dodge discuss their latest findings, the work of their foundation, what it accomplished, why they’re closing shop and whether they achieved what they set out to do. We want to hear from you! Take our survey here: bit.ly/mormonland

It’s Holy Week for Western Christians, which culminates Sunday with Easter. The Holy Land is awash with pilgrims and tourists — including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — who are soaking in the sites of Jesus’ last days. It also signals the reopening of Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center for Near East Studies after a two-year pandemic pause. In this special edition of “Mormon Land,” The Salt Lake Tribune’s senior religion reporter, Peggy Fletcher Stack, who is on assignment in the Middle East, talks with Eric D. Huntsman, a religious studies expert and the center’s new academic director, about the coming days, how the facility can deepen spirituality and much more. We want to hear from you! Take our survey here: bit.ly/mormonland

To Sonia Johnson, the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and ‘80s was more than merely a single political cause. It was a turning point in her life. Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Virginia excommunicated Johnson from the Utah-based faith in 1979 for allegedly spreading false doctrine and working against them but she always maintained it was for exposing details of the church’s national campaign against the proposed constitutional amendment. The discipline prompted her to evaluate all aspects of Mormonism. It also ended her marriage. At the same time, it propelled her onto the national stage, where the iconic feminist ran for the White House and used her newfound fame on behalf of women’s equality. Some 35 years later, Kate Kelly, a Washington, D.C., activist also was excommunicated — at the same Virginia meetinghouse as Johnson — for her advocacy in pushing to ordain women to the faith’s all-male priesthood. She, too, is fighting for ratification of the ERA and has written a new book, “Ordinary Equality,” about the continuing quest to enshrine women’s rights in the Constitution. On this week’s show, Johnson and Kelly discuss their ousters from their former faith, their current feelings toward the church, their advocacy for the ERA and its prospects, along with other women who have battled for the cause of equality.

In January, Salt Lake Tribune columnist Gordon Monson stepped away from writing about the WNBA, NBA, NFL, NCAA, MLS, MLB and the alphabet soup of the sports world to comment on another acronym: LDS. A practicing and believing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he rattled off 20 reforms he’d like to see his faith undertake. Now, Monson again departs from the Utah Jazz stretch drive, college football spring drills and March Madness matchups to offer, in a sort of journalistic makeup call, 20 things he likes about his church — from its lay clergy and meetinghouse basketball courts to its opportunities for service and its emphasis on Jesus. On this week’s show, Monson discusses the positives he sees in the church today.

Almost a year ago, noted Latter-day Saint historian and prodigious researcher D. Michael Quinn died at age 77. Quinn, who retained his belief in the founding events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints until his death, was pressured to resign from Brigham Young University and subsequently excommunicated from the faith in 1993 as part of the famed “September Six” for his writings about women and the priesthood, as well as about post-Manifesto polygamy. For the past 11 months, friends and fellow academics have discussed the scholar’s legacy. On March 25, many of them will gather at the University of Utah for a one-day conference to examine and celebrate Quinn’s life. In addition, Signature Books recently published a new biography of Quinn by historian and archivist Gary Topping. Titled simply “D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian,” the book helps flesh out the multiple aspects of Quinn’s identity as queer, Chicano and fiercely independent. Meanwhile, Barbara Jones Brown, Signature’s new director, is researching Quinn’s unpublished memoirs, discovered by his children after his death. On this week’s show, Topping and Brown examine Quinn’s life and legacy, his battles with the faith’s hierarchy and with his own identity, as well as his unwavering commitment to an honest telling of Mormon history and how he was ahead of his time.

Taylor Kerby persistently feared he would fall short of God’s love — no matter how many prayers he offered, no matter how often he read or recited scriptures and no matter how pure he kept his thoughts. Growing up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Kerby fixated on living every commandment, avoiding a hint of anything that could be termed a sin. Righteousness was not a desire or a goal or a pursuit. It was life, and it was crippling him. He suffered from “scrupulosity,” an obsessive-compulsive disorder that focuses on moral rectitude and brings with it pathological guilt. As a teenager, this religious mania “was all-encompassing, flowing into every aspect of my life and informing the most insignificant decision,” Kerby writes in his new book, “Scrupulous: My Obsessive Compulsion for God.” On this week’s show, he talks about what that was like, how he learned to deal with it and where his faith is today.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days Saints across the United States overwhelmingly lean Republican, vote Republican and identify as Republican. This week’s guest is not one of them. As national director of Latter-day Saints for Biden-Harris, Robert Taber strives to swing more members toward a different direction by campaigning for the victorious Democratic ticket before the election and lobbying for the administration’s proposals afterward. He recently endorsed Judge Katanji Brown Jackson’s historic nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, and urged the Senate to confirm her as the country’s first Black female justice. On this week’s show, Taber discuss his partisan preferences, the issues of the day, the intersection of politics and faith, and his hopes for converting more Latter-day Saints to a new way of viewing the governmental landscape.

The world watched last week as Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Caught in the crosshairs were more than 11,000 Ukrainian members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this special episode, Salt Lake Tribune journalists spoke with Latter-day Saints across Ukraine — and some fleeing the Eastern European nation — to learn about how they were faring, as well as how their congregations have banded together before and after the bombs started to drop.

Coming into 2022, Brigham Young University faced a federal investigation about its discrimination against LGBTQ students, allowing heterosexual couples to exhibit “romantic behavior,” while forbidding the same for same-sex couples. Eventually, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed the investigation, saying the Provo school, owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is exempt from federal laws prohibiting gender-based discrimination. These exemptions began in 1976 under then-BYU President Dallin Oaks. Other issues have since surfaced at the faith’s flagship campus — such as canceling gender-affirming voice therapy for transgender clients, placing stricter limits on protests, and dealing with fallout from a controversial speech by religion professor Brad Wilcox. On this week’s show, Michael Austin, a BYU alumnus and executive vice president of academic affairs at the University of Evansville, a Methodist school in Indiana, talks about the challenges facing BYU and its academic standing.

Race is a fraught topic in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For more than 125 years, the Utah-based faith denied Black members access to its priesthood and temples. That exclusion ended in 1978, but discrimination and racism have persisted. And, though the church has formed an alliance with the NAACP, and church leaders have strongly condemned all forms of racism and bigotry, some members continue to resist change. In a recent speech, a Brigham Young University professor and high-ranking church leader defended the former priesthood/temple ban as part of God’s timing. On this week’s show, Black Latter-day Saint scholar Janan Graham-Russell, a graduate student at Harvard University who is spending the year at the University of Utah as a Mormon studies fellow, discusses that speech by Brad Wilcox — who has apologized twice for his remarks — and the ongoing issue of racism among church members.

Today’s world seems more divided than ever on political solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and some such rifts have seeped into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many members have entrenched themselves in their own partisan positions, choosing derision over dialogue by refusing to talk or even listen to other viewpoints. Others have chosen to eschew politics altogether, believing that it is impossible for policymakers to get anything right and that politics has no place with faith. Retired federal Judge Thomas Griffith, a Latter-day Saint convert who stepped down from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2020, argues just the opposite — that politics is actually a “religious activity.” On this week’s show, he discusses how to practice politics without “losing your soul.”

Eugene England, a popular professor at Brigham Young University who died 20 years ago, probably is best known as the founder of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Last summer, Terryl Givens published the first full-length biography of England, titled “Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism,” detailing his life as a devout but controversial member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A second volume, called “Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal” by Kristine Haglund, now explores the scholar’s work and thought. A respected essayist, England was one of the most influential intellectuals in the modern church. On this week’s show, Haglund examines England’s important contributions to Mormonism, how he was both liberal and conservative, his embrace of church founder Joseph Smith and successor Brigham Young, his friendships and fights with Latter-day Saint apostles, his political views, his theological musings and more.

On Jan. 15, after an undersea volcano showered the kingdom of Tonga with tsunami waves, flooding, rocks and ash, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sprang into action. The Utah-based faith provided tons of food, clothes, water and other household goods to the devastated islands. Church-owned Liahona High School became a welcome refuge for some 1,250 people seeking emergency housing. The governing First Presidency sent a letter of support and consolation to Tonga’s king and queen as well as Latter-day Saints throughout the nation. The church’s imprint on the country is undeniable — Tonga has the highest percentage of Latter-day Saints of any country in the world (nearly 63%; about the same as Utah’s). On this week’s show, Verna Tukuafu, a Tongan native and international area manager at BYU-Pathway Worldwide, discusses the relief efforts in her homeland and what life is like there for members of the majority faith.

For more than a dozen years, Devery Anderson, a white Latter-day Saint studying history at the University of Utah, was obsessed with the 1955 killing of a 14-year-old Black youth, Emmett Till. Anderson’s quest for details culminated in 2015, with publication of his book-length exploration, “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement.” Now, nearly seven years later, Anderson’s book is the basis of a new miniseries, titled “Women of the Movement,” airing this month on ABC. Anderson, who consulted on the show, is deeply aware of his own faith’s past involvement in a racist policy denying Black males ordination to the priesthood and Black females access to temple ceremonies. That practice ended in 1978, but racism in the church remains a problem to this day. On this week’s podcast, Anderson talks about his groundbreaking work on the Till biography and his church’s racial history.

This season’s University of Utah football team was stocked with stars en route to its historic run to a Pac-12 title and the school’s first-ever Rose Bowl appearance. But the heart and soul of the squad was found in an unlikely, undersized, overaged Latter-day Saint receiver-return specialist whose affable, gregarious and lighthearted nature seemed to belie the violent sport he so clearly loved. After a standout freshman season, Britain Covey, all 5 feet 8 inches and 170 pounds of him, served a mission to Chile for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then returned to the Salt Lake City campus, where he proceeded to catch passes, juke tacklers and tally touchdowns to chants from fans of “Covey, Covey, Covey.” But how did this 24-year-old Provo native — who dreamed of playing for Brigham Young University and whose famous grandfather (Stephen R. Covey of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” fame) though a U. graduate, boasted deep BYU ties — end up at rival Utah, a place Britain once thought only a “bad person” would attend? On this week’s show, Covey explains why he chose the U. over the Y.; how his mission helps him on and off the field; how his college coach, fellow Latter-day Saint Kyle Whittingham, became a role model; how he remembers his Rose Bowl experience; and how he is preparing for a shot at the NFL.

Longtime Salt Lake Tribune sports columnist Gordon Monson usually writes about first downs, double-faults, 3-pointers and four-baggers. He is at home commenting on what takes place on basketball courts, football fields and baseball diamonds. Occasionally, though, he enters another arena — that of religion. A practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he has opined about Sabbath observance, BYU’s Honor Code, even how Jesus might behave at a ballgame. In that spirit this past weekend, he offered 20 reforms he would like to see his church undertake. On this week’s show, he discusses those suggestions on topics ranging from missions to money, Word of Wisdom to Sunday sports, tithing to temple recommends, women’s equality to General Conference talks.

Most people know that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced polygamy in the 19th century, but the Utah-based faith eventually abandoned it, beginning with a pronouncement in 1890 by church President Wilford Woodruff known as “the Manifesto.” Even most members, however, are unaware of Woodruff’s 1894 announcement, termed a “revelation,” which ended a teaching known as “the law of adoption,” under which adult members were sealed to church leaders. In General Conference of that year, Woodruff announced that hereafter temple sealings should proceed strictly along family lines, thereby replacing the earlier “kingdom theology” with what became the modern Latter-day Saint understanding of eternal families. “Without an understanding of kingdom theology and the law of adoption, it’s not possible to fully grasp how 19th-century Latter-day Saints understood polygamy,” writes scholar Nate Oman, who teaches at William & Mary Law School in Virginia. On this week’s show, Oman discusses this often-overlooked but highly important piece of Mormon history.

Some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that their church has become staid, legalistic and bureaucratic. They yearn for more of the mystical encounters espoused by church founder Joseph Smith and his early followers. In 2006, Utah attorney Denver Snuffer published “The Second Comforter: Conversing With the Lord Through the Veil.” It became an overnight sensation with those Latter-day Saints who wanted more spiritual experiences. That book and the volumes that followed attracted the attention of church authorities and, in 2013, Snuffer was excommunicated. Hundreds of other members joined him at gatherings and in small groups and thus was born the Remnant movement, which today touts thousands of adherents. On this week’s show, Snuffer discusses the movement — its past, present and future — and his views of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, pioneer-prophet Brigham Young and current church President Russell M. Nelson, along with his experiences with deity, expanding scripture and more.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments about a Mississippi law banning virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Anti-abortion activists are cheering the possibility that the court could overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which granted women a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has aligned itself on several social issues with conservative religions, but its position on abortion is more complicated than that. The Utah-based faith condemns “elective abortion for personal or social convenience” but permits the procedure in cases of rape or incest, severe fetal defects, or when the life or health of the mother is in “serious jeopardy.” On this week’s show, Christine Durham, a former justice and chief justice of Utah’s Supreme Court and herself a Latter-day Saint, discusses the possible monumental shift in abortion policy and practices, and how the high court’s decision may impact the nation, states, Utah’s most dominant faith, its members and women overall — warning that women cannot truly be equal without control of their own bodies.

Leaders of nearly 200 nations met in Glasgow, Scotland, recently to discuss how to limit climate change. The Washington Post reports that they agreed to ramp up their carbon-cutting commitments, phase out some fossil fuels, and increase aid to poor countries on the front lines of global warming. To many Latter-day Saints, these are urgent, even religious, concerns. On this week’s show, George Handley, who teaches humanities at Brigham Young University and has written extensively about environmental issues, talks about how these eco-challenges connect with church teachings.

Temple work may have slowed due to the pandemic, but temple-building is moving forward at an unprecedented pace. With The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announcing multiple new temples at each General Conference, architects are busy designing these holy edifices for locales ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe and scores of places in between. Besides creating new temples, the Utah-based faith is also renovating 10 existing ones, including the iconic Salt Lake Temple. Just last week, the church unveiled a new look for the 1970s-era Provo Temple and its Space Age design, one members have had a sort of love-hate relationship with through the years. On this week’s show, Allen Roberts — a Utah architect who specializes in preservation and has worked on Latter-day Saint chapels, tabernacles and temples — discusses designs for these sacred structures, each of which members view as a “House of the Lord.” He talks about how these temples are designed, the architectural styles that are employed, and reveals some of his favorites (19th-century temples like Manti and Logan top his list along with the ones in Cardston, Alberta, and Washington, D.C.) and some of his least favorites (the current Provo Temple, for instance).

This month marks religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack’s 30th anniversary of covering The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for The Salt Lake Tribune. During that time, she has traveled the globe, journeying with prophets and interviewing apostles. She has written about divisive doctrines and inclusive gatherings, emerging trends and groundbreaking shifts, religious eras and “Mormon moments.” Mostly, though, she has written about people — people cherishing faith, people questioning faith, people rejecting faith. On this week’s show, she shares highlights from her remarkable career and answers questions from our Patreon supporters. Listeners will get the scoop on her travels with Gordon Hinckley — including how she got into a meeting with the Latter-day Saint prophet and Ghana’s president — her behind-the-scenes conversations with Marjorie Hinckley and apostle Dallin H. Oaks. They’ll also get her take on what prompted church President Russell Nelson’s remark about knowing her family, how she learned about apostle David Bednar’s hair gel and many other stories.

