What do you want to be when you grow up?

What will you do after graduation?

What’s your career path?

What’s your plan?

My students hear these questions and their many variants almost daily from a constellation of mentors: teachers, parents, coaches, elders, and other well-meaning adults. These questions lurk in the background as they grapple with the A- that they fear will drop their grade point average and make medical school admission a far-off dream, or as they ponder just how much AI they can reasonably use as they rush to finish a research paper before turning to other assignments imminently due. This mindset determines how students discern the most lucrative summer internship option—“Should I intern with McKinsey, Meta, or Palantir this summer?”— or just the right volunteering opportunity that will allow them to remain buoyant against the undertows of the demands of accomplishment and attainment. Most often, these questions are asked not directly by any one person, but seemingly absorbed by osmosis through the amorphous matrices of digital culture endlessly available with the flick of a thumb—TikTok reels and Snapchat stories of influencers basking in performative success, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels showcasing the ersatz wonders of a life of social capital built on finely-tuned attention mills. From all directions, young people today face the brunt of a constant barrage of variegated calls for them to attain, succeed, perform, accomplish, secure, advance, and do.

Despite it all, my students admit that something is missing; despite the world at their fingertips and the relative comforts that globalized capital has provided unevenly to many swaths of the world, scores of students identify an unnamable, implacable dissatisfaction that runs just under the surface of their affairs—a thin thread of disquiet under the achievements, a hollowness that remains even after the college admissions letter or job placement offers are secured, a root of despair that doesn’t seem to dislodge. I have heard students use different adjectives to describe the sensation—a hollowness, an emptiness, a hunger, and an itch.

Zachary Davis, in his recent Wayfare article The Four Horsemen of New Theism, offers a sobering and unignorable diagnosis: things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Along with Davis, a diverse chorus of scholars and philosophers have sounded the alarm on our civilizational course, ranging from Charles Taylor’s evaluation of the secular age,1 to Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s analysis of the loss of integral cosmology in the modern world,2 to David Abram’s call for a more interdependent ecology of the more-than-human-world.3 These varied analyses suggest that we are approaching the limits of the now-globalized, post-Enlightenment worldview and confronting the anthropological, epistemological, and cosmological voids it has left behind. In signaling a shift, the era’s trend of declining religiosity appears to be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. In its wake, a growing thirst for religious experience and spiritual encounter stirs.

Davis suggests this is a moment of re-enchantment. Amidst so much chaos and uncertainty, there is a greater yearning for a new story and for a new way of seeing—and being in—the world. We are looking for a narrative that will bridge the incoherence of contemporary culture with the depths of our intuitions, aspirations, and inner experience. Davis and his interlocutors offer a compellingly sober analysis of our situation. The next logical question, of course, is—now what?

For those of us eager to roll up our sleeves and work to build, in ways great or small, a better world—one that is more just, joyful, caring, beautiful, virtuous, wise, and receptive to mystery—what are we to do? Where does the work of re-enchantment begin? Whether we agree with those like Paul Kingsnorth who suggest Western civilization cannot be salvaged and that we must begin anew or we agree with those like Rod Dreher and see potential for civilizational rehabilitation, we will wake up tomorrow and grapple at first light with the question—how will I work, today, to build a re-enchanted world?

As a scholar of comparative religions, I believe that we can only rejuvenate Western culture to the extent we grow from our inheritance of intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity. In the twenty-first century, the West is home to new communities of indigenous Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and other communities that exist and thrive at the intersection of multiple epistemic commitments. Re-enchantment ought not aim for perceived cultural purity, but rather—perhaps more essentially—for a shared, multi-polar vision of the human capacity for transcendence. A rehabilitation or reemergence will require both recovery and expansion—a return to origins that also honors the gifts and wisdom gained through all that has been encountered and learned along the way. T.S. Eliot captures this beautifully in the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started  
And know the place for the first time. 

In all cases, it will be the duty of future generations—equipped with whatever tools, visions, insights, and questions we may offer them—to continue the work of re-enchantment after we are gone. A sense of re-enchantment must first animate how we teach the rising generations.

I teach religion, ethics, and philosophy across several institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States. As a doctoral student in the Study of Religion, I chose this path with the commitment to becoming a scholar-teacher of the world’s religious traditions, particularly Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic contemplative traditions. If my scholarship is concerned with the work of intellectually grappling with re-enchantment, my work as a teacher is to make the possibilities of re-enchantment intelligible and meaningful to broadly capable and diverse yet equally disquieted and existentially-thirsty audiences. Following the essential pedagogical inspiration of the Buddha’s teaching of the dharma, wisdom and insight are framed and delivered in myriad ways depending on capacity, language, and context. Each person, regardless of their capabilities, may receive the dharma; any good pedagogy is adaptable, fluid, and responsive. The re-enchanted world will only be built if we explore, consider, and teach the structures on which it may be built.

As a teacher of both high school and college students, I often think about the precarity of the current moment. Besides general and valid concerns of professional teachers being under resourced, under compensated, and under appreciated by students, parents, and the broader culture, teachers stand on the frontlines as translators and interpreters of an uncertain and confusing world. Teachers are generally left to their own devices in the work of molding coherent selves in a world that feels increasingly fragmented; each morning millions of teachers across the country must wake and discern how to best model, to absorptive and observant minds, how to be coherent beings in an often-incoherent world. The work of training young minds how to think, act, and be in the world, in society, in a nation, and in communities often seems an insurmountable task.

Despite the precarity, I also find hope in this moment’s potential for cultural re-enchantment. Teaching has a central and immediate role in turning these philosophical ideas into meaningful cultural, personal, and civilizational change. Teaching is a sacred vocation. The most apt image of a teacher, in my mind, is that of a fire kindler—either the tender of a simple deep-woodland campfire on a cool autumn evening or of a Zoroastrian athravan, a guardian of the temple fire. Teachers are tenders of the fire of wonder, those who guard and tend the holy fire of that which is essential for our survival in the long, cool, dark night of the modern world. Teachers are not charged with teaching students what to think, but the many ways of how one may think. As a teacher of religion, I do not see my role as that of a proselytizer seeking to convince students of a particular intellectual system or cosmological vision. Instead, I strive to create encounters that kindle their inner sense of wonder. That wonder may arise through my attempts to convey the zeal of a Sufi dhikr, the peace of moral certitude in an ethical case study, or the ungraspable clarity of insight cultivated in zazen meditation. Which tradition or experience resonates is ultimately up to the students themselves and whatever chord of longing it awakens within them. My pedagogical work, then, is the sacred art of tending wonder: inviting students to linger in the mystery and beauty of the world, and offering enough kindling for the next stage of their journey. Most importantly, our work lies in teaching students how to renew their own fuel so they may sustain their fire for the journeys that yet lie ahead long after they have left my classes.

In the work of wonder-tending, I see as essential the cultivation of a new anthropology that shifts a student’s primary focus from occupational and production-oriented ontological measures of one’s worth in the world to an ontology of a wonder, humility, and awe whose fruits are delight and joy. This calls for a multi-polar anthropology which draws on shared wisdom of the new ecumenical, multicultural, and inter-religious context of Western civilization and on cross-cultural intuitions of our human capacity for transcendence and re-enchantment. It is an anthropology that shifts the metric upon which we build out worldview from what do you want to do? to how are you going to be?

To this end, in my work as a teacher, I have tried to shift to new variants of the questions above when I teach or mentor students, such as:

What is the quality by which you want to be known by your grandchildren and neighbors?

What kind of home do you want to inhabit when you are older?

How do you want to be?

Most of these questions indicate a subtle but necessary shift towards a new anthropological vision—from product-oriented beings to process-oriented beings, and a shift from gaining understanding to gaining wonder and its fruits of humility, delight, and openness. It is a shift from the dominant post-Enlightenment anthropology of doing, towards a re-enchanted anthropology of being.

This essay is an excerpt of a longer essay exploring the methods for igniting wonder. Find the full-lenth version here.

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Peter Dziedzic is a PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Harvard University. He is also working on a comparative study of walking pilgrimages around the world. He is currently an instructor in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and has recently served as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University and as a professor in Religious and Islamic World Studies at DePaul University.

Art by Karl Wiener. 1901-1949.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

What will you do after graduation?

What’s your career path?

What’s your plan?

My students hear these questions and their many variants almost daily from a constellation of mentors: teachers, parents, coaches, elders, and other well-meaning adults. These questions lurk in the background as they grapple with the A- that they fear will drop their grade point average and make medical school admission a far-off dream, or as they ponder just how much AI they can reasonably use as they rush to finish a research paper before turning to other assignments imminently due. This mindset determines how students discern the most lucrative summer internship option—“Should I intern with McKinsey, Meta, or Palantir this summer?”— or just the right volunteering opportunity that will allow them to remain buoyant against the undertows of the demands of accomplishment and attainment. Most often, these questions are asked not directly by any one person, but seemingly absorbed by osmosis through the amorphous matrices of digital culture endlessly available with the flick of a thumb—TikTok reels and Snapchat stories of influencers basking in performative success, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels showcasing the ersatz wonders of a life of social capital built on finely-tuned attention mills. From all directions, young people today face the brunt of a constant barrage of variegated calls for them to attain, succeed, perform, accomplish, secure, advance, and do.

Despite it all, my students admit that something is missing; despite the world at their fingertips and the relative comforts that globalized capital has provided unevenly to many swaths of the world, scores of students identify an unnamable, implacable dissatisfaction that runs just under the surface of their affairs—a thin thread of disquiet under the achievements, a hollowness that remains even after the college admissions letter or job placement offers are secured, a root of despair that doesn’t seem to dislodge. I have heard students use different adjectives to describe the sensation—a hollowness, an emptiness, a hunger, and an itch.

Zachary Davis, in his recent Wayfare article The Four Horsemen of New Theism, offers a sobering and unignorable diagnosis: things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Along with Davis, a diverse chorus of scholars and philosophers have sounded the alarm on our civilizational course, ranging from Charles Taylor’s evaluation of the secular age,1 to Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s analysis of the loss of integral cosmology in the modern world,2 to David Abram’s call for a more interdependent ecology of the more-than-human-world.3 These varied analyses suggest that we are approaching the limits of the now-globalized, post-Enlightenment worldview and confronting the anthropological, epistemological, and cosmological voids it has left behind. In signaling a shift, the era’s trend of declining religiosity appears to be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. In its wake, a growing thirst for religious experience and spiritual encounter stirs.

Davis suggests this is a moment of re-enchantment. Amidst so much chaos and uncertainty, there is a greater yearning for a new story and for a new way of seeing—and being in—the world. We are looking for a narrative that will bridge the incoherence of contemporary culture with the depths of our intuitions, aspirations, and inner experience. Davis and his interlocutors offer a compellingly sober analysis of our situation. The next logical question, of course, is—now what?

For those of us eager to roll up our sleeves and work to build, in ways great or small, a better world—one that is more just, joyful, caring, beautiful, virtuous, wise, and receptive to mystery—what are we to do? Where does the work of re-enchantment begin? Whether we agree with those like Paul Kingsnorth who suggest Western civilization cannot be salvaged and that we must begin anew or we agree with those like Rod Dreher and see potential for civilizational rehabilitation, we will wake up tomorrow and grapple at first light with the question—how will I work, today, to build a re-enchanted world?

As a scholar of comparative religions, I believe that we can only rejuvenate Western culture to the extent we grow from our inheritance of intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity. In the twenty-first century, the West is home to new communities of indigenous Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and other communities that exist and thrive at the intersection of multiple epistemic commitments. Re-enchantment ought not aim for perceived cultural purity, but rather—perhaps more essentially—for a shared, multi-polar vision of the human capacity for transcendence. A rehabilitation or reemergence will require both recovery and expansion—a return to origins that also honors the gifts and wisdom gained through all that has been encountered and learned along the way. T.S. Eliot captures this beautifully in the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started  
And know the place for the first time. 

In all cases, it will be the duty of future generations—equipped with whatever tools, visions, insights, and questions we may offer them—to continue the work of re-enchantment after we are gone. A sense of re-enchantment must first animate how we teach the rising generations.

I teach religion, ethics, and philosophy across several institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States. As a doctoral student in the Study of Religion, I chose this path with the commitment to becoming a scholar-teacher of the world’s religious traditions, particularly Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic contemplative traditions. If my scholarship is concerned with the work of intellectually grappling with re-enchantment, my work as a teacher is to make the possibilities of re-enchantment intelligible and meaningful to broadly capable and diverse yet equally disquieted and existentially-thirsty audiences. Following the essential pedagogical inspiration of the Buddha’s teaching of the dharma, wisdom and insight are framed and delivered in myriad ways depending on capacity, language, and context. Each person, regardless of their capabilities, may receive the dharma; any good pedagogy is adaptable, fluid, and responsive. The re-enchanted world will only be built if we explore, consider, and teach the structures on which it may be built. This essay, too, stands at a juncture between scholarship and pedagogy, between formulating a sober intellectual diagnosis and demonstrably articulating its needs and value for a wider audience.

As a teacher of both high school and college students, I often think about the precarity of the current moment. Besides general and valid concerns of professional teachers being under resourced, under compensated, and under appreciated by students, parents, and the broader culture, teachers stand on the frontlines as translators and interpreters of an uncertain and confusing world. Teachers are generally left to their own devices in the work of molding coherent selves in a world that feels increasingly fragmented; each morning millions of teachers across the country must wake and discern how to best model, to absorptive and observant minds, how to be coherent beings in an often-incoherent world. The work of training young minds how to think, act, and be in the world, in society, in a nation, and in communities often seems an insurmountable task.

Despite the precarity, I also find hope in this moment’s potential for cultural re-enchantment. Teaching has a central and immediate role in turning these philosophical ideas into meaningful cultural, personal, and civilizational change. Teaching is a sacred vocation. The most apt image of a teacher, in my mind, is that of a fire kindler—either the tender of a simple deep-woodland campfire on a cool autumn evening or of a Zoroastrian athravan, a guardian of the temple fire. Teachers are tenders of the fire of wonder, those who guard and tend the holy fire of that which is essential for our survival in the long, cool, dark night of the modern world. Teachers are not charged with teaching students what to think, but the many ways of how one may think. As a teacher of religion, I do not see my role as that of a proselytizer seeking to convince students of a particular intellectual system or cosmological vision. Instead, I strive to create encounters that kindle their inner sense of wonder. That wonder may arise through my attempts to convey the zeal of a Sufi dhikr, the peace of moral certitude in an ethical case study, or the ungraspable clarity of insight cultivated in zazen meditation. Which tradition or experience resonates is ultimately up to the students themselves and whatever chord of longing it awakens within them. My pedagogical work, then, is the sacred art of tending wonder: inviting students to linger in the mystery and beauty of the world, and offering enough kindling for the next stage of their journey. Most importantly, our work lies in teaching students how to renew their own fuel so they may sustain their fire for the journeys that yet lie ahead long after they have left my classes.

In the work of wonder-tending, I see as essential the cultivation of a new anthropology that shifts a student’s primary focus from occupational and production-oriented ontological measures of one’s worth in the world to an ontology of a wonder, humility, and awe whose fruits are delight and joy. This calls for a multi-polar anthropology which draws on shared wisdom of the new ecumenical, multicultural, and interreligious context of Western civilization and on cross-cultural intuitions of our human capacity for transcendence and re-enchantment.4 It is an anthropology that shifts the metric upon which we build out worldview from what do you want to do? to how are you going to be?

To this end, in my work as a teacher, I have tried to shift to new variants of the questions above when I teach or mentor students, such as:

What is the quality by which you want to be known by your grandchildren and neighbors?

What kind of home do you want to inhabit when you are older?

How do you want to be?

Most of these questions indicate a subtle but necessary shift towards a new anthropological vision—from product-oriented beings to process-oriented beings, and a shift from gaining understanding to gaining wonder and its fruits of humility, delight, and openness. It is a shift from the dominant post-Enlightenment anthropology of doing, towards a re-enchanted anthropology of being.

At different institutions of secondary and higher learning, I have attempted to enact a pedagogy of re-enchantment in different ways. In this essay, I share examples and notes for an emergent pedagogical philosophy of re-enchantment. The examples highlighted here are taken from courses on (1) creativity, (2) happiness, (3) Zen Buddhism, and (4) interreligious readings of sacred texts. My work, as all our work, is necessarily partial and interdependent with the efforts of others committed to a radical reimagination of a post-Enlightenment civilization as we work in different ways—whether in governance, in therapy and healthcare, in sustainable construction, in architecture, or in other ways—to building a different world. Here, I only offer several embers of pedagogical possibility in this moment of re-enchantment.

The Vital Spark: Cultivating Integral Creativity

In a college-level class called Creativity,5 our investigation was guided by a simple yet profound question—what is creativity, what are its limits, and from where does it come? From neuroscience to philosophy to biology to religion, we spent a term together exploring various perspectives on the origins, functions, flourishing, and ends of creativity. Each week, students were tasked with at least one creative assignment which offered an opportunity to integrate free creative generation with thoughtful analytical review. Taught from January to May 2023, the course was taught during the emergence of generative AI as an accessible resource that, in hindsight, opened up radical, novel concerns that our civilization is still grappling with—in a world where robots can write poetry, what is the use of human creativity? Rather than remaining removed from the technology or disengaging, we took a bold first step by testing the early technology to see if it could, in fact, match the products of human creativity At the time, ChatGPT couldn’t generate a convincing Japanese haiku, interpret a poem by Rumi, or produce a short story that combined the authorial voices of Jorge Luise Borges and Ernest Hemingway into a strange new narrative synthesis. While the capabilities of AI tools have expanded exponentially since this course was offered, and while our once-impossible prompts now seem firmly within the realm of generative AI’s capabilities, many remain unsettled and unconvinced that the creativity of generative AI can fundamentally supplant human creative production.

Interestingly, most students in Creativity were not humanities-oriented students. They were concentrators in STEM or STEM-adjacent fields such as computer science, engineering, economics, or pre-med. In office hours, students usually spoke about their lack of personal interest in their major fields of study, but that they “had to” study what they were studying, either because of parental encouragement or because of the lure of a financially lucrative career after graduation. Such decisions are haunting many recent and current computer science concentrators in light of AI’s ascendance. In Creativity, students were ecstatic to be liberated from problem sets or papers that felt rote, and instead instructed to simply create—poems, songs, visuals, scores, portraits, riddles, koans, and much more. They found in Creativity what they had been largely denied in the studies they pursued for economic advancement—the liberation of the creative act from the demands of a product, the play of exploration without having to rush to a destination, and the joy of unexpected connections in trying new mediums of art.

Many theologians and philosophers have reflected on the human necessity for creation, arguing it is the core of our ontological hardwiring.6 Catholic theologians reflect on the human vocation as creators who mirror, in their labor and craft, of the Divine act of creation. The Sufi tradition discusses the theophanic potential of humans who mirror and enact beautification, order, and sanctification through our creative endeavors. Other traditions such as qi gong and yogic systems intuit the connection between creativity and subtle energy channels of the human body. When authentic human creation is stifled and stagnant, we become blocked, frustrated, and flustered in ways which manifest as depression, anxiety, abuse, and dismay. Without nurturing the vital spark and flow of our propensity for creation and creative inquiry, we enter into a state of fundamental fragmentation, a dis-integration which manifests in manifold experiences of anxiety, depression, and mental dis-ease.

What Creativity offered as a node of pedagogical wisdom is a reminder that the work of teaching in any subject or field necessarily begins in the invitation to exploration, play, and experimentation detached from the goals of financial, status, or career gain. Many contemporary educational systems have conflated the goals of creative, synthetic education with career training, much to our civilizational detriment. If we are to enact a collective shift to a re-enchanted anthropology, teachers must begin by encouraging a creative attitude which eventually inculcates a disposition of awe in realizing the limits of one’s personal experience in a world that is always changing, charged with mystery, and beautifully and ever becoming something more than what it currently is. This vital spark is the core of human experience, and it is a teacher’s duty, in the work of re-enchantment, to do what we can to preserve and encourage it in our students’ lives, self-discovery, and self-recovery.

Happiness and Its Many Roads: Centering Meaning and Its Making

At the secondary level, I design and teach a class that is simply called Happiness. In this class, we explore how different cultures and societies have conceived of the notion of happiness and framed the well-lived life. Like Creativity, Happiness is wildly popular among students and a choice elective. Such a class seems to offer some reprieve or hope for a rightly anxious group of students wondering what the world will be like when they are adults. Over the course of our class, students quickly learn that definitions and models of happiness or a well-lived life are not universal across time, space, and culture. We begin by considering the contingency of our contemporary positionality as twenty-first century American students living in a context of globalization and retracing our steps from the present day to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Age of Empire, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and all the way to the various civilizational streams of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the Arabic translation movement, and Greco-Roman philosophy that have given rise to our context. This truncated but necessary roadmap of intellectual history has a singular goal of demonstrating that we live in the context of historical contingency and that our expectations of a well-lived life are far from universal. For many students, it is a liberating opening to understanding that the structures, frameworks, and expectations that define most of their lives are not sacrosanct. We then move to an exploration of major concepts and frameworks, endeavoring a cross-cultural consideration of concepts such as the Greek eudaimonia, Buddhist dharma, Islamic fitrah, Christian vocation, Hindu sat-chit-ananda, and Japanese ikigai. Through keeping a daily gratitude journal and a weekly ikigai journal, students are encouraged to deeply consider the structures that form their sense of “living well” and to consider all the possible alternatives at this pivotal juncture in their formation.

What Happiness offers is an invitation to root our students in a more contextual understanding of our positionality that liberates and invites students to consider what it could mean to live into an anthropology of process, becoming, and being. An essential task of the wonder-tenders in the work of re-enchantment will be to remind students of the ultimate fruits of human life—a contextual and holistic conceptualization of the human person that exists beyond one’s performance, financial status, or job. Whether it’s framed as one’s ikigai, eudaimonia, dharma, or vocation, such frameworks allow students to find their greater story beyond the goals of a paycheck, a house, or a summer home in the Hamptons. Such frameworks, of course, don’t demonize or degrade the pursuit of career success and wealth, but contextualize these pursuits within an expanded network of concerns and relationships. Our teaching must be rooted in the invitation of our students to contextual, holistic, and broader perspectives.

Such efforts build, at the grassroots, the foundation of an anthropology of re-enchantment. I have already seen tangible, hopeful fruits of this pedagogical experiment. One Happiness student who was previously scheduled for a summer internship at an investment bank is now bound for a guided summer monastic retreat (likely to the horror of their parents, my apologies!), and another student has started the necessary training to be a meditation teacher as the result of their gratitude and ikigai journaling. Civilizational shifts begin in these small, personal shifts of awareness, focus, and intent. It begins with a re-orientation of one’s vision.

Dwelling in Questions, Decentering Answers: Inspiring a Wayfaring Mind

At both the secondary and college level, I have designed courses on East Asian Ways of Knowing: Zen Buddhism. The course is a survey of broader Mahayana and specifically Zen Buddhist traditions. Such a course poses a core pedagogical challenge. How does one teach Zen Buddhist epistemology—which prizes direct, lived realization unhindered by conceptualizations—within the radically different and confining structures of a course in Western academic institutions which demand examination, performance, and evaluation? This has become a concentrated adventure in venturing a way forward in light of much broader concerns surrounding disciplinary fragmentation and knowledge integration in contemporary higher education. It calls for a reckoning and has encouraged me to consider alternatives modes of evaluation, drawing on models such as the Islamic mahdarah system of Mauritania which offers more intimate models of teacher-student transmission and peer-to-peer collaborative learning or Buddhist systems of dharma transmission to measure whether or not students have reliably progressed in a course focused on cultivating the path and conditions of meditative realization.

In such classes, I give students a simple maxim: inhabit the questions; don’t seek the answers. Through introductions to various “technologies of contemplation” such as calm-abiding meditation, walking meditation, koan meditation and composition, qi gong, and zazen, students are encouraged to focus on the process of discovery, lingering to consider the unfolding nuances, textures, and layers of observation, thought, and perception emerging during the course. Introductions to Buddhist ethics and cosmology also offer helpful opportunities to introduce students to the possibilities of a re-enchanted anthropology. For example, after exploring the classic Mahayana concept of the bodhisattva, a being who chooses to remain in the cycle of reincarnation until all beings, through their service, have attained liberation, I reframe the question of “What do you want to do when you grow up?” as:

Imagine you accepted the vow of the bodhisattva. How would you exist to spread liberatory loving-kindness to all beings?

The maxim of focusing on the process rather than discerning answers can be a helpful exercise in courses beyond East Asian Ways of Knowing and is a helpful pedagogical process for opening new insights for students.

Dreaming Beyond Canon(s) and Culture(s): Towards a Dia-logos of Imaginal Horizons

I regularly design and offer college-level classes in a series titled Sacred Texts in Dialogue: Reading Interreligiously. Inspired in part by the Great Books approach to learning, these courses are devoted to teaching some of the great classics of world religious literature. Rather than teaching and reading a single text, however, we put two seminal texts into unconventional cross-cultural, interreligious conversations. We may read Rumi’s Persian Sufi Masnavi with Shantideva’s Mahayana Buddhist Way of the Bodhisattva, asking questions such as, what would Rumi make of Shantideva, or Shantideva of Rumi? What would a Sufi make of calm-abiding meditative practices or the Buddhist or Sufi practices of invocatory litanies? What might be an Islamic reading of a Buddhist text, or a Buddhist reading of an Islamic text? In other versions, we may read Dante’s Comedia in conversation with ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Valmiki’s Ramayana with Homer’s Odyssey, or the Book of Psalms and the Heart Sutra.

Courses like Sacred Texts expressly embody one of the essential tasks of the teacher—the opening and expansion of a student’s imaginal horizons. The solutions to our civilizational crises will not arise from the same structures from which the crises were born; solutions most often arise from unexpected convergences, innovative approaches, and insights deep within which emerge only from what Emily Dickinson calls new and “certain Slant[s] of light” which reveal new layers and dimensions to the challenges that face us. Sacred Texts is an exercise in innovative problem-solving through cross-cultural reading and reasoning. The work of wonder-tending calls for suggesting not only fresh answers for our students to consider but also new questions for our students to live into.

