Mormon Land
Mormon Land explores the contours and complexities of LDS news. It's hosted by award-winning religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack and Salt Lake Tribune managing editor David Noyce.
Episodes
June 12, 2024 • 32 mins
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...
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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...
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May 29, 2024 • 30 mins
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....
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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...
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May 15, 2024 • 31 mins
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...
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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,...
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May 1, 2024 • 26 mins
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 Yo...
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April 24, 2024 • 26 mins
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 ...
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April 17, 2024 • 54 mins
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...
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April 10, 2024 • 47 mins
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 conferenc...
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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...
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March 27, 2024 • 34 mins
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 b...
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March 20, 2024 • 32 mins
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 ope...
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March 14, 2024 • 25 mins
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 careta...
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March 7, 2024 • 27 mins
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 $26...
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February 28, 2024 • 25 mins
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 i...
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February 21, 2024 • 39 mins
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 ...
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February 14, 2024 • 25 mins
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 goo...
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February 7, 2024 • 33 mins
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 Thursd...
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January 31, 2024 • 41 mins
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-o...
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