Six years ago this month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints instituted a policy labeling same-sex married couples “apostates” and barring their kids from baptism. The policy later was abandoned, but the pain persisted. Since then, there have been highs and lows with the Utah-based faith and its LGBTQ members: an Honor Code about-face at Brigham Young University, the Y lit up in rainbow colors, BYU’s mascot coming out as gay, and apostle Jeffrey R. Holland calling out a college’s valedictorian for announcing his sexual orientation at graduation. On this week’s show Tom Christofferson, a prominent LGBTQ member and author of “That We My Be One: A Gay Mormon’s Perspective on Faith and Family,” discusses the November 2015 policy — how it shook the church, why it was implemented and later scrapped, where the faith sits now on LGBTQ issues and his hopes for the future on the topic.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers itself the “restoration” of a complete Christianity that was lost centuries ago after the death of the biblical apostles. Several years ago, Denver Snuffer, a former Latter-day Saint, launched his Remnant movement, preaching that the Utah-based faith fell away from the truth after founder Joseph Smith was killed in 1844 and Brigham Young led his followers West. Now, yet another faction, called The Doctrine of Christ, has emerged. Phil Davis, a Latter-day Saint in Provo, asserts that Young murdered Smith and that Mormonism’s first prophet recently returned to re-restore the church with Davis at its helm. On this week’s show, Cristina Rosetti, a religious studies scholar at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, discusses these groups, why some Latter-day Saints are joining them, how conspiracy theories play a role, and whether they pose any threat to the mainstream church.

After Mormonism founder Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, the largest body of the fledgling faith went west with Brigham Young. But a sizable group, including Smith’s widow, Emma, and her children, stayed in the Midwest and, in 1860, founded another church known then as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with Smith’s eldest son as president. In 2001, the church changed its name to the Community of Christ to reflect a more mainline approach than their Latter-day Saint cousins. As of 2018, it was reported to have 250,000 members in 1,100 congregations in 59 countries. On this week’s show, Bishop Carla Long, who leads a Utah congregation in Millcreek, talks about her church’s past, present and future. She also discusses how her faith differs from that of the much-larger, Utah-based church, how it views scriptures (including the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants), priesthood, polygamy, the godhead, the afterlife, and why Community of Christ members shy away from the “Mormon” moniker as well.

Women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are reared to be homemakers, caring for their house and family as a kind of religious obligation, while their husbands work to support the clan. But that isn’t how it works for all Latter-day Saint women in a modern society and economy, which often fall short in valuing the work they do in the home. Many take on part-time employment to bring in extra money, while caring for kids, and that can open up some of them to the false allure of multilevel marketing scams. One of those businesses, LuLaRoe, which sells bold-print clothes and leggings, was started by a Latter-day Saint couple and was the subject of a recent Amazon documentary titled “LuLaRich.” Meg Conley, a Latter-day Saint essayist in Denver and publisher of a newsletter called Homeculture, discusses the documentary, why members may be attracted to MLMs, and what this phenomenon says about Latter-day Saint culture, and the blending of beliefs and business.

Fifty years ago this month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established the Genesis Group, a support organization for Black members. It came at a time when men and women with African blood were denied access to the priesthood and temple. Genesis served as a quasi-branch of the faith, meeting on the first Sunday of every month. It was like no other church organization — not an auxiliary like the Relief Society but more than a “fireside.” When the priesthood and temple ban on Black members was lifted in 1978, Genesis continued to meet, offering fellowship to Black members, many of whom struggle to this day worshipping in a mostly white church. As Genesis celebrates its golden anniversary, one of its original leaders, Darius Gray, talks about the group’s founding, its purpose and its future.

When the governing First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints amped up its plea in August for masking and vaccinations, some conservative members who oppose such COVID-19 measures balked. Now they know how it feels, responded many progressive Latter-day Saints, who have found themselves similarly on the outs with top church leaders on a range of issues from women’s rights to same-sex marriage. Such was the setup for a major Washington Post story about the rise of liberal Latter-day Saints, especially among younger members. On this week’s show, author Emily Kaplan joins us to discuss her piece and the tug of war taking place between progressive and conservative forces within the faith.

The recently completed 191st Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided 10 hours of sermons from the faith’s top leaders, including four women among dozens of men. In this fourth straight all-virtual conference, worldwide listeners heard speeches about mental illness, the importance of temples and dissension among the membership. Speakers also focused on the need to hold fast to faith in Christ, use the church’s full name, and take precautions against the coronavirus pandemic. On this week’s show, Emily Jensen, a writer and web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, discusses the weekend’s sessions — the words, the music, what inspired, what disappointed, and what the proceedings may mean moving forward.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was once known almost as an ethnic group. In the past three-plus years, since President Russell M. Nelson took the helm of the 16.6 million-member global faith, elements of that identity have been stripped away. Statues of the Angel Moroni, a figure from the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, are rarely being added to the tops of new temples. The “live” endowment temple ritual, created as a kind of religious theater, has been replaced by a film. Class names for Young Women, including Beehive, Mia Maid and Laurels, have been scrapped. Long-standing outdoor pageants have ended. Nelson has declared that even using the name Mormon is a “major victory for Satan” and has generally prohibited its usage. What’s happening to the Utah-based faith? Is it in danger of losing its identity? Liz Layton Johnson, a Latter-day Saint blogger who lives in Saudi Arabia with her family, discusses those questions and more for a church she describes as “in flux” as it strives to chart a unifying, yet distinctive, future.

In today’s world, ideas about sex are ever present and often confusing. Sexual relations can bond couples together, or be abusive, manipulative and unhealthy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like most faiths, views the creation of life as sacred, but it also sees sexual intimacy as an expression of love. The Utah-based faith does not preach sex as “original sin,” but it also sometimes sends conflicting, even harmful messages about human desire to members, producing guilt and shame. There are also endless questions about homosexuality and same-sex marriage, the evils of pornography, and what constitutes healthy sexuality. On this week’s show — streamed live Tuesday night to our Patreon supporters — we invited the following panel to explore the wide-ranging issues surrounding sexuality and Mormonism: • Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, a licensed therapist who specializes in working with Latter-day Saint couples on sexuality and relationship issues. • Michael Austin, a university administrator who has a deep interest in Mormon theology, particularly the nature of sexuality. • Jacob Hess, a mindfulness teacher and writer at Public Square Magazine who has explored the problems of pornography.

If Brigham Young wanted to enroll at his namesake university, he’d have to shave his beard. A number of other former Latter-day Saint prophets would have to do the same. Warner Woodworth, an emeritus professor from Brigham Young University, argues that’s just wrong. So he launched a Change.org petition urging the Provo school to end its prohibition on whiskers. Others have tried before to overturn the 1960s-era beard ban but failed. Still, Woodworth is confident this push will succeed. On this week’s show, Woodworth talks about his campaign to “bring back the beard” at BYU.

Eugene England was at the center of Mormon intellectual life from the early 1960s until his death 20 years ago. As the founder of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a popular professor at Brigham Young University, and a widely respected essayist, England was one of the most influential — and controversial — figures in the modern church. He lived in the crosshairs between religious tradition and reform, tackling issues of race, feminism, orthodoxy and the nature of God. He was a devout and believing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who sustained leaders even as they sometimes chastised him and eventually forced him out of the school he loved. On this week’s show, Latter-day Saint scholar Terryl Givens talks about his newly released biography, “Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism.” He also explores England’s influential essays (his preferred literary medium), his frequent feuds with church higher-ups (including the late apostle Bruce R. McConkie), his ultimate ouster from BYU (in an era well before apostle Jeffrey R. Holland’s recent speech at the faith’s flagship school), and his lasting imprint on intellectual pursuits in Mormonism.

Did sea gulls save Mormon settlers’ crops? Did Brigham Young mysteriously and miraculously leave a space in design plans for the Salt Lake Temple that later would be filled by elevators? Did Elvis Presley make margin notes in a Book of Mormon? Was Yoda of “Star Wars” fame really modeled after former church President Spencer W. Kimball? Those are just some of the stories that float around Latter-day Saint circles. But are they true? Keith Erekson, director of the Church History Library, answers those questions and more in his new book, “Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-Day Myths.” Even more important, he arms readers with the tools needed to discern for themselves the difference between fact and fiction whether in religion, politics, medicine or other fields. On this week’s show, Erekson talks about myth-busting and faith-building. He also answers the most common question he receives: Does the Church History Library have the sword of Laban of Book of Mormon fame?

Latter-day Saint apostle Jeffrey R. Holland addressed Brigham Young University faculty and staff this week, urging them to be committed to the school’s “unique mission” and the church that sponsors it. He made headlines for criticizing faculty members who challenge teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its stance on same-sex marriage. The popular apostle even questioned why a BYU valedictorian would choose his 2019 commencement address to come out as gay. If maintaining the faith’s policies on LGBTQ issues ends up costing the school some “professional associations and certifications,” Holland said, “then so be it.” On this week’s show, Michael Austin, a BYU alumnus and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Evansville, a Methodist school in Indiana, discusses the reverberating ramifications of the speech and how it could impact the Provo school’s academic research, professional ties, athletic alliances, classroom interactions and more.

The delta variant of COVID-19 is surging across the country, with nearly half of all Americans still not fully vaccinated. As the enduring pandemic once again grows dire, Utah hospitals have been overwhelmed with mostly unvaccinated patients battling the disease. The new emergency prompted the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to issue yet another, even more forceful, message last week to members to wear masks and get vaccinated. Dr. Samuel Brown is witnessing the pandemic’s devastating toll up close, and all too personally, as an intensive care unit physician-scientist at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray. Brown, who doubles as a religious historian, is also the author of a new book, “Where the Soul Hungers: One Doctor’s Journey From Atheism to Faith.” On this week’s show, he talks about his experiences treating COVID-19, his thoughts about fellow Latter-day Saints who choose not to wear masks or be vaccinated, and how the pandemic has affected his faith.

Scaffolding surrounds the Salt Lake Temple. The two visitor centers are no more. The plaza behind the Church Office Building is mainly dirt. Clearly big changes are in store in and around Temple Square, which ranks among Utah’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing millions of visitors from near and far every year. You may be wondering what this place in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City will look like when all the work is done. Where will the Christus statue wind up? Will the sculptures of church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum return? And what about the holiday Christmas lights? On this week’s show, Ben Metcalf, manager of temple visitors centers for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, talks about this massive makeover and what guests can expect when the four-year project ends.

The New York Times recently took up the topic of temple garments in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The piece focused on Idaho Falls member Sasha Piton, who is urging the church to produce softer, more comfortable and breathable garments, which the faithful wear as a private and personal reminder of their religious commitments. Piton, who posts on Instagram under her moniker, themormonhippie, had shared her concerns about the holy underwear with her more than 25,000 followers. It apparently resonated in Latter-day Saint circles, drawing thousands of comments and private messages. It is just one subject the Mormon millennial discusses on social media. On this week’s show, talks about garments, The Times article and other issues for young members of the Utah-based church.

In the 1940s, Trappist monks looked to create new monasteries in unlikely places, places not dominated by Catholics. They found just such a spot in a high mountain valley in Mormon Utah. For 70 years, Holy Trinity Abbey in the scenic Ogden Valley served as a religious refuge, where monks pondered and prayed, worked and worshipped, lived and died. For a young Michael O’Brien, torn by his parents’ recent divorce, however, the monastery and his family’s frequent trips up “Abbey Road” offered a more personal connection as the monks provided spiritual fathering, committed counseling, timely mentoring, religious role modeling and paths to peace. A now-grown O’Brien, a Catholic who works as an attorney in Salt Lake City and often represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters, captures all that and more in his soon-to-be-released memoir, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.”

This week, Utahns and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are remembering the 1847 arrival of Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. Not everyone, however, believes this epic migration is cause for unmitigated celebration. After all, these settlers ended up displacing Native Americans and transporting slavery to the region. On this week’s show, W. Paul Reeve, head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, and Elise Boxer, coordinator of Native American studies at the University of South Dakota and a Dakota from the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands, discuss how we should treat Pioneer Day.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints return to in-person worship after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions, the question has become: Which pandemic-era changes should stay and which should go? Will members who are homebound or don’t feel comfortable in crowds still be able to watch services via Zoom? Will extra health precautions like hand-washing by deacons continue? Will anyone wear masks again, especially during flu season or when germs are prevalent? Rebecca Jensen, a longtime blogger with By Common Consent, wrote recently about those questions and more. On this week’s show, she talks about post-pandemic Mormonism.

She was church founder Joseph Smith’s first scribe. She created the first Latter-day Saint hymnal. She was the first president of the women’s Relief Society. She was, indeed, the faith’s first first lady. Yet Emma Smith, beloved wife of Joseph Smith, remains a mystery to many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jennifer Reeder, a historian for the Utah-based church, seeks to break through that mystery and the myth in her new biography, appropriately titled “First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith,” revealing Emma’s undying love for her prophet-husband and her feeling of betrayal at his practice of polygamy, exploring her painful loss of young babies and her lifelong commitment to surviving children, examining her fractious relationship with Brigham Young and the Utah church and her eventual embrace of the Reorganized Church (now called the Community of Christ). On this week’s show, Reeder talks about Emma Smith, the “elect lady” of early Mormonism.

In an unexpected and bold move, President Russell M. Nelson announced a partnership with the NAACP in 2018 — just days before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrated the 40th anniversary of the end of its centurylong priesthood and temple ban on Black members. In recent weeks, the Utah-based faith elevated this unlikely alliance with the nation’s oldest civil rights organization by unveiling nearly $10 million in scholarships and humanitarian aid. On this week’s show, NAACP President Derrick Johnson talks about how the former foes — the church once barred Black members from holding its priesthood or entering its temples —became friends, why this evolving relationship is important, and where it is headed.

A recent U.S. survey found that more than a fifth of Gen Zers who self-identify as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or other. Nearly that many millennials (19%) do as well. That is almost double the 10% that researchers Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll found in their 2016 Next Mormons Survey. On this week’s show, Knoll, an associate professor of politics at Centre College in Kentucky, and Calvin Burke, an openly gay senior majoring in English at Brigham Young University and a media manager for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, discuss these latest findings and their implications for the Utah-based faith now and into the future.

The Mormon History Association’s just-completed annual conference offered the usual smorgasbord of delectable scholarly presentations relating to Mormonism. The 2021 theme for the hybrid in-person and online meeting in Park City was “Restoration, Reunion and Resilience.” There were sessions on polygamy and early Latter-day Saint experiences in Nauvoo, Ill., and Kirtland, Ohio, along with discussions of race, LGBTQ issues and the Mark Hofmann bombings. The historians also recognized that they were gathering in the ancestral lands of several northern bands of the Ute Indian Tribe. In addition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced plans to rehabilitate the Hill Cumorah, the Manchester, N.Y., spot where founder Joseph Smith said he unearthed gold plates that contained the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon. On this week’s show Barbara Jones Brown, the association’s executive director, and Jenny Lund, this year’s president and director of the church’s historic sites, share highlights and insights from the conference and plans for the future.

