SquareTwo

Two sets of keys, turned jointly and unitedly in mutual purpose, is what we should be envisioning when we think of our Heavenly Parents and Their work together.

General Conference April 2022 confirmed Heavenly Mother is our doctrine. Further, it was stated that the specifics of the Church's doctrine on Heavenly Mother could be found in the Gospel Topics Essay. This was exciting!

Dreams are highly valued as a source of revelation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but do we have a clear doctrine on dreams?

As a teen convert to the Church, I was taught that we have a Heavenly Mother, but She was being protected by Heavenly Father from the fallen-ness of our world and so we did not pray or speak about Her. The idea, as I understood it, was that if no one thought or spoke about Her, somehow She would be protected. How an immortal, all-powerful goddess could stand in need of protection was never explained to me. Even my teenaged convert self knew that was hooey.

Embodiment is one of the two great doctrines restored by the First Vision. When Joseph Smith entered the Sacred Grove in 1820, he learned two great truths contrary to Trinitarian Christianity. First, he learned that Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father are separate beings. Hence, we do not believe in the Trinity but in the Godhead.

A strange dynamic sometimes animates conversations on the subject when certain members of the Church take part. For example, someone mentions a recent increase in violent crimes in their city. The hypothetical Church member involved in the discussion, upon hearing this, might shake his head and say something like, “Christ is coming back soon.” Others in the conversation usually will mumble some sort of agreement and drop the point.

Apostasy from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has become increasingly common in recent years. I wish to say a few words about how the apostasy of a close family member has impacted my life.

In the temple we are taught that we must enter into a specific order to claim our divine inheritance: the Holy Order of Matrimony. Might this be the holiest Order of God, the one which Priest- and Priestesshood are patterned after? Heaven would then be governed by an order which consists of Priestesshood and Priesthood unified; an order in which complementary physical and spiritual ordinances of birth, awakening, attachment, and oneness are the means by which progression occurs.

Throughout mankind's existence, and especially during times of crisis, conflict, and confusion such as we see now with COVID and the war in Ukraine, one universal question seems to echo the loudest across time and space: “If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering?!”

One of the most glorious truths that has been restored in this fullness of times is the knowledge that men and women are meant to be equal partners, uniting with Christ in our complementary differences to fulfill the measure of our creation.

When I teach my graduate course where we examine the ways that the lives and choices of women affect international relations, my students always have a moment of clarity near the end. They reach a point where they passionately wonder how it is that women, having obtained civil rights and property rights more or less worldwide, still cannot bring about equal standing with men and a cessation of male violence against them.

As far as we know, only two religious societies have successfully built Zion: the City of Enoch and the people in the Americas after Christ's visit. There are good reasons for this paucity of perfect societies: building a Zionistic society of “one heart and one mind” requires sacrifice and a proactive attitude from every individual towards living the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not for the faint hearted.

The symbolism of the blood of the womb echoes in the ordinances of salvation, temples ancient and modern, and the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As we rediscover sacred feminine truths that have been neglected through the ages, we develop a clearer understanding of women and their distinctive purpose in the exaltation of mankind.

The male gaze, I assert, has hovered over the world of women like the giant eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.

For some time I have been curious about ideas of what a woman is, and where those ideas have come from. I have also been fascinated by the images of ancient goddesses, and wondered how their images have influenced thoughts about women through the ages and whether goddess images have any influence on how women are seen today by others and themselves.

I ask that question especially of the orthodox CoJC members, of which there are many, in that legislature. What were they thinking when they voted for this disastrous bill? Were they dreaming of their polygamous mansions above? Or somehow vindicating their polygamous ancestors? Did they think of themselves as heroic ark-steadiers preparing for the Second Coming?

What would happen . . . if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces? What would happen if we thought of matter as the stuff that makes relationships possible, including our relationship to God?