These courses emphasize imaginal dialogue. I use imaginal in an expansive way suggested by Mark Vernon in his recent Wayfare article Awake—and also found in the works of scholars such as Henry Corbin and the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi—not in the sense of something ephemeral, secondary, or distracting, but profoundly real, an exercise of visionary capability that expands realms of what we think is real or possible. The work of re-enchantment entails a reprisal and rehabilitation of this understanding of the imaginal and its many implications for new possibilities in art, politics, communal life, and beyond. Imaginal horizons in a globalized, diverse age also entails a deep commitment to dialogue as dia-logos, what Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar calls not a dialectical duet of two logoi in debate, but a piercing or breaking through of the logos, a movement not of but through rational formulations so that something truer than either side’s conceptual scheme may emerge between the partners.7 Truth-seeking becomes an interdependent relationality rooted in partnership rather than an intellectual conquest. Such a dia-logical spirit must be at the core of the work of re-enchantment, and it is the primary project of Sacred Texts.

We see elements of this necessary expansion of imaginal horizons in the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary programs and studies at the college and graduate level. Students and educators are finding that innovative solutions can be found not only within traditional disciplinary boundaries but also at the unexplored avenues of disciplinary dialogue—where Tibetan Buddhist monks are in conversation with neuroscientists about cognitive health, Shipibo Icaro interpreters discuss plant sentience with ethnobotanists, and where physicists, musicians, and Hindu swamis consider the transformative nature and creational potential of sound, vibration, and speech. Education should be dia-logical, drawing on the vast array of resources which define our world, working towards new, richer, more colorful, more expensive conceptual horizons that can help us think about things like virtue, belonging, honor, justice, and environmental stewardship. Learning to read dia-logically allows us to learn new ways of seeing to find creative solutions in a complex, changing, world. Each new encounter becomes humbling, wondrous, and revelatory.

Inculcating Technologies of Contemplation: Teaching the Student Whole

In my senior year of high school, our English teacher tasked us with memorizing, collectively, a new line of poetry each day at the start of class. At the time, I begrudged the process and did not understand the value of rote memorization, a common pedagogical practice found in other cultural systems that has long been devalued in the West, but I still carry those poems with me today, decades later. I only now see the wisdom of this practice. Both memorization and contemplative practice are virtually absent in contemporary Western pedagogical models. A common practice that unites my four pedagogical experiments detailed above is a commitment to introducing students to experiences of ritual, routine, repetition, rhythm, and regular practice. What Michael Foucault calls “technologies of the self” can be found in many religious traditions as something I call “technologies of contemplation,” those tools which focus on inner cultivation of perception, presence, and introspection that readies students for the work of analysis, connection, dialogue, and evaluation. Whether it’s the lectio divina of Christian monastic traditions or the wird and dhikr of Sufi traditions or the darshan of Hindu traditions, technologies of contemplation are a cornerstone of inculcating an attitude of wonder.

In East Asian Ways of Knowing, students keep a daily meditation practice and journal, and in Happiness students keep a gratitude journal rooted in daily reflection. In Creativity, students engage in a daily creative exercise to mirror the artist’s daily commitment to their craft, and in Sacred Texts students memorize lines from the texts they engage dialogically. These are efforts not only to teach the whole student—to tend to both their intellectual and inner dimensions—but to teach the student whole, to offer them models and pathways for the integration of knowledge and wisdom, to work for the reintegration of a student and their perception, reflection, and intellect in a system and setting of disintegration. This reintegration is at the core of pedagogy in the work of re-enchantment.

Conclusion

The elements of an emergent, integral pedagogy of re-enchantment include (1) tending the vital spark of creative inquiry that is at the core of the learning experience; (2) shaping our curricula in light of a more holistic anthropology that orients our students to the quest for meaning rather than the attainment of an occupation; (3) encouraging students to inhabit questions, to root in process over product, and to linger in the journey rather than rush to answers, conclusions, or goals; (4) stepping outside of frameworks and canons and into a dia-logos that allows new questions, answers, and approaches to emerge organically; and (5) introducing students to the technologies of contemplation which allows for an anthropological and epistemological re-integration in a current system marked by fragmentation, incoherence, and disintegration. These, I hope, would converge in the ultimate cultivation of essential wonder—awe, humility, and hope in the understanding that there is more than meets the eye, and that beauty and virtue remain within our grasp despite the disintegration, incoherence, and fragmentation which seems to surround us.

I often remind my students that there is nothing particularly remarkable about being a teacher. Each of us is and will be a teacher, even if some do it in ways that are more structured and offer a means of sustenance. Each of us is called to the vocation of teaching, of tending the sacred fires of wonder, and of re-enchantment. At some point, and more likely at many points, we serve as teachers for others. We teach our children, our friends, our spouses, our parents, our colleagues, and perhaps most beautifully, utter strangers in unexpected moments—a door held open despite the rush of the day, a soft smile in a grocery store line that breaks through the weariness, a warm touch of reassurance on the palm. Fire asks little more than a thin thread of kindling for it to blaze; hope asks little more than a glimmer of endurance and persistence. I remind my students that if we all commit in ways great and small to the vocation of wonder-tending, then the whole world, soon enough, will blaze with edifying radiance. From the embers of these intuitions and efforts, a great blaze may emerge.

Echoing Davis’ sober pronouncement once again: things, somewhere, have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. We seemingly teeter on a precipice and a descent into chaos. We can choose to linger in our despair and incoherence and brace for impact and collapse. Alternatively, we can stoke the embers of those intuitions that wonder promises us–that something far greater awaits us in the possibility of re-enchantment. I am hopeful that teachers have an essential role to play in this moment, even if we go unrecognized and uncelebrated by dominant cultural matrices. Many times over from Rome to Baghdad to Alexandria and beyond, worlds have ended, and many more times over, worlds have been rebuilt. At each juncture, humans have survived, persisted, and flourished. I take heart in the invitation and opportunity for re-enchantment, and the ways we may be able to enact this shift together, being as trickling droplets of water falling on sturdy rock bed, shaping, with each small act of wonder-tending a path for living waters to flow and nourish the valleys below and beyond, even if such erosions and transformations remain imperceptible to us in this moment, within the limited gaze of this short, precious, and wondrous life.

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Peter Dziedzic is a PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Harvard University, where he is finishing his dissertation on Kashmiri and Persian Sufi poetry. He is also working on a comparative study of walking pilgrimages around the world. He is currently an instructor in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and has recently served as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University and as a professor in Religious and Islamic World Studies at DePaul University.

Art by Karl Wiener. 1901-1949.

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For some strange reason, there is a widespread belief among some nonlawyers that law is boring. Given that law is the place where politics, policy, philosophy, and history intersect and result in institutions and practices that shape our society, the law’s reputation for dullness is puzzling.

That said, even lawyers and law professors, tribes with an unusually high tolerance for the joys of legal technicality, regard tax lawyers and especially tax professors as a breed apart—high priests of a sea of legal arcana that causes even the most resolute eyeballs to glaze over. Given these realities, you, gentle reader, might be tempted to think that a book by such a high priest on Mormonism and taxes is not for you.

But you would be wrong.

In Between the Temple and the Tax Collector, Samuel D. Brunson, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, tells the story of taxes and the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Brunson’s central thesis is that tax law is one of the central ways that religion is regulated in the United States. Churches and certain religious actors have long enjoyed immunity, in whole or in part, from taxation. These immunities require both justification and a definition.

The political community must thus decide through its tax law what makes religion socially valuable and what kinds of people, activities, and institutions come within that category of civically acceptable religion. Looking at the issue from another point of view, taxes are a mechanism by which society generates resources for collective projects that aim (at least in hope and theory) at the public good. Accordingly, it’s very difficult—if not impossible—to articulate a vision of the just society that will not include implications for how we fund the public fisc.

Religion is the sort of thing that articulates a vision of a good life and just society, and it then works to realize it in the world. Given this dynamic during the two centuries of its history, Mormonism has both struggled with its place in Americans’ vision of good religion and promulgated its own aspirations for a good society. As Brunson’s book demonstrates, tax law has been a site where all these issues have converged and been negotiated.

Brunson begins his story by introducing the history of tax law in America. For denizens of the modern world, taxes above all mean income taxes. But before the Civil War, however, the United States had no income tax, and even its use as a wartime expedient proved constitutionally dubious. Instead, the government funded itself mainly through excise taxes and taxes on land. Churches, in turn, could claim tax exemptions for church buildings, parsonages, and glebes (income-producing properties used to pay ministers). Thus, in 1830, the Palmyra Reflector reported that Joseph Smith’s followers were seeking tax exemptions as ministers of the gospel.

As the Latter-day Saint movement expanded and the Church began pursuing more ambitious social projects—first through the law of consecration and stewardship and later through the establishment of Nauvoo—Mormonism’s religious activities spilled beyond the model of proper American religion, a model defined by reformed Protestantism. Latter-day Saints found themselves navigating the legal borderlands of American tax law. At the same time, the Saints needed revenue to support their collective projects.

First, they created tithing, a system of voluntary donations that mirrored certain aspects of secular taxation. Indeed, the very word “tithes” long referred to taxes levied by the state in support of the established church. Hence, under English law, taxpayers had to pay “tithes” to the established church until the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. In addition to instituting tithing in the late 1830s, the Latter-day Saint city of Nauvoo, whose government was dominated by Joseph Smith and his associates in the highest echelons of the Church, levied taxes to fund its operation.

After the Latter-day Saint exodus to the Great Basin and the arrival of federal authority in the form of territorial officials, taxation became another front in the multifaceted legal crusade against the Mormons. Wielding the newly created income tax, federal officials sought to tax tithing revenues in either the hands of the Church or—because the corporate status of the Church was uncertain after 1862—Brigham Young. (The Church had been incorporated under Utah Territorial law, but in 1862 Congress repealed some of those territorial enactments. The precise consequences of this for Church property holdings were not finally resolved until the 1890s.)

The income tax was a radical innovation at the time, and its application was uncertain. Nevertheless, a church’s income was generally not subject to income taxes. Hence, the enforcement action against Brigham Young and the Church represented anti-Mormon hostility. Taxes had become a tool to be used in the federal crusade against Mormon polygamy, theocracy, and communitarianism.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormonism has had other confrontations with the taxman. As the Church expanded beyond the familiar legal environment of the Mormon corridor, running from Idaho to Arizona, Latter-day Saints found themselves entangled in the complexities of tax law. For example, the Church’s first effort to build a chapel on the East Coast involved a multiyear legal battle with the complexities of New York corporate and tax law.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the tax exemption for donations to the Church became an occasional flash point in cultural fights involving Mormonism and race, gender, or sexuality. In Brunson’s telling, such fights were largely symbolic, as he regards religious tax exemptions as both legally secure and of less practical significance than is often assumed in these debates. Rather, he argues, rhetorical fights over tax exemption were mainly about what gets to count as “good” religion and who gets to make that decision.

Brunson has other tax stories to tell, including the battles of fundamentalist polygamous sects with federal and Canadian authorities. Looking more broadly, Brunson’s book has some important insights for students of law, religion, and Mormonism. Americans in particular are primed to view the relationship of law and religion through the lens of the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. We think in terms of the establishment or free exercise of religion and implicitly assume that the central actor in the drama of church and state will be the US Supreme Court, acting as constitutional adjudicator. Brunson’s book illustrates the poverty of this approach, providing vivid examples of conflicts and negotiations between religion and government occurring almost entirely outside the frame of constitutional law. This is an important corrective and an invitation to recognize that we will not understand the full relationship of law and religion unless we escape the gravitational pull of constitutional law.

For students of Mormonism, Brunson’s work belies the idea that law is external to the Latter-day Saint story. Law is not merely something that happens to the Latter-day Saints or an external challenge the Saints have weathered at various points in their history. Rather, law has been a formative influence on the Church itself. Mormonism, as it is experienced by contemporary Latter-day Saints, would be substantially different had our history flowed through different legal institutions. Not only has law shaped the Latter-day Saint tradition, but the Church and the Saints have influenced the law. Precisely because law shapes religious experiences, the Saints have sought to use and, when possible, shape the law for their own ends.

Brunson’s gem of a book reveals this process in an unlikely corner of the law and thus stands as a rebuke to those who might doubt the fascination and religious relevance of taxes.

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Nathan B. Oman is a law professor at the College of William & Mary with thoughts on the world, mostly about law, politics, religion, and books.

Art by Victor Dubreuil (born 1842).

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“There is a season, and a time,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes, “to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” (Eccl. 3:1–8, KJV).

The premise of this well-known passage from Ecclesiastes is that our actions might be sensibly ordered—that there is a narrative logic to our passage through time. Birth precedes death; planting precedes reaping; and rending precedes sewing. But we live in a world increasingly divorced from narrative, linear models of time; it is now possible to harvest food without ever planting a seed and to wear holes in clothes repeatedly, without ever patching those holes or sewing a new garment. For each of us, as for Hamlet, “time is out of joint.” Alienated from the orderly world of Ecclesiastes, we experience a world stripped of narrative continuity as the social structures and strictures that give meaning to time’s passage cede ground to a globalized, on-demand economy. We eat strawberries in winter; we answer work emails in bed, after 10 p.m.; and we shop Amazon deals in Sunday School. In the absence of meaningful temporal boundaries, we slip from moment to moment without a clear sense of how or when we lost the plot of our own lives.

This crisis of temporality is the subject of both Eugene Vodolazkin’s brilliant novel Laurus and Byung-Chul Han’s moving manifesto The Scent of Time. Both books reflect on the atomization of time: our postmodern struggle to discern an orderly pattern in the sequence of moments, days, and seasons that we observe and experience. Although we might regard this discontinuity as a matter of social boundaries, Han insists that “the temporal crisis is experienced as an identity crisis” (TST 43). Our struggle for duration, for a period of time indivisible by the distractions of twenty-first century life, is really the struggle to establish and maintain a coherent sense of self.

Vodolazkin foregrounds the temptation of living a fragmented life in the opening lines of his novel. He writes of his titular character,

He had four names at various times. A person’s life is heterogeneous, so this could be seen as an advantage. Life’s parts sometimes have little in common, so little that it might appear various people lived them. When this happens, it is difficult not to feel surprised that all these people carry the same name” (L 3).

The eponymous hero of Laurus is by turns a hermit, a holy man, a doctor, and a pilgrim, wending his way through fifteenth century Russia to Jerusalem and back. Known as Arseny and Ustin and Amvrosy and Laurus at various points in the novel, Vodolazkin’s protagonist mourns the death of multiple family members in his youth and spends the rest of his life torn between past and future, seeking desperately to recall lost joys or to anticipate a postmortal reunion. As a result, Vodolazkin explains, “he himself did not always understand what time ought to be considered as the present” (L 5). Only his body, and its persistent needs, keep Arseny anchored to the rhythms and sequences of daily life.

Because his body distracts him from past and future joys, Arseny spends his life struggling against physiological appetites and imperatives. He resists desire, because “if you give your flesh a finger, it will grab an entire hand,” and embraces suffering, seeking to confirm his commitment to past and future by ignoring present pains of cold and hunger and injury (L 164). Vodolazkin memorializes this masochistic urge in brilliant prose reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s finest passages, celebrating his hero’s nocturnal trysts with mosquitos in language that recalls both the bloodied Christ in Gethsemane and one of the Bible’s archetypal sinners, who “came out red” (Genesis 25:25). Vodolazkin writes,

On damp, warm nights, when the air turned into a humming blob, he stripped naked and stepped onto the gravestone in front of his house. He experienced an unusual sensation when he ran his hand along his body. It felt as if his skin was covered with thick fur, like Esau’s. The growth turned to blood when he touched it. Arseny did not see the blood in the dark but he sensed its scent and heard the crunch of crushed insects. Mostly, though, he paid them no mind, since he diligently prayed [for an expiation of past sins]. (L 151)

This bloodletting releases Arseny from consciousness and from the present, but he wakes each morning, naked and bloodied on the ground, to find himself confronted, again, by the return of bodily urges from which he seeks an escape into the past and the future.

In fixing his gaze on distant temporal horizons, Arseny seeks an escape from the story of his life, a narrative now that strings together moments into a coherent whole. But Han insists—and Arseny discovers—that any rejection of the present and of storytelling renders the past and future inaccessible. “The end of narration,” Han argues, “is in the first place a temporal crisis. It destroys that temporal gravitation which gathers the past and future into the present” (TST 49). Arseny tries to ignore the scent of his own blood and to forget the story of his own embodied present because “narration gives time a scent” (TST 18). “A scent is slow,” Han explains, so “it is not adapted to the age of haste. Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated” (TST 46). A scent, in other words, preserves our sense of duration and story, inviting us to linger in a present linked to both past and future. The acceleration that Arseny seeks—hoping he will wake up from a midnight bloodletting to discover himself at the end of the world, where past and future collide, without enduring the interminable present—can only be achieved by foreswearing narrative and the orderly progression from one moment to another.

Vodolazkin tempts the reader to join Arseny, in anticipation of the apocalypse and an escape from time. One of Arseny’s companions, on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, prophesies “the end of the world in 1492,” teasing the reader with hints that Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere signals the end of sacred time (L 186). But if the world ends, its surcease passes unnoticed by Arseny, who lives through that year and marks its end only by becoming a monk and taking a new name: Laurus. The world ends only in the sense that Laurus ceases to participate in its inexorable story and begins to experience creation as a series of recurrences: “Laurus lost track of forward-moving time. Laurus now sensed only cyclical time, which was a closed loop: the time of a day, of a week, or of a year. . . . Among temporal indicators, the words one day came to mind ever more frequently. Laurus liked those words because they overcame the curse of time. They also confirmed the singularity and lack of repeatability of everything that had occurred” (L 339). Divorced from story and from time’s linear flow, Laurus finally feels himself at peace, able to bask in the present without constantly anticipating the future or lamenting the past. In presentism, he finds peace.

Han lauds this monastic escape into a life of contemplation as a solution to twenty-first-century processes of “accelerated production and destruction” (TST 113). But Laurus discovers, and Vodolazkin insists, that the vita contemplativa is an insufficient answer. The purpose of contemplation, Han suggests, is to ensure the intentionality of action because “without the determination to act, the human being atrophies into a homo laborans,” a drudge whose presentism is either endured at the behest of others or perpetuated without purpose, mired in an interminable now. Action is a disruption of this status quo, an insistence that time begin anew. Quoting Hannah Arendt, Han allows that “the miracle that saves the world . . . is ultimately the fact of natality” (TST 102). Only as the vita contemplativa gives way to a new birth and a new world and a new story, linking past, present, and future, is contemplation made meaningful.

Laurus concludes much as it began, with a dramatic scene of birth that shocks Laurus out of a comfortable stasis. With this natal surprise, Vodolazkin insists upon both the cyclicality and the linearity of time, as the recurrence of former events provides the monk’s past, present, and future with new meaning; only a return to the novel’s earliest events allows Arseny-cum-Laurus to move forward, towards death, with confidence that his passage through time has been meaningful.

The individuals who witness his death agree that they cannot comprehend the meaning of that event; they

. . . have not understood a thing about it. And do you yourselves understand it? asks Zygfryd.

Do we? The blacksmith mulls that over and looks at Zygfryd. Of course we, too, do not understand. (L 362)

The import of his life and death is comprehensible only to those who have seen the end from the beginning, who have seen time embedded in narrative, so that the circularity of Vodolazkin’s novel is not a mystery but a revelation.

I read that passage—the final words of Laurus—while sitting in a boxy play center, as my seven-year-old caromed from slide to cargo net to birthday cake in a frenzy of adrenaline, singing his congratulations to a classmate at the top of his lungs. With a strobe light pulsing and the latest pop hit blaring over the loudspeaker, I reread those words and wept because I had witnessed the triumphant reconciliation of past, present, and future in Vodolazkin’s novel. I understood.

Han complains that “the real problem today is the fact that life has lost the possibility of reaching a meaningful conclusion,” but Laurus attests to the inevitability of meaningful conclusions, even in the face of chaos and uncertainty and pain and doubt and birthday parties (TST 10). Although we cannot, from our atomistic present, understand the mystery whereby every past injustice will be transformed into a glorious future, Vodolazkin presents a model of time’s redemption in his novel. “In this surmounting of time,” he shows the reader “confirmation of the nonrandomness of everything that took place on the earth,” and that vision is deeply, deeply moving (L 186).

A birthday party is a time for laughing, not weeping. But as I closed the pages of Laurus and wiped the tears from my eyes, I smiled awkwardly at the gaggle of parents glancing in my direction, nodded in time to the music, and gave thanks that time was out of joint.

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Zachary McLeod Hutchins is the author of several books for Latter-day Saint readers, including Joseph: An Epic and The Best Gifts: Seeking Earnestly for Spiritual Power.

Art from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).

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In the memorable speech that ends Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the good-hearted Alyosha proclaims, “There is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory.” In the face of family trauma, suffering, and death, he offers hope that “even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.” But while memory may be essential to redemption, it is also fragile and fickle. By it, we might be damned.

After law school, I worked for the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center (RMIC), an organization that investigates potentially wrongful criminal convictions in Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming. For about eighteen months, I analyzed cases that revealed the terribly painful consequences of memory’s weakness. I came to know and love people who spent many years in prison for crimes they did not commit because of eyewitness misidentification, which is the most common form of faulty evidence in cases of wrongful conviction.

I also carefully studied cases outside of RMIC’s ambit, including the poignant case of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino. As she describes in Picking Cotton, she mistakenly identified Ronald Cotton as her rapist despite having had an extended interaction on the night of the crime with Bobby Poole, the man that DNA evidence demonstrated was the true culprit. She recounts carefully reporting her memories to investigators shortly after the crime, feeling her memories carved onto her “like scars [she’d] never be able to cover.” At trial, she “couldn’t believe it” when Cotton’s attorney claimed the case was one of mistaken identity—“that [she] had been ‘stressed’ after the assault and couldn’t properly identify the man who had been lying on top of [her].”

But she berated herself later when evidence emphatically established she had gotten it wrong: “How could I have been in the same room as my rapist and not recoil?” she asks, reflecting on how her body responded viscerally and involuntarily to Cotton’s presence in the courtroom and reacted with nothing when she looked at Poole.

Cotton’s memory had conspired against him, too. When investigators first confronted him about the case, he provided a confident alibi only to later realize he had gotten his days mixed up. His explanation for the mistake on the witness stand sounded like desperate evasion in the face of Thompson-Cannino’s confident identification. But his seemingly weak testimony was reliable while her strong, sympathetic accusation was not. His prayers for revelation of the truth went unanswered until he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 1995, more than ten years after his conviction.

Thompson-Cannino’s case is an especially tragic instance of a general fact: We are not mere perceivers, recording mental video for precise playback when we later need it. As a popular history of wrongful convictions explains, “What happens in front of the eyes is transformed inside the head, and is refined, revisited, restored, and embellished in a process as perpetual as life itself.” Or as Andrew Bird puts it, “It's all in the hands of a lazy projector / That forgetting embellishing / Lying machine.” Both Thompson-Cannino and Cotton know the potentially profound consequences of this inescapable fact.

The stakes can clearly be high in court, so it shouldn’t surprise us if we feel deep anxieties when memory’s limits shape spiritual transformation. Given how much can go wrong when we recall and recount life-altering spiritual experiences, we should have a sobering sense of caution. But memory’s limitations might also have paradoxical strengths, at least from a certain theological perspective. Ironically, these potential strengths first appeared to me while reading Living with a Wild God, a memoir about memory and extraordinary experience by the antitheological journalist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich.

Before publishing the memoir, Ehrenreich was undoubtedly not a writer about spiritual experience. Her primary subjects were “the myth of the American dream, the labor market, health care, poverty and women’s rights.” But a set of bizarre experiences from her youth haunted her for fifty years, taunting and resisting her until her agent convinced her to turn a history of religion she was writing into a confession that addressed them head-on.

An unwavering and lifelong atheist, Ehrenreich resists simply labeling these experiences as “mystical.” But she reports that her vision, her sense of self—her entire consciousness—were transformed during recurring awe-filled moments that captured her without warning. And out of a sense of obligation to her future self, she recorded memories of them in journals she kept from 1956 to 1966.

In 2001, when faced with the prospect of death from cancer at age sixty, she gathered her personal papers for deposit at a university. But she could not part with those journals, which later became the primary source for the book. “I knew,” she writes at its outset, “the journal would require a major job of exegesis, a strenuous reconstruction of all that I once thought was better left unsaid.” And this exegesis could not be done by just anyone. Because these memories were hers alone, she was the only possible interpreter.

Here, I think, is the central power of memory. It is personal and proprietary. We are all the exclusive exegetes of our most personal experiences, and we feel the thrill of possession. But in our solitary exegesis, we experience both senses of that word. We feel owned by our memories as much as we feel we own them. Attempting to recover their treasures, we lament their incompleteness and corruptibility. And we have trouble explaining them, sometimes even to ourselves.

This confounding dynamic was certainly Ehrenreich’s experience. Aside from her old journals, she had never written or spoken about her strange experiences, which were in large measure unspeakable. She avoided even attempting articulation for fear of “sounding crazy.” Ehrenreich tells us most of what she wrote is likely accurate. What troubles her is what she left out. The first year’s entries offer just a few indirect allusions to “uncanny events” only she can decipher.

Nonetheless, she remembers “perfectly well” the first time “it happened,” roughly a year before the very first entry. While watching a horse show with her family on a Sunday afternoon, her fourteen-year-old self sensed “something peel[ing] off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words.” The experience began repeating itself occasionally, and she began the challenging work of interpretation. As she described the experiences in an early journal entry, “It is as if I am only consciousness and not an individual, both a part of and apart from my environment.” She couldn’t identify any material triggers for these weird episodes, so she concluded initially that they were the result of her perceptual faculties simply “falling down on the job.”

But as rational as this theory sounded, she admits, “I wasn’t ready to abandon the idea that [she] had gained a privileged glimpse into some alternative realm or dimension.” The empiricism of her determined atheism demanded that she keep this door open. “I had seen what I had seen—whatever it is that lies under the named world—and I was not going to deny its existence,” she writes. Looking back, she wonders whether she merited a psychiatric diagnosis such as dissociative identity disorder. But this didn’t work either because the experiences never impeded her daily functioning.

Ehrenreich didn’t realize how emotionally unsettling these extraordinary experiences were until the most significant one occurred during a walk in the mountains at the end of high school. With no apparent impetus, outside and alone, she found herself entering a new and more “radically dissociated state,” one in which she appreciated the mere fact that the air “parts before us without our having to resort to machete or shovel.” Mere movement was astonishing. And then, suddenly, “the world flamed to life” as she had “a furious encounter with a living substance” that came at her “through all things at once.” She didn’t lose control of herself, but she had no power to turn away. She didn’t feel euphoria, but she was captivated by a fearful intensity that lasted a few minutes.

Ehrenriech doesn’t recall how she returned to ordinary existence. “There is a gap here,” she acknowledges, but she recalls acutely how “the insane beauty of the morning had drained completely away, and what remained was not easy to look at.” Something had happened to her, not for her or her edification. “Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus had come with instructions,” she writes. “My vision, if you could call it that, did not.”