Editor's note: Due to an error in postproduction, we've replaced a previous version of this episode. Late in 1843, top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent letters to the five leading candidates for the U.S. presidency, asking each what he would do, if elected, to address the persecution the faith had suffered and to protect it from future repression. Unsatisfied with the responses, they turned to a new candidate: their own prophet, Joseph Smith. Thus began the church founder’s quixotic quest for the highest political office in the land that ended with his assassination five months later. While Smith’s short-lived, long-shot bid for the White House focused on securing the constitutional rights of religious minorities, he campaigned on a host of other issues as well, including the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the nation’s borders, the reestablishment a national bank and the elimination of prisons. Spencer McBride, associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers project, explores that 1844 campaign, including the tug of war between federal power and states’ rights, on this week’s show and in his new book, “Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sprang from a young boy’s quest for religious truth, so it may seem strange that sizable numbers of its members are falling for political claims that stretch so far from the truth. A recent survey shows, for instance, that 46% of Latter-day Saints believe the “big lie” — that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Another poll lists Latter-day Saints — along with white evangelicals and Hispanic Protestants — as the most likely to believe in the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, alleging that the world is run by a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Why are so many members and others embracing these outlandish tales? What’s the appeal of such conspiracy theories? Are these strictly about politics or could more be at play? Matthew Bowman, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University who will be teaching a class on conspiracy theory in America this fall and who just completed a book about UFO belief for Yale University Press, discusses those questions and more.

As we approach the third anniversary of President Russell M. Nelson’s plea for members, media, academics and all others to start using the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and stop using the term “Mormon,” an outside religious scholar is suggesting a, shall we say, different approach. In fact, an opposite approach. Peter Thuesen, in a recent blog post, says the church should instead lean into the Mormon moniker. Use it. Admire it. Embrace it. A religious studies professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Thuesen explains his reasoning and why the church should reconsider its well-known nickname.

Proselytizing has been a hallmark of Mormonism since its founding. It has become common to see pairs of young men, called “elders,” or young women, dubbed “sisters,” sporting black nametags and talking to people about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In recent years, however, the faith’s global evangelizing program has shifted in tactics, especially during the pandemic, with less emphasis on so-called tracting (spreading the word from door to door) and more on technology (seeking and teaching converts online). On this week’s show, David and Kathleen Cook of Rochester, N.Y., talk about innovations they enacted as mission presidents in Chile from 2013 to 2016, their work today as service missionary leaders and the ever-evolving nature of proselytizing and humanitarian service.

For 34 years, the Rev. Tom Goldsmith of Salt Lake City’s First Unitarian Church has been a prominent presence on Utah’s religious landscape. At the helm of his left-leaning congregation, Goldsmith championed social justice causes like immigration reform and climate change. He has shaped his congregation into a refuge for believers who do not feel at home in more conservative faiths, including the LDS Church. Now he is retiring and will give his final sermon Sunday. On this week’s show, he reflects on his ministry, including his dispute with Salt Lake City after it sold a chunk of Main Street to the LDS Church, congregant Tim DeChristopher’s monkey-wrenching of an oil and gas lease auction, and his church providing sanctuary to a Honduran immigrant.

In recent years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has more fully embraced its teachings about Heavenly Mother, but she has been a part of the faith since virtually the beginning. She has long been celebrated in song and verse, but now members and leaders have begun to openly discuss her and debate her qualities. Two Latter-day Saint women, McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding, have written a handful of children’s books about women in scriptures — poets, priestesses and prophets as well as judges and generals — but their most recent works are about Heavenly Mother herself. On this week’s show, Krishna and Spalding discuss their two latest books, “A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother” and “A Boy’s Guide to Heavenly Mother.”

D. Michael Quinn, the noted historian who died last week at 77, had an outsized impact on academic explorations of the church’s past. He was a prodigious researcher, who wrote 10 books and numerous essays. Though a believer in the faith’s founding events, Quinn resigned from church-owned Brigham Young University under pressure and subsequently was excommunicated from the faith in 1993 as part of the famed “September Six” for his writings about women and the priesthood, as well as about post-Manifesto polygamy. On this week’s show, Ross Peterson, retired professor of history at Utah State University and former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, discusses Quinn’s life and work.

Natasha Helfer, a licensed sex therapist and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, faced a disciplinary hearing Sunday on her membership status. She was accused of apostasy for her public stances on masturbation, same-sex marriage and pornography, positions she says are consistent with the consensus in the mental health community. Due to procedural differences, Helfer wound up not attending the hearing, so the council took place without her. On this week’s show, Latter-day Saint sex therapist Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and a friend of Helfer, discusses those topics and the effect this move by church leaders may have on mental health professionals and their Latter-day Saint patients.

His father died when he was 7 years old. Raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents, he committed himself to hard work and diligent scholarship. He became a star student, earned a degree at one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools and launched a legal career that would see him rise to the Utah Supreme Court with whispers that he someday could land a seat on the country’s highest court. Then, virtually overnight, Dallin H. Oaks changed his life’s trajectory, trading his career in the law for a commitment to his Lord. He accepted a call to be an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a lifetime appointment in which he now stands as the top counselor to President Russell M. Nelson and next in line to assume leadership of the global faith. On this week’s show, historian Richard Turley, talks about his recently released biography, “In the Hands of the Lord: The Life Story of Dallin H. Oaks,” which documents the personal journey of a church leader known for his devotion to religious liberty, his doctrinal dissections and his pointed preaching from the pulpit.

General Conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was, for the third straight time, all-virtual due to the pandemic. That didn’t stop it from being timely and topical. Those who tuned in heard about Christ and the resurrection (especially on Easter Sunday), the faith’s international footprint, repeated recognitions that most of the 16.6 million members are single, condemnations of cyberbullying and racist attacks, and an extensive exploration of the Constitution and the bounds of partisan politics. And only two women spoke. On this week’s podcast, Religion News Service columnist Jana Riess, author of “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” looks back at the highlights, lowlights and memorable moments from conference and what some of them may portend the church’s future.

James Huntsman, a member of a prominent Latter-day Saint family, recently accused The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of fraud and sued to recover millions of dollars in tithing. Huntsman alleges that the global faith has “repeatedly and publicly lied” about its use of billions of dollars in member donations solicited to pay for missionary work, temple-building and other educational and charitable operations. Citing a whistleblower’s much-publicized IRS complaint about the church’s $100 billion “rainy day” fund, Huntsman’s federal lawsuit states that millions instead went toward commercial enterprises. On this week’s podcast, Sam Brunson, a Latter-day Saint and a tax law professor at Loyola University in Chicago, talks about the lawsuit, the church’s investment reserves, its tax implications and the faith’s finances.

For the past year, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like others around the world, have dealt with a health care crisis that is both personal and societal. Even without the coronavirus pandemic, however, members face moral choices about medical issues throughout their lives. They must decide whether to continue a doomed pregnancy, whether to test a fetus for a genetic disorder, whether to vaccinate their children for sexually transmitted diseases, or whether to discontinue treatment of a dying parent. As they grapple with these personal questions — as well as the ethical questions surrounding health and healing in society at large — many people look to principles spelled out in their religion to provide answers and moral guidance. Latter-day Saints may turn to their 96-year-old prophet-president, Russell M. Nelson, who is a former heart surgeon with respect for medical and scientific wisdom. On this week’s podcast, Courtney Campbell, a philosophy professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University and author of the recently published “Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics,” examines these medical topics — from abortion to birth control to vaccines and end-of-life care — and makes his case for why Latter-day Saints should support universal health care.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced that it will discontinue the “live” presentation of a religious ritual known as the “endowment” in its iconic Salt Lake Temple. Instead of members acting out the scripted roles of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, for instance, a film version used in other temples will be shown. The faith’s governing First Presidency also said that historic wall murals, which help set the tone and understanding of the ceremony, had been removed. Similar changes are planned for the Manti Temple, which houses a Mormon masterpiece by artist Minerva Teichert. The moves sparked an outcry from preservationists and many church members. Here to talk about the changes is Jody England Hansen, who served as a volunteer worker in the Salt Lake Temple before it closed to undergo renovation.

A new documentary, “Murder Among the Mormons,” has become a big hit this month on Netflix. It recounts the 1980s story of document forger Mark Hofmann, who tried to upset the traditional historical narrative regarding the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by producing fake artifacts. When he got entangled by his own financial double-dealing, Hofmann attempted to cover up his counterfeiting by setting off separate bombs that killed one of his clients, Steve Christensen, and Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former business partner. He then injured himself in a third blast. The three-part series offers not only a riveting whodunit dissection of deadly crimes but also a fascinating exploration of Mormon history. On this week’s podcast, co-director Jared Hess, of “Napoleon Dynamite” fame, discusses the documentary, the haunting footage the filmmakers found, the phony discoveries Hofmann pulled off (including the big one he was plotting to peddle before his crimes unraveled), the callous calculations revealed in the mind of this killer, and the lessons Latter-day Saints and their leaders can take away from the whole sad saga.

Brigham Young University released a 64-page report from a faculty committee last week on “Race, Equity and Belonging” at the Provo school. It exposed widespread and significant concerns about the mistreatment of minority students who attend the private university owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many students of color end up transferring or dropping out as a result of experiences that “left many disillusioned, brokenhearted and struggling.” The report noted that “current systems at the university are inadequate for coordinating services for students seeking assistance with challenges related to race” and recommended 26 changes as “first steps” toward addressing the problems. On this week’s podcast, BYU law professor Michalyn Steele, the committee’s only Native American, discussed the report and why she remains optimistic that meaningful changes will occur to make the school a better place for all.

Michelle and John Amos are both converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both are graduates of Southern University, a historic Black college. And both are high-powered engineers. Michelle worked for NASA for 30 years, including as part of the team that developed the Mars 2020 rover. Her husband, John, after a 21-year career with the Navy and Navy Reserve, became an engineering director at the global company Siemens Energy. Now the Amoses are overseeing more than 200 young Latter-day Saints as they lead the church’s Louisiana Baton Rouge Mission. During this last week of Black History Month, the couple talk about their conversion, their careers, their mission and their perspectives about racial issues in their faith.

For more than a quarter century, Salt Lake Tribune columnist Robert Kirby poked fun at Mormon history, practices, culture and members themselves, including one particular member: Robert Kirby. His brand of comical commentary brought not only winces and complaints but also personal insights and even community healing. He reached out to crime victims and those who had lost loved ones. He officiated at LGBTQ weddings. Mostly, though, his musings elicited laughter. He brought a lovable irreverence to reverent things. A former police officer, he joked about being a beat cop in the Celestial Kingdom. He boasted that he could “beat up”an aging Gordon B. Hinckley. And his piece about “five kinds of Mormons” is seen as a classic of Latter-day Saint satire. Now, after thousands of columns and millions of chuckles, Kirby is calling it quits. He’s retiring. So brace yourselves, listeners, as he joins us today via Zoom from his holding cell in Herriman to talk about his career as the nation’s only religion humor newspaper columnist.

For the past 25-plus years, it has been the policy at Brigham Young University that it is OK to be gay, but not to act on it. That echoes the position taken by the school’s owner, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are clearly BYU students who are open about their LGBTQ identity while living the church’s standard of celibacy. But what about faculty and bosses? Ben Schilaty is a licensed therapist and BYU Honor Code administrator who has written his story in a newly released book titled “A Walk in My Shoes: Questions I’m Often Asked as a Gay Latter-day Saint,” put out by the church’s publishing house, Deseret Book. In this week’s show, Schilaty — who co-hosts with former Cougar mascot Charlie Bird the “Questions From the Closet” podcast — talks about coming to terms with his sexual orientation, his falling in love with another man, his commitment to living as a devout Latter-day Saint, the evolution of church LGBTQ policies, BYU’s short-lived Honor Code change, and his work at the faith’s flagship school.

In 2018, John Paul Bellum came up with a Twitter hashtag, #DezNat, which stands for Deseret Nation, to help like-minded conservatives within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints find one another on social media. Bellum said he was hoping to rally members willing to defend the faith, its leaders, its history, its doctrines and especially its teachings on the family — all of which he saw as under attack online. Since then, #DezNat has been used in hundreds of thousands of tweets, including some with memes threatening violence toward perceived critics. On this week’s podcast, researcher Mary Ann Clements, who has tracked and written about #DezNat for the Latter-day Saint blog Wheat & Tares, discusses this internet movement, its origins, its purposes, its evolution, its ideas about race, its place in online Mormon culture, the fears some of the posts engender, and the LDS Church’s response to these messages.

In his new book, “Restoration: God’s Call to the 21st-Century World,” scholar Patrick Mason explains how 16.5 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can — with help from the billions of others across the globe — “renovate the world.” Mason emphasizes that while Mormonism’s “ongoing restoration” is more about looking forward than backward, the church and its members must discard some historical and cultural baggage, including racism, sexism and colonialism, to reach its ultimate destination. He also calls on Latter-day Saints to take up the cause of the “Messiah of the marginalized” and lift all the children of their Heavenly Parents. Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, joins this week’s podcast to talk about his book, these topics and more.

As it prepares to welcome a new president, the United States, a land of prophecy and promise to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stands at a momentous moment. A defeated, disgraced and divisive president has become the first commander in chief to be impeached twice. A violent mob has desecrated the People’s House, eroding the very foundation of democracy. And, amid threats of more unrest, a shaken nation tiptoes into the future with as much trepidation as hope. One Latter-day Saint who, perhaps more than any other, can bring insight to this turbulent time is former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. The longtime Democrat served in Congress for 34 years, including eight years as Senate majority leader, the highest federal office ever achieved by a Latter-day Saint, before retiring in 2017. On this week’s podcast, Reid recounts his early days as a Capitol Police officer, the pain he felt seeing the place he labored for so many years being ransacked, and why he believes top church leaders, perhaps the governing First Presidency, need to warn members to beware of aligning with “fringe” groups and causes, adding that Latter-day Saints who take part in this insurrection are giving the faith a bad name.

In a wide-ranging interview published in Sunday’s Salt Lake Tribune, revered Mormon historian Richard Bushman, author of the acclaimed Joseph Smith biography “Rough Stone Rolling,” talked at length about his childhood in Oregon, his mission in New England and his education at Harvard, where he wrestled with his faith in God. He also discussed the mystery of the gold plates, from which the Book of Mormon sprang, his understanding of truth, and his perspectives on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — its past, present and future. Bushman discusses those topics and more on this week’s podcast.

This year’s global pandemic brought extraordinary actions inside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Worship services were halted. Temples were closed. Missionaries were released, recalled and reassigned. Humanitarian outreach reached record levels. And there was much more: Major denunciations of racism were given. Changes to church practices and parlance were announced. A new symbol and proclamation were unveiled. Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, discusses the year in Mormonism on this week’s show and what it all may mean moving forward for the global faith.

The group FairMormon is dedicated to defending The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from critics and rebutting falsehoods about the faith’s history and theology. FairMormon is particularly concerned about the influence of a 2013 volume called the “CES Letter,” which provides a long list of what it sees as problems with the church’s descriptions of its past, including founder Joseph Smith, his “First Vision,” translation of the Book of Mormon and polygamy. So FairMormon enlisted a handful of Brigham Young University actors and writers to produce satirical videos with essentially a twofold mission: Tear down the “CES Letter” and build up these younger members. Will the mocking nature of these videos work? What is the best way to tackle controversial aspects of Mormon history? On this week’s shows, Michael Austin, a Latter-day Saint writer, BYU alumnus and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Evansville, where he works every day with college students, addresses those questions and more.

