Showing all posts by Galdralag

We are delighted to feature a guest post reflection from Mofem matriarch Bradamante.

Sometime in the mid-oughts, one of my grown children, who was undergoing a faith transition at the time, remarked to me that the Church I grew up in wasn’t the one he grew up in. He was certainly right about that, though I honestly hadn’t noticed this when he was actually growing up. I had, foolishly as it turns out, thought that it would be the birthright of all of my kids to experience the same optimistic and nurturing Mormon adolescent experience that I had been (as I realize now) unbelievably fortunate to have had. It had actually been one of the things I had looked forward to most when I anticipated my future family, back in the day: that the Church would nurture them as it had nurtured me. I had internalized the “it takes a village” idea long before Hillary Clinton came on the scene to articulate it, and I looked forward to raising my kids in that village.

Privilege. So often you don’t know you have it. Growing up in that uncorrelated Eden of the past,* I had no way of knowing how much things would change. Read More

I play the piano for a small Methodist congregation on Sunday mornings. They meet in one of the oldest Methodist churches in the South, a small, lovely brick building in a sleepy old town. It is not large enough to house a pipe organ. The pastor, who interviewed, auditioned, and ultimately hired me, is a young, 40-something woman, recently ordained. She and her husband – he sits in the pews with their three children every Sunday – are fugitives from a much stricter Baptist tradition.

I took the job for purely practical reasons; I needed a form of income that was not too time consuming but would enable me to help support my family while writing my dissertation. Yet, increasingly as time passes, I find myself surprised at my weekly reactions – emotional, intellectual, and spiritual – to the experience of having a woman preside. Her sermons bring up ideas that refuse to leave my mind, and everywhere in her speech are inclusive metaphors of female experience. Although, of course, some of the basic teachings and traditions of Methodism are distinct from Mormonism – the examples below will make that obvious – the parallels are striking enough that, while listening to her, I feel I am beginning to develop a vision of what real female leadership from ordained women would look like in an LDS setting. Here are two examples from sermons that have remained with me: Read More

Ever since the new essays dealing with more complex bits of Mormon history appeared on lds.org, almost daily I encounter facebook statuses and posts in private groups of people reeling, overwhelmed and disoriented, unsure of what to do. These are good people, people who have devoted their lives and their talents and their faith to the Church, many of them deeply orthodox. Their statuses are, for me, an unsettling echo of the statuses of many of my more liberal and progressive Mormon friends last summer when Kate Kelly and John Dehlin were facing Church discipline. It seems it’s been a hard year for Mormons of most stripes.

For a while I didn’t look too closely at the statuses. They reminded me of the numbness and shock I felt, over a decade ago before social media existed, when I pored over books in the Harold B. Lee library shortly after taking out my endowments as a younger, pre-mission-age single woman at BYU. I didn’t know then where to turn, whom to talk to. When I did bring up the information I found in those books to close friends and family – secret “spiritual wivery” and polyandry, blood atonement, racist pronouncements said over the pulpit in the name of the Lord – even the least dogmatic immediately told me not to worry about it or not to read it. My protestations that I wasn’t reading anti-Mormon materials but historical documents and books written by LDS scholars fell on deaf ears, and, even more unnerved, I realized that this was not something I could talk about with any of my LDS friends. It was many, many years before I did. My faith transition was achingly alone.

And so, when John Dehlin issues a request, as he frequently does, for people to offer their advice and stories for how they handle their own faith transitions, I find myself wondering what advice I or any one of us can give. Read More

Two months ago I had a once in a lifetime experience: I was invited to an Emirati wedding. In a vast, glittering ballroom, chandeliers festooned and arches bedecked with streaming garlands of real flowers, I sat with nearly six hundred Emirati women eating an eight-course gourmet meal, waited on by servants robed in white with gold sashes. As is common in the UAE, the wedding guests were dressed to the nines – full professional makeup, elaborate waist-length hair extensions, and high-end sequined designer gowns with plunging necklines paired with improbably spindly six-inch heels. Arab pop blasted from the speakers, and the female members of the bride’s and groom’s families stood in turn. They danced traditional dances together in front of the seated crowd, ululating and graceful in their glamorous gowns, wending their way up and down the center of the room in a processional toward the bridal bower. No photography was allowed – no cameras whatsoever were permitted in that room. I sat, my brain rapidly stultified by the rich food and blaring music, trying to create a mental video of the glamour and the dancing, trying to make sure I did not miss too many details of this extraordinary night.