In her first journal entry after the event, she reports, as she describes it in the memoir, an “emotional meltdown, unleavened by intellectual curiosity.” “I have lost my youth,” the entry reads, “The universe has no purpose. . . . Life is a joke.” Old Barbara acknowledges that her judgments of her younger self are harsh, but the brevity and self-pity of young Barbara’s account is maddening given what is at stake. “I feel,” old Barbara confesses, “like grabbing that useless girl by the shoulders and shaking her myself. What happened? What exactly went on in your head? Tell me everything even if it sounds crazy!”

And yet she acknowledges that young Barbara could not be expected to understand what happened and that her experience had been genuinely traumatic. The experience transcended the entirety of her understanding. The compartments of her mind were washed away as mysterious experience poured into them. Was there even a first-person from whom the original experience could be obtained?

This question points us to the first of memory’s paradoxical powers. We run up against its limitations in an intensely personal way that can teach us compassion for other selves. Our younger selves are intimately connected to our current selves, and by learning compassion for the weakness of our former selves, we can learn compassion for the weakness in others. Memory’s limits have the power to turn us outward as much as inward.

But for young Barbara, turning either way was a challenge. She knew no one, whether in her extensive reading or in her own life, who could relate. The one time she tried to speak about such an experience, she invoked the idea of God, foreign to her and yet the most accessible explanation. “I saw God,” she told a friend who had noticed her altered emotional state shortly after a ski trip, but immediately felt embarrassment and regret, “as if [she’d] been caught in an act of plagiarism or, more precisely, antiquities theft.” She pretended to have been kidding and said no more.

What had been shaken was not her atheism, but her sense of her surroundings. Part of the puzzle, she explains, was that “nothing unnatural or physically impossible had occurred, objects had not moved on their own, and the laws of geometry had remained in force.” She acknowledges the material and emotional factors that may have shaped the experience (e.g., low blood sugar or depression from recent social rejection). But reaching for reductive accounts of electrical states of the brain did not provide an adequate handhold on the terrifying cliff she was sliding down.

As the years passed, she kept her worries about the soundness of her mind to herself, and the frequency of her dissociative states diminished, as did her interest in them. She pressed on with college and the lab-life of a scientist. But her memories of the experiences always buzzed in the background, insisting that she was ignoring something important and irresponsibly abandoning her former self.

With middle age and motherhood, she felt a renewed interest in those old memories and found that seeking out accounts of similar experiences helped her begin to wrap her mind around them. This new sense of fellowship, not to say agreement, even led her to assert that her mental health likely would have fared better in the period just after her ski-trip vision if she’d had a religion in which to “house” the experience, a community with which to deal with the unfathomable. And while she would, with compelling argument, object to use of this acknowledgment as justification for belief in God, the acknowledgment is suggestive of another of memory’s powers—namely, the way it knits people together and focuses them on common causes.

Because the past always remains with us, we seek solidarity and understanding with those who have had similar experiences. And because we know we’ll need our past to forge our future, we deliberately create collective memories by taking family vacations or participating in religious rituals. We know memories attach us to one another and focus us on ideals and aims. We plan ceremonies like weddings to produce memories that will motivate and guide our actions.

Ehrenreich is, of course, decidedly opposed to forging a future with religion. But after years of meditation on the import of her visitations, she concluded that a capital-O Other—or, more likely, Others—are seeking us out. Not gods or ghosts, belief in which remained clear roadblocks to human flourishing in her view, but powers that animate animals, trees, and other life-forms of the universe. Whatever one might call this conviction (perhaps animism or neo-paganism), it is as firmly rooted in the natural world as it is in her early memories.

Here, we find yet more of memory’s powers. Memory gives us a sense of the preciousness of certain places and times. It ties us to the tactile and shapes our very sense of our surroundings. Something as ordinary as smell (a sense that, interestingly, does not feature in Ehrenreich’s memoir) can be intensely evocative of past eras and emotions. Hearing a few bars of a specific song can transport us to significant places of our past. And feeling the air and seeing the landscape of a significant place can remind us of the touch of a special person.

And yet, despite our familiarity with these powers, we fear, as we should, memory’s limitations. It tricks and haunts us, as it did Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, even when we handle it with great care. So how do we honor its powers while being realistic about its limitations?

William James, famed father of American psychology, offers, indirectly, a potential solution to this problem in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In that well-known book, which Ehrenreich praises briefly in the memoir, James encourages his readers to consider fruits, not roots. Forget searching for the truth of spiritual experiences, he argues. Focus on their tangible effects. Applying this approach to the limits of memory, we would abandon all quests for recovering original experiences and ask instead whether our ways of remembering them produce good fruit in the world.

This solution is attractive for its practicality and humility. We lack access to comprehensive recordings of our past, so why not concentrate on effects instead of accuracy? The trouble, I think, is that abandoning concern for truth leaves us with feeble means of assessing when fruits are good and when self-interest is corrupting our projects. Liars routinely justify themselves by invoking the primacy of outcomes over truthfulness, and good outcomes often depend on audacious truth-seekers (think of both the investigators in a case like Ronald Cotton’s and the scientists behind the DNA that demonstrated his innocence).

I think James and his fellow pragmatists are right when they assert that our memories and the beliefs that derive from them are not, to steal a line from Louis Menand, “a passive mirroring of the world, but an active means of making the world into the kind of world we want it to be.” But true as this may be, I wonder whether we should see memory’s inability to “mirror the world” as a paradoxical form of its power. In revealing our weakness and interdependence, memory’s limits can be a means of turning our hearts in genuine interest and compassion toward each other, our prior selves, and, as they did for Ehrenreich, toward the revelations of things, which can be stunning. When Ronald Cotton prayed for exoneration, for example, God disclosed the truth with DNA evidence, not a divine video of the crime.

Of course, we might also think about how memory’s limits can turn us to God as well. But if we see God primarily as an omniscient solver of our memory problems, an omnipotent filler of its gaps, we will lose sight of memory’s empowering limitations and the people and things toward which they turn us. Instead, we might see our inability to conjure the world anew in our own minds as a divine gift, a spur to seek connection to and revelation from the people and wonders outside of them.

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus prepares his disciples for his death at the Last Supper, he assures them that the Holy Ghost will “bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). But his instruction for remembering is not esoteric guidance for obtaining heavenly visions of his teaching. He gives them, instead, the ordinary task of regularly re-enacting their sacred meal together. In this simple ceremony that ties them to each other and to him, the joys of embodiment—taste and smell, the touch of a friend, sharing precious time—mix with recollection of an incomprehensible loss and love, and in this mixture, profound sorrow is honored while it is transformed. Memory is redeemed.

Perhaps, then, when we struggle to recover and relate to our past, we should try seeing our failures as a divine invitation to seek God in the minds of others and the marvels of creation. Maybe only then will we experience memory’s power to produce the wonders of heaven and, as Alyosha declares at the close of his speech, “gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been.”

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James Eagan is a songwriter who wishes he were a novelist.

Art by Agnes Pelton.

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I began to notice them in the airport, the way one learns to identify confederates—the little tells of mannerism, clothing, and speech. I spoke to none of them, but I knew where we were all headed. They were on the plane, then the next day, on the train, then on the light rail, a trickle, then a stream, then a river converging on the sidewalks of Salt Lake City. Now we sit in rows of folding chairs, eight thousand of us facing the stage at the other end of this vast room, our chatter filling the air.

The lights dim. The room falls silent. A video plays on the massive screens hanging from the ceiling. Red lightning flashes; thunder rumbles from loudspeakers. An urgent voice issues forth: “A storm is coming . . . ”

I didn’t think I’d be this affected—my heart pulses in my throat as the video fades to black. The stage is spotlit.

“Worldhoppers,” a voice announces, “please welcome your hosts, Brandon and Emily Sanderson.”

The room roars.

The man on that faraway stage, wearing his signature blazer-over-a-t-shirt and standing next to his wife with his hands in his pockets, still doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with what he finds in front of him. In the past few years, Brandon—he’s always just “Brandon” to his fans—has published a half dozen books and run the best-funded Kickstarter of all time. He has gone toe-to-toe with the publishing industry to fight for authors. And the company he founded with his family and friends is now hosting Dragonsteel Nexus 2024, a convention attracting thousands of people from all over the world. From humble beginnings, he has become, by any measure, one of the most beloved and best-selling fantasy authors of all time.

Tonight is the release event for Wind and Truth, book five of a projected ten-book series, The Stormlight Archive. His magnum opus. It’s a pivotal point for the series and for his career.

Brandon Sanderson is, reportedly, nervous.

Brandon and Emily make pleasantries, thank-yous, and a few announcements, then Emily leaves the stage, leaving Brandon alone. It’s time for his speech. On what might be the most important night of his life.

“Yeah, this is the part where I blab at you,” Brandon says, pacing the stage with a smile. “What have I been thinking about lately?

“Well, I’ve been thinking about Robespierre.”

I was not thinking about the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre that morning when I ducked into the Salt Palace Convention Center with my friends. I was thinking about how to fill out my passport.

We’d each been given one at registration: A booklet with a blue cover and “Worldhopper Passport” printed in gold foil. The booklet’s gray pages bore the names of planets and locations from Brandon’s books, and below those names were lists of tasks and empty boxes awaiting stamps.

My friends and I were in giddy overdrive. The passport was clearly part of a game, and a game meant a prize.

Our first task was to scope out the cavernous, hangar-like main hall. Portable blue curtains subdivided the concrete: A craft room and a game room with rows of plastic tables; A labyrinth of crowd control stanchions leading to the official Dragonsteel Store; A curious structure like a black-and-white circus tent; Food stalls scattered on the periphery; And the Exhibitor Hall, where phalanxes of vendor booths patiently lurked to ensnare our wallets. We guessed that completing activities—playing games in the game room, visiting vendor booths, etcetera—would win us passport stamps. We just had to find a way to tackle them efficiently.

And before eight thousand other people did. Already on the morning of the first day of a three-day convention, people swarmed everywhere—wearing backpacks, lanyards dangling from their necks, in pairs and squads and pushing strollers, all ages, all genders, many, many people dressed up as characters from Brandon’s books—all of them grinning, passports in hand, poking at things, investigating things, making plans. The first panel of the day was one I’d been planning on attending, so I rushed off, promising my friends I’d update them on anything stamp-related that I learned.

The panel was scheduled in a large, carpeted room stuffed with lines of cushioned red chairs. Locating a middle section with a decent view, I squeezed into a seat. A glance around left me a little dizzy. There were hundreds of people.

But it was quiet. Outside the doors, the convention center was a dull roar, but inside, people spoke in low tones to the people in their party or they sat alone, bowed over their passports.

And like a chill sneaking through a window I’d forgotten to close, a question I’d been asking for the days and months leading up to Dragonsteel snuck up on me.

What am I doing here?

The thing is, I’ve never been totally comfortable being a “fan.”

Being a fan means being loyal to something. Fandom puts you in a fundamentally argumentative posture; Star Wars is better than Star Trek and Red Sox versus Yankees follow the same principle. Even within fandoms there are schisms over whether this romantic pairing is the truest, or whether the team should have fielded this quarterback versus that one. And for whatever reason, the requirements of this posture seem to have become more extreme over time. “Like this or die.” Or sometimes, “If I don’t like where this goes, I will die.”

I find loyalty difficult, but not because I don’t think it’s important. In fact, in my life as a person of faith—the same faith as Brandon—I think that loyalty might be the most important thing in the universe. Our faith’s founding figure, Joseph Smith, taught that by making sacred promises with God and each other, we can be “sealed” to our loved ones, thereby allowing those relationships to continue even after death. Thus, in Smith’s cosmology (as I read it) heaven is nothing less than a network of sealed relationships uniting the entire human family in a web of relationality. The promises we make to be with each other and with God may be nothing less than the very ground of our existence—now and forever.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. But this means I don’t give my loyalty easily, including to cultural artifacts, no matter how much I love them. A fictional plot can twist at any moment. Cultural trends cycle and re-cycle.

It also means I’ve never been a convention goer because I know I will be mingling with people who are loyal, whose lives begin and end with these stories. I worry that at best, I would be a zero to them. At worst, an impurity.

But I knew I couldn’t stay away from Dragonsteel Nexus 2024. I’d been reading Brandon’s books for over fifteen years, and I thought they were great and worth celebrating. I was excited for Wind and Truth.

And part of me was intensely curious. At the newest height of his career, but with so much still at stake, how was Brandon Sanderson thinking about fandom and about his fans? And could that include me?

The panelists mounted the stage. A guy wearing a baseball cap popped open a laptop on the table and leaned towards the microphone. “So, should we get into it?”

What’s even the point of a convention?

Homo sapiens has probably been organizing meet-ups around shared interests since at least communication appeared as smoke on the horizon. The first science fiction conventions date back to the 1930s, and the first comic-con was held in the 1970s. But it’s the size of fan conventions—over 200,000 attendees at some comic-cons—plus their purpose that feels unique in human history. Never have so many people gathered in one place to connect over a cultural experience that they mostly experienced somewhere else. Whether book, TV show, movie, video game, or comic book, a defining feature of nerd culture is that one usually encounters the primary cultural products in the same physical space as, at most, a few dozen other people—and far more often, totally solo. And what separates a nerd from someone else who curls up on the couch alone to watch Ted Lasso or to read Jane Eyre is the desire to evangelize. No wonder, then, that despite legitimate hurdles to the whole endeavor—introversion, lingering shame, a relative lack of social skills—fans cannot help but convene. Convening may be the only way to shatter the fear of solipsism, to confirm that one belongs to a greater culture.

All that to say, Dragonsteel Nexus 2024 was a big, big deal. It wasn’t part of another convention, not Brandon Sanderson sharing a panel discussion or an allotment of square footage in an exhibitor hall. Brandon Sanderson and his books were the event.

What has made him so successful? The convention-goers I asked gave many reasons. The characters are compelling and inspiring. The page-turning plots deliver emotional impact and epic action, culminating in explosive and satisfying climaxes. The books help someone make sense of their depression, or their loneliness, or just get through a tough time at work.

But maybe the biggest part of the appeal is Brandon’s worldbuilding. Over a dozen books and counting take place within the same shared universe, called the Cosmere. Many Cosmere books are self-contained, focusing on the characters, events, and magics of a particular world. But undergirding all these worlds and their stories is a comprehensive and consistent system of magic that’s never fully explained in any one book but is frequently referenced and hinted at. This system is so detailed that fans approach it like a science, using the data they’ve gathered on it so far to theorize how the superstructure of individual characters and plots will develop in future books. In Brandon’s books, gaining greater knowledge of the Cosmere and its magic systems is almost always a key to victory for the characters. And there are a small number of characters, often appearing only in cameos and side roles, who are “worldhoppers,” people who know how to slip between planets and think about the Cosmere from a comprehensive angle.

It only makes sense that Brandon’s fans see themselves as worldhoppers too. Reading is worldhopping, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, book to book. And since knowledge is power in the Cosmere, the attentive reader can have a deep sense of participation as they see how characters grapple with the same puzzle pieces the reader has access to. Sometimes the characters don’t grasp the puzzle as well as the readers and sometimes they leap ahead; irony, horror, comedy, shock, triumph, delight and surprise can result.

Thus, Wind and Truth is the convention’s main event, but the theme is worldhopping. Hence the passport. Hence the text of the flags flanking the Salt Palace: “Dragonsteel Nexus 2024. Be a part of the story.”

And hence the panel I was watching: “The Butterfly Effect: Disruptors of the Cosmere.” For close to an hour, before a crowd of hundreds, the four fans on stage took turns positing what-if scenarios at pivotal moments in the story of the Cosmere and debating what changes might have then cascaded through the books. What if, for instance, a certain character’s romantic interest had not died in an early book, allowing both characters to later inherit some of the Cosmere’s immense magical powers in future books? Would their relationship have survived or soured?

“Well, we know it takes time for a Shard’s intent to corrupt a person’s personality,” one panelist pointed out.

Some nods from the other panelists, heads cocked in reflection. There were instances of Shards working together before.

“You could potentially see an interesting thing in Era Two,” a second said, “where discord is still happening, but in two beings instead of one.”

“You never want to date your coworkers,” riffed a third. The room laughed.

I felt torn. Even though I’d read all the same books, I remembered less than half of the events that the panelists were so deeply and enthusiastically arguing over. I understood much less than half of the magic systems they were referencing. If I laughed, would I be laughing about the same thing? If I asked the guy sitting next to me for an explanation, would he look at me with kindness, confusion, pity, disgust? Did I belong in this room? Did I want to?

Truth was, I was only at the panel to see one of the panelists, a minor Youtuber who creates fan videos explaining the Cosmere. I’d discovered his videos only recently but had enjoyed them so much I wanted to thank him in person. And yes, in this recursively tiny pond, it was a chance to be touched by the fame of a kind of big fish (the size of at least a few thousand Youtube subscribers). After the panel, I had no trouble zipping up to him as he came off the stage.

“I just wanted to say, I love your content. Would you sign my Worldhopper Passport?”

He obliged and thanked me for the compliment. Then he withdrew something from his pocket.

“And here,” he said, a conspiratorial wriggle in his voice, “is a Silverlight key.”

Into my hand he deposited a small piece of white, 3D-printed plastic in the shape of a cool-looking key. I hurried out of the room grinning.

My friends and I reconvened and confirmed that completing convention-related tasks had been rewarded with stamps in our Worldhopper Passports; I’d received a stamp from someone in a Staff t-shirt at the end of the panel.

“But did any of you get a Silverlight key?” I asked, trying and not entirely succeeding to not sound smug. “Do you know what that’s for?”

No, they hadn’t, and no, they didn’t know, but it seemed like an exciting piece of the convention game.

The next seven hours of convention flew by, attending panels, playing board games, wandering the exhibitor hall—to everything its season and a stamp to every activity under heaven. We discovered that a completed set of stamps could be traded for a pack of Stormlight Storydeck cards at the circus-tent-like structure in the middle of the main hall. Each pack of the Storydeck contained a random assortment of cards, but what was on the cards was an ingenious idea for a convention game: a few paragraphs of a story written by Brandon and his team. A set of nine cards, when flipped onto the reverse side and placed in a rectangle, created a piece of artwork relevant to that story. There seemed to be three stories, spread across fifty-four cards each; one hundred and sixty-two cards total, eighteen stunning pieces of artwork. Already by the end of the first day I’d collected a few dozen cards.

But I still didn’t know what the Silverlight key did.

Despite the long day, it was only an appetizer for the main event: the Wind and Truth release party. Eight thousand attendees in the biggest hall. Lightning flashing on the screens. The real reason we were here: The book. The man himself. Talking about his book.

Except he wasn’t talking about the book. He was talking about the French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.

“If you don’t know anything about Robespierre, his story is fascinating to me,” Brandon said. “The very machine he helped create eventually cut him to pieces. Literally.”

Brandon paced the stage with one hand waving a clicker and the other in his pocket. Maybe he could sense my bewilderment, because his delivery suddenly seemed to falter. His eyes glued themselves to a teleprompter somewhere near the front of the stage.

But he pressed on. With a promise to return to Robespierre, he moved onto more familiar ground, recounting his earlier career. The mood in the room picked up, people cheering and laughing as he showed slides of a very young, beardless Brandon at book signings.

Then he said, “I feel like in fandom, we’re making a constant fight for legitimacy.”

“I once had a mother at a book signing look at me straight in the eyes and say, after her daughter got one of my books signed, ‘All she’ll read is this fantasy stuff. How do I get her to read something that’s actually good?’”

The groan from the audience was immediate, almost instinctual. Brandon half-grimaced, half-grinned.

“Society really likes to shame people who enjoy things. Have you noticed that? ‘How dare you like something.’ Whatever you like, someone’s going to pop out of the woodwork and try to make you feel stupid for being interested in it. Every fantasy writer, myself included, has been confronted by these interviewers who imply the entire genre is crap and then they push us to distance ourselves from it.”

The audience had become more animated. And so had Brandon.

“I’m proud of my books,” Brandon said. “I think my stories do something interesting and innovative with the narrative and with the storytelling. I think the Stormlight Archive explores what fantasy is capable of being, all while delving into the human condition.”

Smiling, he delivered the next lines like hammer blows. “I like my prose! I do it deliberately! I don’t think it is bad, I think it is good! It just tries to do something different!”

The cheering of eight thousand fans swelled to the ceiling of the massive room. I almost expected chanting to break out—or wanted to start chanting myself. Four! More! Years! Four! More! Years!

And then Brandon pivoted.

“The point is,” Brandon said, “taste is subjective, and we don’t all have to agree to make a community. If our rallying cry is ‘Everything we don’t like is crap,’ then we’re missing the point. Stories bring people together, and I believe that fantasy fiction is one of the most powerful ways that happens.

“As things have changed for me, in my life, it feels like things have changed for us as a culture in parallel; my career and rise seem to parallel the rise of nerd culture in general.

“Our success hasn’t stopped people from wanting to point at us and poke fun. It happens. We can’t do anything about that, other than to stand tall and ignore them.”

With the hand holding the clicker, he jabbed a finger down emphatically. “But let’s also make sure not to emulate them.

“We as people who love fantasy books are, in many ways, like the political revolutionaries I mentioned at the start of my speech. My challenge for you is to learn from the stories of people like Robespierre. Don’t let our movement eat itself alive. Let’s not be the type of people who feel ashamed for our love of books, but let’s also not be the type who distance ourselves from subgenres that others are discovering and coming to the fandom through.

“When you return home, remember what I’ve talked about. Let’s make a place in fandom. Let’s make sure we’re not gatekeeping who gets to be a fan. That doesn’t work anymore.

“So. If you want to be here, Dragonsteel Nexus is for you. Thank you for making this our biggest release event ever. I love you, you’re amazing, and I hope you have a fantastic Nexus 2024.”

And just like that, his speech was over. The audience cheered him off.

I was flabbergasted. For a moment there, the speech had been everything I’d expected—triumph, glory, participative. But then it had turned into . . . a lecture? A sermon?

I wasn’t sure that he’d said the words Wind and Truth once.

I definitely wasn’t sure that I agreed with what he’d said.

It was a noble sentiment: There’s room here for everyone. By all rights, it should have appealed specifically to me, putting my impostor syndrome at ease. But I also heard an uncritical and passionate call to action to not being critical. Wasn’t the point of being a fan—liking something, loyalty to something—inherently an exercise in preference? Fandom wasn’t an expression of preference over minor details but over fundamental details in the stories we told about our very lives. How could a community without discernment, without borders, be a community at all? The paradox seemed like it would implode under its own mass, like a black hole.

But solving it would have to wait. The Q&A was starting.

Why is Brandon so successful? I think the real answer is the Q&A.

On special occasions like holidays, his birthday, and, of course, the annual convention, Brandon answers questions from his fans. Plenty of questions are of the expected variety: writing advice, or Brandon’s thoughts on other books or movies. But most questions are about his worlds. Keen readers who have delved deep into the Cosmere system line up at a microphone and ask Brandon questions about how the system works. The most entertaining questions try to stump Brandon or push him to the edge of the knowledge he can reveal. And they can be devilishly complicated.

A fan in a gray jacket approached the microphone. When he spoke, his English was slightly accented. “My question is regarding Connection. With Connection you can make people understand the language of the place that they’re in by changing their native language for people who are multilingual. So, my question’s regarding people who grow up bilingual. How does that interact with it?”

“There are multiple ways to interact with that,” Brandon responded. “One would be to replace one of the languages, but also you can make Connection with more advanced uses to not just replace but to add to—or to change your past in a bit of a Forging way. So there are a lot of different ways it can manifest depending on the skill of the person who is making that bond.”

“As a quick follow-up,” the questioner continued, “I myself grew up with Spanish and English—some people really grew up with Spanglish rather than the two languages.”

Brandon grinned, catching where the question was going. As he spoke I could almost see his brain churning. “Yeah, that could totally happen. In fact, you can tell—here’s an example. You can tell in certain books when someone has a bit of an accent, that oftentimes that’s a tell—like, if someone has no accent, it means they’re using magical means to circumvent it. And if they do have a bit of an accent, then they may have learned it or they may have been bilingual and are adding on—or things like that. Thank you for your question.”

“Thank you,” the fan replied, and the audience clapped, as they did for every exchange, for both the questioner and the answerer.

Another fan: “Do the Shards of Adonalsium still have a tangible Connection to Adonalsium?” He drew a link in the air with his fingers. “So, the vessel and the power.”

“I mean, technically yes, because the remnants of Adonalsium are the Shards and that Connects all of them. Probably not in the way that this question’s intended to mean . . . ” Brandon tilted his head from side to side. “But it is a technical yes.”

“This is harder than my thesis defense was,” he joked at one point.

Knowledge is power in the Cosmere, and a worldhopper’s knowledge allows them to participate in its grand events. Brandon, of course, has all the knowledge. But I think it’s this remarkable style of transparency that sets him apart and makes him so beloved as an author. The only questions he doesn’t provide an answer to are questions that will be answered in future books, to which he replies “RAFO.” “Read and find out.” It’s a dance of trust between him and his readers. His opus is one big promise to reveal all, one big “read and find out.”

But it also means that, for now, keeping secrets is essential. Entertainment and surprise would be impossible otherwise. “There’s always another secret”—a phrase from one of his early books that has come to represent his career just as much as any promise to read and find out.

As I watched the Q&A, an unexpected sense of familiarity came over me, and when I finally placed it, I nearly fell out of my chair. Brandon was doing no more or less than what every Latter-day Saint has learned to do from the earliest age: answer questions about the strange and secretive worlds you believe in.

No wonder he’s so good at it. He’s been doing this his entire life.

And no wonder that fandom fascinates me—the experience of being a fan and a religious person, and a Latter-day Saint in particular, have so many parallels. Our communities cannot exist without knowledge that’s only available to insiders, yet we desperately want to share those secrets. And no matter what status we might achieve in the world, we always feel like we’re making a constant fight for legitimacy. I thought of an essay by the Latter-day Saint journalist McKay Coppins in the Atlantic. Coppins recounts that when The Book of Mormon was having massive success lampooning his faith on Broadway, the church took out a full-page ad in the play program. “You’ve seen the play—now read the book!” When Coppins heard of this, he thought it was a savvy, playful coup—“a testament to Mormon niceness”—and he said so to a prominent New York theater critic. “No,” the critic said, “It’s because your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

How else to describe fandom, even at the peak of its powers?

I began to notice something about the Worldhopper Passport. It had been carefully designed to get us antisocial nerds to be social.