As a child with limited exposure to blatant evil, in my perspective, a harlot was the pinnacle of wickedness. I'm not sure if I was ever explicitly taught this in church, but this term was used to describe women who preyed on men with their insatiable lust. This fits well with another false concept I learned that when a woman falls from grace, she falls farther than any man ever can, because she is inherently purer.

That women served as deaconesses in the early church is not really in dispute. Paul writes about women deaconesses as early as the sixth decade, about 30 years after the death of Christ. The presumed earliest mention of women deaconesses is in Romans 16:1, where Paul specifically refers to Phoebe as a deacon, though in English the word is changed to read “servant.”

Heavenly Mother is prominently present in scripture. She plays all the roles we would expect a divine mother to play. While her presence has been obscured by the loss of plain and precious parts of original texts, her extensive involvement in the lives of her children is nevertheless still apparent if the scriptures are closely read with attention to symbols and surrogates. As the modern Zeitgeist impels us to look for the feminine divine in the scriptural canon, voices speaking from the dust—especially the Book of Mormon—providentially give us background information necessary to find our divine Mother hidden in plain view.

If the center path—the straight and narrow one—is the true and safe path each LDS member is enjoined by the Savior to follow, then these other two paths, one slightly to the right and one slightly to the left of that central path, are the two apostasies of which I wish to speak. They are so close to that central path, abutting it on either side and seemingly parallel, that it is quite easy to slip into one of these other two paths almost without noticing. Indeed, once on one of these other two paths, it is easy to continue to think of oneself as a believing Latter-day Saint—until it’s clear you are not because a Church disciplinary council is excommunicating you.

After decades of studying LDS doctrine concerning women (and carefully distinguishing it from LDS cultural understandings and practices, which in quite a few cases contradict that doctrine), I have been liberated as a woman from the erroneous and harmful beliefs about women that haunt those raised in Abrahamic traditions. How remarkable and in some senses ironic it still seems to me to have experienced “women’s lib” by conversion to Mormonism! How utterly right it feels for this feminist to be a member of the LDS Church!

The thesis of the book is simple: Latter-day Saints have a unique interpretation of national security in this fallen world. A reference familiar to me relates to the material in the book. It is President Spencer W. Kimball’s article, “The False Gods We Worship,” in the June 1976 Ensign. He writes that we rely too much on weapons of stone and steel and have “become anti-enemy and not pro-kingdom of God.” This is true: Satan buys up armies, navies, and governments. We have a world that has experienced many wars throughout history that have taken millions of lives.

Priestesscraft includes, at a minimum, the selling of eggs and the selling of gestation. The Church strongly discourages both practices, and that is not because it just hasn’t “caught up with the times.” The Church strongly discourages both practices because you should not sell these sacred things for money; you should not practice priestesscraft. It is a betrayal of how God intended you to use your priestesshood power and authority, and it is a betrayal of the innocent children and children-to-be involved.

Shattering a Sacred Silence Through An Examination of What Church Leaders Have Taught About Her In Mark Sullivan’s novel, Beneath A Scarlet Sky, he describes the difficulty of researching the Nazi occupation of Italy during WWII: “I was also hampered by a kind of collective amnesia concerning Italy and Italians after the war . . . No one talks about World War II in Italy so no one remembers.” [1] This same concept applies to Heavenly Mother: the less She is discussed, the less She is remembered until—in a haze of collective amnesia—nothing is said except the excuse, “We don’t talk about Heavenly Mother because we just don’t know much about Her.”

Did we women make it worth the loss here so that there might be a place of eternal sanctuary for women in the universe, a refuge where no man can enter who does not love, respect, and honor women? Where the keyword for a man’s entry is actually a woman’s name? My sisters, are the pearly gates in reality the Gate to Women’s Country? You can see how this book could haunt one’s thoughts for years . . . as it has mine

McArthur Krishna, Bethany Brady Spalding, with illustrations by Kathleen Peterson (2019) Girls Who Choose God: Stories of Extraordinary Women from Church History, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book.