And then, at the stroke of midnight, the groom came (looking pale and nervous), escorted by the broadly grinning male members of the bride’s family. And all of the sequins, all of the elaborately coiffed hair of the numerous guests, disappeared in moments under long frothy black abayas and headscarves, leaving only portions of the women’s faces, their henna tattooed hands, and their designer heels showing.** Only the bride, in that room filled with hundreds and hundreds of women, could be seen in her gorgeous gown by her husband-to-be. Only the bride’s immediate male relatives could even enter into the ballroom where the bride was seated, uncovered, surrounded by her vast network of family and friends. (Even the groom’s male relatives were forbidden entrance, and this despite the fact that all of the women other than the bride had covered themselves before any of the select few male relatives had entered.) They had entered into a sacred, private female space. Read More

Towards the end of my mission, I was assigned a companion who was of mixed-race heritage (her father was African American, her mother white). (I am of stereotypical Mormon pioneer stock, a mix of the UK, Scandinavia, and a couple of Cherokees from over a century back. I looked remarkably white, and remarkably American, in the Latin American country where I served.) This companion, on the other hand, looked very like many of the people who lived where we served, and her physical appearance opened doors. For the first time on my mission, I was not asked with suspicion about race and the church. Also for the first time, both investigators and members talked openly in front of me about the complexities of being a racial minority in a church led primarily by white American men.

I think I’m probably similar to many people who are too young to remember the priesthood ban. Not only had I literally never heard any of the folk stories (à la the infamous Prof. Bott scandal of last year) about the reasons for the ban, but I was 18 by the time I learned that prominent LDS leaders had once spoken out against miscegenation, and that some people had described black people as “fence-sitters” in the pre-existence – both of which sounded so crazy to me that I paid no attention. I grew up going to church with family friends of various races and ethnicities. My very first babysitting job was for a family in the ward, good friends of my parents, whose family included a white mom and a black dad. No one ever said anything about it – no one ever talked about race at all. My father had served a Spanish-speaking mission and would often talk to and translate for local immigrants from different countries in Latin America. When I heard about the priesthood ban, it was always a story with a happy, faith-promoting ending: people described the feeling of joy they experienced when it was finally lifted. I say all of this to illustrate my profound ignorance of the ban and its implications. In my mind, before my mission, it was a historical blip; a deviation; an embarrassing product of its time that was corrected in due course. My mission challenged this view. Read More

Anthropologists have long scratched their heads at the organizational logic underpinning kashrut, the rules and regulations surrounding the proscription, prescription, and preparation of foods in Judaism, also called “kosher laws.” Why are only animals that both chew cud and have cloven hooves permissible? Why only fish that have both scales and fins, thereby eliminating species like catfish, sharks, and all shellfish? Why are locusts okay to eat while nearly every other species of insect is forbidden?

Various arguments have been put forth, one of the most common being that of basic health. At the time when the Torah was being codified, so the reasoning goes, parasites like trichinosis were very common, vaccines didn’t exist, and, in the absence of thermometers, it was difficult to determine if meat had reached the requisite temperature to be safe for consumption when cooked over an open flame. Others argue that it was about differentiation. The Law of Moses generally contains a constant proscription on types of mixing: no linen and wool should be woven together (Deut 22:11); two different crops should not be sown in the same field (Lev 19:19); a kid should not be cooked in its mother’s milk (Deut 14:21); and the Israelites should not intermingle with the Canaanites and others. Even the word “holy,” repeated many times in the first five books of Moses, is based on the Semitic root q-d-sh, whose meanings include separation, differentiation, and designation for a specific purpose (see, e.g., Lev 19:2, “…Be ye holy, for I the Lord God am holy.”) Separation and categorization, this line of thought suggests, were the driving forces behind kashrut. Read More