One stamp could be obtained by sticking tiny plastic beads to a piece of sticky paper, which would create a map of Roshar, the world of the Stormlight Archive. The map was large and the beads were many, so I found myself sitting at a round folding table, surprisingly engrossed by the tactile satisfaction of the activity, and chatting with a complete stranger. I discovered that she had travelled from Connecticut to be here.

“No way! I’m living in Boston. I flew in on Thursday.”

“So did I!”

She had traveled to Dragonsteel solo. She was one of the few among her friends who had read Brandon Sanderson, although she was trying to get them to read more.

“How’s the convention been for you?” I asked. “I’ve never really been to conventions before, so I don’t know what to compare it to.”

“Neither have I,” she said. “But it’s been great. Everyone has been so nice.”

We chatted about the books, the convention, and New England as we worked on the puzzle. Eventually I took my leave—there were other stamps to chase, after all. But I walked away with a spring in my step.

The interactive aspect didn’t end with the stamps, because turning in stamps was rewarded with the Storydeck packs. And because the cards in each pack were random, it was impossible to complete a set without trading. Some of the hall’s limited seating had already been colonized by people sorting, swapping, and making deals.

The stamp-eligible activities had also been organized in such a way that I frequently found myself discovering new Sanderson subcultures. One panel I attended was for Spanish-language fans. The crowd filled only a third of one of the smaller conference rooms but was terrifically energetic. A roll call from the panelists established that people had travelled from as far as Spain, Uruguay, Colombia, and Peru. One guy hovered back and forth with a phone on a selfie stick, livestreaming the event for a popular Spanish-language Cosmere podcast. Sitting in the back, I followed along with my rusty missionary Spanish.

“I couldn’t believe it when I read Jasnah’s character,” one panelist exclaimed. She had travelled from Argentina and was cosplaying as that very character, wearing a fabulous purple dress in the Stormlight Archive style, her jet-black hair elaborately arranged. “I was like, there’s this Mormon guy in the United States that’s describing my life!”

Other activities I had little interest in. Cosplay, for example. I loved observing people’s costumes from a distance—men in blue military-style coats holding spears and swords; women in long dresses with their left hands covered up; an incredible full suit of armor with glowing light effects; someone, hilariously, dressed as a famous building—but I had no interest in dressing up myself. And as the card trading became more intense towards the end of the convention, I still found it awkward to insert myself into the haggling, even though people were typically generous. One trade left me irritated; he could tell how badly I needed one card to complete a set and extracted more from me than I thought he deserved.

And there was one thing I was missing. On the final day, missing only a few cards to complete my Storydeck, I sidled over to the information booth.

“Hey, do you guys know what I’m supposed to do with a Silverlight key? Someone gave one to me and I’m not sure what it’s for yet.”

“Can I see it?” the staff member asked.

I produced the key out of the plastic box where I’d been storing my Storydeck cards. She turned it over in her hands.

“I think this is just something someone gave you. It’s not connected to the Storydeck at all.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” she continued, mercifully not seeming to notice my embarrassment, “lots of people here are doing fun little things like that. I’ve been handing out stormlight spheres. You want one?”

She held out an ordinary marble. I took the marble and the key, mumbled my thanks, and sped off before I melted to the floor in shame. I’d thought I’d been specially chosen for my devotion, when the key had been . . . well, not anything. I couldn’t even remember what Silverlight keys were supposed to do in the books. So I’d probably missed an in-joke, too.

The only thing to do was to turn in my last few stamps at the tent. By the third day, Storydeck had metastasized and seized control of the convention. The line to get cards was half an hour long and table space had run out, forcing conventiongoers to sit on the floor as they organized their cards and haggled, clogging the hallways and the corners of panel rooms. I got in line and struck up a light conversation with the people around me, shaking our heads and laughing at our own mania.

I was nearly into the tent when someone called my name, and a few bends in the line behind me, I discovered a friend I hadn’t seen since our days together at BYU. She was attending with her husband and having a great time, and we fell into an easy rhythm as we caught up on each other’s lives since undergrad.

“I’ve been doing a lot of writing,” I told her. “Actually, I’m planning on writing about Dragonsteel for Wayfare. Have you heard of Wayfare or Faith Matters? I think it’d be right up your alley.”

She interjected quickly and clearly, “We aren’t really active in the church right now.”

I don’t think I let my disappointment show. We moved on to other topics and soon hugged and said our goodbyes. I walked away happy to have seen her, but the unease I had been feeling at the beginning of the convention had returned. Except now, it was about being a different kind of outsider, of knowing that someone I loved had disavowed the community that mattered most to me. Of knowing they had gone somewhere I was unwilling to follow, however much I might love them.

But I was surprised to find, only a few hours later, that the sting had already disappeared. It didn’t take me long to realize why. We had bonded over the more immediate link of being at Dragonsteel. Brandon Sanderson had given us a different story to build from.

The next day, I was flying back to Boston.

At my airport gate were the same people I’d noticed on the flight out. All silent, their noses buried in Wind and Truth. I wanted to make conversation, but felt immensely awkward. The convention was already fading into a colorful dream . . . or worse. My whirlwind of obsession over the passport, the Storydeck, the small celebrities, all the little trinkets I’d collected—maybe it had been a spasmodic delusion.

“We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own,” the early Latter-day Saint apostle Orson F. Whitney once declared. But I hadn’t experienced any truly transcendent art at Dragonsteel Nexus. I didn’t fly home with a spiritual awakening. Instead, I flew home with a key, a marble, a deck of cards, and a copy of Wind and Truth. Secrets that should have connected me with the people near me in the airport, but didn’t. They were secrets I felt I’d stumbled into, trespassing on what should have belonged to a real fan.

But I could still see the smile on the staff member’s face as she gave me the marble, the twinkle in the panelists’s eye as he handed me the Key, the generosity of so many card traders helping me complete my deck.

How do we make communities? In our day, we’re accustomed to thinking of communication between two people as the attempt to accurately share internal truths, to “bridge the gap” between our minds, to achieve something approaching the mind meld of more perfect beings, be they Vulcans or elves. As the media theorist John Durham Peters explains, communication in this way is described in the terms of “transmission at a distance—making contact, tuning in or out, being on the same wavelength, getting good or bad vibes;” communication breakdown is a problem “of proper tuning or noise reduction.” The vision of fandom as a community may therefore be to find those souls with whom communication is possible because the maps in your head and the stories of your heart are most readily transmissible—or might only be conveyable—between those who are already attuned to the same maps and stories. One can at last pass through the gates of the fortress of solipsism with other fans.

But what if it’s impossible to transport our innermost truths into another? What if we can only leave tracks that others have to interpret? Then communication isn’t a matter of matching receiver to signal. Then secrets can never be shared because they are always received by an imperfect decoder; then secrets die the moment they’re sent. In fact, Peters proposes, all communication might ultimately be “indistinguishable from communication with the dead.”

Maybe Brandon meant something different than I thought when he said there was room for everyone in the Dragonsteel community. Maybe a community could be borderless, but not because it gave up on discerning opinion or taste. Maybe community meant discerning that a story you loved had put another fan in your orbit and deciding that their presence—their fact of being—deserved your attention. Good taste or bad taste, passionate or casual, near or far, dead or alive.

Maybe, instead of a secret, all we can send is a key, a marble, a passport, a book. Keys, all of them: an invitation, a promise, an expression of faith. We found each other. Come find me again.

A promise to build a world together.

Joseph Smith saw in a vision that heaven would be located on earth itself. Here is where the human family will dwell, here is where we make good on the promises we’ve made to each other. The keys to the kingdom unlock this same door again and again and again.

Earth is where every secret will be revealed.

At the release party Q&A, a fan in a gray sweater had approached the microphone. “On your podcast, you were talking about authors who you felt wrote something revolutionary and literary and beautiful that changed people’s lives. And you mentioned that you felt that you had not quite reached that point. I’m wondering, what do you feel you need to do to reach that point, and,” he added a little mischievously, “do you have any plans to get there?”

The audience laughed. So did Brandon.

“Here’s the sad thing,” he said. “I think to get there most of us can’t still be around. Go look and see what the bestsellers were on the New York Times list in any given year and recognize how few of those you recognize. . . . Most of us don’t write something that changes the nature of a genre. That’s okay. We’re here to change people’s lives. Maybe, in a hundred years, people will look back and be like, ‘And then Sanderson came along and the way he approached magic and worldbuilding and storytelling is still today having huge ripple effects.’ That would be awesome. But that’s not why I write.”

It’s the simple answers, the foolish and weak answers, that are the hardest to accept. Brandon knows he’s going to die—that his works might die, that they are in a way dead from the moment they leave his hands. The communities founded on those books will also die because every community overflows its limits, absorbs and surrenders to its competitors and compatriots, rises again in new forms and configurations. But Brandon also knows that death isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing would be to not use his talents to create something that brings people together. Why not do that through books? Why not create new worlds to unite us within the world we live in?

And if our Miltons and Shakespeares look different than what we were expecting, maybe it will be because we knew better. We were too busy building the scaffolding of heaven on the site where heaven will exist, right here on earth.

“In eternity this world will be Troy,” Marilynne Robinson writes in Gilead, “and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” As my friends and I exited the Salt Palace on the second night of the convention, smog smothered the streets so thickly we could barely see to the end of the next block. It looked like nothing so much as a scene straight out of Brandon’s Mistborn books, where a ruined city is perpetually enveloped by mysterious mists. And sure enough, there were cosplayers everywhere, posing in their mistcloaks, taking pictures and laughing. Cars rumbled out of the mist and disappeared again like ghosts, the skyscrapers swallowed and shrouded as if to prefigure the fact that they, too, would someday vanish. Construction crane arms swung in the haze, their lights pinwheeling above our heads like a marching band of angels executing a turn before dispersing once again.

A country singer was playing at the stadium down the street. Clusters of men and women in jeans and cowboy boots emerged from the smog and walked past the worldhoppers exiting the Salt Palace. Neither group seemed to realize the other was there, two worlds flowing in parallel, never touching. I wanted to take one of the concert-goers by the arm, spin them in a dance, and say, “Can’t you see what’s happening here? Can’t you see how good we are to each other?”

But I didn’t. Some secrets could be shared, and some could wait. But one day, maybe in eternity, all our stories would be revealed to each other. This was a promise I could keep.

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Jeremiah Scanlan is an attorney by day, novelist by night, birdwatcher by both. Most recent lifer: American goshawk(!!), Cantwell, AK.

Art by Esther Hi’ilani Candari (@hiilanifinearts), illustrator for Brandon Sanderson, Isles of the Emberdark.

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I have been arrested once in my life, for selling the wrong kind of art on the street. I had a date that night, and I was able to convince the precinct to let me go a little early so I could make it to dinner, but not before procuring my first (and hopefully last) splotchy-faced mug shot. Selling art on the street without a license is not illegal. However, the officer who arrested me determined that the particular art form I was selling (stained glass) was a craft, rather than art, and therefore was not protected under the first amendment.

What is craft, and how does it differ from art? This question, to me, strikes at the deeper issue of whose voice is deemed worthy of being heard, and I would define craft as art deemed “women’s work” that the consumer economy has chosen to devalue. In every society, women have gathered in groups to produce practical art forms in community. When I visited Samoa last winter, I learned about Tapa, a traditional form of ceremonial cloth stamped and painted by women to carry sacred meaning. Closer to home, my family for generations has gathered together at bridal and baby showers to tie quilts in community. We take turns leading “Sun Valley crafts” on family reunions, and gather for the highly anticipated annual “Christmas craftapalooza” and wreath making night. No holiday, and no family member over about two years old, is safe from crafting. Crafting is about creativity and beauty—in other words, art—but it is also fundamentally about community, relationship-building, and love. All of which makes it, to me, profoundly feminist.

Last week, the New York Times published a podcast discussion initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” later rebranded “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” The original title made for some fun memes, and drove some of my friends to cancel their subscriptions to the Times. In it, columnist Ross Douthat interviews socially conservative thinkers Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargent on their critiques of liberal feminism as relates to how the workplace functions in the U.S. Libresco Sargent argues that the modern workplace has failed women by looking down on dependence in a species that is fundamentally interdependent, particularly during phases of women’s lives such as pregnancy and child rearing. In other words, the workplace has not risen to meet the inherent biological needs of women.

Andrews, meanwhile, argues that women are incapable of meeting the inherent needs of the workplace, at least when they form a relative majority in a given group. Per Andrews’s “great feminization hypothesis,” as outlined in her essay The Great Feminization, too many women have entered various traditionally masculine professions due to affirmative action and anti-discrimination efforts. As a result, they have weakened the workforce, infusing it with “wokeness,” and replacing meritocracy, hearty debate, and rule of law with emotionality, passive aggressiveness, and cancel culture. Per Andrews, “everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” Cancel culture (a term Andrews seems to use interchangeably with “wokeness”) is “simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

I was unfamiliar with the great feminization hypothesis prior to reading the NY Times piece, but I have since spent time with Andrews’s essay, and I think it deserves a place in the discussion about gender in 2025. As a physician who works in the fairly female-dominated field of pediatrics, I agree that there are typical changes that occur in group dynamics when groups are primarily female or male. I also agree with Andrews that the goal of feminism should not be to achieve numerical equality in every profession.

But I disagree with her on two main levels. First, rather than undermining institutions, I believe that the presence of at least a meaningful minority of women tends to enrich and strengthen the functioning of most groups. Second, my reason for believing we should not force numerical equality in every profession is not because women present an existential threat to the functioning of these professions, but rather because I am primarily concerned with wanting humans to live rich and meaningful lives, and I am not convinced that income generation is a good metric for this goal.

I am sure that there are some women who’ve chosen not to pursue certain careers because they felt pressured to stay home and raise kids, but I think there are far more women today who deprioritize careers relative to other aspects of life from a position of empowerment. I respect these women as fellow feminists (wanting to live a meaningful life is why I chose my career too!); and if anything, I think our society could benefit from more emphasis on non-income-generating care and community building for both men and women, rather than less. I’m convinced women belong in any workplace they feel drawn to; but I also want to live in a society that values work for the worth that it adds to the world, regardless of income.

Regarding Andrews’s thesis, while there is far more variation within genders than between them, statistical differences do exist between men and women, many of which relate to group dynamics. In the medical field, for instance, female providers on average tend to downplay their own status, ask more questions relating to social and emotional factors, and explicitly validate patients’ experiences. One study examining female vs male physicians’ patterns of communications sums this up as “a patient-centered communication style that inspires patient reciprocation and is likely to reflect a more intimate therapeutic milieu of heightened engagement, comfort, and partnership.” Other studies have supported Andrews’s argument that men are statistically more risk-taking and focused on competition over collaboration.

Whether these differences are learned or biological may not matter as much as recognizing that when leveraged wisely, both “masculine” and “feminine” patterns of behavior are beneficial to society as a whole. An extreme in any trait without the moderating effect of other traits tends to be suboptimal for a workplace or other group, and my preference is for groups that benefit from some of the competitiveness, risk-taking, focus on profits, and over-confidence of the average man, as well as the caring, creativity, collaboration, caution, and idealism of the average woman. But what do the data say regarding Andrews’s more ominous assertions? Does an influx of women in a given field lead to more emotional decision making, poorer outcomes, or less dedication to truth seeking and rule of law? Are “female modes of interaction . . . not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions”?

This argument does not appear to play out in my own profession. Men and women score equally on objective measures of affective variation (aka emotionality), and women are not statistically more likely to act based on emotion rather than rationality at work. Female physicians, for instance, are more likely than male physicians to follow evidence-based practice and clinical consensus guidelines in patient care, medicine’s form of “rule of law.” Female surgeons have fewer complications, possibly relating to their more methodical/slower operating times on average. Female clinicians spend more time with patients, are more likely to involve family members and patients in clinical decision making, which could be seen as more emotion-driven, but they also achieve lower mortality rates and readmission rates than male physicians in settings where patients are randomized to physicians based on call schedules. The data in my field of practice are clear: Women have not ruined the practice of medicine, they have improved it.

This is not to say that medicine would benefit from an all-female workforce. Men bring strengths to group dynamics as well; a collaborative approach is helpful, but more direct or assertive styles of communication, as are typically seen in all-male groups, provide balance, too. And I am not arguing that only men are to blame for any bad outcomes in medicine. To do so would be to fall prey to an upside-down version of a common error, which is to fault women when things go wrong.

Take “cancel culture,” which Andrews sees as a consequence of women’s biological drive to care more about empathy and group cohesion than reason. I agree with Andrews that cancel culture poses a danger to society, but I disagree that it is the fault of one gender or political leaning, and I disagree that it has anything to do with empathy or “wokeness.” One can certainly engage in cancel culture in feminine ways. But history abounds with more masculine examples of cancelation, from the Salem witch trials to McCarthyism, to Mao’s cultural revolution, and to the tone of our current political environment in which collaboration with one’s political opponents is far too seldom seen as a strength. Cancel culture is fundamentally about silencing and invalidating anyone with a perspective different from our own, and in that sense, it is a manifestation of contempt rather than empathy. It can be seen in arresting someone for selling the wrong kind of art, in the literal cancellations of newspaper subscriptions for publishing the wrong opinion article, and in the assertion that conservative feminism doesn’t exist in retorts to the NY Times piece published by Glamour and Ms Magazine. The knee-jerk reaction to the article itself proves one of the article’s central points, namely that feminism, narrowly defined, is being used by some as an ideological justification for shutting down debate by dismissing anyone with an opposing view. Not only are self-identified conservative feminists wrong . . . they don’t even exist!

But conservative feminists do exist, along with many other types of feminists, all of whom add to the rich tapestry of conversation about what it means to be a woman, to value women, and to respect them. First-wave feminists fought for my right to vote and to own property. Second-wave feminists argued for economic and professional equality, the leveling of gendered hierarchy. Of course these feminists are correct that women are equally capable of excelling in traditionally male-dominated fields, with minor partial exceptions relating primarily to differences in physical size, speed, and strength in athletics. At the same time, I agree with others that given some potential inherent differences on average between men and women, these differences should be celebrated, rather than diminished. Where one iteration of feminism argues that masculinity as expressed via patriarchy is harmful to women and should be dismantled entirely, another perspective labeled, perhaps, conservative or cultural feminism contends that typically gendered activities focused on home, parenting, and other non-income-generating pursuits should be equally respected as options women can choose not because they are oppressed, but because those forms of work are inherently meaningful. The New York Times discussion of Helen Andrews’s article uses the broad terms liberal and conservative to categorize different forms of feminism, but we could also draw distinctions between individualistic feminism vs collectivist feminism, ecofeminism, intersectional feminism, data feminism and more. Regardless of the inherent limitations of any terms we may use, the more perspectives we are able to hear and learn from, the better.

As a pediatrician, I am tremendously grateful to first- and second-wave feminists for making my own career path possible. At the same time, I appreciate that not all feminisms focus on individual career or economic advancement, instead centering family, relationships, strong communities, social welfare, or other goals as paramount. To me these approaches are complementary, a recognition that as humans we have both material and spiritual needs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is inescapably patriarchal and hierarchical in ways that can be difficult to grapple with for many women (myself included). But it is also a church that places families at the center of the gospel. None of the hierarchies of church leadership endure after death in LDS theology, but families do, or at least can. In that sense, the trappings of ecclesiastical hierarchy—prophets, apostles, stake presidents, bishops, Relief Society presidents and the like—are temporary scaffolds present primarily to support the building of the foundational, enduring structure of family relationships. And who is primarily seen as responsible for building families in the church? Women.

Professionally as well, my ability to meet objective health metrics for patients is entirely dependent on non-income-generating work done by families and to a large degree by women. I examine kids in the office and have brief conversations going over history, diagnosis and plan, but the parent is the one who truly provides the actual preventive and medical care the vast majority of the time. In this sense, medicine is yet another scaffold that exists primarily to support the central structure of families. This pattern is common to many professions; humans do not thrive in isolation, and we owe our success as a society not only to economic structures, innovation, worker productivity and rule of law, but also to largely unrecognized and underappreciated forms of profoundly meaningful relational work done primarily by women. I am paid for the work I do professionally but not for my efforts as a mother, sibling, friend, partner, neighbor, etc. But is financial reward the best measure of worth?

In his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Don Thompson explores the question of how contemporary art is defined and valued, with particular attention to a rotting preserved shark that was sold for $12 million as The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living. Thompson argues that prices in the world of contemporary fine art are shaped by the desire of the ultra-rich to flaunt their wealth by owning something everyone knows is exorbitantly expensive. “Works of art, which represent the highest level of spiritual production, will find favor in the eyes of the bourgeois only if they are presented as being liable to directly generate material wealth,” he states. In our overly consumerist society, this generation of wealth is achieved not solely through artistic talent (the top echelons of popular artists such as Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons don’t actually create much of the art they sell; they “conceptualize it,” and pay others to produce it) but through marketing, branding, and hype. “You are nobody in contemporary art until you have been branded,” Thompson explains.

Applying one narrow view of liberal feminism to contemporary art, the goal of women’s empowerment might be to have more female “top contemporary artists” who are selling works of arguable absurdity for millions of dollars. Certainly, economic measures like equal opportunity for financial advancement and equal pay for equal work are important, and my purpose here is not to argue against those aims, but rather in favor of expansive conversations about feminism that include other perspectives. After all, few would argue that a shark in formaldehyde marketed by a trendy brand of artist actually adds more insight or value to the world than a quilt made by an Amish community, or a piece of textile art inspired by traditional weaving. In light of that, should we be satisfied with the goal of solely having an equal number of women earning equal money in our current hyper-capitalist society? Or should we also seek to recognize the value and spirituality of more communal and traditionally “feminine” forms of art and work, as well as more “feminine” ways of engaging in professional spaces, and to elevate their role in our society, regardless of who chooses to engage in them? Is fine art, in other words, actually more valuable than craft? Or do we only view it as such because we aren’t very good feminists?

To be a feminist is to acknowledge, learn from, and celebrate the inherent worth and equality of women alongside men. That can mean clearing out misconceptions about where women do belong (everywhere) and don’t belong (nowhere), and what forms of work women can feel called to (all of them). It can also mean calling into question a solitary view of human relations that focuses only on “masculine” measures of success, such as individual achievement and competition, broadening those metrics by adding to them the value of interdependence and community. It can mean supporting women who choose to work in traditionally male-dominated fields, but it should also mean supporting women—and men—who choose to focus their efforts in traditionally female forms of work. A capitalist view of the world may value things based solely on their economic worth. But a spiritual worldview, and a feminist worldview that embraces all iterations of female empowerment, ask more from us.

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Annie Edwards lives in Bountiful, Utah with her four kids and two dogs. She enjoys music, running, hiking, skiing, reading, working as a pediatrician, and crafting.

Art by Wari textile artists ca. 425–1100.

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To read another Wayfare contributor’s perspective on The Great Feminization Hypothesis, read Sharlee Mullins Glenn’s Toward A Great Mutualization.

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Weigard A, Loviska AM, Beltz AM. Little evidence for sex or ovarian hormone influences on affective variability. Sci Rep. 2021;11(1):20925. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-00143-7

Samantha C. Paustian-Underdahl, Caitlin E. Smith Sockbeson, Alison V. Hall, Cynthia Saldanha Halliday. Gender and evaluations of leadership behaviors: A meta-analytic review of 50 years of research, The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 6, 2024.

Tsugawa Y, Jena AB, Figueroa JF, Orav EJ, Blumenthal DM, Jha AK. Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates for Medicare Patients Treated by Male vs Female Physicians. JAMA Intern Med. 2017 Feb 1;177(2):206-213. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.7875. PMID: 27992617; PMCID: PMC5558155.

Blohm M, Sandblom G, Enochsson L, Österberg J. Differences in Cholecystectomy Outcomes and Operating Time Between Male and Female Surgeons in Sweden. JAMA Surg. 2023 Nov 1;158(11):1168-1175. doi: 10.1001/jamasurg.2023.3736. PMID: 37647076; PMCID: PMC10469280.

Heybati K, Chang A, Mohamud H, Satkunasivam R, Coburn N, Salles A, Tsugawa Y, Ikesu R, Saka N, Detsky AS, Ko DT, Ross H, Mamas MA, Jerath A, Wallis CJD. The association between physician sex and patient outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Health Serv Res. 2025 Jan 17;25(1):93. doi: 10.1186/s12913-025-12247-1. PMID: 39819673; PMCID: PMC11740500.

Roter DL, Hall JA, Aoki Y. Physician Gender Effects in Medical Communication: A Meta-analytic Review. JAMA. 2002;288(6):756–764. doi:10.1001/jama.288.6.756.

Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day is an epic poem, a style hearkening to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s Iliad, or the epic of Gilgamesh. A narrative poem, aptly named epic, Mullins Glenn’s focus is no less ambitious than the heart of Mormonism’s Plan of Salvation: creation, fall, atonement, salvation. Ambitious as it is, Mullins Glenn manages a text that avoids didacticism while weaving together core tenets of Latter-day Saint belief with remarkable freshness.1

In this sense, Mullins Glenn’s offering is a work of theopoetics, a theological process that uses poetic forms to present not irrefutable theological dogma but expressions of relationality and encounter—making theology from scraps rather than from blueprints.2 Theopoetics insists that God emerges from the brokenness of the world, not always in glistening grandeur but more often in the aching woundedness of touch, gently, right where it hurts.

In reshaping the central pillars of Latter-day Saint thought, Mullins Glenn is not presenting a densely fortressed theological argument. Rather, she is suggesting—imagining—anew. To join her imagination is to gain new perspective; to behold, by immersion in the poetic word, a vision of what might be possible without being tied to that vision. This uniquely cultivated tone may be what allows the poem to glisten as it spans the Latter-day Saint story of salvation. Mullins Glenn’s prose soars, with dazzling moments of song like this one:

O light resplendent, light divine

Which shineth forth from God’s own face

Same light which giveth sight to eye

And lendeth life, and filleth space.3

Yet the prose is less grand than the arc of the poem itself, meant to be a story experienced rather than extracted attention to a singular verse or two.4 With extraordinary tenderness and gentleness, the arc encompasses creation, the meaning of suffering and evil (theodicy), the human condition (theological anthropology), and the salvation and eternal life of earthly creation (eschatology). In only sixty pages, including simple but evocative illustrations, this depth of engagement seems ambitious, but the poem’s gentle openness explores rather than proclaims the profundity of existence. It is this work and play of imagination that allows the poem to speak so deeply and yet so broadly.