The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church. Riess, Jana. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, 2019. 312 pages. Reviewed by Ashley Alley and Kenneth Jeng.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Bateman, was born in Manchester, England in 1832, converted to the Church, and came to Utah in 1850. He met Marinda Allen, my great-grandmother, in 1853 as he ferried her across the Jordan River and married her the following year. He was 22 and she was 16. In later years he took a second wife, Harriett Egbert (who actually had been a baby when her parents came to Samuel and Marinda’s wedding dinner). Marinda gave birth to thirteen children and Harriet had eight. Marinda’s youngest child, Juliaetta, was my grandmother. She wrote a biography of Marinda, with much about the family and her own life, entitling it Little Gold Pieces. This article is about that book.

Motherhood is authorized Priestesshood.

It was in 2013 that I first penned a list of things I thought would change in the Church as we moved towards the diarchy that surely exists in the celestial kingdom. I’ve periodically updated and added to it in subsequent writings. Recently, I’ve been reminded it’s time I updated the list for 2019—and boy, oh boy, are there a lot of updates to make!

A reporter recently described the United States as being in a civil cold war. At the most prosperous time in history, in the most prosperous nation in the history of the world, in a digital world where we can truly know each other, the popular view is that hate and discord are everywhere.

A 2002 Mormonad in the New Era magazine showed an ice cream sundae with a cockroach in the ice cream. The caption read, “It’s great, except for . . . the bad parts.” [1] Although a commentary on questionable media, I also saw it as a commentary on the gospel because the beautiful ice cream sundae of the Plan of Happiness held for me one depressing, cockroach-like thought: polygamy was part of God’s eternal plan.

Somehow over the course of my life, I stumbled across the name Simone Weil, but knew next to nothing about her. This introduction to her thought, published in 2018, came highly recommended, and at 105 pages, it seemed a gentle enough introduction to tackle on a recent flight to DC.

Peterson’s 12 Rules is a prosaically titled book that has already been deemed a modern classic by his followers. However, in addition to that very helpful cultural rediscovery, Peterson introduces into his work one big fat hairy error which threatens all the good he had hoped to accomplish.

"The Father and Mother: An Adaptation by V.H. Cassler from an October 2018 General Conference Talk by Elder Brian K. Ashton," In the premortal world, we were born as spirits to Heavenly Parents and lived with Them as a family.

This book, one of their best, centers around the experience of doubt. The introductory chapter of the book notes that people often have preconceptions, misunderstandings, and beliefs that cause difficulty for them. History abounds with such mistaken beliefs...

The Utah Women & Leadership Project has a series of Utah Women Stats research snapshots with the goal of providing specific, timely data on a series of issues relevant to Utah women.

He never hit me, not in 24 years. But for most of those years he hurt me.

As a mother of Latter-day Saint children in the twenty-first century, it is important to me to teach my children about the evil that is racism, including racism within our own church history.

Through the years, I have had hundreds of LDS women talk to me about feeling lost—lost in terms of their direction in life. Most have testimonies of the Gospel and serve faithfully in Church callings, but many of these sisters are going through transitions in life and feel a “void” that they often struggle to describe.

It has not been very many years ago that the idea of a woman being sealed to more than one man was a foreign subject.

Book review of The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us, by Bruce Feiler. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. 306 pages.

There is a theme in almost every book, chapter, and verse of scripture that is not specifically articulated and only tangentially understood. It is “lostness.”

On March 26, 2018 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a revision regarding a bishop’s responsibility when dealing with victims of abuse.

In April of 1895, the Territory of Utah was all abuzz about woman’s suffrage: would the new constitution of the proposed State of Utah grant women the right to vote?

John Mark Mattox emeritis of the editorial board delivers an exposition of the aims of SquareTwo. This article was originally published in SquareTwo, Vol. 4 No. 3 (Fall 2011.