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From a PhD student in Counseling Psychology at BYU:

“What we believe makes a real difference. Decades of research shows that religious beliefs affect individuals’ emotional well-being, including depression and anxiety levels. Believers tend to report greater peace, gratitude, and hopefulness than non-believers.  However, we all experience troubles.  As we experience increased isolation and hardships associated with COVID 19, our mental health can be affected.  Researchers seeking to understand how our spirituality influences our emotional lives during this trying time invite you to participate in a brief 15-minute survey. We will report the results of this research on our blog in the future.   Thank you for sharing your experiences!”

All participants are eligible to receive one of three $50 Amazon eGift cards given at random (odds of winning are about 1 in 200).

Link to survey

The thing about sitting on the back seat of a tandem bicycle is that it is objectively not equal to sitting in the front.

No matter how many times someone might say that sitting on the back seat of a tandem bicycle is equal to sitting in the front, that doesn’t change the fact that it is just not true.

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Necessary disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

There’s a grand tradition of Mormon (and ex-Mormon) women writing memoirs, from polygamy and temple tell-alls to coming-of-age stories to narratives of faithfully enduring the tragic to tales of everyday life and motherhood. Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood is Melissa Wei-Tsing’s entry into the genre, and the title right away tells you that the author is not your average everyday Latter-day Saint woman. (Is there even such a thing? A topic for another essay.) Hers is a unique life, and, with a slightly more academic audience, Crossings could have easily been called Intersections, as the work touches on what it’s like to wear multiple identifies, as Inouye slips between fitting in and standing out and always works to ground herself in what matters to her.

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President Eyring’s Women And Gospel Learning In the Home talk, from October’s General Conference, has been a popular pick for RS lessons over the past few months, at least judging my social media activity. Up until recently, I was a Relief Society teacher, and I chose this talk for my lesson in November. I’m sharing my lesson outline below, with some commentary in case it helps anyone prepare to teach or participate in a class based on this talk.

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See details here: Association for Mormon Letters 2019 _ Call for Papers

It’s been a year now since we heard the terrible news that our co-blogger Katie (Vada) had been killed in a car accident. I feel like a year should be long enough for me to believe that this horrific incident actually happened, but I don’t always feel like I’m there. Part of it is maybe the absurd awfulness of the whole thing—could the universe really be so cruel as to have this happen to a mother of six, driving home from seeing her twin girls in the NICU? I mean, really??? And part of it is maybe tied up with what it means to  have a relationship with someone when most of your interaction is online. I hadn’t seen Katie in person since her sister’s wedding in 2011. But it felt like I “saw” her all the time, because she was around on Facebook, and in our blog discussions. And yet—people disappear from the internet regularly. It doesn’t usually mean that they’re actually gone. It’s like I can’t get my brain to entirely process that the reason she isn’t on Facebook anymore isn’t just that she decided to take a break. That’s she’s not going to reappear. It’s still wrenching to grapple with the reality of what happened. Read More

Just to declare my potential biases up-front: I received a copy of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother In Mormon Poetry in exchange for a review. Also, I know some of the contributors. 

In my last review of a book of Heavenly Mother poetry, I asked for more: more perspectives, more poems, more essays, more talk of Heavenly Mother in general. Well, ask and ye shall receive, as Peculiar Press has come out with an entire anthology of Heavenly Mother poetry, from the early origins of the Church to the present day.

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I first read Mother’s Milk, by Rachel Hunt Steenblik, last July, about a month after I learned I was pregnant for the first time. I tried to see myself as the mother portrayed in these poems, but mostly failed: I had constant nausea and threw up 5-10 time a day for two months straight in my first trimester, and so I felt no magical love connection to the fetus, whom we nicknamed Barfolomew. I mostly just felt tired, and irritated at the way this hostile force had overtaken my body. The poems were lovely, tasty snack-sized deep thoughts, but, like Lynnette has written about on this blog, I wasn’t really a Heavenly Mother person, and the mothering portrayed in many of the poems–nursing, weaning, comforting in the night–didn’t resonate with me. I tried to hold space to change my mind, though: many of my friends talked about childbirth as a quasi-magical experience, a primal connection to their mothering self, and, despite the pain, glowed about the love they felt for their child right away, or for a rush of instant recognition when their child was placed on their chest.

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This is slightly adapted from a sacrament meeting talk I gave a few years ago (hence, all the numbers are out of date). I recently stumbled on it while cleaning out some files and decided to share. 

Let’s start with something about me: I have been a church-attending Mormon all my life. let’s calculate, for a minute, what that means, besides a closet full of skirts and a knowledge of all the verses to “I Believe in Christ”: I have taken the sacrament to renew my baptismal covenants approximately 782 times–17 years since my baptism, at 46 Sundays a year. (52, minus two Sundays for General Conference and two for stake conferences and two more for vacation Sundays or simply arriving at church late. I didn’t say I’ve been a perfectly church-attending Mormon all my life!)  That, my friends, is a lot of times to do something and still not quite understand or enjoy it.

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When we were using the Joseph F. Smith manual for Relief Society a few years ago, I remember reading a note in the intro material about Smith’s use of “men”, “man”, or “mankind”:

“Also, President Smith often used terms such as men, man, or mankind to refer to all people, both male and female. He frequently used the pronouns he, his, and him to refer to both genders. This was common in the language of his era. Despite the differences between these language conventions and current usage, President Smith’s teachings apply to both women and men.”