For instance, Mullins Glenn brings forward a complex theology born of distinctive Latter-day Saint ideas yet resurrected with forms that give new life to the whole. She spends significant time on the premortal existence and its importance for human agency and consent—a theme that has profound importance throughout the text. But the premortal existence narrative also includes without preamble or apology the presence of women, including “gracious Ora, daughter of the light . . . brave Adira too, and Nava, Ezrah, Abigail, and more.”5 Mother God is introduced as the fullness of Elohim, the two together forming the wholeness of God.6 This enriching of the present shards of our common story is somewhat reminiscent of a midrash,7 the filling in of gaps found in the scriptural text, but its distinctive characteristic is less filling in than reimagining or imagining anew.

The gentleness of her imagined world opens new possibilities for a narrative most Latter-day Saint readers are familiar with. The presence of embodied, emotionally complex characters challenges nagging notions of human depravity. Her depiction of premortal beings suggests tender, brave, relationally-woven, intelligent souls who work with their God to forge pathways forward. This relational depth opens new dimensions for understanding the “problem” humanity finds itself in, including the meaning of sin, suffering, and relationship with the divine. A reimagined beginning, subtly but not radically different from the old and familiar, ripples new meanings and questions into the whole fabric of faith. The problems of sin, suffering, and relationship with the divine take on different hues in Mullins Glenn’s imagination. Rather than being defects in the human person or consequences of poorly exercised agency, sin and suffering are natural consequences of a vulnerable humanity.

Theological response to this woundedness, for Mullins Glenn, is light. Light, the essence of the divine, is likewise at the core of all living things. We lose light, our true being, as we are wounded by sin and despair. But the light remains our inheritance and true substance. Through relationship with Jesus, we can gather light and move to a fullness of being. Thus, relationship with the divine reconciles the core of our vitality, helping us move toward the fullness of self and unity with all things.

This is markedly distinct from other approaches, both within and without the LDS Church. Reading the human problem of sin as a defect requiring correction in Eve’s consumption of the apple, for example, has colored centuries of interpretation, including John Milton’s depiction of the Fall. Milton’s Adam is (apparently by nature) delighted at Eve’s beauty and “submissive charms” on which he looks with “superior love.”8 His Eve is the corruptive influence, gesturing to entrenched Christian teachings about women.9 Mullins Glenn follows strands of Latter-day Saint tradition in reworking this narrative, casting Eve as an intelligent agent rather than a corrupting influence.

But in fleshing out and dignifying Eve and Adam, Mullins Glenn does not shy away from some of the complexities surrounding this creation myth. Her deeper concern seems to be with the relationship between humanity and deity and the apparent contradiction in communication portrayed in traditional depictions of the Fall. The Gods were not, in other words, hoping that their Eve would make the right choice despite their explicit commandments against it. Lucifer as the serpent genuinely deceives Eve in Mullins Glenn’s narration, intending to destroy her. Rather than eating an apple, the serpent Lucifer kills an innocent sheep from which Eve partakes. It is the advent of death that allows Eve and Adam to become carnal. This death, then, at the behest of Eve, represents the first sin.

While the choice to eat allows Eve to gain knowledge and experience, it also takes an innocent life; it has consequences. Eve did not know that in agreeing to partake the serpent would slaughter the sheep. She gains knowledge through an innocent sacrifice. The parallels to Christ’s passion narrative are already ripe, but the payoff for Mullins Glenn’s distinct imagination now comes to fruition. In her version, Eve’s choice was not the only way; God was not issuing contradictory and ostensibly manipulative decrees. The choice Eve made had consequences, positive and negative, including the vulnerability of mortality. The need for a Savior is thus not to compensate for something fundamentally and irreconcilably wrong about fallen humans but to allow them to tether themselves to light and so make their illuminated way back home.

This is a distinctly nuanced concept of sin and salvation. Moreover, it is a distinctive atonement theology ultimately reflecting what might be called a Christus Victus atonement model, where Jesus frees humanity from their bondage that they might be truly human, or in Mullins Glenn’s terms, truly light. She is careful to steer clear of substitution, ransom, or satisfaction theories, which undermine the theological anthropology she espouses. Sin cannot be a form of depravity that fundamentally alienates humanity from God, and it cannot be the helpless predilection of fallen humanity that nothing but payment to justice can diffuse. Sin must be the consequence of vulnerability, and its salve must be within the fundamental nature of the human being. This core nature, this true human nature, is light.

This light, we are reminded, is equivalent to God. Humans, the children of God, can become more and more like this light through both agential choice and the merciful help of the divine. The light of our core nature can become, indeed, brighter and brighter. The significance here is paramount: If humans are fundamentally light at their deepest core, they are fundamentally good. Accordingly, they are capable of genuinely choosing good. By contrast, a theological anthropology that assumes basic human depravity expects humans to choose poorly (sinfully) if left to themselves. The ability to volitionally choose light in concert with the deepest core of human nature, then, is pivotal to Mullins Glenn’s theological imagination of agency exercised for good and ill.

Agency, so central to Latter-day Saint theology, is thus paramount to Brighter and Brighter. It is choice (and, for Mullins Glenn, consent) that provides the experience necessary to learn. We are wont to choose amiss, not because of natural corruption but simply because we lack knowledge or experience. And in so choosing, we lose light, which light is our true nature.10 This is the central theological problem for Mullins Glenn, not corruption. We might consider sin a loss of light, a loss of our true nature, and suffering a consequence of a world of free choice. The follower’s task, then, is to grow in light. This is explained at the very beginning of the saga in the premortal council. Father God explains:

“It’s all about this vital light,” said El.

“The light you bear, the light you gain, the light you share.” He paused, then, smiling, looked around.

“The hoped-for aim is that you all become

pure conduits of light—receiving light,

bequeathing light in one continuous flow.

For this is truth eternal, that the more

you give, the greater your capacity

to reap, to grow, to learn, and to obtain.”11

In gently redirecting the problem that needed to be solved (human sin as vulnerability more than corruption), Mullins Glenn is expanding the parameters of possibility for what it means to be human, to be in relationship with the divine, and to follow the path of discipleship. Light is our true, unborrowed nature. With the link she makes to the premortal realm, this true nature is crucial. Always, between the divine and the human, there is deep love, tenderness, and gentleness. The anger and paternalism often found in depictions of God’s relationship to humankind are simply absent.12

Indeed, Mullins Glenn emphasizes the great depths of love that the divine parents traverse in order to accompany their children on their mortal journey. In addition to Jehovah’s agential choice to sacrifice himself on behalf of the human family, Mother God lays down her body for her children, choosing to take on the disembodied form of Spirit in order to accompany enfleshed spirits through mortality. Her body is laid with love at the foot of the Tree of Life, to be taken up again at the end of time when balance is restored to creation and the Mother takes her rightful place in the fullness of God. Mullins Glenn’s imagination here invokes Lehi and Nephi’s dream of Asherah, the symbol of the tree,13 and the presence and absence of the divine female throughout history. A consensual sacrifice in contrast with the viper’s attack of the lamb, God’s body is

Cocooned in living funerary pyre,

with cherubim and flaming sword to guard

the way. Then, in exhalation of

suspended animation, El, alone,

sealed off the Garden, reliquary of

the body that would rise again in glory

to restore the Earth to her Edenic state.14

It is through the efforts of Jehovah, El and Mother God (Elohim), and all the children of light that salvation, balance, and harmony are procured.

This is a powerful yet subtle shift, requiring refreshed language about power, hierarchy, and authority. The power of God is not strictly power over creation, but power for and with creation. The gathering of light is the gathering of this kind of power, a power that connects and welds and seals humans together by their own choice.

As a woman who feels the absence of the divine feminine keenly, I was moved by the depiction of a powerful deity’s sacrifice. I sympathize with Mullins Glenn’s choice to give a possible explanation for the aching gap in female representation, with her dignified and characteristic emphasis on agency. Moreover, I appreciate her eschatological gesture to the time when balance will be restored, even if I might quibble with the moves she makes. This is masterful storytelling: In contrast to proclamation, which insists on certainty, a storyteller can insist only on imagination. When I can imagine differently, I am living within an expansive story, one with boundaries flexible enough to create new life.

Mullins Glenn is clear: “I am not attempting to set forth doctrine; merely using imagination to present interesting (and feasible) new perspectives. Fundamentally, that is what Brighter and Brighter is—an offering of imagination.”15 As a work of imagination, Brighter and Brighter invites the reader to step into new possibilities, and its form enables this. In contrast to an academic paper, a novel, or an essay, which can function rather like a hammer in pressing a point, a poem glistens like a beam of light through a window. A poem can also sometimes evoke what other forms can only gesture to. The work of evoking, illuminating, imagining is deeply spiritual.

Yet our discourse often veers away from the translucent sheen of the poetic in favor of the more sturdy hues of prose. Yes, there are times for hammers and points. But in terms of spiritual life, we need the art of theopoetics—theology done through the imprecise medium of art and poetry. Rather like a mother dressing a child’s wounds, a work of art can nurse us in places we didn’t know were aching. A work of art can open our hearts to questions we want to ask but have not found words for, to curiosity that begs to be let out to play in the grass, to feelings of wonder and awe and sadness that have been corralled by prescriptive certainty. This is what Brighter and Brighter as a theopoetic work of art did for me, awakening new questions, new longing, new hope, new curiosity.

Creation, for Mullins Glenn, is ongoing, ex materia16 from the beginning. We as eternal beings are co-creators:

And as they exercised their will,

they co-created what the world would be.17

If we can continue to create what the world has been, will be, could be, might be, we can continue to create what our church might be and become. In this I reach with hope for work like Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day. It is perhaps especially with imagination, with theopoetics, that we can construct places of shelter against the storms of doubt, drought, and certainty. I hope that Mullins Glenn’s work will inspire renewed imagination in and attention to the cornerstones of Latter-day Saint faith so that we may continue to wonder together, exploring the halls and gardens of our living faith. Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day gestures toward a horizon of balance, nurtured by a creation imbued with light and bolstered by a Jehovah of abundant and flowing illumination. Tendril by tendril of unquenchable light, we might build the faith to imagine our way home.

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Kristen Blair is a practical theologian working on her PhD in Theology at the University of Toronto. She is focused on feminist interpretations of kenosis, exploring dimensions of submission, agency, and dependency. She loves good food, the good earth, and mothering her two babies.

Art by J. Kirk Richards.

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The night of Truth & Treason’s VIP pre-screening, I arrived to exactly the kind of buzz you come to expect before a big release. We struck our best red carpet poses at the step and repeat, nabbed our tickets, and settled into our seats. The Megaplex was in the heart of Utah County, and the theater whirred from the familiar exchanges of historians and foundations and tastemakers who frequent these events. We were all ready to post our hashtags and cheer.

However, sometime between the opening scene and the credits, we were transported. Or perhaps the room itself was transfigured. The standing ovation was reverent, like what you might expect to hear after a hymn if we applauded in our faith tradition. The theater had become a space of collective reckoning, perhaps even discomfort, calling back to the fervor of those youth firesides where you left knowing there were changes you needed to make. This was not sentimental filmmaking. It was spiritual in the most potent sense of the word, and the attempts to manufacture enthusiasm afterward fell flat in the face of what we had just witnessed. Genuine art holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away. After the screening, a friend told me the film had fundamentally altered his perspective.

Matt Whitaker’s Truth & Treason tells the true story of Helmuth Hübener, a sixteen-year-old Latter-day Saint from Hamburg who, in 1941, discovered his brother’s shortwave radio and began listening to banned BBC broadcasts. What he heard contradicted everything the Nazi propaganda machine had told him about the war, about Germany’s enemies, about the future of the Reich. Armed with a borrowed typewriter and red notecards stolen from the banned-books archive at City Hall where he worked, Helmuth began writing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets throughout Hamburg. He convinced his friends Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudi Wobbe to help him, slipping pamphlets into mailboxes and onto windshields, each one ending with a simple instruction: “This is a chain letter. Pass it on.”

Over eight months, they distributed hundreds. By February 1942, the Gestapo had arrested all three. Helmuth, taking full responsibility, was tried in August and executed by guillotine on October 27, 1942 at only 17—the youngest person put to death for resistance to the Nazi regime.

Nazi resistance films constitute their own established genre. Among the countless that exist, many are well-known and award-winning, such as Schindler’s List, Defiance, Resistance—even The Sound of Music. Though willing to strip bare the unrelenting, uncensored horror of the Nazis, these stories sometimes risk romanticizing the act of defiance, showing us heroes who change the course of history, or at least save lives, making their sacrifices count in ways we can measure and applaud. Truth & Treason offers no such comfort. More conversant with Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, which tells the story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter’s refusal to swear allegiance to Hitler, Whitaker’s film grapples with the emptiness that can accompany doing the right thing.

Like Hübener, Jägerstätter was executed for his convictions. Neither man’s resistance changed the outcome of the war. Neither saved Jewish lives in any measurable way. Neither toppled the regime or even slowed it down. And yet both films insist, quietly but firmly, that these men’s choices mattered profoundly—not because they altered history, but because their words stood as bedrock testaments to that which is axiomatically right, cleansing them from the blood and sins of their generation.

Where Malick’s film is contemplative and dreamlike, a three-hour meditation on faith and suffering that operates at the pace of prayer, Whitaker’s is far more accessible, more direct, perhaps slightly softer in its approach, while retaining a similar spiritual intensity. Truth & Treason isn’t perfect—more context for what really drives Helmuth would be welcome, and those answers may well exist in the expanded four-part limited series version. But it’s focused, and the real miracle is that it works at all, considering it was originally conceived as a series; that Whitaker managed to construct a coherent, emotionally satisfying feature from episodic material is a technical achievement that should not be underestimated. Each of these two films is about wrestling with what it costs to refuse complicity for one’s faith, even while condemned by fellow adherents of it. In this way these men are, perhaps, “as Job.”

It probably helped that Whitaker has been refining this story for two decades. In 2002, he directed Truth & Conviction, a documentary featuring interviews with Hübener’s surviving friend Karl-Heinz Schnibbe. The filmmaker literally looked up Schnibbe’s number in a Salt Lake City phone book and called him, beginning a relationship that would span years. Around 2008, with a feature screenplay for Truth & Treason by Whitaker and Ethan Vincent, Haley Joel Osment was cast as Helmuth Hübener and Max von Sydow as Judge Karl Engert. They even shot promotional footage with Osment as a proof of concept, but it never came to fruition. However, Whitaker never let go of the story.

The film begins with three boys standing up to a crowd of fellow Hitler Youth, and I think that’s important. We don’t hate these other kids just because they are Hitler Youth; so are our characters. Rather, we can observe how Hitler Youth is starting to affect them, or perhaps what kinds of beliefs and behavior benefit most from within it. Helmuth and his friends Karl-Heinz and Rudi are all Latter-day Saints, and like all young men of the church at that time, had been Boy Scouts until that was banned by the Nazis. Now they wear the same brown shirts as the bullies. They’re all German, all teenagers, all supposedly on the same side. What separates them is conviction.

Ewan Horrocks plays Helmuth with controlled restraint—not the passionate rebel of other resistance films, but a boy who becomes increasingly unable to stay quiet. He’s brilliant, working at City Hall as the youngest intern they’ve ever hired. And he’s excellent at writing propaganda for the Nazi machine. He likely would have done very well for himself simply staying in that lane, maintaining the pride of his parents and gaining admiration from his patriotic bishop.

However, one morning Helmuth’s Jewish-Mormon friend Salomon Schwarz is turned away from church, and together they watch their bishop post a sign at the door: “Jews Forbidden to Enter.” Shortly after, Salomon is taken away by the secret police. As forbidden BBC broadcasts continue to reveal the Reich’s lies, Helmuth realizes silence makes him complicit. His faith provides a moral vocabulary independent of the state. After he begins distributing his leaflets, the Gestapo assigns SS officer Erwin Mussener to hunt down their author. As both reluctant admirer and relentless pursuer of his quarry, Mussener functions like the film’s Javer.

A lot could be written about Mussener, made so tragically human by Rupert Evans as the loving father who does terrible things, and who suffers alongside other Germans as the war grinds on. The film recognizes that tyranny requires ordinary people to function, and that systems of oppression devour their own. But we’ve seen that story before. I’m sure it’s the Mormon in me, but the more interesting and challenging (albeit minor) character is Latter-day Saint Bishop and devout Nazi, Arthur Zander.

Daniel Betts plays Zander not as a bigot or an idiot, but as a decent, resolute man, who feels that his faith justifies his prudence. When Zander invokes the Twelfth Article of Faith to defend his sign—”We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law”—he is not twisting scripture. Feeling the rumblings of an unstable nation thirsty for order, Zander assimilates in order to survive; he is the uber patriot, the model minority, all to demonstrate that he is a good, normal, moral, law-abiding, country-loving citizen. The character that embodies the most Latter-day Saint traits and values, save Helmuth Hübener, is Arthur Zander – the man who wrote “excommunicated” on Helmuth’s membership record.

This is where Truth & Treason becomes genuinely subversive, even prophetic. Whitaker’s development of this story long predates our current political moment. He is not making a parable about 2025. And yet the film lands with the force of direct address precisely because it tells the truth without editorializing, without winking at the audience, without reassuring us that we would have been different. Great art simply tells the truth—it is we who politicize it by mapping what is happening around us onto it. If the film feels political, it is because of the time we are in. It would not have been political twenty years ago.

The relevance does not end there. Recent research by historian Stephen O. Smoot reveals that Nazi intelligence files from 1933 to 1939 demonstrate a fundamental incompatibility between Latter-day Saint doctrine and Nazi ideology. In five hundred pages of secret police documents, the Nazis wrote that “the doctrine of Mormonism is completely incompatible with [Nazism].” The tragedy of Zander and others like him is not just that they were seduced by an ideology incompatible with their faith, but that they also compromised their faith for a group that would never truly accept them. This irony has marked the faith from the beginning: Latter-day Saints yearn to assimilate into groups and movements which use the Mormons to secure power, and then readily devour them once they have done so. The weeks before and after the film’s release have been a sobering reminder of this inescapable aspect which seems to haunt the Latter-day Saint identity.

The files Smoot uncovered also show that while some members sympathized with the Nazi Party—like Zander—many German Latter-day Saints did not approve of the regime and refused to participate. Latter-day Saints did not ubiquitously flock to the Nazi party, a pernicious myth sometimes perpetuated. Perhaps we allow this to be said of us because there isn’t enough Hübener in how we interact. Standing for truth against your own culture is tense work. It feels lonely. It’s easier to comply, to accept what feels beyond our power, to perhaps even be sorry for existing. We’ve learned to survive that way, and the sympathetic Bishop Zander exemplifies this.

A few years after Helmuth was executed, fellow Latter-day Saint and Navy officer “Tommy” Monson was preparing to fight in World War II. After all the other religious practitioners had been sent to their respective worship services, Monson stood alone, thinking himself to be the only Latter-day Saint in his camp, until he realized that there were many other “Mormons” standing behind him. In 2011, now as leader of the worldwide Church, President Thomas S. Monson dared Latter-day Saints to “stand alone,” citing a rhyme he had learned in Primary. Even while honoring and sustaining the law, there will always exist within Mormonism an ongoing paradox, reminding the faith of its own history of prophetic dissent on the basis of conviction. “Dare to be a Mormon. Dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm. Dare to make it known.”

Hübener shows us what that looks like when the stakes are life and death. And just as there were more with President Monson than he thought, so it was with Hübener. His friend Rudi Wobbe later reported that of two thousand Latter-day Saints in Hamburg, only seven were pro-Nazi, though five happened to be in Helmuth’s congregation. The boy who thought he stood alone was too late to discover that others stood with him. But it does not have to be too late for us. We are only a few generations away from Helmuth, whose devoted friends consulted on the development of this film. Stephen Smoot recently presented his research to Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, whose father was a bitter opponent of both the Nazi and Communist regimes. Latter-day Saints need not conform to Nazis.

The final scenes offer no easy consolation. In the courtroom, Helmuth’s lawyer presents an escape: blame Karl-Heinz, sign the prepared statement, and save yourself—a proposition so absurdly hellbent on denying one’s faith, it’s worthy of a Book of Mormon villain. Helmuth sets down the document. Like Abinadi to the priests of Noah, he testifies that Germany is ruled by a lunatic fighting an unwinnable war. He tells the judge “your time will come. The judge will be judged, and truth will prevail.” He maintains that his “Father in Heaven knows I have done nothing wrong, and He will be the proper Judge in this matter.” The story gives catharsis without reward, and loss without visible redemption. And yet what remains is the example, the question of what we believe strongly enough to risk everything for.

Angel Studios was founded by Latter-day Saints and is headquartered in the heart of downtown Provo. Part of Angel’s business model includes only greenlighting films that pass its Angel Guild, a sort of B2C free market studio board, where thousands of paying members vote on what they want to see get distributed. This painstaking process has allowed Angel to cultivate a titanic evangelical audience—one which does not always reciprocate the same loyalty in return. Angel is frequently labeled “conservative” or “right-wing,” noted for championing the traditional values of their base in their work, and yet simultaneously scrutinized by that base for the religious identity of its owners. The distribution of the hit series The Chosen made this dynamic public: vocal segments of the show’s evangelical fanbase expressed such vocal alarm at the “Mormon involvement” behind the scenes, forcing creator Dallas Jenkins to repeatedly distance himself theologically. In these cases, Angel Studios ironically embodies that old tired attribute—tolerated by the credal Chistian, but on one critical condition: leave every trace of Mormonism at the door.

Perhaps this fervent gatekeeping is not without reason—we are “peculiar”, after all, or at least we’re supposed to be. As it would happen, the studio’s most distinctly Latter-day Saint film cannot help but also be its most quietly subversive. It has earned festival acclaim on the strength of its craft, not because it flatters the audience most likely to show up for a release. Truth & Treason refuses the easy comforts that often accompany stories of patriotism or obedience. It shows how propaganda can wear the costume of loyalty to country. It confronts the fact that, during Hübener’s trial, the Nazis themselves pointed to America’s history of Manifest Destiny as justification for conquest. And it asks whether a good and trusted bishop, committed to his nation, can mistake authoritarianism for righteousness. While critics have welcomed this honesty, the usual Angel box-office fervor has been notably absent, and the film’s returns have suffered because of it. Truth & Treason may land a little too close to home, leaving it, in the end, very Mormon indeed—by standing alone.

In a landscape crowded with reality-show and criminal caricatures of Latter-day Saint life, loud on conflict and thin on conviction, Truth & Treason feels like a needed course correction. It is the sort of “fair and accurate” representation the Church insists it longs for: a real Latter-day Saint authority figure who is well meaning, but flawed; and a Latter-day Saint hero who acts on his beliefs when it costs the most. Not popular, not profitable, but principled. Helmuth doesn’t sell a sanitized image of discipleship. He reveals what it looks like when a young Saint actually trusts his theology enough to let it govern his choices. Whitaker’s film assumes that we are capable of wrestling with complexity, that our faith can withstand scrutiny, that truth should not require translation to be understood.

As the world spins closer to days of chaos and tyranny and war and upheaval and “the earth… in commotion” and “the waves of the sea heaving themselves beyond their bounds”—to the last days, even—Latter-day Saints will find themselves deciding whether they would despise someone like Helmuth Hübener for his youth, or whether they would reckon with his treason as “an example of the believers… in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”

Call me a zealot, but I believe Matt Whitaker, Kaleidoscope Pictures, and Angel Studios have become the instruments of delivering precisely the film we need right now, whether we want it or not. For years I’ve called for a new wave of Latter-day Saint cinema — one that embraces its Mormonism without apology, yet allows a universal and accessible story to lead. A cinema not weighed down by sentimentality, but willing to interrogate itself, and executed with excellence in every technical dimension. As I left the theater that night, I had to admit that this may well be the most important Mormon film ever made. And with its expanded series available to stream, it ought to be watched widely among Latter-day Saints, discussed seriously, and allowed to do its uncomfortable work.

This review is a chain letter. Pass it on.

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Barrett Burgin is an award-winning writer and director from South East Appalachia. He has made several well-received films, including THE NEXT DOOR, THE ANGEL, JAVA JIVE, and A SCOUT IS KIND. Barrett received a BA in Media Arts from Brigham Young University, graduating with Honors in 2019.

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One of the baseline assumptions of polite society is materialism, specifically the belief that all real phenomena can be explained through reference to the physical world (the interactions of leptons, quarks and energy). This is easy enough to accept, and seems true on certain levels. No one is astounded when a dropped rock falls instead of floating, or when a buildup of electrons produces a lightning bolt. However, there is a fuzzier area of conflict, where materialist assumptions begin to rub up against human perceptions of ourselves and our world that seem innate, almost beyond debate. 

Philosophy of the mind is such an area—a strange branch of knowledge, focused on questions of consciousness, mental cognition, qualia (subjective, conscious experience), and related phenomena. Despite all the academic jargon, it is surprisingly intuitive; all it asks for is reasoning, careful observation of internal thoughts, and the natural deductions that arise from these observations. Still, investigating a new field is always easier with an introduction, and David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life is an excellent mid-difficulty foray into this section of human knowledge. And, more importantly for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I found it to be an exciting invitation to return to our early Mormon heritage of material and spiritual mysticism. The book unpacks the undergirding assumptions of our largely materialist computer age and provides alternatives that feel instinctively correct. And yet, despite Hart’s skillful refutation of these material premises, his book leaves us free to choose which world we wish to live in: one totally comprehensible, but dead at the heart, or a world full of wonder, spirit and mind that is immaterial, and thus ultimately incomprehensible in human terms.

I have always read a reasonably eclectic selection of books. All Things Are Full of Gods is nonetheless one of the strangest books I have read this decade. It is a Platonic dialogue, meaning it reads like a transcription of a conversation rather than a work of philosophy or nonfiction. The conversation is between four retired Greek gods debating ontology, epistemology, physicalism, and spiritualism. One, Hephaistos, takes up the fight for materialism. The other three, led by Psyche (Greek for soul), represent the view that mind (or perhaps spirit), rather than matter, forms the basis of reality. 

The Platonic dialogue format has notable strengths: Regardless of how artificial and structured the conversations may be, the back-and-forth makes the academic dialogue easier to follow than reading dueling theses or treatises. At times it’s also legitimately funny, as when, after Hephaistos’ gibe about Eros’ mother Aphrodite (who is also Hephaistos’ oft-straying wife) is thrown back in his face, Hephaistos sheepishly admits that their “marriage counseling has been going quite well as of late.” The dialogue also forces a full presentation and defense of the materialist assumptions that underpin modern life, rather than a “straw man” version. And while Psyche’s triumph over Hephaistos is a foregone conclusion (and you can sometimes tell, as when Hephaistos concedes too quickly in the interest of moving the book along), overall, the victory feels earned.