In a lengthy essay in The Atlantic posted online Wednesday, reporter McKay Coppins explores The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history as “The Most American Religion.” In a subtitle, the article states: “Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal — only to find their country is in an identity crisis. What will the third century of the faith look like?” Coppins’ piece looks backward and forward, not as a dispassionate observer, but through his own lens as a practicing Latter-day Saint. He talks with scholars and politicians, insiders and outsiders, leaders and laypeople, even church President Russell M. Nelson. In this week’s podcast, Coppins talks about the path Mormonism has followed and what steps the Utah-based faith could — and should — take as it treads into its next hundred years.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posted a video this week from apostle Dale G. Renlund in which he pleaded with members to put on masks and put off assembling in large gatherings in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Wearing a face covering,” he said, “is a sign of Christlike love for our brothers and sisters.” Renlund, a former cardiologist, emphasized that he was speaking not as a physician, but as an apostle, a position of great respect within the Utah-based faith. His words were just the latest in a series of statements and actions by top church leaders in support of public health guidelines. Still, they triggered strong debate between Latter-day Saints who support mask-wearing and those who don’t. A key question: Are so-called anti-maskers among the church’s membership guilty of not following their prophet? The short answer is yes, according to Latter-day Saint writer Emily Jensen, the web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Jensen discusses that question and the wider implications for the church in this week’s podcast.

In the not-too-distant future, the United States and other nations will have a vaccination available, thankfully, for COVID-19, which has killed more than 1.5 million people and altered millions of more lives. But besides the issue of who will get the vaccination first looms another question: Who will be willing to get it? Debates about the value and efficacy of vaccines — as well as the socioeconomics of those who will get them and those who won’t — have raged throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Such a debate took place in the early 1900s in Utah over the smallpox vaccine, dividing prominent community members, leaders and Latter-day Saints, including top church authorities and the editor of the church-owned Deseret News. On this week’s podcast, Ben Cater — who teaches history at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and has written about the religious politics at play in public health during the Progressive Era in Utah — revisits that period and how it may parallel our current times.

As a global faith leader, President Russell M. Nelson urged members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last week to “flood social media” with posts about gratitude — even as he acknowledged the pain of the coronavirus pandemic that has plagued the world. In response, throngs of Latter-day Saints have done so. Some might even see it as a religious obligation. But it’s not just a good religious act. Therapists see the expression of gratitude as good for mental health, too. On this week’s show, Marybeth Raynes, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Salt Lake City, discusses the benefits of giving thanks.

In October 1969, 14 African American players for the University of Wyoming planned to sport black armbands in a football game against Brigham Young University to protest the then-priesthood/temple ban on Blacks in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (that ban ended in 1978). Their coach booted them off the team hours before kickoff. Now, more than 50 years later, the “Black 14,” as they have been called, are actually teaming up with the LDS Church, to bring 180 tons of food to people in need in nine U.S. cities stretching from Maryland to Wyoming. On this week’s podcast, Mel Hamilton, one of the original Black 14 whose son actually converted to Mormonism, talks about the experience, past and present.

Before the presidential election, some pollsters and pundits suggested that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might play a key role — despite their relatively small numbers. Indeed, many members became actively involved on one side or the other, forming groups like Latter-day Saints for Trump and Latter-day Saints for Biden. They seemed especially visible in Western swing states like Nevada and Arizona. So, for instance, did Latter-day Saints help turn the traditionally red Grand Canyon State blue? Quin Monson, a Brigham Young University political science professor who also is a partner at Y2 Analytics, gives a “qualified yes” to that question. He offers more insights on Latter-day Saint voters and how their partisan leanings have changed — and may change — on this week’s podcast.

Most bishops of a Latter-day Saint congregation give the church five years of their lives as they shepherd the spiritual and even temporal well-being of hundreds of families and individuals in their area. Because they are volunteers, that means they do this while holding a full-time job as well as taking care of the needs of their own families and loved ones. Ross Trewhella, however, served his Latter-day Saint parishioners in Cornwall, United Kingdom, for 12 years — almost unheard of for a bishop in modern Mormonism. In this week’s podcast, he reflects on the highs and the lows, the challenges and the rewards, the members and the memories after more than a decade of service — and how he feels now about relinquishing his seat at the front of the chapel.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints used to be more evenly split between the two major political parties, even supporting Democrats Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson for U.S. president. But something happened in the 1960s. Latter-day Saints began moving to the right and eventually became a reliably Republican voting bloc, a trend that continues to this day. Though there were many social factors behind this shift, one high-placed church leader may have helped shape Mormon political views for decades. His name: Ezra Taft Benson. A Latter-day Saint apostle and onetime church president, Benson held political positions that went further right than mainstream Republicans. He spoke out against communism — even calling Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “Communists” — considered running on a presidential ticket with ardent segregationist George Wallace, and wanted to name a member of the right-wing John Birch Society to the faith’s top quorums. But he got plenty of pushback for linking politics and religion from other church leaders including David O. McKay, Gordon B. Hinckley and Boyd K. Packer. Matthew Harris, author of “Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right” and a history professor at Colorado State University in Pueblo, joins us today via Zoom to talk about Benson and his influence on Latter-day Saint politics. Matthew, welcome.

For many voters, including a number of Latter-day Saints, this year’s presidential election comes down to one issue: abortion. They may not like Donald Trump’s style, but they believe he will support the cause of protecting the unborn. At the same time, many other voters, including, again, a number of Latter-day Saints, have a more complex view of abortion, with some pointing to the more nuanced stance of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself on that topic. So how might this debate play out among Latter-day Saints, especially in Utah, in this election? And how might the current battle over the Supreme Court — and talk of toppling Roe v. Wade — affect the outcome? Morgan Lyon Cotti, associate director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, discusses this and other issues dividing Latter-day Saint voters in 2020 and beyond.

McKay Coppins wrote recently in The Atlantic that President Donald Trump publicly praises evangelicals, prosperity preachers and other religious conservatives, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while privately mocking them and belittling their beliefs. Coppins, a Brigham Young University alumnus, joined this week’s podcast to talk about the presidential candidates, the state of this year’s White House race, how the Biden and Trump campaigns are courting members, and whether Latter-day Saints — and the issues they care about most — could help determine the outcome in swing states.

Early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe the ability to translate was one of the spiritual gifts mentioned in the New Testament. Church founder Joseph Smith said he translated the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, “by the gift and power of God” from ancient writings found on gold plates. So, if Smith used this gift to translate the Book of Mormon, as he asserted, how might he have done it? Was there more to this mystical process? What role might a so-called seer stone have played? And what should members and outsiders alike keep in mind when considering the birthing of this global religion’s foundational text? Latter-day Saint physician Samuel Brown, a religious historian and author of the recently released “Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism," addresses those questions and more on this week’s podcast.

Many gay Mormons have a story about their experience in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though all the narratives stand on their own, most involve these members recognizing their attractions, trying to reconcile what they are feeling with what the Utah-based faith is teaching about homosexuality — that it is not a sin, just acting on it is — coming out, what they hope for the future, and how their family and friends respond. On this week’s podcast, Matthew Gong, who works in artificial intelligence, discusses his unique journey with his faith, his family, his friends and himself.

In August 2018, President Russell M. Nelson urged the media to use the faith’s full name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to stop employing the terms “Mormon church” or “LDS Church” — indeed to cease using “Mormon” altogether, even when referring to members. A year later, Public Square Magazine, published from the perspective of Latter-day Saints, decided to survey whether various national news outlets — including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Associated Press and CNN — had complied and how it affected their coverage. On this week’s podcast, Public Square Managing Editor Christopher Cunningham discusses the results, along with the challenges journalists face in heeding the church’s preferred style and the implications their word choices carry.

In 2017, after the election of President Donald Trump, several female members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, distressed by the increasing political polarization and eroding ethics in government, formed Mormon Women for Ethical Government. The group, which is not endorsed by the church, is dedicated to seeking a peaceful, just and ethical world with a pledge to be faithful, nonpartisan and proactive, along with a commitment to civility. In a few short years, its membership has ballooned to more than 7,000. Now, with the nation in the midst of another deeply divisive presidential race, the organization’s executive director, Emma Petty Addams, and Christie Black, an engagement director, joined this week’s podcast to talk about their group and its goals.

Launched in the 1970s, Affirmation is one of the oldest support groups for LGBTQ members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As the Utah-based faith has evolved in its understanding of and approach to its LGBTQ members, Affirmation has expanded as well — across the country and around the world. For the next four weekends, the organization will host a virtual international conference, complete with live and recorded workshops, speakers and discussions. On this week’s podcast, Affirmation President Nathan Kitchen discusses the conference, the group’s widening reach, and the challenges LGBTQ Latter-day Saints face from Arizona to Argentina to Australia — and across the globe.

In 2015, the church issued a short essay matter-of-factly affirming its belief in a Heavenly Mother. It was only six paragraphs, barely 600 words. That left the subject wide open to imaginative exploration with more and more leaders and members embracing the idea and mentioning Heavenly Parents in writings and sermons. Latter-day Saint poet Carol Lynn Pearson insists the world “needs” to find, or rediscover, Heavenly Mother, arguing that bringing her back “is not just cosmetic, it is cosmic” and can help bring peace, justice and harmony to the planet. She undertakes that quest in her new volume of verses, “Finding Mother God: Poems to Heal the World,” and discusses it on this week’s podcast.

As the U.S. presidential race heats up, Latter-day Saints, like all Americans, are starting to choose sides. And both campaigns have begun courting members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially in battleground states with significant LDS voting blocs. In recent decades, Latter-day Saints have overwhelmingly cast ballots for Republican candidates, though their support of Donald Trump in 2016 was not nearly as enthusiastic. Four years later, both camps see a chance to win over church members, asserting that their presidential nominee and party best represent Latter-day Saint values. On this week’s podcast, Utah Rep. Kim Coleman, a member of the advisory board of Latter-day Saints for Trump, and Scott Howell, a former state senator who heads up the Joe Biden campaign in Utah, discuss faith, politics and why Latter-day Saints should vote for their candidate.

The long-standing practice of having lay bishops interview teens and ask them questions about their faith and their lives, including any sexual activity, has come under fire in recent years. A group called “Protect LDS Children” urged the church to stop the practice, citing examples of bishops who were insensitive and even abusive. Church leaders made changes, allowing, for instance, those being interviewed to have a second adult with them in these conversations. But critics and some mental health experts maintain the sessions should cease altogether. Jennifer Roach, a therapist, recent Latter-day Saint convert and a victim of clergy abuse herself, believes the interviews serve a vital purpose. She shares her views on this week’s show.

Rabbi Sam Spector of Congregation Kol Ami in Salt Lake City has been in Utah a little more than two years but has already built strong relationships with members and leaders of the state’s predominant faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Just last week, the 30-something rabbi was on hand to oversee a group of Latter-day Saint volunteers who spent five days working alongside Kol Ami congregants to xeriscape the synagogue’s six-acre plot. On this week’s podcast, the young and energetic rabbi discusses coming to Utah, meeting a Latter-day Saint apostle named “Jeff,” traveling to Jerusalem with Brigham Young University professors and engaging in an interfaith dialogue that doesn’t tiptoe around big differences. He also addresses why Christians doing Passover Seders can make him uncomfortable and who uses the term “Zion” more — Latter-day Saints or Jews.

A few weeks after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published the sermons of Eliza R. Snow comes the online release of additional diaries by a lesser known, but no less influential, female leader in the faith’s history. Emmeline B. Wells packed a lot into her 93 years of life. She was a three-time wife, mother of five daughters, a writer, editor, longtime Relief Society record-keeper, Relief Society general president, and, perhaps above all, a zealous advocate for suffrage and women’s rights. Her diaries reveal much about her efforts to, in her words, “advance women in moral and spiritual as well as educational work.” On this week’s podcast, Cherry Silver, a co-editor of the online publication, and Kate Holbrook, the managing historian for the church’s History Department, discuss the project, Wells’ life and her writings.

Amid a global pandemic, civil unrest, a presidential election and — in Utah — a string of nerve-rattling earthquakes, many biblical believers are thinking anew about the so-called apocalypse. For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though, the end times have always been a part of their theology. After all, the latter days are referenced in their faith’s official name. There also is buzz in pews and on porches about the “White Horse Prophecy,” Mormon politicians, and church President Russell M. Nelson, who frequently warns about preparing for the Second Coming Scholar Christopher Blythe, author of a soon-to-be released book, “Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse,” joins the podcast this week to discuss, well, the “end of the world” or, at least, Mormonism’s ties to the prophecies, predictions and passions surrounding it.

Utah author Mette Ivie Harrison has been writing about her transition away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Besides opposing some of the faith’s policies, practices and doctrines, Harrison also has cited the restrictive views held by some members. In a recent column, however, she notes that she again finds herself bumping into rigid thinking — this time coming from former members. In this week’s show, Harrison discusses her spiritual journey and the “five doctrines of ex-Mormonism.”

Eliza R. Snow ranks as the most influential Latter-day Saint woman of her time and after Emma Smith, wife of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, perhaps the best-known woman in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Snow was a poet and a preacher, a plural wife of prophets and a defender of polygamy, a leader of the Relief Society and a champion of women. Still, there is much Latter-day Saints don’t know about her. That may change now that the church has launched a new website, called The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow, that brings together her sermons, nearly 1,200 of them. On this week’s podcast, two of the forces behind the massive project — historians Jennifer Reeder and Elizabeth Kuehn — discuss how a reluctant public speaker became a powerhouse at the pulpit, how she viewed Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and how she traversed the Utah Territory, building up the faith’s women and rebuilding the Relief Society.

As Americans tune into the movie version of the Broadway megahit “Hamilton” amid a national debate about the virtues and vices of the nation’s framers, the question arises: How do and should Latter-day Saints view them? Mormon scriptures prophecy that the Americas would sprout a place of “promise,” a “land of liberty.” Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are taught that God “raised up” these “choice spirits” to establish a divinely inspired Constitution and a Declaration of Independence that proclaims “all men are created equal.” Yet many of the founders embraced slavery; others enabled it. On this week’s podcast, Benjamin Park, an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University and author of the recently released “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier,” discusses these principles and paradoxes.

Perhaps no issues have roiled members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than questions about race, gender and sexuality. Scholar Taylor Petrey offers an original exploration of these topics and how they connect and intersect in his new book, “Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism.” On this week’s podcast, Petrey, the current editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and an associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, examines how the Utah-based faith’s views have shifted, especially since World War II, and what that evolution may portend for the future.

Amid the nation’s reawakening on the issue of systemic racism, Brigham Young University’s president has conceded that “there is work to do” on the Provo campus. Many students and alumni agree, and some of them have called on officials to rebrand the administration building, given that it bears the name of Abraham O. Smoot, a former benefactor who owned slaves. On this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast, two of the activists behind this effort, Tristan Quist and Cole Stewart-Johnson, discuss why they are targeting the Smoot Building and how a name change may help make the university a more welcoming place for all. They also share their views about the monikers on other BYU buildings, some of which are named after past leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and about the school’s name itself.

In 1852, Mormon pioneer-prophet Brigham Young put The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on a path toward a racist practice barring blacks from the priesthood. Some 126 years later, in 1978, church President Spencer W. Kimball ended the policy. But racist doctrines and white supremacist views from Mormon pulpits and within Mormon pews hardly started with the priesthood ban and certainly didn’t stop with its removal. Scholar Joanna Brooks, a professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, explores these uncomfortable teachings and the sometimes-ugly undercurrents in her new book, “Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence.” In this week’s podcast, she discuss how coming to terms with the past and present could help the church and its members build a brighter, more inclusive, more equitable future.