I first heard this story during my Jewish Studies coursework. I keep poking around trying to find the original since more than ten years have passed since that first hearing, but I have been unsuccessful. So here is the story, reconstructed from class notes and filtered through a decade of forgetfulness:

Once, shortly after the Second Temple was destroyed, a famous Rabbi told his students that he would be making the long journey from Yavne to Alexandria, Egypt, to meet with an important Gentile woman. His students loved him and could not bear to part with him, so they insisted upon accompanying him on the journey. Read More

In Rabbinic tradition, Noah is considered the lesser – if not the least – of the Patriarchs. Unlike fathers Abraham and Jacob, Noah did not argue with God. When faced with God’s declaration of the impending destruction of all life through the Flood, Noah was obedient and preached to the people, warning them of the imminence of God’s wrath. But he did not, like Abraham when contemplating the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, attempt to persuade God to forgo such a drastic, horrific plan.

For the rabbis, then, part of righteousness comes from dialogue with God. Noah was righteous, yes. But the better part of valor – the proof of the truly great – is in challenging God; in wrestling like Jacob and the angel until we may claim our blessing (Genesis 32:24-32). Although we are to be obedient, we are not to be unquestioning. On the contrary, God wishes us to respond. No human question could upset the Divine; it is questions that bring us closer to Him. Read More

You can find the earlier posts in this series here, here, here, and here.

5) The Elders

I have no younger brothers. On my mission I came to feel a sense of siblingdom with a lot of the Elders in my different zones and districts – a feeling of occasional exasperation mixed with tenderness and deep affection, what I imagine I would feel toward my younger brothers if I had them. I loved those guys.

I served in the Provo MTC alongside an Elder from California. He and I were in each other’s district there and again after we moved to a smaller MTC in Latin America for our Spanish language training. Then, after we arrived at our mission country, we happened to be placed in the same district again. I will try to be careful in how much detail I give in this story because it is his and not mine.

Read More

You can find the earlier posts in this series here, here, and here.

4) Class Awareness

I served with one native-speaking companion, a fiery, fascinating woman from Nicaragua. Not only was she a native speaker, but she was also an exceptionally educated person. Often when we were out talking with people in the streets they would stop her and ask her to rephrase things, telling her that her Spanish was too high-brow for them. And she spoke nary a lick of English, so living with her was a sink-or-swim course in Spanish fluency for me. (I can’t imagine how frustrating it must have been for her to basically serve as a Spanish finishing school for so many Americans coming to the country with shaky MTC-Spanish. The Mission President very judiciously gave her a new companion nearly every transfer period so that as many English-speaking sisters as possible could benefit from her expertise.) Read More

I was in an anthropology class, studying Jewish ritual observances of the Sabbath, when the instructor asked a simple question: Why does the Jewish Sabbath begin at sunset instead of sunrise? It caught me up short. I had no idea.

It’s from Genesis, he explained, from the creation narrative. Look at the wording of the account of each day: Read More

A few years ago, a friend of mine from Israel came to church with me. He was curious about Mormonism, and he happened to come on – you guessed it – a Fast Sunday. I prepared him ahead of time for the likelihood of congregants offering unusual personal stories from the pulpit, thinking that by doing so I was covering most of my bases. It ended up being a pleasant enough meeting, mostly filled with streams of little kids getting up and being cute in front of the microphone. I felt a certain amount of relief heading into Sunday School for the second hour.

This was a large, well-attended ward in Utah County. The Sunday School was packed, and it was clear from the lack of a set time for visitor introductions that few visitors came. No one knew there was a non-Mormon in their midst. And then the Sunday School teacher, an older gentleman, began to talk about the Holy Land and the Last Days. Read More