So, what do these characters argue about, and how does Psyche earn her victory? Psyche starts the argument with a series of claims she deduced from the experience of deciding to pick an especially beautiful rose:  

[M]ental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material and that the material order to the degree that it exists at all [...] originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as a result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God. 

Hephaistos, the materialist, disagrees with each of these suppositions, and, over the course of six days, the four gods debate these points, with citations from philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern.

As an example, one key insight, developed and reargued throughout the book, is that, as children of the internet era, we tend to think of everything as a computer, including ourselves. This makes some sense; the computer is a world-shaking invention, making what was once unimaginable (finding million-digit primes, mapping the universe), trivial. However, just as our grandparents in the atomic age wrongly analogized everything (from geopolitics to sexuality, to the atomic bomb and nuclear containment regardless of how stretched the metaphor), in the computer age, we are comparing something rich and miraculous—human consciousness—to a box of silicon wafers. As Psyche points out, we speak of computers having memory, of knowing what they contain, but they don’t really know anything. They can, through mechanical processes, display a few lighted squiggles on a screen, but it takes a conscious mind, the viewer, to turn that chaotic pattern into letters, words, and information. And by analogizing a mechanical process and a mental one, we debase the beauty of consciousness. 

This is especially important in the era of AI broadly and Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically, which, though rarely addressed explicitly in All Things Are Full of Gods, hover outside and offer “a clear window into Hart’s broader concern.” Much has already been written on AI and Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but in essence, the thought experiment challenges whether AI, when processing inputs and delivering outputs, can really ever be said to be “thinking,” or “intelligent,” or “conscious.” Certainly, AI can follow a set of rules to turn linguistic inputs into linguistic outputs, but as Hart observes, this translation provides no evidence that there was “any semantic knowledge involved at any point in the process, and there’d be no occasion or logic dictating that such knowledge could arise from or supervene upon the process” (emphasis in original). Of course, these arguments only work if you believe that there is a meaningful conceit of consciousness, of knowledge, and of logic. Many materialists really do believe that the human brain is nothing more than a computer, and that the firing of neurons, the flipping of tiny magnetic bits, or any other method of computation are consciousness: that form precedes thought and matter precedes mind. 

This book is fun, interesting, and different, and more than that, important, especially to members of the Church. But before diving into the connections to Mormon thought and doctrine, I’ll give a quick caution. While I’ve praised the book for its accessibility, that’s only in comparison to truly dense, insider texts. The book can still be inaccessible at times, casually dropping in words like “mereology,” “solecism,” and “psittacine” (“the study of parts and wholes,” “a grammatical mistake,” and “relating to parrots,” respectively). It isn’t for everyone, especially not for those who dislike grappling with abstract ideas that don’t have concrete examples attached. 

Despite its density, I think that All Things Are Full of Gods is vitally important to Latter-day Saints, because it can help us reconnect with and understand anew the spiritual/material mysticism that began early in the Church and has since weakened, replaced by Protestant Christianity’s legalism. When Psyche claims “If the physical order can’t be the ground of mind, mind must be the ground of the physical order,” how different is that from Doctrine and Covenants 29:32, which claims that all things were created “First spiritual[ly], secondly temporal[ly], which is the beginning of [God’s] work.” What do we imagine when we think about spiritual creation? Is it just writing out ideas on some kind of divine chalkboard, or is it a real creating and organizing work, just one that is hard to conceive of in our material realm? 

Or again, Hart is skeptical of Cartesian dualism, the idea that the two types of stuff, the material world and the spiritual one, overlap but don’t interact, as they are of distinct and irreconcilable substances. I felt myself cheering at such a rejection, thinking of God’s promise to Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 131:7 that “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure.” Not too long after Descartes, Joseph Smith helped us to move again into a monist (as opposed to a dualist) world. Hart argues that spirit is primary, and the material world is derived from the spiritual one. Of course, any equivalency can be reversed, and the verse could just as easily read “All matter is spirit,” and indeed, with the primacy of spiritual creation, this may have been what God (or Joseph Smith, translating the revelation from pure knowledge into English) meant. 

And beyond these literal connections to some of the more mystical aspects of our founding doctrines, I found myself asking how much we, as members of the Church, have ceded ground to the materialist assumptions that undergird Western society. For example, we believe in a God who follows laws. But do we imagine those laws to be spiritual or physical laws? Do we imagine God as having to follow, for instance, the law of gravity? Then what do we make of the Ascension (or the First Vision, for that matter)? Do we unintentionally align ourselves with Deists, who are grateful that God set up the universe in such a way as to allow only the miracles that happen to conform to the starting, immutable physical laws that bind even God himself? Or, speaking of miracles, do we foreclose certain possibilities, imagining that, as God is bound by physical laws, he will only grant us miracles that have some sort of plausible deniability? 

On a more practical note, I wondered about the connections between the materialist view of consciousness inherent in the attempts to develop sentient AI and Elder Ulisses Soares’s April 2025 general conference talk, “Reverence for Sacred Things,” in which he warns of the use of AI in spiritually inappropriate ways. Certainly, at one level, he is probably warning against members of the Church generating pictures of Shrimp Jesus, or other disrespectful acts. But as he talked of reverence, and of “higher and holier things,” I couldn’t help but wonder if he was also striking at an entire philosophy, one that imagines that there is nothing above us, and that we are the mere products of emergent properties from lower, simpler matter. In that world, there is nothing worthy of reverence. But in the world Hart tries to introduce us to, while we are certainly made of matter, that matter is animated, given form, meaning, and existence by something worthy of reverence: Spirit, Mind, and ultimately, God.

As I read, I felt, flickering around the edges of the characters, hints of the enchanted world that the ancient Israelites, the early Christians, and even Joseph Smith’s family lived in, to some degree. I hope that as this book and others like it spread among modern practitioners in religion, we can feel our way, fumbling, back into the world of Spirit. 

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Ben Dearden is a lawyer, a husband, and a father of two sons. He enjoys writing articles, screenplays, and stories with tiny audiences.

Art by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912).

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How should we read the Doctrine & Covenants (D&C)? Is it a history of God’s dealings with Joseph Smith and other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, despite having no clear narrative structure? Or is it a theological record of the Church’s doctrine and teachings, despite how its revelations are tied to specific moments and people? Historian Jan Shipps famously said that the Church “doesn’t have a theology; [it has] a history.” But is it possible the two are so closely linked that it’s both difficult and disingenuous to disentangle them?

In Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants, theologians Rosalynde Welch and Adam Miller explore how the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) evinces a Latter-day Saint view of Jesus Christ through revelations that blend the historical and the ethereal. Written as a series of letters to one another, Miller and Welch use an exegetical approach to excavate seven sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, trading theological and personal insights on each.

This book builds on their previous book, Seven Gospels (2023), also published by Deseret Book, which follows the same correspondence format to study seven passages in the Book of Mormon. Both Miller and Welch have been active instigators of a decades-long project to provide philosophical but accessible Latter-day Saint theology, termed “speculative theology” by Miller for being exploratory rather than authoritative.1 Welch holds a PhD in early modern English literature, currently serves as the associate director at BYU’s Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, and has written multiple books and articles on Latter-day Saint theology. Miller, a professor at Collin College with a PhD in continental philosophy, has pursued his project across numerous academic articles and more than a dozen books, including others published by Deseret Book. To date, much of Welch and Miller’s work has focused on the Book of Mormon as a touchstone of their speculative theology, including in their work as board members of the annual Latter-day Theology Seminar. By focusing on the D&C, Seven Visions expands their theological project to a newer and unique book of scripture.

As a book inviting readers to contemplate how the D&C blends history and theology to testify of Christ, Seven Visions succeeds for at least two reasons: it productively wrestles with the non-narrative structure of the D&C, and it places the D&C alongside other books of scripture, producing creative insights from the interplay between the texts. This move also brings the reader closer to Joseph Smith and his contemporaries as they contemplated the scripture, particularly the New Testament, that often inspired the D&C. While at times the book feels a bit uneven and the conclusions redundant with the authors’ previous writings, Seven Visions is a digestible and creative companion to any Latter-day Saint’s study of the Doctrine and Covenants. 

The book shines when Miller and Welch grapple with the somewhat slippery form of the D&C. Unlike the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the D&C is not a narrative book. It is not a story. Instead, it is a series of revelations primarily given to Joseph Smith, the inaugural prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presented without much context. These revelations cover both the metaphysical and the mundane, and the seven sections that Welch and Miller discuss are no exception. But this wrestle with form is perhaps one of the strongest contributions of Seven Visions. From the juxtapositions within the sections, Welch and Miller draw out the lesson that life with Christ is, by definition, lived in relation with other people, encompassing both the eternal and the everyday. This is striking in Miller’s reading of D&C 19, which includes a sweeping view of God’s meaning of “eternal” and specific instructions for Martin Harris. “Taken at face value,” Miller comments, “the two halves of the revelation don’t appear to have much in common. But I think they’re actually talking about the very same mystery: how we, as Christians, are meant to emulate Christ in our handling of loss and suffering” (see 77–82). The theological insight in this section is not separable from the historical particulars, and the inherent tension enhances the meaning.

In turn, the form of Seven Visions as a series of letters between friends shores up this generative contrast. Some of the best moments in the book are when Welch and Miller’s relationship with each other and others takes center stage. For example, when they swap stories about first dates with their respective spouses2 or when Welch nods toward their shared love for a series of Norwegian novels (94). These asides bring a richness to the book that is difficult to achieve in more didactic, solo-authored books. They demonstrate in situ the central importance of the human alongside the heavenly dimension.

Another major strength of Seven Visions is how Miller and Welch read the D&C in conversation with other scripture, particularly the New Testament. In fact, reading this book made me wonder why we don’t always read the D&C in just this way, since some of the revelations come in direct response to questions about teachings in the New Testament (or perhaps it’s just me who missed that boat).3 These cross-textual readings are particularly generative in Welch’s letters on D&C sections 45 and 110. Welch reads D&C 110 alongside Revelation 19 and Matthew 25, not just as the dedication of the Kirtland temple (which it is), but as “symbolically, the first temple wedding of the latter days” (96). Welch celebrates this temple wedding between Bride and Bridegroom as she would any other marriage, as “an absolute miracle” (97) full of mistakes and human error, but also intimacy and love.

Welch sees a universalism in section 45’s vision of Christ’s Second Coming to the city of Zion that contrasts with the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, briefly referenced in D&C 45:56. We might assume, given the allusion to this parable, that Zion will be a locked fortress, like the door of the bridegroom’s chamber. But, Welch declares, “Not so! In contrast to the bridegroom’s chamber, the Lord describes latter-day Zion as a city of unlocked doors. The peace lovers of every nation will flock to Zion with joyful songs (see 45:69–71). But what will keep the warmongers and their bloody swords out? Their own faint hearts and their own faulty assumptions about glory and terror . . . from the perspective of sin, the brilliant light of the Lord’s love provokes dread and avoidance” (44–45). Like a collision of tectonic plates, Welch’s juxtaposition of D&C 45 with Matthew 25 provides the creative energy to produce a novel understanding of the millennial city of Zion, one that is protected not by battlements but by the love of God. In this way, Welch comments, “there’s something about the unlocked doors of Zion, its defenseless breachability, that reminds me of the bleeding body of Christ” (45). I was struck over and over again in Seven Visions by Welch’s creative analogies. This includes her statement that “from a blinkered human perspective,” Jesus’ life, with its high points of pre-mortal existence and post-mortal glory bracketing mortal suffering, looks a bit like a Nike swoosh (22) (I laughed aloud!).

Miller also emphasizes putting the D&C in conversation with the Bible and Book of Mormon. He claims that newer text can even transform the old: “The Doctrine and Covenants is to the Book of Mormon and the Bible what the New Testament is to the Old. In one sense, things remain just as they were . . . But in another sense, things couldn’t look more different than they had just a moment ago” (12). However, it’s not always clear from Miller’s letters exactly how things look “more different” given the D&C. Those familiar with Miller’s own picture of grace and salvation find it mostly undifferentiated from how it appears in his other books.4 This is perhaps to be expected; it is his project, and repetition does not make it less true or useful to readers new to Miller’s work. 

Miller’s ideas do expand towards something new in Seven Visions, at least within his canon published through Deseret Book, in the letters meditating on metaphysics in D&C 88 and 130. Miller’s epistle on section 130 is perhaps his most unveiled writing on metaphysics since Future Mormon. This is a sensible move given that this section contains some of Joseph Smith’s most metaphysical (and heretical, according to his Christian contemporaries) statements on the embodied nature of God and Jesus. But Miller’s most interesting move is to weave God’s physicality with God’s temporality, thinking through what section 130 has to say about God’s experience of time. While Christians typically see God as existing outside of time, Miller takes section 130 to express the opposite view, that “temporality is real but relative. Time passes for God, angels, and humans” (112). Miller then adroitly asks, “What might it mean if eternal glory is not an escape from time-bound bodies, actions, and consequences?” (113). While Miller offers one answer (in the style of his project referenced above),5 this question pierces the heart of a truly Latter-day Saint theology of materiality and requires many more answers. These answers must grapple with basic and unsettled questions in Latter-day Saint metaphysics, not to mention philosophy writ large. In Miller’s words, “What is matter? And can matter be separated from time?” To answer these questions, scholars will need to engage more deeply with D&C 130 and its companion sections 129 and 131, the late-comer “crunchy little edge pieces” of the book,6 and probably with D&C 88 as well. I for one would like Miller to follow through on his comment to Welch that, “given its reach and complexity, you and I could, I think, devote whole books to reading just this one revelation.” In other words: bet.

In some ways, Seven Visions is a memoir of friends grappling together with Restoration scripture. It is a book animated by interactions: between the authors, between the divine and the daily within the D&C, and between the D&C and other books of scripture. Reading it convinced me that we, as a church, should be more diligent in reading the Doctrine and Covenants in tandem with other scripture. That the resonances between texts produce a richer song than the D&C on its own. It also helped me see that the form of the D&C, which can sometimes feel disconnected and contrary, can actually be a boon to its power, rather than a hindrance. This form helps glimpse the vision in Christ as the “fusion of the overwhelming and the intimate, of the infinitely big and the incredibly small” (95). I hope Welch and Miller’s work inspires others to produce more theological works imbued with that fusion.

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Catie Nielson is a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is also active in the Mormon Studies community, where her primary interest is in Mormon materialism and its relationship to the broader philosophical tradition.

Art by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).

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Bitter Water Opera, a 2024 magical realism novel by Nicolette Polek, is a pilgrimage and a heroine’s journey and a puzzle box and many other things. But mostly, it is a ghost story, one where the heroine chases the lives of ghosts instead of living her own. 

On occasion I find myself hiding. Usually, I hide from my children, but I also hide from writing and cleaning and going outside and touching grass. And when I hide, I distract myself with video game streamers or sporting events or whatever content the algorithmic gods bestow upon me. I search for contentment in distant events I cannot control; I avoid the vulnerability and work of everyday life. During these acts of self-concealment, I sometimes ask myself, “Why am I doing this? What am I doing with my life?” In other words, “Why am I avoiding living my life in favor of whatever this is?”

Limerence is an intense, often involuntary and unreciprocated, longing for another person to the point of persistent fantasizing and obsession. In Bitter Water Opera, the heroine Gia doesn’t experience limerence for another person but for other lives, for “another world that destroyed all joy” (70). 

The book unfolds in four parts. In each, Gia pursues one or two different lives. Part one shows Gia’s current life falling to pieces. She’s taken leave from her university position; she sleeps more than half the day; she has destroyed her relationship with her partner. Within the first few pages, she sends a letter to the ghost of Marta, a woman she has admired, hoping that Marta will “in some act of imitation on my part . . . fix my life” (10). Marta arrives, bearing cigarettes and lime-green shoes. Eventually, Gia tries on Marta’s shoes, but she cannot step into Marta’s life, even in her own imagination or imitation. 

Having tried unsuccessfully to fit herself into Marta’s life, Gia tries another life, one which “involved starting many projects, planting many seeds, and knocking on many doors, openly accepting invitations and pursuing any and every innovation one desired within reason, with the calm understanding that some efforts wouldn’t fully succeed” (66). She retreats to a colleague’s secluded cabin in the forest. She attempts to tend the overgrown garden as she also attempts to tend her own life, scrubbing and weeding and passing through a dark night of the soul. After that dark night, she attends a church service, planting a single pear tree before planting fruit tree after fruit tree after fruit tree. She prepares a sumptuous meal, which she then consumes down to the last crumb. But she doesn’t seem satisfied. 

Is this second life better than the one she had before? To both the reader and to Gia, the answer seems a resounding yes. But there is still work to do because she is still engaged in limerence; she is still seeking for a life other than her own. Indeed, repeatedly throughout the text, she presents false dichotomies of these limerent lives: “There seemed to be two ways of living that I’d encountered up to that point” (66), one of which was her modern academic life slowly leading towards ruin. She says of that life, “[w]e were all being bested by an educational machine that ran on spurious promise, a part of some larger cultural milieu of restlessness and indecision, shame and lack. It was as though everyone was involved in elaborate and too-secret cover-ups of their own selves” (31). As mentioned above, she tries on Marta’s life, but she can’t just change her life as she would her shoes. At another point, Gia “imagine[s] two doors” (35) each leading to lives different than those already described. Again and again she pits these lives against each other, seeking one that will satisfy. As she describes in her letter to Marta: “At night I drive on the highway. I pull towards exits that go somewhere far. I switch lanes, but never end up leaving. I cannot bring myself to leave the things that make me small” (5). 

In part three, Gia passes through Death Valley (or the valley of death) and the nearby opera house built by Marta and her partners when still alive. Despite the efforts of three dedicated caretakers, the opera house is crumbling as tamarisk trees (that is, living plants) uproot and destroy the foundation and walls. While there, Gia drives deep into the desert and experiences the sublime as she is “surrounded by emptiness and [doesn’t] wish to fill it” (100). Indeed, in contrast to the smallness she expresses in her original letter to Marta, she becomes “small and unnoticeable, but it [is] a smallness where something wonderful” surges around her. She feels that the smaller she becomes, the more she can see this wonderful thing (100). 

Though the foregoing description might seem to reveal too much—especially for a book barely more than 120 pages, many of those pages having only half a page of text—the nutritional density of the book far exceeds its pages and dwarfs the descriptions here. In beautiful, poetic prose, Polek layers color and nature and ontology and theology and scripture and creation. The book demands rereading, annotating, turning back to see the last reference to a heron, to the wind, to candles, curtains, colors. It plumbs the past and future, both of which are illusions, ghosts to be chased. Only in the present can we be present. The juxtapositions continue with the artificial versus the natural. The natural—the non-artificial—is where the sublime, or God or however you want to describe that which is outside the self, resides and works on us. 

The sublime is not found in hiding from one’s children, in avoiding vulnerability, in digital content and passive consumption. Those activities are ghosts; they are dead things and ruinous. To close with a quote from the text:

Anything can be haunted if you wish it to be. . . . Ghosts are tumors of the imagination. Instead of renovating old hospitals, abandoned factories, you permit them to decay. You celebrate stagnant, broken forms and shirk the responsibility to bring them back to life. . . .

You spend obscene amounts of money on plasma detectors and high-definition microphones, nonsense equipment, just because you don’t know how to clean debris from a room to imagine new possibilities. Instead you take pictures of lost towns where life has passed through them like a sieve. Instead of innovation you take an opera house like this and turn it into a site for your irreverence. (109-110)

The book invites us to plant gardens instead of preserving ruins; to seek the living rather than the dead. 

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Ryan Fairchild is a former entertainment and technology lawyer who now stays at home with his three children and is much happier for it.

Art by Carel Weight (1908-1997).

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Join us at The Compass August 6th at 6pm for a pre-release screening and conversation about the new film Full of Days.

Directed by Sarah Perkins and shot by Josh Sabey (the team behind The Book of Mormon Storybook), the film is inspired by their own family's child welfare case. It is the first filmic retelling of The Book of Job told from a female perspective.

Description

After a child's fall from a haystack results in a broken rib and a child welfare case, an indigent ranching couple struggles to keep their family and livelihood intact. But there are chaotic forces in the valley—gods and devils, wilderness, and the west wind tunneling through.

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When: Wednesday, August 6th, 6pm

Where: The Compass Gallery, 250 W. Provo Center Street.

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It’s no secret that Celine Song knows how to artfully craft a film that aches with longing and cozies up to the complexities of the human experience. But while her debut film Past Lives (2023) addresses the pain of letting go of what didn’t work out, Materialists (2025) meditates on the discomfort of choosing to hold onto something that just might work out. If Past Lives is tragically nostalgic, Materialists is tentatively hopeful. It is a delicate offering to a world that makes dateability a prerequisite for being considered well-adjusted and supplies only a pathetic array of dating apps to those who overstay their singlehood. Song’s latest work gently holds up a mirror to the viewer and asks “Why do you want to be loved so much?”. Fittingly, mirrors are a physical symbol utilized by Song throughout the first half of the film to invite movie-goers to enter into a practice of self-reflection with her.

(Note: If you haven’t yet seen the film and want to avoid spoilers, save this review and come back to it later.)

After a wildly bold opening scene (which absolutely pays off) featuring a dating neanderthal couple, the film time-jumps to modern day NYC where viewers meet Lucy, a professional matchmaker, as she prepares for her day. These first shots of Lucy do not show her directly, but rather her image as reflected in a set of mirrors. Lucy is the name given to the 3.2-million-year-old female hominid skeleton sometimes called the “missing link” in human evolution, but in this story, Lucy’s name is not tied to flesh-and-bone reality but to the visual perception our protagonist curates and presents to others. The mirror mediates all. Lucy’s salon-styled vanity mirror (the kind framed by orbs) shows her applying makeup and adjusting accessories, the horizontal mirror by her door shows her leaving her chic apartment, and (in a later scene) the polished paneling of a banquet hall reflects wedding guests dancing to “Sweet Caroline.” Without resorting to clichéd insert shots of phone screens and didactic commentary on the online simulacrum of social media, Song quietly establishes a distanced world where people are viewed and allotted value indirectly.

But much like the worlds-without-end effect produced by two looking glasses positioned directly opposite each other, there are layers to Song’s mirrors. Not only do they reflect the aforementioned outward-facing alter egos, optimized to emphasize one’s most attractive attributes, but they simultaneously act as memento mori (artistic reminders of one’s own mortality) and warnings of how love can be used to dress self-obsession in sheep’s clothing. Frequently found in vanitas art (remember the opening shots of Lucy in her vanity mirror?), memento mori are objects that stress to viewers that youth and vitality are transient, and death an omnipresent reality. The mirrors in Materialists expose imperfect truths about the characters, even as those characters attempt to use these reflective surfaces to adjust their images. One prominent example is the smudged, broken medicine cabinet in John’s bathroom that reveals a mess of half-used hair products and orange prescription bottles behind its mirrored encasement—a chaotic interiority that speaks to the previous “death” of John’s 5-year relationship with Lucy.

While Materialists’ mirror-gilded set reminds its characters of their fallible humanity, these characters also seek out human counterparts they can use as mirrors to soothe an insatiable need, born of insecurity, to be assigned value through a partner. At the wedding ceremony of her client Charlotte, Lucy consoles a troubled bride who fears she is only marrying her fiancé because he makes her sister jealous. Lucy masterfully reframes Charlotte’s words, insisting this means that she loves how her fiancé makes her feel valuable. But this form of “love” is transactional; it takes, but doesn’t give. There is no investment required, only continual withdrawals. In this egocentric equation, to be seen is to be loved. What you yourself might see in a partner is irrelevant.

In the same way that characters turn to mirrors in a variety of forms to selectively conceal and reveal parts of themselves, they also turn to the camera itself in a manner reminiscent of talking head interviews. As Lucy meets one-on-one with clients, Song chooses to portray their interactions with only one person in frame at a time, alternating between Lucy and her rotating roster of “shoppers” who demand impossibly precise age ranges, heights, weights, lifestyles, and politics in potential partners. As viewers face these singular figures on screen, they may be surprised to see parts of themselves in Lucy’s clients and these ridiculous lists of must-haves. In this way, the camera’s position acts as a mirror for viewers.

Not only does Song’s positioning of the camera act as a confrontational mirror for her audience, but her maneuvering of it does as well. One camera movement Song executes with particular skill is the gradual zoom-in. In several scenes throughout Materialists, she portrays characters facing each other in long shots that include the bustling scenes around them before slowly cropping out that surrounding visual noise as the characters’ lines increase in intensity and intimacy. This visual language pairs deliciously with Song’s dialogue which is sharp but never forced; vulnerable but never melodramatic. The visual and the verbal initially position viewers as casual eavesdroppers removed from the main characters who exist in a self-contained tableau before the camera then brings the audience uncomfortably near the characters where viewers may once again see parts of themselves in these up-close interactions.

Through her use of mirrors and reflections, Song successfully collapses space, requiring her audience to look inward, an exercise of grit that is mirrored by the visual grit of the 35mm film stock she records on. As the film progresses, however, the mirrors disappear as characters begin to actually look at each other instead of obsessing over their own reflections. After being purged of optical obtrusions, the narrative nears its end. It is here that Song begins collapsing time as well as space. With the exception of the opening scene, Song keeps her narrative grounded in the present day; that is, until the final sequences when the story’s timeline begins to self-reflexively fold in on itself. After Lucy decides to build a life with John, a voiceover transports the audience back to the neanderthal world and its couple, content in each other’s arms. The story then returns to NYC as John crosses into Central Park, where he is meeting Lucy. Behind him are massive advertisements outside the Natural History Museum for an exhibit on neanderthal life. When John finds Lucy on a park bench, he takes a flower from the bouquet he has brought her, fashions a ring out of its stem and slides it onto her finger. The God’s eye view shot used to capture this symbolic gesture is an exact reflection of the one used to capture the same action of the neanderthal couple at the beginning of the film. With this move, Song suggests that the rituals associated with romance and dating (such as gifting flowers or giving each other rings) are neither modern nor arbitrary; they are time-honored offerings that represent a willingness to give instead of take. This collapse of time is then playfully exaggerated during the closing credits wherein Lucy and John enter a crowded courthouse to tie the knot. After they exit the frame hand in hand, who should walk through those same doors but the neanderthal duo themselves. Choosing to see instead of insisting on being seen, whether in 10,000 BCE or in 2025, remains the purest expression of love.