With the world in the grips of COVID-19, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Mormon research historian Ardis Parshall has been posting photos and vignettes of Latter-day Saints who died during the Spanish flu of 1918-20, which claimed tens of millions across the globe. By doing so on her blog, keepapitchinin.org, she is putting a human face on what too often can appear in history books as cold statistics. On this week’s podcast, she touches on some of the souls who were lost during this previous pandemic, discusses why she launched the heartfelt, yet heartbreaking, project, and reveals how this labor of love actually has helped her and others cope with the current crisis.

George Floyd’s death — as just the latest example of a black person dying at the hands of law enforcement — has shaken, angered, agitated and, some say, awakened the nation, setting off waves of sometimes-violent protests against racism and police brutality. Days later, Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith with its own racist history, took to social media, condemning prejudice, calling racists to repentance and decrying the lawlessness that has erupted. Two African American Latter-day Saints join this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast to discuss systemic racism, protests and the church’s delayed response. Both LaShawn Williams, an assistant professor of social work at Utah Valley University, and Kimberly Applewhite, a psychologist with the Utah Center for Evidence Based Treatment, say society, the nation, their church and individuals can and must do more to wipe out the sin of racism.

Women are gaining a higher profile in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at both the local and general levels. But having women in the room — and usually vastly outnumbered by men when issues are discussed and decisions are made, often by the faith’s all-male priesthood — doesn’t necessarily mean these women are being heard, let alone heeded. New research from three Brigham Young University professors — Olga Stoddard, Jessica Preece and Chris Karpowitz — sheds light on these group gender dynamics. On this week’s podcast, two of those researchers, Preece and Karpowitz, discuss their findings, and how women’s voices and views can be elevated not only in business, government, politics and academia but also in the LDS Church.

A week ago, top leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints directed that all displays in foyers and entryways in the faith’s meetinghouses across the globe be reserved exclusively for artwork that depicts Jesus. They even included a list of 22 paintings for such use. While the push to focus on Christ won wide praise, some observers questioned the approved pieces, suggesting they lacked gender and cultural diversity while offering only a narrow, Eurocentric vision. In this week’s show, Utah artist Brian Kershisnik, whose works have become increasingly popular in Latter-day Saint circles, discusses the church’s directive, the difficulties in depicting Jesus, and the role of art in sacred spaces. Kershisnik says would like to see the church draw from a wider palette of paintings from across the world and across generations, including pieces that challenge as much as comfort their viewers.

Back in mid-February, Brigham Young University set off shock waves when it quietly removed from its Honor Code the section forbidding “homosexual behavior.” Many students believed — and had been told by school officials — that the shift meant the prohibition against such actions as same-sex hand-holding, kissing and dating was no longer in place. The LGBTQ community and its allies celebrated. Two weeks later, however, the Church Educational System, which oversees all BYU campuses for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, did an about-face, stating that “same-sex romantic behavior” remained incompatible with the school’s rules. The reversal resulted in anger, frustration, protests and questions about what may happen to LGBTQ students when classes resume on campus. Michael Austin, a BYU alumnus and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Evansville, a Methodist school in Indiana, discusses the issue on this week’s podcast.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled a new symbol last month as part of President Russell M. Nelson’s continuing efforts to emphasize — to insiders and outsiders alike — that the faith is centered on Jesus Christ. Does this logo, from a design perspective, help accomplish that aim? Yes, says Randall Smith, a Salt Lake City graphic designer who helped craft a previous logo for the church. But the new symbol, while “safe and expected,” he adds, is “not very progressive” and its complexity may make it difficult to use in some mediums. Smith discusses the new logo and his work for the church on an older one, which began springing up as part of the “welcome” signs now found on Latter-day Saint meetinghouses across the globe.

Richard E. Turley Jr. retired recently after nearly 30 years working for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, most of that time in the History and Family History departments. He has co-written or penned several books, including the acclaimed “Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy” and “Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case.” Most recently, he served as the managing director of the faith’s Public Affairs Department. He reflects this week on his career, the highs, the lows, the memories and the milestones.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently released guidelines to help members and lay leaders navigate various religious rites during the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual sacraments are out, a decision that has deprived some women and other members of regular communion. Baptisms, where permitted, are in. Priesthood ordinations and baby blessings still can take place. Temple recommend interviews can be conducted via video, even though the temples themselves remain closed. As for online worship services, well, some areas are holding them; others have been instructed not to. On this week’s podcast, Neylan McBaine, founder of the Mormon Women Project, discusses how these functions of faith are operating amid all the COVID-19 restrictions and how some changes could boost the equity and efficacy of Latter-day Saint worship. McBaine’s 2014 book, “Women at Church,” challenged members to think outside the box when it comes policies and practices within the faith — something a lot of leaders now find themselves doing.

During its recent General Conference, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported that its global membership has topped 16.5 million, with nearly 249,000 new converts in 2019, a substantial increase from the previous year. Here to help drill down on those numbers — and other recently released church statistics, including country-by-country breakdowns — is independent researcher Matt Martinich, who tracks church growth on his website, ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, and is project manager for The Cumorah Foundation.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just concluded one of the most unusual General Conferences in its history. Due to crowd restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic, the sessions took place in a small auditorium in the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City. While no more than 10 people were in that room, the conference may have never had a larger audience — transmitted online and on TV to millions around the world, many of them forced to hole up in their homes and eager to view a gathering that church President Russell M. Nelson long had promised would be unlike any other. Nelson marked the bicentennial of founder Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” with a new proclamation. He unveiled a new church symbol. He announced new temples, including firsts for the Middle East and mainland China. And he called for another worldwide fast to pray for relief from COVID-19. On this week’s podcast, Joseph Stuart, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and a contributing editor to the Juvenile Instructor, a Mormon history blog, discusses the conference, its impact, its memorable moments and how it ultimately will be remembered.

It’s been several weeks since our latest “Mormon Land” podcast. Thankfully, not much has happened in that interval. OK, let’s just say the world has turned upside down. For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its fundamental operations, programs and plans have been upended by the coronavirus. Services have been canceled. All temples are closed. And tens of thousands of missionaries have been recalled, released or reassigned. All of this coming in front of an online spring General Conference that will mark the bicentennial of Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” but will have no public attendance. Here to sort through these astonishing developments and look forward to this weekend’s conference is Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a major shift recently when it published online, in full, its updated General Handbook, which spells out policies, practices and procedures in the worldwide faith. Previous handbooks were for leaders only. Now rank-and-file members and even outsiders can be on the same page when it comes to church governance. The guidelines include, for instance, new nomenclature for church discipline and a new section on transgender individuals. It even urges Latter-day Saints to “partake” of the sacrament, or communion, “with their right hand when possible." Discussing these developments and other changes in the new handbook is Jonathan Stapley, a scientist and historian whose recent book, “The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology,” won top honors from the Mormon History Association. He also is a popular blogger for By Common Consent.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may think they know all about Nauvoo, the Illinois city on the banks of the Mississippi River that blossomed into their faith’s headquarters from 1839 to 1846. There, Mormons built a fast-growing city-state that rivaled Chicago. There, they established a militia. There, they built their second temple. And there, they buried their beloved prophet. But few know that during those Nauvoo years, church leaders worked to rewrite the U.S. Constitution even as Mormon founder Joseph Smith ran for U.S. president. Few know how polygamy emerged even as Smith worked to conceal and control it and how he struggled even mightier to win converts to these unorthodox unions, especially in his own household. His brother Hyrum, who was slain with him at Carthage, for instance, went from a vehement opponent of plural marriage to a zealous proponent almost overnight, while Joseph’s first wife, Emma, only occasionally veered from her disdain for the practice. Historian Benjamin Park, author of the newly released “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier,” sheds new light on those subjects and more in this week’s podcast. Listen here:

A printed Sunday school manual for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contained a disavowed racist teaching that referred to “dark skin” in the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, as a “curse” from God. The church has acknowledged the error and corrected it in the online manual. But is that enough? Some Latter-day Saints say it isn’t. They want the faith’s top leaders to issue a statement to members worldwide and use the mistake as a teaching moment to help combat persistent bouts of racism. And what about the overall curriculum? Does it fulfill its stated goals of helping members “deepen [their] conversion” and “become more like Jesus Christ”? Religion News Service senior columnist Jana Riess addresses those questions and more in this week’s podcast.

In September 2018, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its first authorized, in-depth look at the faith’s history in nearly a century. The four-volume set, known as “Saints,” will explore Mormonism from its humble birth to its current global presence. The first volume, “Saints: The Standard of Truth,” examined church history from 1815 to 1846. The second book, “Saints: No Unhallowed Hand,” which came out Wednesday, covers 1846 to 1893. It includes, for example, Brigham Young’s presidency, polygamy, the priesthood ban, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and lesser-known but equally meaningful moments in church history. The 700-plus-page volume ends with the Salt Lake Temple dedication. Discussing the project this week are Matthew Grow, managing director of the church History Department and general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, and Angela Hallstrom, a writer in the History Department and literary editor for the series. Listen here.

Next week, Utahns will celebrate the Beehive State as the first place an American woman voted under equal suffrage laws. Feb. 14 is the 150th anniversary of that first female vote, cast by Seraph Young (Brigham Young’s grandniece). Discussing the suffrage movement, what led up to the vote, and the role of Latter-day Saint women in the effort is Katherine Kitterman, co-author of a book with Rebekah Ryan Clark that has just been published by Deseret Book called “Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah.”

This week’s podcast takes listeners to the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, it travels back to the earliest day, the moment that gave birth to the Mormon movement. Latter-day Saints know it as the “First Vision,” in which church founder Joseph Smith said he saw God. As members around the globe prepare to mark the bicentennial of this event this spring, the “Joseph Smith Papers” project has released a series of six podcasts that explores this reported 1820 encounter with deity through the eyes of historians. Discussing the “First Vision,” which gave rise to a world religion of more than 16 million members, and the various accounts Smith and others gave of the experience are Matt Grow, managing director of the church History Department and general editor of the “Joseph Smith Papers,” and Spencer McBride, a historian with the project and the host of the “First Vision” podcasts.

This year, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are studying the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon. A printed Sunday school manual accompanying the course caused a stir recently when news broke that it contained outdated teachings about “dark skin” referred to in the text as being a “curse” and a sign of divine disfavor. The church corrected the reference in its digital manual and an apostle even told a Martin Luther King Day gathering of the NAACP that he was “saddened” by the error. But the uproar has revived questions about race in the Book of Mormon and the Utah-based faith as a whole. Discussing those issues on this week’s podcast is Michalyn Steele, who teaches at Brigham Young University’s law school and is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. She grew up in a small Latter-day Saint congregation on the Cattaraugus Reservation in New York.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are studying the Book of Mormon this year. This has focused renewed attention on the faith’s signature scripture and how it came to be — with stories of angels and gold plates and rocks called “seer stones.” Discussing the text’s origins is Richard Bushman, author of the highly acclaimed Joseph Smith biography, “Rough Stone Rolling.” He is working on a book about the gold plates, which Latter-day Saints believe tell the religious history of peoples in the ancient Americas and which Smith said he translated into English. That translation now is known as the Book of Mormon.

Questions persist inside and outside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about the $100 billion reserve the faith has amassed in an investment account. In this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast, historian D. Michael Quinn says the church’s reserves are actually much steeper than has been reported. But, he adds, so are its expenses, especially in supporting its global presence. Quinn, a scholar who has done the deepest dive to date into the history of Latter-day Saint finances — his 2017 book, “Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth & Corporate Power,” remains the definitive volume on the subject — discusses the issue.

Nearly 50 years ago, France Davis arrived in Utah, where he became the pastor of the state’s most prominent black congregation. For 46 years, he led Calvary Baptist Church. But Davis is more than a preacher. He’s an educator, who has taught communication and ethnic studies at the University of Utah; a civic activist, who has served on numerous boards and commissions; and a civil rights icon, who marched for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. During his decades in the Beehive State, his words have carried a resounding moral clout and clarity that belie his small stature and soft-spoken nature. As Davis retired at year’s end from the pulpit, he joined the podcast to talk about his time leading a Baptist church in the heart of Mormondom.

Recent news reports of a $100 billion investment portfolio amassed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have focused attention once again on the subject of Mormon wealth. Whether the Utah-based faith may have violated tax laws — as some allege and church officials deny — is just one issue. The deeper questions may be: How much is too much for a church to hold in reserve? How much should members and others know about the faith’s finances? And should all churches be required to be more open about their money? Nathan Oman, the Rollins Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School who is writing a book on Mormon legal history, addresses those questions and more in this week’s podcast.

When Utahns recently rallied for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, there was Gayle Ruzicka vowing to oppose it. Considered one of the most powerful people never to have held elected office, Ruzicka, the conservative activist and president of the Utah Eagle Forum, can be counted on to be in the midst of high-profile fights — from abortion to sex education, gay marriage to conversion therapy, hate crimes legislation to medical marijuana. She talks about her activism and how her Latter-day Saint faith informs her lobbying — even when it stretches beyond the church’s positions.

From its earliest days, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has emphasized community. But the global faith of 16.3 million members may be shifting somewhat from that collective approach. Sunday services have been trimmed from three hours to two with a new emphasis on home-centered, church-supported gospel study. Scouting is on the way out, replaced by a more individualized program for young children and teens. By most accounts, members are excited about and eager for the new direction, but could something be lost in the process? Matthew Bowman, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, discusses that question and more in this week’s podcast.

This has been a remarkable year of change in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It started way back on Jan. 2, with the introduction of gender-inclusive temple ceremonies, and continued throughout the year. The about-face on the LGBTQ policy, a widened stance on civil weddings, weekly calls home by missionaries, female witnesses at baptisms and temple sealings, a new program for children and youths — and that’s just the beginning. Blogger Jenny Dye, co-host of the “Mormon News Report Podcast,” has been tracking and commenting on the developments. She joins this week’s show to talk about the deluge of church adjustments, announcements, rescissions and reforms. Listen here.

Latter-day Saints pride themselves on being a “peculiar people,” and they have their own peculiar parlance to reinforce that image. Stake centers, active, inactive, investigator, Primary, callings, sealings, fast Sunday, Word of Wisdom, baptism for the dead, garments, manifesto, the block. These terms all have specific meanings for members but can be head-scratchers for outsiders. Zandra Vranes, co-author of "Can I Get an Amen?,” was raised in the church but is comfortable in black denominations, where women wear big hats and shout out their “amens.” She joined this week’s podcast to talk about Latter-day lingo — how it can be funny, unifying, confusing, misleading, even off-putting. Listen here.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints expressly forbids polygamy and has done so for more than a century. But plural marriage remains a part of its theology, enshrined in its scripture and practiced, at least through so-called sealings, in its temples. Add to that the renewed chatter about legalizing polygamy in the U.S. and the question becomes: What if the church reinstituted plural marriage? Melissa Leilani Larson, who wrote the screenplays for the movies “Jane and Emma” and “Freetown,” explored that notion in her play “Pilot Program.” She discusses that play, her views about polygamy and its place in the Utah-based faith’s past, present and future in this week’s “Mormon Land.”

When nine U.S. citizens were killed in a brutal attack in northern Mexico last week, much of the world learned for the first time about that area’s past and prevailing ties to Mormon polygamy. Those ties include a complex cast of characters and creeds — both mainstream Latter-day Saints and breakaway believers. Helping to untangle and understand this web is historian Barbara Jones Brown, executive director of the Mormon History Association who has studied and written about post-1890 Mormon plural marriage.

