Mormon Land

The delta variant of COVID-19 is surging across the country, with nearly half of all Americans still not fully vaccinated. As the enduring pandemic once again grows dire, Utah hospitals have been overwhelmed with mostly unvaccinated patients battling the disease.

The new emergency prompted the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to issue yet another, even more forceful, message last week to members to wear masks and get vaccinated.

Dr. Samuel Brown is witnessing the pandemic’s devastating toll up close, and all too personally, as an intensive care unit physician-scientist at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray.

Brown, who doubles as a religious historian, is also the author of a new book, “Where the Soul Hungers: One Doctor’s Journey From Atheism to Faith.”

On this week’s show, he talks about his experiences treating COVID-19, his thoughts about fellow Latter-day Saints who choose not to wear masks or be vaccinated, and how the pandemic has affected his faith.

Scaffolding surrounds the Salt Lake Temple. The two visitor centers are no more. The plaza behind the Church Office Building is mainly dirt.

Clearly big changes are in store in and around Temple Square, which ranks among Utah’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing millions of visitors from near and far every year.

You may be wondering what this place in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City will look like when all the work is done. Where will the Christus statue wind up? Will the sculptures of church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum return? And what about the holiday Christmas lights?

On this week’s show, Ben Metcalf, manager of temple visitors centers for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, talks about this massive makeover and what guests can expect when the four-year project ends.

The New York Times recently took up the topic of temple garments in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The piece focused on Idaho Falls member Sasha Piton, who is urging the church to produce softer, more comfortable and breathable garments, which the faithful wear as a private and personal reminder of their religious commitments.

Piton, who posts on Instagram under her moniker, themormonhippie, had shared her concerns about the holy underwear with her more than 25,000 followers. It apparently resonated in Latter-day Saint circles, drawing thousands of comments and private messages.

It is just one subject the Mormon millennial discusses on social media. On this week’s show, talks about garments, The Times article and other issues for young members of the Utah-based church.

In the 1940s, Trappist monks looked to create new monasteries in unlikely places, places not dominated by Catholics. They found just such a spot in a high mountain valley in Mormon Utah.

For 70 years, Holy Trinity Abbey in the scenic Ogden Valley served as a religious refuge, where monks pondered and prayed, worked and worshipped, lived and died.

For a young Michael O’Brien, torn by his parents’ recent divorce, however, the monastery and his family’s frequent trips up “Abbey Road” offered a more personal connection as the monks provided spiritual fathering, committed counseling, timely mentoring, religious role modeling and paths to peace.

A now-grown O’Brien, a Catholic who works as an attorney in Salt Lake City and often represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters, captures all that and more in his soon-to-be-released memoir, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.”

This week, Utahns and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are remembering the 1847 arrival of Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley.

Not everyone, however, believes this epic migration is cause for unmitigated celebration. After all, these settlers ended up displacing Native Americans and transporting slavery to the region.

On this week’s show, W. Paul Reeve, head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, and Elise Boxer, coordinator of Native American studies at the University of South Dakota and a Dakota from the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands, discuss how we should treat Pioneer Day.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints return to in-person worship after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions, the question has become: Which pandemic-era changes should stay and which should go?

Will members who are homebound or don’t feel comfortable in crowds still be able to watch services via Zoom? Will extra health precautions like hand-washing by deacons continue? Will anyone wear masks again, especially during flu season or when germs are prevalent?

Rebecca Jensen, a longtime blogger with By Common Consent, wrote recently about those questions and more. On this week’s show, she talks about post-pandemic Mormonism.

She was church founder Joseph Smith’s first scribe. She created the first Latter-day Saint hymnal. She was the first president of the women’s Relief Society. She was, indeed, the faith’s first first lady. Yet Emma Smith, beloved wife of Joseph Smith, remains a mystery to many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jennifer Reeder, a historian for the Utah-based church, seeks to break through that mystery and the myth in her new biography, appropriately titled “First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith,” revealing Emma’s undying love for her prophet-husband and her feeling of betrayal at his practice of polygamy, exploring her painful loss of young babies and her lifelong commitment to surviving children, examining her fractious relationship with Brigham Young and the Utah church and her eventual embrace of the Reorganized Church (now called the Community of Christ).

On this week’s show, Reeder talks about Emma Smith, the “elect lady” of early Mormonism.

In an unexpected and bold move, President Russell M. Nelson announced a partnership with the NAACP in 2018 — just days before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrated the 40th anniversary of the end of its centurylong priesthood and temple ban on Black members.

In recent weeks, the Utah-based faith elevated this unlikely alliance with the nation’s oldest civil rights organization by unveiling nearly $10 million in scholarships and humanitarian aid.

On this week’s show, NAACP President Derrick Johnson talks about how the former foes — the church once barred Black members from holding its priesthood or entering its temples —became friends, why this evolving relationship is important, and where it is headed.

A recent U.S. survey found that more than a fifth of Gen Zers who self-identify as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or other.

Nearly that many millennials (19%) do as well.

That is almost double the 10% that researchers Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll found in their 2016 Next Mormons Survey.

On this week’s show, Knoll, an associate professor of politics at Centre College in Kentucky, and Calvin Burke, an openly gay senior majoring in English at Brigham Young University and a media manager for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, discuss these latest findings and their implications for the Utah-based faith now and into the future.

The Mormon History Association’s just-completed annual conference offered the usual smorgasbord of delectable scholarly presentations relating to Mormonism.

The 2021 theme for the hybrid in-person and online meeting in Park City was “Restoration, Reunion and Resilience.”

There were sessions on polygamy and early Latter-day Saint experiences in Nauvoo, Ill., and Kirtland, Ohio, along with discussions of race, LGBTQ issues and the Mark Hofmann bombings. The historians also recognized that they were gathering in the ancestral lands of several northern bands of the Ute Indian Tribe.

In addition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced plans to rehabilitate the Hill Cumorah, the Manchester, N.Y., spot where founder Joseph Smith said he unearthed gold plates that contained the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon.

On this week’s show Barbara Jones Brown, the association’s executive director, and Jenny Lund, this year’s president and director of the church’s historic sites, share highlights and insights from the conference and plans for the future.