“Love is the last religion, the last country, the last surviving ideology.” With this line, Song positions love as the final sacred frontier. She proposes a definition of love as the last intact ritual in a post-structural world where the unexplainable has been demystified and sanitized by nihilism, and heartbreak has become a foregone conclusion. But it is the film’s insistence that love cannot be planned nor forced nor manufactured that paradoxically offers relief. As frustrating as it is to hear that “love will find you when you least expect it,” it is precisely the act of acknowledging one’s own lack of control over the elusive enterprise of romance that frees one from the impossible pressure of “getting it right.” Love blooms and when it does, it requires seeing directly without mirrors, without rose-tinted filters, without limerence-ridden fantasies.

Love is understanding, and understanding transcends measured value. Value is transactional. Understanding is given without expectation. Understanding is the beginning of a radical love unencumbered by capitalistic checkboxes and definitions of worth. After all, it is largely the worship of the constructed deities of money (metaphorically enshrined in NYC as the center of American financial power) that have shifted definitions of “love” to a business casual kind of “value”—a what’s-in-it-for-me kind of mentality. And so, the pursuit of money and status is revealed to be the ultimate navel-gazing mirror, a system set up to assign worth based on assets, including the people around you. This is the thesis of Materialists: Love is not a process of projecting, brokering, or even settling. Like the concept of God, it simply is.

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Devin Glenn holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and International Cinema Studies from Brigham Young University and an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California.

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This essay is an excerpt from Jonathan Stapley’s important new book, Holiness to the Lord, published recently by Oxford University Press.

One day, in the year before I was born, my dad received a call at work. He was a lay church leader at the time, and our ward included some forest land next to a city park. Those calling him asked that he meet them at this property, and when he arrived, they began to count trees. It was the site for a temple in Bellevue, Washington, that now serves the Seattle area.

Before the Seattle Temple was dedicated, there was an open house. Hundreds of thousands of community members walked through it, including the governor and federal officials. Newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest carried articles about the temple and its fixtures, with pictures of the baptistry and “celestial room.” They wrote about the color of the carpets, the “Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers,” and “French provincial furniture.”

After the open house, Spencer Kimball, who led the church as its president, dedicated the temple, and then closed its doors. From that moment, local church leaders have worked to find every opportunity possible to open them for their faithful members. But no non-members have entered since that time.

It has always been easier for Latter-day Saints and their leaders to talk about the construction materials and furnishings of the temples than what actually happens inside of them. The way the Saints have guarded their speech about the temple over nearly two hundred years is complicated. The temple is sacred and holy, but it is also separate. It is true that participants in the temple commit to never disclose certain aspects of the ceremonies outside of the temple, but those aspects are an extremely limited proportion of the overall experience. Nevertheless, Latter-day Saints have viewed most or all of their experiences in temples as private. Culturally, the temple is found in this space—beyond public access.

However, in recent decades, church members and church leaders have had to negotiate the privacy of the temple experience with the heightened visibility of temples because of the increasing numbers of temples as well as the public nature of our most important medium of communication—the internet. Church leaders appear to have decided that it is time to disclose to the public not only what temples are made of, but what they are made for.

Joseph Smith revealed an expansive cosmology, where “kinship, priesthood, government, and heaven all became synonymous.” In this new understanding, heaven was not a reward or destination. It was relational—a network of people materialized through the rituals of the temple, a “cosmological priesthood.” Throughout the nearly two hundred years since Smith introduced it, the temple has remained a liturgical space where Latter-day Saints generate a sacred, cosmic identity. The temple is a site where Latter-day Saints order their bodies, their communities, and their universe. Moreover, this work has not been static; this identity generation is the product of continual adaptation in response to cultural change.

The privacy of the Latter-day saint experience in the temple is still important. Under the protection of this privacy, many Latter-day Saints have received meaningful mystical experiences. As scholar Hugh Urban has noted, these experiences are generally personal and largely incommunicable. However, the visible liturgy of the temple has done important work not only to shape the lives and minds of its patrons, but to create new relationships.

Throughout his ministry, Joseph Smith repeatedly identified biblical archetypes which he ritualized. The culmination of this process was his expansion of John of Patmos’s apocalyptic vision. In describing his theophany, John quoted a heavenly hymn to Jesus, who “redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10). This was temple imagery from the Hebrew bible appropriated and recast to describe the Christian heaven. Through Joseph Smith, this vision of heaven became the concrete product of the Latter-day Saint temple liturgy. The temple created a kingdom of priests and priestesses in heaven and on earth—performed biblicism on a cosmic scale.

For Smith, this heavenly concourse necessarily incorporated men and women. In the temple liturgy, women dressed in the clothing of the ancient Israelite temple priests, just as men did. Then through relational sealing rituals Latter-day Saints fixed their family relationships for all eternity. They planned on extending those relationships through the entire history of humanity. They constructed the eternal past, present, and future in a timeless network of relationality. For Latter-day Saints, identity as eternal kin is inherent to the identity as members of the heavenly priesthood.

The Latter-day Saint experience with the temple has shifted in important ways since a mob murdered Joseph Smith in 1844. Still, this vision of kings and queens, priests and priestesses, remains imprinted on the temple liturgy and its material culture to the present. The temple has functioned as a dynamic map that orients church members as they move through space and time. This movement necessarily requires change in the individual, but also in the community more broadly and in the temple itself. For example, the way temple access has regulated Latter-day Saint food practices and sexuality has differed dramatically across generations. The possible family relations created through temple ritual have similarly varied. Building from the procession of twentieth-century sociologists of religion, Armand Mauss argued that Mormonism’s historical persistence is the result of a balanced tension of change—retrenchment to insider peculiarity on one hand and accommodation with the broader culture on the other. The temple remains a central liturgical site for Latter-day Saint identity formation. It has also been a central location for this balanced adaptation in the face of cultural change.

I imagine that most people in Bellevue, Washington, have never noticed that the streetlights on the freeway overpass below the Latter-day Saint temple are painted with red and white horizontal stripes. The careful observer will also see that there are inactive strobe lights that cap these tall structures. When the Seattle Temple was first dedicated it had a shorter spire than it does today, and the West-facing Moroni at its top had a base with a red flashing light.

These were concessions planners made to get a temple built so close to the nearby municipal airport. It has been about forty years since this airport was closed and demolished. Office buildings and hotels now stand where aircraft taxied, took off, and landed. These striped streetlights are one of the few things that remain.

There are aspects of the Latter-day Saint temple and its practice that are like the freeway overpass beneath the Seattle temple. In many cases, structure–function relationships are observable and evident. There are also elements like those red and white streetlights—facets of belief, practice, or material culture where function is not immediately clear. It is with this earthly history that Latter-day Saints do heavenly work, the work of the temple liturgy—the Latter-day Saint construction of a kingdom of priests and priestesses in heaven and on earth.

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Jonathan Stapley is an award winning historian and scientist. Oxford University Press recently published his volumes, The Power of Godliness and Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, from which this essay was adapted.

Art: Manhattan, Brigham City, and Boston by Deb Fox.

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I am about to tell you a true story that is going to sound made up. I totally understand if you don’t believe me. After all, I make a lot of things up. My interview with Jeevan Sidhu, the Bollywood playback singer turned Mormon mystic? Pure imagination. My review of the Church History Museum’s avant-garde wing? Wishful thinking. I’m sorry if you ran across those things and wanted them to be real. But not very sorry, because I wanted them to be real, too. I want to live in the world where something stunningly surreal is always waiting around the corner, where the Mormon collective subconscious is constantly boiling with lucid dreams.

So—take it with a grain of salt when I tell you about something that happened to me in June.

I was at the Mormon History Association conference. In the morning, I listened to a presentation about an early 20^th century Latter-day Saint jazz musician once played in a biopic by Danny Kaye. During a lunchtime plenary about Carry On, I made a very funny joke about Cedar City in the 1870s. After lunch, I sat by the University of Illinois Press table and got lost in a forthcoming epic poem about Joseph Smith.

At some point, I looked over the upcoming presentations—and hesitated. There are so many interesting things from our past that people talk about. And there are also so many weird and uncomfortable things. When you walk into a history panel, you never know quite what you’re going to feel and what you’re going to need to process. In that way, history is uncomfortably like life, and I’m not always sure I’m up to either. So I stalled. I got up and talked to some friends. And then, at the end of the exhibition hall, tucked into a corner that almost didn’t look like it should be a vendor space, I caught sight of flickering lights shining out from inside a big black tent.

And yes, I know this all sounds like I’m making things up again. Normal people don’t laugh at jokes about the 1870s. University Presses don’t publish epic poems about Joseph Smith. Black tents don’t appear out of nowhere at academic conferences, and they certainly don’t beckon to you like the Zoltar machine in Big.

But J Celene Anderson, the independent film producer, was there. I’m pretty sure she’s real, because we’ve talked about poetry before. Barrett Burgin was also there. I can’t remember if I’ve actually shaken his hand to confirm that he’s not some malign spirit. But I saw him, for whatever that’s worth.

Anyway, Celene and Barrett said they had something to show me, if I was interested. They were currently showing a short horror film based on Doctrine and Covenants 129, but once it was through, they would love to show me a 15-minute comedy called Java Jive.

Well, what could I do? When I wonder if I’m at the edge of a tear in reality, I step through.

I think there was another viewer beside me as I ducked through the curtain and into the tent. Barrett gave me headphones. He pressed play. And then, for fifteen minutes, I was more or less lost to the world.

How can I describe this movie to you? It’s so close to realism. And it’s so far away.

I could try to explain what I saw moment by moment. How the film opens with a luxurious swirl of coffee beans giving way to the white cover of a Holy Bible. How a young man goes out on splits with two missionaries, biking iconically through the rain. How if you blink you’ll miss that the missionaries’ nametags say Elder Stoner and Elder Bundy, and that all the literature they hand out seems to be exclusively about the Word of Wisdom.

I could tell you about the incense burning. About the awkward opening discussion where the elders try to explain what counts as “hot drinks” to a little person while he piles up a lot of meat to eat. I would try to get quickly to the part where the camera slows and the audio slows and the little person’s already-low voice goes down another octave as he says, “So you’ll never…have coffee…in your life?” and the missionaries abruptly start staring at the teenaged priest until he blurts out, “Never. I’d rather die than make God ashamed.”

Even Elder Stoner seems to notice that this is an inappropriately extreme reaction. But it fits just fine into the world of the film. Java Jive is completely insane. Larger than life. It’s in the same funhouse-mirror style as the story of the Rameumptom. It’s a camel dancing through a needle’s eye. And yet, those opening sequences somehow also bring back memories. I remember being a missionary, trying desperately to get a message across while also hearing how strange it must have sounded in someone else’s ears. I remember being a teenager, torn between boundless zeal about my faith and crippling self-consciousness. I remember growing into what W. E. B. called double consciousness, the phenomenon where someone from a minority culture can’t help but see themselves through the imagined eyes of the majority.

Java Jive is clearly set in a parallel reality. It’s also set somewhere inside my mind.

There is too much in this short movie to explain. Let me sum up. The main character in Java Jive is the teenaged priest. His name is Ben. He has a date tonight. Her name is Mary. They’ve been together for a while and he really likes her. Enough, apparently, to withhold information; she doesn’t know that he’s a Latter-day Saint.

She takes him to a coffee shop. Its menu has tiny icons to mark everything that is dairy-free, gluten-free, kosher, halal, sattvic. There is no trumpeting angel or miniature temple to mark the items without coffee beans. And anyway, Mary has already chosen the most delicious, sensually rich coffee money can buy to share with Ben. “I have wanted to do this for so long,” she says. She is holding the cup the way the heroine might in an old Bollywood movie, back when censors didn’t allow kissing and every gesture dripped with sexual tension instead.

Remember that I am watching this in a tent tucked in the corner of the Mormon History Association’s annual conference. Participants here go through my people’s past with fine-toothed combs. They study. They scrutinize. Some criticize. There are plenty of moments to cringe.

And I’m cringing now on behalf of my dear, fictional teenaged friend Ben and his escalating predicament—while also laughing so hard I almost fall out of my chair. Nate Morley, who plays Ben, squirms around confrontation with an energy that is captivating. I feel completely wrapped up in the knots in his guts. Ryann Bailey, who plays Mary, lets anticipation crest into frustration and then a desperate confusion that lays its own claim on my sympathies. Bridger Nebeker’s sound design is, at turns, both hypnotic and hilarious. Barrett Burgin’s direction is visually rich, as studded with evocative detail as an artwork by Megan Knoblauch Geilman.

It is so good to be here, in this dark tent, the colors of Barrett’s film flashing across my face before I head back out into history. The awkwardness I’m feeling here isn’t going to end out there. When people pull frustrating moments out of the vast pool of our history for examination, when I hear the occasional judgment in a presenter’s voice, I will be back in the world of Java Jive. In theory, I’m supposed to learn lessons from the failures of the past. But in practice, I’ll probably also feel a lot of embarrassment. I’m at risk of resenting historical figures for making us look bad while other people are watching.

There’s a phrase in Yiddish for this. A shanda fur di goyim! (a shame before the Gentiles!) is used to scold someone for acting awkward, reinforcing stereotypes, or airing dirty laundry while the world is watching. The trouble with being part of a stigmatized minority group is that Ben isn’t just flailing for Ben. My self-perception is tied up in his embarrassment. Joseph Smith and Martin Harris aren’t just two guys trying to figure things out. They’re my two guys and people are gonna look at me funny if they land us on South Park.

Double-consciousness is not a game we’re set up to win. Judging our conduct by a dominant culture’s standards, we’re bound to come up short. But we can’t seem to help but play. We’re all Ben, out on a cultural limb to begin with and then getting into awkward situations partly of our own making. We can beat ourselves up about that. Or maybe we can listen to Barrett and laugh.

How do I feel about my people? How do I feel about all the strange things we do? How do I feel about all the things we can’t quite bring ourselves to say?

I’m probably like you. As I’m trying to process the world around me through the warped lenses I’ve been given, I still occasionally swing from hot to cold, zealous to self-conscious. Some things about us light my imagination on fire. Some things about us freeze my heart to a stop.

So it’s cathartic to laugh my guts out in the dark tent that somehow appeared at the end of the exhibitors’ hall at the Mormon History Association conference. Good to reflect that at least I’m not lukewarm.

Editor’s note: We checked, and James is really and truly not making this one up. Burgindie Pictures has graciously agreed to share a link to prove it. We promise it doesn’t lead to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” To see Java Jive for yourself, click here. Better yet, join us at the Wayfare Film Festival to see it on the big screen and discuss it with James Goldberg, Barrett Burgin, Josh Sabey, Sarah Perkins and Theric Jepson.

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James Goldberg is a poet, novelist, and champion of Mormon literature. His works include The Five Books of Jesus and A Book of Lamentations.

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“All we ever write is an autobiography.”—Claudia Bushman

When I was a graduate student, I once noticed a small, framed quote perched on my advisor’s bookshelf. Situated in front of books chronicling the American West, it read: “So often our lives are shaped by past events we did not choose.”

As someone who has wrestled with questions of historical agency, the sentiment stuck with me. So did its lyrical cadence, which has the lilt of a William Carlos Williams poem. So much depends on structures, systems, and families we have been born into; so much depends on the opportunities we can grasp; so much depends on the way we face the challenges and blessings that come our way.

Reading Claudia Bushman’s I, Claudia: The Life of Claudia Lauper Bushman in Her Own Words reminded me of that phrase on my thesis advisor’s bookshelf. Perhaps I made the connection after seeing the opening page of the autobiography, which shows a portrait of Claudia Bushman (with waves of gently coiffed white hair), smiling invitingly in front of an impressive bookshelf. Or perhaps I made the connection through reading about Claudia’s1 own wrestles with the limitations and latitudes of agency, space, and time. Regardless, I thought about that phrase as I read Claudia’s memoir: So often our lives are shaped by past events we did not choose. Claudia’s own life is a testament to how she allowed love to transform what she did not choose for herself, and how she shaped her life through her decisions. Grounded in the church of her birth, she has, time and again, chosen to love and serve that community—even at times when it has not loved her back.

The power of agency is ever-present in Claudia’s autobiography. The woman is a doer in every sense of the world; she makes extraordinary things happen. She seems to have a gift of materialization: her imagination manifests in the creation of events, community, and fun in the most marvelous ways. Her autobiography is filled with examples of what she calls “projects.” From helping with her mother’s musical projects in San Francisco to co-founding Exponent II with other Latter-day Saint feminists in the Boston area; from organizing a statewide release of ladybugs for Delaware’s bicentennial to pursuing a doctorate degree in American Studies while raising a family, Claudia’s willpower, creativity, and determination are extraordinary. She remarks that her “projects come as visions, suggested by clues of various kinds that I have stored away in my mind,” and the projects described in I, Claudia do have a sort of revelatory quality to them (I Claudia, 195).

Although Claudia demonstrates agency in a very individual sense—as a woman on a mission with the means and ability to enact change—agency, however, involves more than just the power of the individual. In a 2011 address, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” the religious scholar Catherine Brekus argued for a view of agency not just as individual but as “relational and social.” Claudia Bushman seems to understand this intuitively, and agency—the power to act within social, communal, and spiritual structures—illuminates her various works. She recognizes that she could not accomplish her projects alone. They come together with other people; they are realized only in community. Claudia found willing hearts and hands in her LDS communities for these projects, with “everyone consecrating talents to produce an admirable whole” (I Claudia, 235).

In the chapter “Four Projects,” Claudia describes four monumental endeavors she took on while living in New York City. These included organizing a living nativity scene in the lobby of the LDS meetinghouse in Manhattan; planning the Manhattan New York Temple Youth Jubilee at Radio City Music Hall; chairing the Harlem Bridge Builders; and erecting a statue of Joseph Smith in New York City for the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Any one of these projects could be the crowning achievement of any one person’s lifetime; the fact that Claudia dreamed up three of them (she gladly participated in, but did not create the Harlem Bridge Builders) within the span of ten years seems, to me, nothing short of Olympian.

But Claudia’s projects don’t only dazzle, they are also deeply intimate. I was especially moved thinking about the living nativities she envisioned and then organized with other eager members of New York City wards. As ward family members took turns embodying the Holy Family, their devotion to the Christmas scene touched the hearts of individuals who stopped on that busy corner of Columbus Avenue during a hectic (sometimes joyous, often lonely) time of year. On the other side of the window panes, ward members who participated in the live nativities still carry those memories in their hearts. Claudia’s dedication to community projects shows that agency—especially used in building and improving relations—has the power to “bring to pass much righteousness” (D&C 58:26–28).

Still, despite the various accolades that accompany Claudia’s accomplishments, an undercurrent of melancholy flows through the book. Part of what makes agency problematic in historical frameworks is that agency has limits. And though limits and opposition make agency possible, Claudia obviously wrestles with the pains of certain limitations on her individual, familial, and societal dreams. Her maxims hint at this. Two of her self-described favorite maxims: If I didn’t quit, I could never go on and If you keep up, you’ll never get ahead suggest a pragmatic approach to life’s limitations.

But the refrain that haunts me—repeated in multiple chapters— is her confession: “I wanted to be somebody.” Claudia does not shy away from the difficulties of being the wife of a respected academic and religious leader. After recollecting their family’s move from Belmont, Massachusetts, to Newark, Delaware for her husband’s academic career, Claudia remarks that husbands “move from something to something and wives move from something to nothing” (I Claudia, 181). This comment directly references the travails of being a “trailing spouse” in academia—uprooting one’s home, family, and career prospects for their spouse’s career. But her comment also reflects feeling lost and unrecognized in the hierarchies of career, academia, and church callings. Being a bishop’s wife, she recalled, is “a job without a job description” and entails taking on, often single-handedly, “family situations that should be shared” between husband and wife (I Claudia, 171, 177). For Claudia, it came with other painful sacrifices. When LDS church leadership took measures to quell Exponent II in the 1970s, they specifically asked Claudia to step down as an editor because of her husband’s calling in the stake presidency. She complied but acutely felt the loss of leading the intellectual, sisterly community. “It was just great to be somebody,” she wrote of her days as the editor for Exponent II.

This echo of “It was nice to be somebody” troubles me, especially as someone who shares some similar demographics with Claudia: an American Latter-day Saint woman with a PhD in History who is a “trailing spouse.” I do not believe anyone reading Claudia’s autobiography would think for a moment that Claudia was never not somebody. But those nagging doubts feel familiar. There is a tension in wanting to be recognized and in channeling ambition for the good of the community. But there is a larger, structural issue that bothers me more. Claudia’s fear of not “being somebody” speaks to institutional, societal, and national failures of imagination. When success is viewed as one’s place in a hierarchy, when efficiency is trumpeted as theology, and when people are valued for their position rather than viewed as essential members of the body of Christ, we all suffer. Indeed, instead of idolizing worldly ideas of power, this and future generations must imagine (and then create) a world more aligned with the principles of “persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned” (D&C 121: 41–43).

Envisioning that better world might begin in our hearts and minds, but the earthly communities we build must realize its fulfillment. Claudia embodied this ideal by building those earthly communities wherever she lived. For most people, places become a shorthand for identity. Phrases such as, “I’m a Chicagoan,” or “I’m a Londoner” signify characteristics, attitudes, and histories. While Claudia is a native San Franciscan, she embeds herself wherever she goes, enabling her to call many places home.

Claudia has a tremendous love of and respect for place; her descriptions of the various loves and homes of her life are sensually vivid. While reading, I could imagine the feel of fog from the harbors of wartime San Francisco; I visualized the tony, leafy suburbs of Belmont, Massachusetts; and I could almost smell the books in Claudia and Richard’s Upper West Side apartment. Reading Claudia’s autobiography, there is no doubt that each place she writes about shaped her intellect, her thoughts, her soul, and her future. Places take on an almost character-like quality; they, too, seem endowed with agency. She correlates the dedication and “birth” of the LDS Cambridge Ward chapel in 1956 with the birth of her first child. “I became a mother here,” she writes (I Claudia, 107). Chapels, especially, serve as symbols for Claudia’s sense of belonging within the Church. She recalls, in warm tones, the San Francisco Sunset Ward’s chapel, a “three-story white stucco building with Spanish accents” that had been “built with the dreams of visionaries, the pennies of poor Saints, and the blood of my father who was then the bishop of the ward” (I Claudia, 37). The Sunset Ward chapel was truly a communal space—both to commune with God and to join in community with other Saints.       

Claudia values the formative aspects of her Church community, including the traditions and stories she learned as a child, the lessons in public speaking, the big events, and the roadshows. And she misses its richness, the “active church of my youth” (I Claudia, 25). She recognizes that community is built in those hours of preparing meals together, sewing costumes for a play, or conversing in the hallway between classes. Activities matter, as they provide opportunities for members of the Church to practice discipleship and become friends. Claudia’s emphasis on place challenges readers to recognize the value of local histories, to consider what is lost in the name of progress, and to actively build community in our given corners of this earth.

The more experience I gain, the more I believe that love takes courage. (Even the Latin root of the word “courage” comes from cor, or “the heart.”) Love takes risk. There are no guarantees that the people, institutions, or places we love will love us back—let alone in the ways we desire. Claudia takes the risk to love over and over again. Love animates her scholarship and her discipleship.

“Given the chance,” Claudia wryly remarks at the end of her autobiography, “I may create a whole new life” (I Claudia, 288). What would that life be? So much would depend upon the circumstances, of birth, family, tragedies, and serendipity. And yet. So much would depend on the woman. Claudia has already revealed so much to us that I think we can allow her to have some mystery in these imaginings of a “whole new life.” But I have no trouble imagining that whatever life she leads—real or hypothetical—she would fill it to the brim with belonging, wonder, and beauty.

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Megan Armknecht is an Associate Editor for Wayfare. She currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she has switched her favorite seasonal hot cocoa for iced hot chocolate this Christmas.

Art by Margaret Keane (1927-2022).

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I have been eagerly following the launch and development of the New York Times “Believing” Project pioneered by associate editor Lauren Jackson. Jackson, no longer a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the same reporter who has recently covered Mormon YA fantasy writers and sister missionaries wearing pants. As her Times Insider headline tantalizingly teases: “She Almost Went on a Mormon Mission. She Became a Journalist Instead.” The result? A surprisingly faith-friendly writer who is deeply familiar with Latter-day Saint culture now works as a primary gatekeeper at the most-visited news site in the United States.

Jackson is not just high profile; she’s open, honest, concise, thoughtful, and sensitive. She combines insatiable curiosity with rigorous research—exactly what one might expect from a Latter-day Saint upbringing with its commitment to education as a spiritual imperative. Best of all, she’s trained her gaze on contemporary religion and spirituality. Her year-long research project is now a subscription column committed to publishing a diversity of voices and expressions of faith. It’s astoundingly refreshing, insightful, and bold. 

Jackson’s “Believing” Project is not just another category of content to consume; it’s an experiment that interests me for many reasons. As I see it, Lauren Jackson, McKay Coppins, and others represent a sort of watershed in Latter-day Saint news coverage—the latest edition in a long saga of Latter-day Saints in the public eye. Academics have been monitoring Mormon media coverage for a long time, especially since the “Mormon Moment,” and we certainly appear to be in a new one. The key issues have always been about being in the world but not of it, balancing institutional loyalty with outgroup relations, and translating across different discourse communities. These tensions exemplify what makes something newsworthy. News, after all, is information out of place. News is never news for those who are in the know. (Imagine this Church News headline: “Many People Believe in God, New Study Finds.”) News is illuminating for cultural criticism and historians of journalism precisely because it reveals what an audience deems newsworthy. News reflects what people find surprising. 

That’s why the “breaking news” statistic for the “Believing” project launch might fall a little flat for religious readers. The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey reported that 92% of U.S. adults believe in at least one of the following: a soul, God, spiritual reality, or an afterlife. This might be astonishing for New York Times readership, infamously urban, educated, and liberal, but probably shouldn’t be that surprising for anyone who actually belongs to that 92%. News only reveals what some people don’t already know, and it perhaps says more about the reporting community than the reported. Case in point: as soon as you have someone with a significant religious background in the New York Times offices, suddenly there’s a beat for religion. 

Even this might be oversimplifying though. God, as Jackson demonstrates in an interview with Krista Tippett, is particularly hard to talk about. People hold core beliefs close to their chests. Faith is personal. Disclosure is risky and has social ramifications. Even two or more open parties who think they’re connecting over divinity may be misfiring in meaning. Jackson, then, isn’t just another Mormon exile leveraging her difference to climb ladders in the great and spacious building. (Though there’s a strong template of this among post-Mormon writers.) She’s really thinking hard about these issues and trying to create space for conversation around a particularly polarizing and vulnerable topic. Her ethics statement is a paragon of what bilingual, study-and-faith, disciple-scholars should do: “I work to understand sharply divergent perspectives and represent them with nuance, humility and empathy.” 