A recent Pew Research report reaffirmed a rising trend: Americans, especially younger ones, are abandoning organized religion. It’s a phenomenon that cuts across denominations and is expected to continue. But what about in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? How is this missionary-oriented faith faring in its efforts to recruit and retain members? Turns out, says independent researcher Matt Martinich, the Utah-based church is still growing, though the rate has been dropping for decades. He says the faith continues to boom in West Africa, for instance, but growth is stagnating in Northern Europe. Martinich’s latest survey shows retention of new converts is improving — 50% in the U.S. and 49% outside of it — but country-by-country rates vary wildly, ranging from 80% in Congo to 33% in Uruguay. Martinich discusses those findings and more in this week’s “Mormon Land.” Listen here:

Individuals with same-sex attractions certainly can — and do — sometimes choose lives of celibacy to adhere to religious convictions, but, without an intimate partner, says a University of Utah psychology professor, they may find those lives lacking. Lisa Diamond, an expert on gender issues, discusses that issue — along with questions of sexual fluidity and gender identity — as Utah regulators consider rules banning conversion therapy for minors — a proposal that, in its current form, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposes. Listen here.

During the recent General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Reyna Aburto, a high-level women’s leader in the faith, gave a widely praised sermon about depression, anxiety and other forms of mental illness that has members talking more openly about those issues. Jane Clayson Johnson has contributed to that conversation. A journalist known nationally for her work at CBS News, ABC News and NPR, she faced her own battle with clinical depression. In her book, “Silent Souls Weeping: Depression — Sharing Stories, Finding Hope,” and in this week’s podcast, she describes her own experience as well as what she learned from more than 150 other Latter-day Saints who have dealt with depression. Johnson emphasizes why these stories must be told and how Mormonism poses some distinctive challenges for those suffering emotional afflictions. Listen here:

When historian Quincy Newell was researching 19th-century African American Mormons, one name kept popping up: Jane Manning James. This African American convert, who worked in church founder Joseph Smith’s household and eventually was “sealed” to him as a “servant,” probably still ranks as the most famous black female member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints this side of Gladys Knight. So Newell wrote a full-fledged biography of this pioneering black woman. Titled “Your Sister in the Gospel,” it was released earlier this year by Oxford University Press. Newell, associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College in New York state, joined “Mormon Land” this week to talk about the remarkable life and legacy of Jane Manning James. Listen here:

This week we revisit and discuss — what else? — the recently completed General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Besides the usual prayers, songs and sermons, the weekend’s sessions included, as church President Russell M. Nelson promised, a number of momentous changes. There were overhauls to programs for the Young Men and Young Women (with a heavenly, gender-inclusive twist in the latter’s theme). Eight new temples, including two more in Utah, were announced. Newly tweaked temple recommend questions were unveiled. Historic and memorable talks (such as the first by an African American general authority) and another controversial speech by Nelson’s first counselor were delivered. Examining these events and the impacts they may have on the faith are Emily Jensen, a Latter-day Saint writer, editor and blogger, and Joseph Stuart, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and co-chair of the Mormon History Association’s 2020 Program Committee. Listen here.

To mark the 100th episode of our “Mormon Land” podcast, an expert panel will discuss how a 95-year-old leader is reshaping The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, overhauling prominent policies and sacred ceremonies, loosening some rules while tightening others, even changing how people refer to the religion.

Debbie Cole was sexually assaulted in 1989 at age 19. Thus began a 30-year emotional and spiritual odyssey for this Irish Latter-day Saint — days of agony, anger, reconciliation, recovery, resolve and reform — all which culminated earlier this year with the passage of “Debbie’s Law,” which allows for tougher penalties for repeat sex offenders. Cole discusses her journey and how her faith helped see her through it. Listen here.

The Salt Lake Tribune just concluded a special three-part series on the challenges Western faiths, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, face in Russia — a nation dominated by the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the biggest — if not the biggest — obstacles is the government’s ban on public proselytizing by these so-called outsider religions. Latter-day Saint missionaries, for instance, are called “volunteers.” Here to talk about the status of Mormonism in Russia is David Stewart, an independent demographer who co-founded The Cumorah Project, which tracks, among other things, Latter-day Saint growth around the world. Stewart also served a mission in Russia. He joins us today from his office in Las Vegas.

Award-winning KUER reporter Lee Hale said his new religion podcast, called “Preach,” would be a “different kind of faith conversation.” A two-minute promotion for the show, which debuts Friday, Sept. 6, provides a clue. It begins with Hale briefly describing his time knocking on doors in Minnesota as a Mormon missionary and how, a decade later, he finds his own beliefs are “evolving.” Yes, Hale is opting to be open about his identity as a Latter-day Saint. He talks about that choice and his podcast, which will focus on, in his words, “the messy middle” of faith on this week’s “Mormon Land.”

Child-safety advocate Ed Smart recently came out publicly as gay and revealed that he and his wife, Lois, are divorcing. Such announcements from prominent newsmakers make headlines. But what about the straight spouses left behind? Some say they are the forgotten ones — that when their partner comes out of the closet, they go in. Lolly Weed knows about this experience personally and professionally. A marriage and family therapist associate, she and her gay husband, Josh, ended their 15-year marriage last year, something they talked about on a previous “Mormon Land." She returns to this week’s podcast to talk about the challenges these straight spouses face — the heartache, the betrayal, the damage to their self-esteem, the faith trials and, for Latter-day Saints, the reality of a Mormon theology that, in essence, continues to encourage mixed-orientation marriages, no matter how misguided.

The Tony-winning “Book of Mormon” musical is in Utah’s Zion for the third time, bringing its own brand of raunchy, raucous, yet oddly reverential satire back to the Salt Lake City stage. But there may be more at play than meets the ear and eye when Elder Price joyously sings about getting his own planet and Elder Cunningham lovingly lies his way to convert after convert in the jungles of Uganda. In fact, Mormonism’s ties to musical theater — both from within the faith and without — run deep. Jake Johnson, an assistant professor of musicology at Oklahoma City University, explores those connections in his new book, “Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America.” He shares his insights this week on “Mormon Land.”

ERA. Forty years ago, those three initials set off strong conversations and sparked national headlines. The Equal Rights Amendment — the proposed constitutional measure guaranteeing equal legal rights regardless of sex — fell short of ratification among the states. Now, it’s back, and, by some counts, needs just one more state to reach ratification and become the law of the land. So where does the church — which vehemently fought the ERA for years — stand on it today? It isn’t saying. When asked earlier this year by The Salt Lake Tribune, the institution declined to comment. Some advocates say church leaders have told them the faith is now neutral on the issue, emboldening their push for ratification. Anissa Rasheta, a national organizer for Mormons for ERA who is pushing for ratification in her home state of Arizona, discusses the measure — the need for it, the status of the fight and the reception it is getting from today’s Latter-day Saints, young and old, male and female, leaders and laypersons. Listen here.

For nearly two decades, Elder Steven E. Snow has served as a general authority for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The past seven or so years, he has been the church historian, overseeing the faith’s history department. During that time, he has led the release of “Saints,” the first in a planned four-volume narrative history of the church, and the production of landmark essays that tackle some of the pricklier points of Latter-day Saint history and teachings. Snow, who is poised to receive official emeritus status in the coming fall General Conference, talks about his tenure and some of the issues he confronted, including: • How to explain Brigham Young’s role in the former race-based priesthood ban. • How to detail the early days of Mormon polygamy and Joseph Smith’s plural wives, including one who was 14. • The much-publicized news conference showcasing the so-called “seer stone” that historians say Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon, the faith’s signature scripture. • His reaction to the controversial 2015 policy on LGBTQ couples and their children, and the subsequent reversal. • His relationship with former Church Historian Marlin Jensen, a fellow Democrat in a religion dominated by Republicans. • His commitment to the environment and his hopes for more eco-friendly policies from the faith. • His excitement over the dynamic changes taking place under church President Russell M. Nelson. Listen here.

Stories of members walking away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are legion. And plenty of books have been written in recent years documenting and addressing the concerns of these disaffected members. But what can loved ones and leaders still in the faith do to help, to serve, to embrace these onetime believers? That’s what David Ostler explores in his new book, “Bridges: Ministering to Those Who Question.” A retired business executive, Ostler, who has lived on several continents and has served as a bishop, stake president and mission president, discusses his findings in this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast.

Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, addressed the NAACP’s national convention this week. His appearance came in the wake of a new partnership formed between the church and the country’s oldest civil rights organization and a year after the faith celebrated the 40th anniversary of the end of its centurylong ban on blacks holding the priesthood and entering temples. No, Nelson did not apologize for that prohibition. Such words could have been a powerful moment, said LaShawn Williams, an African American Latter-day Saint and an assistant professor of social work at Utah Valley University. But actions count for something, too. So what did this event signify, and what is the state of race relations within the Utah-based faith? Williams addresses those questions and more. Listen here:

It has been almost a year since Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, launched his push to get members, the media, scholars and others to stop using the nicknames “Mormon” and “LDS” when talking about the faith and its followers. Since that time, the Utah-based church has made a number of changes. Some have been high profile, renaming the renowned Tabernacle Choir, for one; others have been less noticeable, like rejiggering website domains. Historian Matt Bowman, the newly installed Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon (there’s that word again) Studies at Claremont Graduate University shares his thoughts on the progress of this sweeping campaign.

Retired Columbia University professor Richard L. Bushman is best known for his biography of Mormon founder Joseph Smith and as an expert in early American history. In the past few years, though, he and his historian wife, Claudia Lauper Bushman, have taken a keen interest in the arts — specifically those associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This week, the two talk about what prompted them to help organize the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in New York City, which just completed its third annual festival, and what they see as the faith’s aesthetic.

Best-selling author Steven Waldman calls it “America’s greatest export." Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, discussed it in March with Pope Francis in their historic meeting at the Vatican and again this week with visiting Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan. It has become practically the go-to subject for Nelson’s first counselor, Dallin H. Oaks, a former Utah Supreme Court justice. And it was a major force in the so-called Utah compromise, which brought housing and employment protections to LGBTQ individuals. That topic, of course, is religious freedom, and Mormonism’s role in its evolution is part of Waldman’s new book, “Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom.” As the nation celebrates its independence this week, he sheds light on the issue in this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast.

With foundational beliefs in prophets, modesty, fasting and family values, Islam and Mormonism share some deeply rooted faith traditions. And this week’s guest, Carolyn Homer, knows more than a little about both religions. Homer is a civil rights attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

For 52 years, the Mormon Miracle Pageant has been a dramatic staple in central Utah, drawing tens of thousands of visitors to the grounds of the historic Manti Temple. But come Saturday night, when the spotlight goes dark, it will mark the last time the pageant will ever light up the summertime night. This week’s guest, Merilyn Jorgensen, sang in the choir at that first performance in 1967 and eventually became the official historian, even compiling a 600-page book about its history. She discusses the pageant’s roots, its memorable moments, its evolution, the sadness of seeing it fade away, and the tiny “miracles” behind the Mormon Miracle Pageant.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has more than 16.3 million members worldwide, but it still is seen by many as an American, even Utah, religion. How does the faith become truly global and allow cultural differences in its congregations and worship while still maintaining unity? Latter-day Saint scholar Melissa Inouye not only thinks and writes a lot about that challenge, she has lived it as well. A teacher of Asian studies at the University of Auckland, Inouye has lived in Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Southern California, Boston, Utah and, of course, now, New Zealand, so she knows a thing or two firsthand about how Mormonism functions in the world. She addresses that topic, the place of women in the patriarchal faith, church as a “safe setting,” LGBTQ issues and more in this week’s “Mormon Land” and in her new book, “Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life, Death, Cancer and Motherhood (Not Necessarily in That Order).”

Abortion — always a hotly disputed, highly divisive topic — is back in the headlines. Several states, including Utah, have passed laws severely restricting the procedure in hopes of setting up a showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court, where a new conservative majority would have the chance to strike down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Where does The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially stand on the issue? Is it more “pro-life” or more “pro-choice.” And do rank-and-file members understand the nuances in their faith’s position? “I hear a lot of rhetoric from church members … who I don’t think are giving an accurate view of what the church’s actual stance is on abortion,” says Angela Clayton, who recently wrote about the issue for By Common Consent. The church’s policy, she argues is “enabled by Roe v. Wade,” and those Latter-day Saints who call abortion murder are resorting to a “theological hyperbole” that stretches beyond the faith’s doctrine. Clayton discusses those issues and more in this Tribune story and on this week’s podcast.

A little more than five years ago, the Mama Dragons burst onto the scene. Since that time, the group has grown into a respected and vital support organization for families and their LGBTQ loved ones, especially in the Latter-day Saint community. Now, a new play — titled “The Mama Dragon Monologues: Mormon Mothers of LGBTQ Kids Speak Out" — chronicles these women who often are torn between devotion to their faith and love for their queer children. As Utah celebrates Pride Week, Sue Bergin, who co-wrote the play tapping the real words of Latter-day Saint women, discusses the budding production, which has already had a staged reading in San Jose and is scheduled to have another next month in New York.

The Hinckley Institute Morgan Lyon Cotti discusses why the LDS Church is using “specialists” to help members become more politically active.

As Salt Lake City prepares to host a June 6-9 Afterlife Awareness Conference — “where shamans break bread with scientists” — we focus on end-of-life care and research along with near-death experiences. Our guests are Jeff O’Driscoll, an emergency room doctor, author and Latter-day Saint who talks about his observations and insights, and Terri Daniel, a hospice chaplain, ordained interfaith minister and grief adviser who founded the annual Afterlife Awareness Conference nearly a decade ago.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took another giant leap toward inclusion this week, eliminating the yearlong waiting period between a civil marriage and a temple “sealing.” This means couples can marry civilly and invite all their loved ones to witness the wedding and then be sealed in a private temple ceremony without a long delay. Until this change, which took effect immediately, practically every Latter-day Saint family has had to exclude at least someone from a temple wedding, leading to awkward explanations and hurt feelings that sometimes last for generations. Crystal Young-Otterstrom knows that firsthand from her family. She joins the “Mormon Land” podcast to talk about her experience and share her thoughts on this historic change.

Matt Easton made headlines around the world after stating during his recent valedictory speech at Brigham Young University that he is “proud to be a gay son of God.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its flagship school aren’t the easiest places to be an LGBTQ member and student. Belonging to those institutions can be especially challenging for transgender individuals, for whom the rules are even muddier. Andy Winder knows that firsthand. He started undergoing hormone-replacement therapy during his sophomore year and lived, worked and studied in near-constant fear that he would be expelled. Winder made it to graduation — in 2018 — but the path to a diploma didn’t come without bumps and bruises, twists and turns. The 21-year-old writer discusses his journey on this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast. Listen here:

Latter-day Saints are taught time and time again that sexual relations are absolutely forbidden — before marriage. But after couples wed, all that changes, immediately. Sex becomes not only acceptable but also encouraged, even exalted. Making that transition isn’t always easy for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s where Jennifer Finlayson-Fife steps in. A Chicago area Latter-day Saint and a licensed therapist who specializes in working with member couples on sexuality and relationship issues, she joins the podcast to talk about, well, sex in Mormonism.

The world watched in horror this week as Notre Dame burned. Now, with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints poised to announce Friday the details of a massive renovation project for its iconic Salt Lake Temple, perhaps Mormonism’s Notre Dame, thoughts turn to the Utah-based faith’s sacred structures. Allen Roberts, a Utah architect who specializes in preservation, including work on Latter-day Saint chapels, tabernacles and temples, discusses the church’s historic buildings, their place in the design world and the faith’s high points and low points in preserving them.

