BYU Studies

Volume 58:2 (2019) - While not described as such, Martyrs in Mexico is a continuation of the story that author F. LaMond Tullis gave us in Mormons in Mexico, a classic work, first published in 1987, detailing the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the country just south of the United States. Martyrs in Mexico, however, has a narrower scope, focusing on one community—San Marcos, Hidalgo—from which would come well-known individuals of the Church in Mexico. Why did Tullis choose San Marcos? The obvious answer is that this community holds an important place in Church lore. San Marcos was the place of one of the Church’s most remembered (though not necessarily among American Saints) martyrdoms: that of Rafael Monroy and Vicente Morales, who were killed by a firing squad of Mexican revolutionaries for, the story goes, refusing to renounce their faith. The value of Martyrs in Mexico is that it tells more than has been told before about Rafael Monroy’s life and family and how they became a dynastic family in the Church in Mexico. It also tells us more about Vicente Morales, who has been the forgotten man in this story of martyrdom.

Volume 58:2 (2019) - This essay begins with the author’s twenty-six-hour drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Everett, Washington, seven years after he had come out to his parents that he was gay. He was miserable, and his life had become unmanageable. His parents assured him that they would love and accept him, no matter what he decided to do. During his visit in his parents’ home, he arrived at the decision that he would drink his own bitter cup and remain faithful to the covenants he had made. He makes clear in the essay that this is his own decision, not one he is recommending to anyone else. “I am not able to choose whether to have opposite-sex attractions, but I do have a multitude of other choices. As a gay Latter-day Saint, the choice I make again and again is to seek out God’s will for me and then to do it.”

Volume 58:2 (2019) - In her thought-provoking book, On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City, Laura Rutter Strickling captures the complex conversion narratives of fifteen Latter-day Saint women who found space for themselves within a “historically White church”. The book provides powerful accounts of individual spiritual journeys while also grappling with the racial tensions that implicitly and explicitly influence black and white interaction within and without The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Strickling has written a compelling book that encourages readers to consider the forgotten and the overlooked in order to understand religious belief, practice, and experience within the Church of Jesus Christ. Even though Strickling focuses more on sharing the stories of why these women chose to become Latter-day Saints than she does on interpreting and analyzing the historical meaning and significance of these stories, her work does, both implicitly and explicitly, pose the question: what does it mean to be a Latter-day Saint?

Volume 58:2 (2019) - When the author’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, he came face to face with his failure as a husband to be her full partner. “The simultaneous, stark revelation of her mortality and my personal failure left me wanting to sit alone in a room and cry my way through the smothering chaos rather than accept the painful transformation that beckoned. But there was no time to stare, heartbroken, at my pitiful soul, dithering about whether I could be remade, whether we could be made whole. I would have to man up. I would need to keep house.” Hereafter follows an account of the author’s adventures in learning to cook and even to bake, as well as his observations on the Last Supper, the sacrament bread, and the priesthood. After being called to serve in an elders quorum presidency, he learned, with his wife’s tutoring, how to bake what he calls the cookies of the priesthood, to share with his quorum members.

Volume 58:2 (2019) - When the author’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, he came face to face with his failure as a husband to be her full partner. “The simultaneous, stark revelation of her mortality and my personal failure left me wanting to sit alone in a room and cry my way through the smothering chaos rather than accept the painful transformation that beckoned. But there was no time to stare, heartbroken, at my pitiful soul, dithering about whether I could be remade, whether we could be made whole. I would have to man up. I would need to keep house.” Hereafter follows an account of the author’s adventures in learning to cook and even to bake, as well as his observations on the Last Supper, the sacrament bread, and the priesthood. After being called to serve in an elders quorum presidency, he learned, with his wife’s tutoring, how to bake what he calls the cookies of the priesthood, to share with his quorum members.