Enter the objectivity problem. How does one represent both sides of fraught issues with balance and the notoriously impossible standard of impartiality? How ironic that a so-called post-truth world has become so obsessed with the facts. I’m of the opinion that faith may help us more than facts these days—not because facts aren’t important, but because facts don’t get us out of the capitalized Truth problem any faster than postmodernism does. There’s nothing new under the sun, and religion is the oldest of all news. As Charles Taylor put it in A Secular Age, the major shift in modern consciousness was for religion to become only one option among many epistemological alternatives rather than the default setting for identity, ethics, and collective action. Ninety-two percent belief shouldn’t be news for anyone familiar with the Global South or the long durée of history. The statistic reflects back on who it is newsworthy for: a small slice of an even smaller slice of a particularly unique demographic in a certain place and time. 

In short, a critique that one might leverage against the “Believing” Project is that it feels a bit like the secular rediscovering the sacred. Major news outlets from Interfaith America Magazine to Christianity Today to Religion News Service have been covering these sorts of topics for decades, as have other niche faith venues like Image, Plough Quarterly, Commonweal, and Tricycle Magazine. Wayfare, of course, fits in this camp, and should continue to reflect on what its publication priorities and audience say about itself and the contemporary Mormon moment. 

Still, I’m not complaining. I’m thrilled to be reading top-notch journalism about belief on a weekly basis. For me, it remains significant for faith to take on a new center-stage role with a national spotlight. It’s another indication of what has been called a postsecular literature and arts movement of which Wayfare is a part. I admire Jackson’s work as affirming, faith-positive, and pluralist. I love that it cuts across a breadth of traditions and appreciate her willingness to do her homework. Jackson is really taking the time to listen to thousands of voices speaking up about faith and spirituality today. One of my favorite pieces so far is “The Moments That Shape Our Belief,” which includes touching blurbs by Orlando Bloom, Mitt Romney, Kristin Chenoweth, and Hannah Neeleman. I hope Jackson’s “Believing” Project becomes one of those brilliantly written books of distilled research and synthesized nonfiction. If it does, I’ll rush to read it. 

As the column unfolds, I hope to see continued attention to mystery, epistemic humility, the unknowable, and faith as the foundation for functional language—all reasons why I continue to believe. Staying out of a post-Enlightenment credo-type belief seems important here, which is being done nicely so far by including a diversity of religious and mystical traditions. I’d also like to see the column take miracles and paranormal experiences seriously, as does Ross Douthat’s recent book Believe. Everyone draws the line somewhere between true and not true. I’m even wishing for some rumination on what it looks like to take what many call “fundamentalism” seriously as a valid (and often wholesome) way of life in a pluralist, postsecular society. 

What is the obligation of the educated toward the religious? Certainly not to fault them for living a life of simplicity. One can, as Thomas McConkie keeps teaching us, live out a rich life from many different developmental stages, epistemological perspectives, or ethical and metaphysical worldviews. It’s unfair for me to fault my relativist graduate student peers for not taking truth seriously and then turn around and fault my local ward for not taking history or contingency seriously. In many respects, belonging is a choice; one opts into a community by accepting its norms and practices. There’s always elbow room, to be sure. I espouse a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom vision of community except for intentional efforts to undermine or unfairly change a group’s core essence. To whom more is given more is required. The burden of the intellectual is to be sympathetic to viewpoints that one can understand even while knowing that the Other cannot inhabit your own perspective in the same way. I put myself in your shoes even if you can’t put yourself in mine. The “Believing” Project models this beautifully. 

Last but not least, Jackson’s editorial persona is endearing. When justifying why she can’t go back to the faith of her childhood she writes, “I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath).” There’s obviously a world of intrigue behind such a carefully cultivated voice, but I’m willing to be charmed by my columnist. Jackson models the kind of risky self-revelation that talking about God always entails: “I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. . . . I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists.” This is the both/and gospel of the twenty-first century—or perhaps just what happens to certain types of inquisitive people in early adulthood. 

For me, the best writing about religion will have to be willing to really go there—to say this: what if something is true? What if, in all our confidence about what is right and wrong, we are the ones who are wrong? Heaven forbid that the prophets be found right, but that’s what faith asks of us. “I still want it all to be true,” writes Jackson, “miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.” I’m tempted to offer Alma’s reply; let this desire work in you. Jackson’s got a good story, but couldn’t the headline have been even more shocking? “She Almost Became a Journalist. She Went on a Mormon Mission Instead.” Sometimes it’s harder and more interesting to stay. 

Perhaps the rhetorical and social constraints of being a New York Times editor don’t allow that, though, even if McKay Coppins seems to be pulling it off at The Atlantic. Here’s another difference in method between the two: one went biography (the very dirt of private fact, as William James called it) and the other is opting for an extra layer of abstraction and remove. This allows for a wider view and more generalization, but also seems to over-emphasize the social needs that religion fulfills—belonging, behavioral guides, meaning-making—rather than the sheer existential possibility of it all. Here’s a question not at all unrelated from this essay’s meditations on the news: Would The Secret Lives of [TikTok Influencer] Wives even sell without the “Mormon” in it? Assimilators who can carry and play their card labeled “The Other” have a gambling advantage. 

Let me conclude, then, by making a personal confession myself. Even though I’m in zero position to pass judgment on the next to nothing I know about Jackson’s life, I can still admit in the first person that part of me wishes I knew she was a diligent and committed member of the Manhattan Fifth Ward. I don’t wish this because I think everyone should live their religion or their Mormonism in the same way. I genuinely wonder if Jackson could have accomplished what she has if she had gone on a mission. God works in mysterious ways. I think that I feel this way, though, because none of this is actually about Lauren Jackson specifically—it’s about what’s at stake when someone writes about a faith community that they are no longer completely a part of. 

In short, the Believing Project can be a metaphor for what’s lost in translation between sacred and secular. I am devastated when Latter-day Saints feel forced to suppress or trade their glorious tradition in order to try out for the world’s big league. I understand and have felt this impulse firsthand. In fact, that’s precisely why I wish people like Jackson didn’t feel like they had to leave, so there could be more word-heads like me in the Church. What I long for is a template of radical heterodoxy with near-perfect orthopraxis—a voice that glorifies and improves the tradition by remaining squarely in it. 

Jackson’s story touched a nerve for me; like news reflects its audience, my reading reflects my own anxieties. I fear a future where there are only two options: a child-like faith that stays in the Church and an adult-like faith that leaves it. Moreover, I fear a version of American culture with a similar binary: secular conformity versus religious isolationism. Both religion and secular American culture will have to expand if we are to achieve true pluralism. Longing for faith is a perfectly acceptable reason to continue to choose membership over disfellowship, just as religious affiliation shouldn’t hamper opportunities in the wider public sphere. The choice between missionary and reporter turns out to be a false one from the outset. Jackson’s column clearly demonstrates a deep sense of personal mission, and a desire to help secular readers understand sacred things. What’s more evangelical than that? Still, Wayfare will never have as many subscribers as the New York Times, so we’ll have to hope that Lauren Jackson also writes a memoir one day. Until then, in a news cycle that is so insane and unwieldy these days, I confess that I’m on the whole pleased. Jackson has helped me start to find my belief in the news again. 

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Isaac James Richards received a B.A. in Communications and an M.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where he taught courses in the English Department, the School of Communications, and the Honors Program. He is an award-winning author of several poems, essays, and peer-reviewed publications in venues such as LIT, Oxford Magazine, and The Journal of American Culture. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State.

Art by Robert Delaunay.

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The wintering sun is low but not yet gone as I step into the old white steepled building full of Joel Church’s paintings. Light seeps clearly through the cold open room, spreading into corners, revealing dozens of darkly painted canvases bearing human forms. There are few people inside, making each voice distinct and each footstep noticeable—Belchertown, Massachusetts, is quiet that way. The original pews have been removed, the simple wooden floor cleared of everything but paintings and sculptures. Reverence fills the emptiness. The church, though tall on a hill, is shrouded by dense, unleafed November trees. No one passing on the two-lane road below would know what this chapel holds. 

Inside, artist Kirk Richards welcomes those who wander through the doors. He acquired this church years ago to serve as a studio and, now, as an occasional gallery space. “Make yourself at home,” he tells everyone. It is the type of home everyone present is likely familiar with; most people, including myself, are here because they know Kirk’s religious work and are at least tangentially connected to the Christian faith his subject matter typically converses with. But this show, his first gallery presented by his second artist name, Joel Church, is different—instead of angels and Jesus and God, his new work delves purely into “the greatest of all forms: the human figure.” 

Blue ink transfer drawings accented by brief strokes of white paint cover a wall near the entrance. The papers are mostly the size of small notecards, collaged with fuller pages and a few canvas enlargements that mimic the pulsing, bleeding effect of transferred ink. All blue. Dark, inky blue. Male and female figures walking, resting, presenting their bodies to the viewer and drawing their limbs close. Marked in the corner of each piece is a small silhouette of a steepled church. Not a name spelled out in letters, but a signature in picture form. 

In a small room off to the side, separated from the expanse of unclothed figures, hang two depictions of a haloed, pink-robed Christ surrounded by indistinct crowds of people draped in painted cloth. The colors are pastel, neutral, warm; the shapes are abstract, blurred. In one, Christ lifts a cup; in the other, he gestures to a flying dove. Both pieces, along with a framed landscape propped between them, bear the initials JKR in blocky print. “I’ve been doing religious work—paintings of Jesus and angels—from the moment I had skill enough to finish an oil painting. I return to themes of healing and teaching over and over again.”

Kirk has always been called by his middle name alone—both signatures are departures from his everyday persona. His original artist name did not require significant thought; the inclusion of his first initial was merely used to differentiate himself from an older painter in Texas who shares the name Kirk Richards. Once he began exploring markedly varied themes, Kirk created the name Joel Church to distinguish the intentions guiding his work, though the separation isn’t always clear. “One body of work always wants to spill over into the other, and vice versa.” Attempting to categorize the work under each name, he calls the work by J. Kirk Richards “overtly religious and urgently active and reactive to my immediate surroundings, contexts and roots, mostly with clothed figures.” In contrast, he describes work by Joel Church as, “searching for something beyond the immediate contexts,” though unsure of exactly what paths it might explore. “So far, the human figure has been a central component. Perhaps too central. Time will tell.”

Mostly. Mostly clothed, always figures. Despite the necessity of studying the human figure to produce life-like art, Kirk has sometimes been criticized on grounds of religious propriety. He responded to his detractors in a 2012 blog post titled, Why are you painting those naked ladies? Or, what makes me think I can go to a nude drawing session on Saturday and then go to church on Sunday? Describing a figure drawing session at a studio in Park City, Utah, Kirk recalls his first experience as a young artist drawing a nude model. “She stepped onto the platform. She stood there, naked. I started drawing. I began the overwhelming task of laying values, lines, and marks on my page—desperately straining my brain to correctly record proportions, anatomy, edges, divisions of light and dark.” Ultimately, the experience was not sexual in the way his personal naivety and community’s religious framework had led him to believe. At a later drawing session, an older artist further molded Kirk’s philosophy regarding figure models by suggesting, “The human body is not inherently sexual.” After years of artistic practice, Kirk believes, “We were created in the image of God—which image I believe should be respected. I have no problems reconciling my faith with nudity.” 

The issue with clothing, Kirk explains, is that the style and draping pattern of cloth immediately dates a piece of art, assigning it a certain time and place in history, which he often tries to avoid. “The figure itself, whether nude or clothed, speaks through gestures. The bend of the waist, arm, leg, hand—those gestures begin to tell a story. I want that story to be universal, archetypal, or separate from physical time and place. Figurative gesture is key in my work.” His Joel Church paintings, sculptures, and ink tracings speak through stance and shape.

In 2017, Kirk displayed his art show After Our Likeness at a gallery in Provo, Utah. An interpretation of the Biblical creation story, the pieces depicted “God as a woman and a man working in tandem to make the world and its inhabitants.” In addition to the acknowledgement of female deity and portrayal of sacred beings as semi-nude in order to transcend the human concept of time, the figures bore skin tones that corresponded with their changing landscapes: greens, purples, browns and blues. Some viewers critiqued the varying skin tones and his attempt as a white artist to represent race, saying some of the paintings resembled photographs of slaves. Kirk apologized for any pain caused, but pointed out that the purpose of this art show was to dismantle the white Mormonism version of the creation story and offer images all people could relate to. For him, the universality he was seeking necessitated varying skin tones and abstract nudity. “I admit that the show comes together at a dangerous intersection—where race, religion, art and the body meet,” Kirk wrote, “but I humbly suggest that this show needed to be done here and now.”

Kirk’s primary gallery and studios are in Utah, close to where he studied art as an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University. When he first expressed interest in focusing on religious art as a student, professors warned him against specializing in such a niche, but Kirk could not be swayed from his initial impulse. He continued creating what he wanted to create. Though he doesn’t paint for any specific church, much of his artistic community exists within the context of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

While many of his paintings have been licensed by the LDS Church and other denominations around the world, not all of his work has been so readily used by organizations, especially when artistic choices depart from standard portrayals of scriptural accounts—giving angels wings, or placing Christ in the shadows. Margaret Olsen Hemming, an LDS art curator, explains, “Church-approved images of Christ and Heavenly Father skew heavily toward depicting white, European-looking men in an illustrative style.” If Kirk’s only goal was to create images that a specific church would be willing to use, most of the paintings that resonate most significantly with people would never have been painted. He urges other creators to “make artwork for God’s children. Having pursued my own vision of what I want to communicate to God’s children, my images hold a power that orthodoxy would have squelched.”

Kirk’s numerous rainbow paintings signed JKR are a tangible example of this unorthodox power. “My first rainbow painting was Jesus Said Love Everyone, depicting Jesus with embracing arms, in a rainbow robe filled with people. The painting had seven sides, a number that in religious symbology means perfection.” Disagreeing with the stance others of his faith took towards the LGBTQIA+ community, Kirk found inspiration and hope in the song children sing in church about loving everyone and treating all people with kindness. 

One irony begs to be questioned: The work presented under Kirk’s second artist name, Joel Church, purportedly leans less religious than the work signed J. Kirk Richards. So why is it housed in a church? “I wanted a space where I could work on large-scale art pieces. Churches were, and to an extent still are, relatively inexpensive to purchase in the northeast. I looked at non-church spaces as well, but they didn’t appeal to me in the same way. The idea of a sacred space containing art excites me.” In the future, Kirk hopes to create multiple art chapels—transforming old churches into art studios and galleries.

When questioned theoretically, the line between the art associated with each of the two names remains blurry. Yet up close, distinctions become clearer, especially in the context of Joel Church’s first art show, consisting of pieces congruous in texture, subject, and motif. “There are a lot of themes in these about values or virtues, and monuments, and also about the transitory nature, the limited lifespan of all things.” 

Standing in front of the blue ink drawings, I inquire how much time he has spent creating the pieces being shown. “I started in this space nine years ago, so a lot of these, particularly the paintings on linen, it’s been almost a decade. And some of them still aren’t done, embarrassingly. I want them to have a similar finish, not with colors, but with the texture and the oil layers, as that one right there,” he says, pointing to Glass Ceiling, an expansive linen canvas that claims a central spot at the front of the chapel where the altar once might have stood. The painting is dark, metallic, faded yet boldly defined. A statuesque female figure lacking head, neck, and half her legs, floats upward in a strong stance. Hips wide and sure, belly full and firm, breasts draping the ribcage with softness, muscled arms raised defiantly with clenched fists that pound against streaks of light, shattering blueness. She is clothed not in cloth, but in metal skin. Defined not by time, but by lack of timid gesture.

While the canvases have been worked on over the past decade, the images crafted on smaller panels of copper have emerged only in the past six months. “I was trying to think how I could do something that works with this body of work, but faster. I’d come out here, make a little bit of progress, then go home. Two-thirds of the copper ones were done while I was here in the last four weeks. The textures are actually chemically created patinas, so it’s not like the paintings, noodling to create the illusion of a patina, it’s actually the chemicals doing the work.”

The process starts with painting the copper panels with monochromatic oil colors, then creating a mixture of red wine vinegar, plant fertilizer, and salt to effect chemical changes on the piece. “I lift the panels off the liquid so it’s swimming above the soup, then I put some of it on the painting, and I pour on solvent and salts, different seasonings.” After the chemicals alter the texture and shape of the original painting, he’ll use more paint to add spaces, colors, and tones. 

I wander through the church, standing before each figure. They can’t see me; most of them don’t have heads. Some have blurred faces, or eyes of painted stone or metal. They are statues and monuments, with life and movement bound and pulsing. In Resistance, a male torso bears the weight of a heavy stone on his shoulders. In Nurture, a father cradles an infant close to his chest; in Mother and Child, a woman wraps a young body in trustful arms. In Boundary, a defined female figure propped on a work table bows her head to the right, body soft and rounded, arms either broken off or not yet built. A reaching hand floats at the end of an imagined limb. The color is green, as if already oxidized. Paint is splattered and a patch above the left breast appears unfinished, reminding me this is a painting of a statue, not a statue itself. Despite the repeated translations away from true human form, I recognize my own body in hers. Bloom depicts a coppery bare-breasted woman whose skin appears warmed by living blood, red hair loose, lips and collar bones defined even as the eyes retain abstractness, flowers gathered around her waist.

A few people gather with Kirk by a wall marked by the outline of a larger frame that used to hang there long ago. “Venus is quite white,” he says, referring to a piece whose lighter coloring adds significant contrast to the copper hue, featuring a standing female figure, her weight grounded in one foot while the other hovers, arms ending at the shoulders, torso ending at the neck. He points to the framed copper plate on the wall closest to us. “Sometimes I just try to do almost monochromatic but not totally, with some greens, so it’s a little cooler than the copper, kind of that pinkish and white. I let the oxidation bring the cools in, and then sometimes I paint some green on top after that process to do some subtle shifting of things to finish it off.”

Amy, Kirk’s wife and partner in the art business from the very beginning, joins the group. I ask her if she has a favorite piece tonight. “There isn’t anything he does that I don’t like, but I’m biased. There’s the Glass Ceiling, of course, which is great for us women.” She raises her arms in fists to match the figure’s stance. Amy is an artist too; she’s had art shows of her own. “Now it’s more of a hobby. I went back to school and work as a therapist now, but I’d like to do something with art therapy,” she says. She’s visited this church every other year or so as Kirk has come to work on these pieces. I shiver despite my coat, and Amy comments on the coldness of the large open chapel. “Sometimes he’ll go in that corner room and shut the door, let it warm up and paint in there.”

In the fresh absence of the sunken sun, the dull green and brown patchworks of the stained-glass windows suddenly match the coloring of Kirk’s work. When a woman returns to the wall of blue ink transfer drawings to decide which one she wants to purchase to take home, I follow. They are small enough, simple enough, to be affordable pieces of fine art. We point out our favorites, some of our choices overlapping. She is drawn to the folded poses, “in part because the Joel Church signature in the corner is so clear. And I love her. The confidence,” she says. I am drawn to the figures pulling their knees close to their chest, imbued with cozy safeness. “I was raised in the church,” the woman tells me, “and reclaiming the feminine form and bodies as good has been such a growing space.” I voice my agreement. We pull our favorites from the wall where they all dangle from tiny binder clips on thin nails. I choose two: both side profiles, one of a woman walking forward with a sense of quiet sureness, her arms drawn slightly back in motion, the other of a woman kneeling with her arms raised to the heavens. They are blue. Dark, inky blue, with a faint blend of pink in the white painted accents. They feel scripture-paper thin in my hands.

Kirk unclips the drawings and tapes them into a folded postcard, guarding them from potential harm, while continuing his conversation with those around him. “My paintings have always prioritized the poetry of scripture over dogma. To me, dogma is the main thing that makes scriptures unappealing. Remove the dogma, and scripture is full of immense beauty. Do I care about how I’m perceived? A little bit. I’ve worried more about sharing on social media lately, but I’m not sure if it’s because of concern about what people think of me. It might be that I’ve been relishing quietude lately, when my brain and heart can rest. There are a lot of things I can’t reconcile, so I live with tension. I’ve been embracing differentiation theory, which is about how to belong to yourself while also belonging to another person or group. I am myself. I am not my country, family, or church. I participate within those groups, but I am different from those groups. That’s about all I can do to reconcile things at the moment.” 

Outside, the early night is stark and brittle, poked by scraggly bare-leaf branches. The tall, rounding windows pulse warm with chapel light, transferring reverence to the darkened air.

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Fleur Van Woerkom is a lover of earth, art, movement, and stories. She is currently studying writing at Columbia University. 

Art by Joel Church. Photos by J. Kirk Richards.

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One thing I remember hearing a lot in LDS church meetings as a kid was the promise, usually slipped into a sermon or testimony, that if parents stay true to the faith, our families, wayward children and all, would turn out OK. I’m sure at the time I rejected such pronouncements as so much wishful thinking, but in retrospect, I was probably too dismissive. After all, what we love is determined by the rituals of our lives, sometimes without us even realizing it. These repetitive physical practices, or “cultural liturgies” (James K.A. Smith’s term, not mine), are no doubt a two-way street. When we engage in the habits that seem characteristic of modern life—habits increasingly focused on consumption, social mimicry, and self-promotion—they affect who we are as people in ways that are no less real because of their subtlety, and sometimes their effects can be negative. That is Smith’s point in his various writings on the subject.

But the opposite can be true too—the primary songs, the ward Easter potlucks, the ministering assignments, the fast-offering collections—all of these seemingly mundane rituals that constitute a particular religious life also structure our identities. They tell us who we are and where we belong. And this influence can surely endure long after we have perhaps created distance between ourselves and the religion we grew up in. “The Mormons are my people,” we sometimes hear from someone who has, for one reason or another, left the faith. It might sound like an oxymoron, but to me at least, that sentiment is perfectly intelligible. In life, we are led to an unchosen goodness by the light of maps made by religions we have at times abjured. Perhaps that’s the real truth behind those aspirational promises I remember from my church-going youth.    

These thoughts and more came to mind when I was reading Mary Clyde’s recent novel, Journeys from a Desert Road. Clyde is perhaps not as well-known as some others in Mormon letters, possibly because this is only her second book and appears several decades after her first one. But that first one, a marvelous collection of short stories, garnered Clyde the prestigious Flannery O’Connor prize, and this novel is further evidence of her considerable literary talents. I don’t know whether there will be more where this came from—I’ve heard Clyde quip that she is satisfied with being a two-book wonder. But I choose to hope for more from Clyde while also being grateful for what she’s already given us. 

And what is that exactly? Without giving too much away, the novel is about a family and the aftermath of an atomic explosion. Or should I say “explosions” in the plural? More than one explosion features, and they are both literal and figurative, each quite real. The family in question, the Wilsons, are well-to-do, thoroughly modern and secular, and living in the shadow of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. But they are also haunted by a Mormon upbringing that has long since been abandoned and is only physically present in the person of a devout grandmother, Iris, who still lives in Utah but also seems to be wherever the family needs her to be. When we first meet Iris, Clyde sketches her with just a few brushstrokes, highlighting her smallness and tendency to wear Jergens cherry-almond lotion. But despite the lack of frills, Iris manages to draw out of the family, and in particular her daughter, Ellen, and adult grandson, Jack, a certain moral strength befitting their pioneer ancestry.  

Where this moral strength comes from is slightly mysterious. But the cultural liturgies I mentioned above probably play a role. Jack’s memories of the Bible stories his grandmother told him and his sister when they were young; the 72-hour kits she had made in Relief Society and given them for Christmas; the C.S. Lewis quotes that Ellen can’t stop quoting from her youth; the family stories of ancestors who braved the Mormon trail; Iris’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir music; the LDS tendency to call other members “brother and sister”—all of these things structure Ellen’s and Jack’s lives, both waking and sleeping. It’s as if the rituals and hymns of the faith have long since done their work, resulting in a sort of built-in teleology, a self-sustaining directedness outlasting its moment of creation and pointed toward something good, if not the Good itself. “I don’t want to pray, Mom,” Ellen tells her mother at a low point. What Ellen doesn’t seem to realize is that in some sense her whole life is a prayer.  

And so in the wake of the explosions that turn the Wilsons’ lives upside down, the family does what their forsaken faith has imprinted on them to do: they gather. After one explosion, they take up makeshift handcarts and trek to Payson, a small town in the center of the state, to the home of an uncle and aunt where they hope they will find Iris, who is sure to know what to do. And after another quite different explosion, the family gathers in the recovery room of a hospital, Iris again a source of stoic optimism in the midst of the beeps and whirs of lifesaving machines, having arrived thanks to a ride from a ministering sister from Ellen’s family’s congregation, a woman whom Ellen barely knows and calls “Sister Pooley” but whom Iris, acquainted only since the airport, calls by her first name, “Christine.”

There will be a natural inclination to compare Clyde’s book to The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the relationship between a father and a son as they navigate a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  And there are certainly similarities: after all, they’re both stories about fundamentally good people trying to muddle through a catastrophe. But in McCarthy’s book, it was never clear where that goodness came from and whether it existed independent of one’s will that it should. In McCarthy’s world, goodness is carried around like fire and is consequently fragile, as if it might be snuffed out at any moment by an unexpectedly strong breeze. Perhaps for that reason, The Road ends on a rather plaintive note. Speaking of the brook trout that once filled the mountain springs, McCarthy writes that “[o]n their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” 

The ending to Clyde’s novel is not in any way easier to stomach than McCarthy’s. The explosions leave their mark on the Wilson family in various and sundry ways. But in contrast to McCarthy’s closing lines lamenting over the ravages of nature’s entropy, Clyde seems to see a different possibility: the thing being put back and being made right again. In other words, she ends on a note of redemption, a vision of “the bomb . . . sucking up destruction like milk through a straw: destroying what it has destroyed. Making something new.” But this doesn’t seem to be a redemption that might happen in the future if only one can muster the will to believe. That wouldn’t be all that different from McCarthy’s take. Rather, Clyde’s vision seems to be of a redemption that has in fact already happened, and possibly long ago, and that the Wilson family’s story, like all of ours, is one of simply coming to that realization. Of course, this doesn’t equate to a happy ending, whatever that might mean. And indeed, in the story’s final pages, we find the Wilson family bruised and battered and somewhat diminished from their journey of hardship. And yet, there are hints that, thanks no doubt to her mother’s steadfastness, Ellen understands something deeper about what has happened. As she tearfully observes in the novel’s closing scene, echoing every parent’s hope, “‘It’s so good to have my family here safe and sound.’”  

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Zachary Gubler is the Marie Selig Professor of Law at Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

Art by Maynard Dixon.

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