Nearly 3½ years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stunned insiders and outsiders with a new policy labeling same-sex married couples “apostates” and generally barring their children from baptism until they turn 18. Last week, Latter-day Saint leaders delivered another shocker by reversing those rules. What happened? And why? And where does the Utah-based faith go from here? Discussing those questions and more about the church’s evolution and, some say, devolution on LGBTQ rights is historian Gregory Prince, author of the newly released “Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences.”

After surveying thousands of returned missionaries, independent researcher Matt Martinich decided “urgent reform” was needed to help The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints achieve real growth. He offered his suggestions in a recent post on his website, ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, and discussed them further in a Salt Lake Tribune story and this week’s podcast.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that the ultimate ordinance is eternal marriage between a man and woman. It preaches the importance of rearing righteous children. It even published a proclamation to the world extolling the virtues of the so-called traditional, nuclear family. Although many, if not most, members do not have that at home, it still is pointed to as the “ideal.” So it’s not the easiest faith in which to be single. Rosemary Card, who worked as a teenage model in New York, later graduated from Brigham Young University and served a church mission, addresses that topic and more in her book, “Model Mormon: Fighting for Self-Worth on the Runway and as an Independent Woman.” She also is the founder of Q.NOOR, a temple dress company for Latter-day Saints. Listen here:

The recently completed session of the Utah Legislature appeared poised to ban so-called conversion therapy, barring therapists from trying to change the sexual orientation of minors. The bill had not one but two Republicans championing it and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — seen as a potential stumbling block — had taken a neutral stance on the measure. But conservatives hijacked the bill and watered it down beyond recognition. The clash highlighted once again the divisions on LGBTQ issues. Discussing those issues on this week’s podcast are psychologist Lee Beckstead, a gay former Mormon who testified against conversion therapy in a prominent court case, and therapist Ty Mansfield, an active Latter-day Saint who has written about his same-sex attractions and his marriage to a woman. Both Beckstead and Mansfield are involved in a united undertaking known as the Reconciliation and Growth Project, a joint effort that includes a far-reaching study, to find common ground within the LGBTQ community.

Thirty-three minutes. That’s how long President Russell M. Nelson’s private audience with Pope Francis lasted at the Vatican. But the first-ever face-to-face meeting between a Latter-day Saint prophet and a Catholic pontiff was months — if not longer — in the making, and its impact might be felt for years to come. Or will it? Was this historic encounter more about symbolism than substance? Or is that symbolism, ultimately, more important than any substance? Patrick Mason, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, discusses why this meeting and the recent events in Rome mean so much more to the 16 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than the 1.2 billion-strong Catholic Church. Listen here:

Knowing who ordained whom to the priesthood in the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is seldom of interest to anyone beyond curious descendants and detail-obsessed researchers. But a recent discovery solving the mystery surrounding the ordination of Elijah Able (sometimes spelled Abel), one of the most famous black converts in the faith’s fledgling years, excited historians and helped shed additional light on a religion with a tortuous track record on the issue of race. W. Paul Reeve, professor of Mormon studies at the University of Utah and author of the award-winning book “Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness,” documented the discovery and discusses what it means and why it matters.

For months, Latter-day Saint leaders, scholars and rank-and-file members — not to mention a fair share of outside observers — have looked forward to the release of Jana Riess’ book about her groundbreaking Next Mormons Survey, a sweeping study of 1,156 members and 540 former members, young and old, male and female, across the U.S. Well, that day is near. Her book, “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” comes out next week. Riess, a Religion News Service senior columnist, discusses her findings — covering everything from changing orthodoxy, shifting politics, softening LGBTQ views and a surprise or two (think coffee) — on this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast.

This week, Latter-day Saint parents got an early Christmas — or Mother’s Day — gift: The chance to talk to their missionary daughters and sons outside of those two holidays. These young sisters and elders now can call, video chat or text their families weekly in yet another major cultural shift under the administration of Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While you can imagine the rejoicing among missionaries and their families, some fear the relaxed rules go too far. On the latest podcast David Cook, a former mission president in Chile, and Susie Augenstein, whose son is serving in Poland, discuss the change.

Latter-day Saint temples have been in the news a lot lately. New temples are opening. Some older ones are closing for renovation. And groundbreakings are taking place around the globe. Capturing the most attention were the recent changes that brought more gender equity to the religious rites that take place inside these temples. So how has temple worship evolved throughout the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Historian and author Devery Anderson, who edited the volume, “The Development of LDS Temple Worship," shares his insights.

A state lawmaker is proposing a measure that would prevent Utahns from changing the sex designated on their birth certificates. Such a move would set a “very dangerous” precedent, argues Laurie Lee Hall, a former stake president and temple architect who was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for living as a transgender woman. “ … It would ultimately wind up, without hyperbole at all, erasing transgender people from existence.” Hall, who appears on this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast, also notes that she has no issue with the faith’s so-called family proclamation, which declares that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." She “relates” to it. After all, Hall says, she always has been — and forever will be — a woman. “But I don't seem to relate to that in the way that most in the church interpret it,” she adds. “What they're really thinking, I think, when they read that is that biological sex determines who you are and that at the end of the day you will always be whatever your biological sex was.” Hall shares her thoughts on the proposed bill, President Dallin H. Oaks' October sermon on gender issues and more.

For years, David Matheson, a Utahn who was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and married to a woman, was a prominent advocate and professional practitioner of so-called “reparative therapy,” an effort that essentially seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Matheson came to renounce that type of treatment and instead focused on therapies intended to reduce, in his words, the “shame, anxiety and effects of trauma” experienced by LGBTQ individuals in society. Now, Matheson is divorced and making news by coming out as a gay man seeking a male partner. He also is expressing remorse for the pain he may have brought to men he was trying to help along the way. Matheson discusses his past, present and future on this week’s “Mormon Land,” especially now as he strives to navigate a new place for himself in the faith he loves.

Latter-day Saints are full of jokes, jabs and judgments about so-called “Utah Mormons” — how church members who live in the heart of the faith are somehow different than those who live elsewhere. New survey findings from writer-researcher Jana Riess show that’s true, especially when it comes to orthodoxy and some cultural influences. Latter-day Saint scholar Patrick Mason, who grew up in Utah but has lived in the Midwest, Eastern Europe and now Southern California, has noticed the differences, too. For instance, in those places away from the Intermountain West’s Mormon Belt, he said, when members attended church, it didn’t matter how they were dressed. "The overwhelming feeling, at least that we experienced, was ‘thank goodness you’re here,’” Mason said in this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast. “Who cares whether you’re wearing a dress or pants or what you think about the Book of Mormon? If you’re willing to walk in that door, you know, thank you for being here.” There were, he added, “fewer litmus tests for what makes a ‘real Mormon.’” By the way, Mason, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, soon will become a “Utah Mormon” again. In July, he takes over as the Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. He said his family values diversity and “a lot of things that we found outside of Utah. But ... I was raised there, and I’m I don’t think I’m too screwed up. ... I can’t wait to get back there.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made historic changes last week to its temple ceremonies, drawing widespread attention and praise, especially from women, for its use of gender-equitable language. Neylan McBaine, author of “Women at Church” and founder of the Mormon Women Project, joins this week’s podcast to discuss what these changes mean for women, men and the wider church.

If The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seemed to be dormant during the waning years of enfeebled President Thomas S. Monson’s tenure, that inactivity ended in 2018. After Monson’s death at age 90 two days into the year and the ascension of apostle Russell M. Nelson to the presidency, the deluge of changes, adjustments, announcements, rescissions and reforms came at a dizzying pace and show no signs of letting up. We recap the historic headline-making year in this week’s podcast.

In Christian homes around the world this holiday season, families have dusted off their Nativity sets and carefully arranged the pieces in their living rooms. There are wise men, shepherds, barnyard animals, Joseph, perhaps an angel, all paying homage to the baby Jesus. But what about one woman in every Nativity: Mary. Where does the mother of the Lord fit in Latter-day Saint theology and the wider Christian world? Cristina Rosetti, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California Riverside and an expert on the intersection of Mormonism and spirit communication, examines that question and more. A convert to Catholicism, Rosetti, who is a also an archivist at Sunstone and a former Mormon studies fellow at the University of Utah, explains the prominent role Mary plays in Catholic worship and her more-subdued part in Latter-day Saint teachings, along with the doctrine of Heavenly Mother and how together they affect women’s places in the world of faith.

Salt Lake County is home to the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It also boasts the faith’s famous tabernacle and its landmark temple. But the county is no longer populated mostly by Mormons. The latest membership numbers, supplied by the church itself, show that Utah’s most populous county is now 48.91 percent Latter-day Saint. In fact, the Latter-day Saint tally statewide has fallen below 62 percent. This continuing demographic shift is more than a statistical footnote. It carries with it sweeping implications for schools, politics, neighborhoods and the church itself. Jim McConkie, a Salt Lake City attorney, former Latter-day Saint bishop and an ex-congressional candidate, has witnessed this transformation and sees opportunities for the area to become more cohesive and inclusive even as it grows more diverse and increasingly becomes a place for non-Mormons.

Two days before Election Day, Marty Stephens, a Latter-day Saint stake president and the church’s chief lobbyist on Utah’s Capitol Hill, took to the pulpit and urged his congregations to “Follow the prophet” and, in so many words, vote against the ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana. Although most Utah voters ultimately bucked the church’s position and approved Proposition 2 anyway, Stephens’ sermon and the public and behind-the-scenes actions of Utah’s predominant faith during the campaign have revived questions about the separation of church and state and whether Latter-day Saint authorities wielded inappropriate influence on politicians, policymakers and rank-and-file church members. McKay Coppins, staff writer for The Atlantic and a graduate of Brigham Young University, shares his views on Prop 2, the midterm elections, Mitt Romney, the church’s forays into public policy, its clout in Utah and Washington and the intersection of religion and politics.

The federal government recently released a sweeping scientific report filled with dire predictions if climate change is left unchecked, but President Donald Trump is doubting his own administration’s findings. The White House’s perplexing response set off fresh conversations this week about the perils of a warming climate. As that debate, like the planet itself, heats up, we invited Ty Markham, a co-founder of the Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance, to discuss her grass-roots activism and how her Latter-day Saint faith informs it.

It’s Thanksgiving week, and Americans’ thoughts — and stomachs — turn inevitably to food. What better time, then, to explore whether Latter-day Saints have any special connection to food or, at least, certain foods? After all, we’ve all heard about funeral potatoes and green Jell-O. But the faith also has a health code that counsels members on what they should and should not eat or drink. What role does it play? Here to discuss this topic is Christy Spackman, who holds a doctorate in food studies and teaches at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

So-called Middle Way Mormonism is generating a lot of chatter online, in homes, at churches and elsewhere. While a clear definition of the term remains elusive — even among self-proclaimed middle wayers — this approach is gaining traction, especially among millennial members, more and more of whom are seeing themselves as neither all-in nor all-out of the faith. By Common Consent blogger Sam Brunson argues all members, at some level, are middle wayers.

Three years ago this month, word leaked out of a new policy from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one that deemed members who enter a same-sex marriage “apostates” and barred their children from baptism and other religious rituals until they turn 18. The policy made international headlines, setting off a wave of protests and rallies, public resignations and private resentments. That furor has faded but, for many, the questions and the pain, like the policy itself, persist. So, three years later, what is the state of LGBTQ relations within the faith? Kendall Wilcox, an openly gay Latter-day Saint filmmaker and co-founder of the group Mormons Building Bridges, would like to see improvement, but under the church’s new leadership of President Russell M. Nelson and given recent sermons by his first counselor, Dallin H. Oaks, he isn’t hopeful. He talks about that and more on this week’s podcast.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints surprised many when it announced that large church pageants are now “discouraged.” That same day, leaders of the mother of all Latter-day Saint pageants, the Hill Cumorah Pageant, said that it would end its 81-year run after the 2020 season. On this week’s podcast, Gerald Argetsinger, who served in the pageant presidency for 12 years and worked as its artistic director for most of the 1990s, laments the loss of this iconic piece of Latter-day Saint dramatic history, discusses the pageant’s storied past and highlights the impact the show had through the decades on members and nonmembers alike.

For several decades, Colleen McDannell has taught religious studies at the University of Utah. She has written books about heaven, Catholic reforms and Christianity’s place in popular culture. In her latest volume, she turns her attention to the faith that calls Utah home with “Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy," which punctures the stereotypes attached to Latter-day Saint women and reveals them as, at times, outspoken and progressive and, at other times, as insular and conflicted. Either way, McDannell writes, “it will be women who determine whether the next generation remains committed in their faith — and precisely what shape that faith will take.”

It’s the toughest assignment a member can get in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — bishop. It’s a lay calling that brings with it no pay but heavy demands. The bishop is responsible for the spiritual and even temporal well-being for hundreds of families and individuals in his area. All of this on top of the needs of his own loved ones and full-time job. Ross Trewhella has been serving in this taxing but rewarding task for nine years, shepherding his Latter-day Saint flock in Cornwall, England. Hear his thoughts on the shift coming in January from three hours of Sunday services to two hours, the appeal to stop using the word “Mormon," the challenges his faith faces in the United Kingdom and more.

President Russell M. Nelson and his colleagues did it again. They pulled off a momentous General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They shortened Sunday worship services. They announced a dozen new temples. They gave sermons that made news. They even have members and outsiders talking about how they are supposed to be referring to members and their faith. For this week’s podcast, Patrick Mason, head of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, and Emily Jensen, a Latter-day Saint writer, editor and blogger, discuss what did — and did not — happen at the two-day gathering and what its impact will be.

In some respects, the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City is a 28-story monument to a program called “correlation.” In the 1960s, authorities in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints introduced in earnest a more consistent approach to the faith that came to be known as correlation. The sweeping effort attempted to make every congregation, class and calling the same across all regions, climates and cultures. These days, critics see correlation as a hinderance. It made the church more patriarchal, they argue, and more bureaucratic. Supporters counter that the undertaking helped the church achieve and accommodate phenomenal growth. It did more to unite the members than divide them, they say, and the fruits of it will be evident at this weekend’s General Conference. Few historians know as much about correlation as Matthew Bowman, an associate professor of history at Henderson State University and author of the critically acclaimed “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.” Bowman, who is researching a new book about correlation, discusses his findings on this week’s “Mormon Land.”

Mormon Land is alive with the sound of rumors. Probably the only thing on the Latter-day Saint calendar as reliable as General Conference is the buzz, the chatter, the leaks in the weeks before about what will happen at the upcoming sessions. On this week’s podcast, we’re going to unashamedly indulge the love for such gossip and talk about what members are talking about. Latter-day Saints may not know what’s going to occur at the Oct. 6-7 conference, but that never stopped an entertaining debate about the possibilities. Is the three-hour block toast? Will temple changes be announced? What about the missionary program, medical marijuana, women’s issues, the church’s name and more? Here to help us with this conversation is Mormon writer, editor and blogger Emily Jensen.