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The argument goes like this: if women get the priesthood—I mean, they won’t, because God doesn’t want them to, but just imagine if they did—then what would men do? They wouldn’t have anything special anymore, and if they can’t have anything special, why would they participate? Or sometimes it’s like this: if women have the priesthood (or, toning it down, if women can be Sunday School presidents, or pray in sacrament meeting, or what-have-you), fewer men will get to do it, and we wouldn’t want to limit their opportunities.

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I was lucky enough to grow up with unorthodox Mormon parents, who patiently listened to and sympathized with my teenage and college-age complaints about going to church: how boring it was, how my YW leaders could never answer my questions, how I often felt like I just didn’t fit in. And every conversation, at least in my memory, ended with a gentle reminder: “Remember,” they’d say, “it’s your church too.”

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This week I invented a fun new game: General Conference corpus slam poetry. Read More

CW: General discussion of sexual assault 

When I was a teenager, my Utah County ward had a “morality talk” for the youth about every six months. (It was only years later that I learned that in other contexts, “morality” had a much broader meaning, and wasn’t just code for “chastity.”) Often they wouldn’t tell us the topic in advance, guessing (probably correctly) that pretty much no one had a great desire to hear yet another morality talk. We would asks our leaders suspiciously, is this going to be about morality again, and they would dodge the question. The talks, usually given by the bishop, tried to emphasize to us the seriousness of engaging in “immorality.” We heard a lot about the sin next to murder, and why sex outside of marriage was so terrible (not, of course, that the word “sex” was ever uttered). Often we would be allowed to submit anonymous questions, most of which turned out to be variants of “how far is too far?” and “how do I know when I need to confess?” There were no clear answers given to these questions, though we did get to hear about the dangers of “necking” and “petting,” terms which no one seemed able to quite define. We watched what we called the river movie a lot (the one in which a bunch of teens go river rafting, and one reckless young man neglects to wear a life jacket, while the voice of Spencer W. Kimball warns about evil.) At the end we would hear about the atonement and the possibility of repentance, with encouragement to come talk to the bishop if necessary. To my leaders’ credit, I don’t recall hearing analogies suggesting that engaging in sexual behavior would cause irreversible spiritual damage that even the atonement couldn’t fix (e.g., leaving you as chewed-up gum or a board with scars from nails). On the other hand, I wasn’t paying all that much attention. One of my friends in a different stake told me that her YW leader had bought them all crystal temples, which, if they remained pure, they were to present to their husbands on their wedding nights. If they slipped, they were supposed to smash the temple. I wasn’t overly aware of the problems in this discourse at that point in my life, but even I thought that was a little weird. Read More

I don’t actually remember the first time I met Katie. I know what time period it would have been, probably sometime in the fall of 1999. But I’d heard about her long before I met her, because her older sister (who blogs here as Seraphine) and I were roommates at the University of Illinois, where I was a grad student. Seraphine and I were in the habit of talking late into the night, and in the course of our many conversations, we traded a lot of information about our respective families. When Katie showed up, then, it just meant putting a face with a person with whom I already felt somewhat familiar. Our time at that university and in the small singles branch connected to it overlapped by a year, but I can’t say I got to know her very well.

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As many of you have heard, one of our bloggers was killed by a drunk driver last night. We are stunned and heartsick to have lost Vada. Not all of you may have known her well from just here. But in addition to her thoughtful public posts, she was an active member of our backlist, and contributed immeasurably to our small ZD community. She was also very involved in the online Mormon feminist world in various other places, and we know many people were positively impacted by her. She will be terribly missed.

Vada leaves behind a husband and six children, including preemie twin girls who are still in the NICU. A YouCaring account has been set up for her family; if you’d like to donate, please go here.

I work at a tech company. I’m in a non-technical position, but in a field that’s still typically male-dominated, which means that, with some regularity, I find myself to be the only woman in a meeting. Read More

I got into a discussion recently (and by “recently,” I mean “about a year ago, because time apparently flies when you’re an adult) in which I made an assertion that the conversations in the mainstream Bloggernacle are mostly male-dominated. (I defined mainstream as “aside from the feminist blogs,” since the writerly voices at FMH and Exponent are mainly female.) My interlocutor pushed back, pointing to such mainstream luminaries as Peggy Fletcher Stack and Jana Riess as evidence of Mormon women writing and speaking publicly. The whole conversation made me curious, and so I asked: these days in the Bloggernacle, who’s really talking?

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I’ve heard the “all women are mothers” line at church so many times that they mostly blur together in a haze of Ideas I Wish Would Go Away, but there is one time that stands out in my memory: once, in a ward conference, a stake Relief Society leader was teaching a lesson about the special roles and gifts of women, and, focusing on the nurturing powers of women, started listing examples of how mothers nurture their children: they feed theme, bathe them, clothe them, clean up after them, heal them, love them. She then asserted, as usual, that even women without children are really mothers who can nurture the children in their lives. “For example,” she said, with an entirely straight face,   “you can lift a child who needs it up to a water fountain so they can get a drink.”

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