In March, Religion News Service senior columnist Jana Riess joined us to talk about Latter-day Saint millennials, part of her groundbreaking multigenerational survey of Mormons and former Mormons. Now, with her new book — “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church” — due out in less than six months, she’s back with us to discuss more specifically what her research revealed about women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Sam Young is a Mormon on a mission. He wants bishops’ one-on-one interviews with Latter-day Saint youths to end. He wants the sometimes sexually explicit “worthiness” questions they are asked in these private sessions to cease. To propel his cause, he formed a group, Protect LDS Children, launched an online petition and led a march to church headquarters to deliver tens of thousands of supportive signatures. He even staged a three-week hunger strike to draw attention to the issue. This past Sunday, however, this former bishop appeared at a “disciplinary council” before his local lay leaders, who argue his actions have crossed a line by opposing not only church policy but also church policymakers. As he faces the prospect of excommunication, the question now is: Will Sam Young remain a Mormon on a mission? In this week’s podcast, Young discusses what took place at his hearing, how the accusations against him, to his mind, misinterpret his actions, why he undertook this fight, and why he will continue to work for change, preferably with the church’s help, whether he is in the faith — which is his hope — or out of it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made history this week — with its own history. For the first time since 1930, it released an authorized, in-depth book that explores the faith’s past. “Saints: The Standard of Truth" is part of a four-volume set that will explore Mormonism from its humble birth to its current global presence. On this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast, Benjamin Park, who is a Latter-day Saint and a history professor at Sam Houston State University, discusses this first installment, its strengths, its weaknesses and its potential to shape members' views about their own religious heritage.

Soon after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced its opposition to a Utah ballot initiative on medical marijuana, emails began appearing in the inboxes of Mormons across the state. In them, the church stated that while it “does not object to the medicinal use of marijuana,” it is dead set against this particular ballot measure. Will the church succeed in defeating what, to this point, has been a popular proposal? Will the email blast prove effective or could it backfire? If the initiative passes, is it evidence of the church’s waning influence in Utah? If it fails, would it reinforce the notion that the state is essentially a theocracy, governed not by elected leaders but by a sustained religious hierarchy? Morgan Lyon Cotti, associate director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, discusses those issues and more on this week’s “Mormon Land” podcast.

Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, issued a one-paragraph statement last week directing members, the media and others to use the full, formal name of the Utah-based faith and urging them to do away with the shorter but more widely known terms “Mormon” and “LDS.” His statement totaled only 71 words, but it prompted tens of thousands more to be published on the topic because the implications could be wide-ranging and long-lasting. In this week’s podcast, Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman looks back at the historical uses of the term “Mormon” and the evolution of the church’s name along with the opportunity members now have to engage in a deeper conversation about their religion. And Stuart Reid, a former Utah lawmaker who used to work in the church’s public affairs department, discusses the reasons for this and past naming campaigns but with a particular focus on the future. In short, he says, Nelson is preparing the church and its followers for Christ’s eventual return.

Emma Smith stands alone as the most famous woman in Mormon history. The wife of church founder Joseph Smith is mentioned in histories, journals, even LDS scripture. Less known is her enduring and endearing friendship with the early church’s most noted black woman, Jane Manning James. A forthcoming film, titled “Jane and Emma,” documents and dramatizes that friendship. The movie’s director, Chantelle Squires, and its screenwriter, Melissa Leilani Larson, discuss the film, its title characters and their hopes for what it might do for race relations within — and without — the LDS Church.

You probably read about a woman who secretly recorded an interview with her former Missionary Training Center president about alleged sexual misconduct he committed. Or maybe your heard that Mormon general authorities are paid more than $120,000 a year in salary. Perhaps you wonder about the LDS Church’s vast wealth. You swear you’ve seen that it has at least $32 billion in stock holdings. Well, if you know those newsy nuggets, it’s probably because of a website called MormonLeaks, which posts documents, recordings and videos secretly provided by church leaders, employees, sources, whistleblowers or other moles from within the Utah-based faith. So how did MormonLeaks get its start? What is its goal? Which leaks have been the biggest? And how does it navigate often-tricky ethical waters? We put those questions and more to the forces behind the website, Executive Director Ryan McKnight and technical director Ethan Dodge.

The northern Utah mother at the heart of a spat about public breastfeeding has reached a “compromise” with her LDS bishop: She’ll now wear two tops to help hide her breast from above and below while nursing her 19-month-old daughter at her Mormon meetinghouse. But the dispute isn’t dead. The woman is “not quite ready,” she said in her first audio interview on the matter, to meet with the LDS leader who denied her a “temple recommend” unless she covered up. “I would like to see [LDS authorities] put out a policy worldwide, throughout the whole church, to protect mothers, to make it so that women can breastfeed their babies however is comfortable for mom and baby — whether that’s covered or not covered,” the woman said Wednesday on The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast. The woman, who agreed to go by the initials S.D. because she hopes to resolve the impasse with her clergy, also addressed misinformation that has sprung up in the viral venting since her story surfaced. “[One misperception] is that … as soon as [my daughter] is done nursing, I leave my breast hanging out for the world to see, which is, again, completely inaccurate,” she said. “As soon as my daughter unlatches, I put it away immediately because I don’t want people seeing my breast. The only person I want seeing my breast is my husband.” Carrie Stoddard Salisbury, the Exponent II blogger who exposed the controversy, said on “Mormon Land” that hundreds of women have agreed to write letters to the faith’s top female leaders calling for a consistent, female-friendly policy on breastfeeding.

This week, Utahns are celebrating the 1847 arrival of Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. By all accounts, the Mormon migration from Illinois to the Great Basin was a monumental journey, one that helped shape the LDS Church and the American West. But, as with many historic events, the truth about the trek can get twisted and turned through the years. Did Brigham Young, for instance, really say “this is the right place”? Did sea gulls save crops from marauding bands of crickets? Did no handcart pioneer ever leave the faith? In this special Pioneer Day edition of “Mormon Land,” LDS historian Ardis Parshall helps separate the fact from the fiction.

The LDS Foundation recently made a historic contribution of $25,000 to Affirmation. That sum may not be a big amount, but symbolically it is huge. It marks the first significant collaboration between the Mormon church and the independent LGBTQ support group. President Carson Tueller and Executive Director John Gustav-Wrathall discuss that donation, the resulting fallout, their group’s diverse membership and whether Affirmation is getting too cozy with the LDS Church in the latest edition of “Mormon Land.”

Art expresses and evokes deep human emotions, which makes it intimately connected to spirituality. It makes sense, then, for LDS artists to explore their faith through their creativity. In 2017, such links prompted a group of Latter-day Saints in New York City to launch the Mormon Arts Center Festival, which LDS author Terryl Givens called "a seminal event in Mormonism's coming of age artistically." A year later, the festival has grown larger and even more international, says one of the organizers, Richard L. Bushman, the famed Mormon scholar and emeritus history professor at Columbia. Before the festival gets underway on June 28, Bushman explains why a rigorous look at Mormon arts is crucial to the Utah-based faith.

For years, a standard Mormon refrain has been “give us a new hymnbook.” Well, the pleadings from that chorus have been answered. The LDS Church has announced that it is developing a new hymnal for use by Mormons across the globe along with a new songbook for children. So which hymns should stay? Which should go? And which new ones should be added? Writer Kristine Haglund, a former editor of Dialogue and a self-professed “serious amateur” singer and musician, discusses those questions and the vital role music plays in LDS worship services in the latest edition of “Mormon Land.”

Islam and Mormonism share some religious traditions. Both have histories rooted in a prophet. Both tout modesty and family values. And both embrace fasting and shun alcohol. As we approach the end of Ramadan, we explore those Muslim and Mormon ties with Shuaib Din, imam at the Utah Islamic Center, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges, a Latter-day Saint who last year organized an iftar, or break-the-fast meal, for her LDS and Muslim neighbors on the latest edition of “Mormon Land.”

On the latest episode of “Mormon Land,” University of Utah professor Paul Reeve offers insight on where the LDS Church's ban on giving black men and boys the priesthood and black women and girls entrance into temples originated.

In the latest episode of “Mormon Land,” Cathy Stokes describes her conversion to Mormonism, what it means to be a black Latter-day Saint and what's next for the church after it celebrates its 1978 decision to end a centurylong ban on black men and boys being ordained, and on black women being allowed in Mormon temples.

In 2015, the LDS Church issued a short essay matter-of-factly affirming its belief in a Heavenly Mother. Some argue whole books should be written about her. And that’s precisely what Rachel Hunt Steenblik did with her volume “Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother.” She discussed her writings and research on the latest “Mormon Land” podcast.

This breakup is sure to have a profound impact not only on the faith — which was Scouting’s largest chartering sponsor, especially in Utah and the Intermountain West — but also on the longtime youth organization itself. How much smaller will Scouting get? Will LDS boys and girls stick with or join the program? How much will it cost? What happens to all those camps? Will Scouting even survive? Mark Griffin, a Scout executive with the Great Salt Lake Council, answers those question and more on this week’s “Mormon Land.”

They decide which Mormon missionaries should be teamed up together. They make sure the young proselytizers stay healthy and safe. They shepherd these eager elders and sisters through any faith, physical or emotional crisis. In the end, LDS mission presidents can rank among the most influential church leaders in individual lives. This week on “Mormon Land” — and in the wake of recent revelations about misconduct by a couple of former mission presidents — Jim and Jeanne Jardine, who oversaw the California Sacramento Mission from 2008 to 2011, discuss the roles of LDS mission presidents.

In her 2014 book, “Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women's Local Impact,” Neylan McBaine examined the roles of Mormon women in their congregations and suggested paths toward more gender equity within the global faith. Why not, for instance, have teenage girls hold the microphone at testimony meetings? How about letting young women take part in what was then called visiting teaching? Why shouldn’t mothers be allowed to hold their infants during formal baby blessings at church? And why aren’t husband-and-wife teams who oversee LDS missions co-presidents? Well, some changes have occurred since her book’s release. Lots of others, McBaine says, are needed. Hear her thoughts on feminism, Ordain Women, the Mormon #MeToo moment and more in the latest edition of “Mormon Land.”

On the latest installment of “Mormon Land,” Clinical social worker and therapist Marybeth Raynes discusses the relationship between apologies and forgiveness — both of which were discussed at the latest General Conference.

On this episode of “Mormon Land,” independent demographer Matt Martinich discusses how the LDS Church is faring in the countries Mormon President Russell M. Nelson plans to visit on his international trip.

In the latest edition of ‘Mormon Land,’ historian Matthew Bowman reflects of the changes announced at the most recent Mormon General Conference.

In the latest episode of “Mormon Land, ” LDS relationship and sexuality counselor Jennifer Finlayson-Fife discusses the repercussions of the latest sexual abuse scandal to hit the Mormon church.

LDS professor Andrea Radke-Moss discusses her own experience with raising a young son and daughter to overcome gender stereotypes — especially within the LDS Church.

In this edition of “Mormon Land,” author, scholar, researcher and senior columnist for Religion News Service Jana Riess discusses a massive survey she did of current and former Mormons.

In this edition of ‘Mormon Land,’ BYU biology professor Steven Peck discusses why all Mormons should believe in evolution.

One of the nation's most respected legal scholars, former Utah Supreme Court Justice Christine Durham talks about her Mormon faith, the intersection of law and religion, and her relationship with LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks. The Salt Lake Tribune's Peggy Fletcher Stack and David Noyce host.

Mormon bishops and the counsel they give spouses in abusive marriages are in the news. What should — or should not — these lay leaders say and do in these confidential conversations? David Cook, a former LDS bishop, stake president and area Seventy, and Alice Faulkner Burch, president of the all-female Relief Society for the Genesis Group of black Mormons, discuss those questions and more in the latest edition of “Mormon Land.” Listen here.

If any gay man and a straight woman could make a marriage work, Josh and Lolly Weed could. But after 15 years, the two are divorcing. In this edition of “Mormon Land,” Josh and Lolly Weed discuss their divorce and how it will affect their family dynamics and their relationship with the LDS Church.

Drawing inspiration from Martin Luther's action 500 years ago, Mormon blogger Liz Layton Johnson recently wrote 95 ways to improve her church. Johnson joined Tribune senior religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce to talk about her wide-ranging, practical ideas.

Mormon historian Ardis Parshall sits down with The Tribune's Managing Editor Dave Noyce and Senior Religion Reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack to discuss the woman's role in the Mormon church and the new First Presidency.

For 22 years, Don Harwell served as branch president of the Genesis Group, a support group for black Mormons. Don and his wife Jerri Harwell visit with Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce about the group, race in the church and President Monson's special relationship with Genesis.

What is the relationship between faith and doubt? Author Adam S. Miller describes his take on reconciling personal belief with LDS Church doctrine in a new edition of his book, "Letters to a Young Mormon." He talks with Salt Lake Tribune senior religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce.

How will LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson be remembered? Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce discuss Monson's 50-year imprint on the faith with Henderson State University history professor Matthew Bowman, author of "The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith."

While reporting in Hong Kong, Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack discovered a Mormon congregation that only serves domestic workers. Stack spoke about the group with a woman known as Ling Ling, a former Relief Society president of the Everyday Branch.

BYU religion professor Eric Huntsman describes Mormon history, cultural tradition and his personal observance of Christmas with Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce.

How much does a Mormon bishop need to know about a person's sexual behavior during a worthiness interview? Former LDS bishop Richard Ostler and therapist Julie de Azevedo Hanks discuss the issue with Salt Lake Tribune reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce.

President Donald Trump plans to visit with Mormon Church leaders when he comes to Utah on Monday. Morgan Lyon Cotti, deputy director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, and BYU political science professor Kelly Patterson join Salt Lake Tribune senior religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce to talk about LDS encounters with U.S. presidents and why many Utah Mormons still like Trump.

Jim McConkie, co-founder of the Refugee Justice League which provides pro bono legal help to Utah refugees, explains how his Mormon faith influenced this effort to Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and editor Jennifer Napier-Pearce.

Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack talks about Mormon life, practices and cultural influences in Indonesia, Vietnam and other southeast Asia sites she recently visited.

Authors Fiona and Terryl Givens argue much of contemporary LDS thought has been contaminated by Protestant rhetoric and is inconsistent with the theology articulated by Mormon founder Joseph Smith's original vision. They discuss their new book "The Christ Who Heals" with Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce.

Salt Lake Tribune religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack interviews Lewis Hassell, an LDS mission president based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Salt Lake Tribune humor columnist Robert Kirby says he lied in order to serve a Mormon mission years ago. Now he offers his take on the LDS Church's new set of questions for prospective missionaries.

Historian D. Michael Quinn discusses money and finances throughout Mormon Church history and theology with Salt Lake Tribune editor Jennifer Napier-Pearce and managing editor David Noyce.

Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce talk with Laurie Lee Hall about her transition from a former stake president and LDS temple architect to a transgender woman.

Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young University recently changed its policy to allow Coke to be sold on campus. Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce talk about the reversal and the Mormon health code called the Word of Wisdom with Philip Barlow, Arrington Chair of Mormon Studies and a Religious Studies professor at Utah State University.

Salt Lake Tribune senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack talks about her fascinating career, from encounters with Mormon prophets to the Dalai Lama. Recorded before a live audience at the City Library in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

Blogger Steve Evans of By Common Consent and Darius Gray, former president of Genesis Group, join Salt Lake Tribune managing editor David Noyce and senior religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack to discuss October 2017 General Conference.

Tom Christofferson describes his life as a gay man, his complicated relationship with the LDS Church and the unwavering love of his parents and brothers in his new book, "That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon's Perspective on Faith and Family." Each week, Mormon Land explores the contours and complexities of LDS News. Award-winning Salt Lake Tribune religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack, managing editor David Noyce and editor Jennifer Napier-Pearce host.