In The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025), Leah Libresco Sargeant —our guest for today — envisions a world where caring for loved ones is not seen as an interruption of a real, normal, satisfying life, but constitutive of one. In fact, one measure love might be our “interruptibility.” The myth that we are independent is an “anthropological falsehood” promoting the lie that we can survive or thrive without others who choose to care for us. Women’s bodies point continually to this lie, and its tragic that pregnancy, birth, nursing, and parenting overall are treated as interruptions from work and life. Yet, as she reiterates in this episode, “men can’t get away with pretending to be autonomous, either. They just get caught later.”

We talk to Leah about her book and how it relates to single people, whose lives are often structured so that they simply don’t receive as many interruptions from other people, and often struggle to ask for help. Hope you enjoy the conversation!

Today we share another interreligious dialgoue on the relationship between sex and the spiritual, which — contrary to pretty much all public messaging on the topic since the day I was born — is not inherently antagonistic. Not when you look deeper into the texts and teachings. And certainly not among the Dharmic faiths, which are known for being anthropologically astute on matters of desire, love, and attachment. Our guest for this conversation is Premananda Villasa, a museum curator and yoga instructor based in Washington DC, and a fellow Residential Minister at Georgetown University.

Prema taught us about the four stages of life in the Dharmic traditions, which show the arc of spiritual progression across the life cycle from student to householder to retiree to renunciate. Sex and sexual energy play a different role in each of these life stages. You can’t truly advance to the next stage without grappling with the former. These earthly/pragmatic stages are what we might call our “dharma” — they define the relationships and duties through which we can access and channel divine love.My takeaway: knowing your own “dharma “is the first place to start in figuring out what’s right for your life, with sex and many other things. Just as we learned in our conversation last year with Fr. Briscoe and Sara Perla, it depends on the type of relationships and the forms of service we are called into.Beyond the theology of it all, we discuss the challenge of trying to live in a way that is both holy and human when it comes to sex. It takes time and experience to know our own bodies and understand how we love, hurt, and heal through them — how do we give ourselves and others the grace to learn from experience, while not being careless? How do we navigate dating norms or religious expectations that conflict with what we feel is right? Similar to our conversation on sexual maturity with Jennifer-Finlayson Fife, we ask: what does it mean to be adults about sex?

Hope you enjoy.

We’re coming up on Giving Tuesday, which is a good time to reflect on what we’re giving our time and money to. Today’s guests, Abe Collier and Melissa Robel, discuss their own wrestles with this question as they heeded unexpected calls to found their own humanitarian organizations. I was eager to talk to Abe and Melissa because their organizations are both young and small — right at that point where leadership can be lonely and it’s easy to wonder am I crazy for even attempting this?

Abe is the founder and director of Dignity Aid International, which delivers essential food and hygiene supplies to rural villages and psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine. Melissa is the president and founder Pads 4 Refugees, which supplies disposal menstrual products to women in refugee camps. Both Abe and Melissa caught their inspiration while volunteering (separately) in refugee camps in Greece, noticing unmet needs at different extremes. While being a founder sounds sexy — and it certainly takes a lot of confidence — it also asks for humility to sit in spreadsheets, patience to communicate across cultural and language barriers, and grace for people living through the immediate effects of war, displacement, chaos, and loss. Sometimes life feels like a hero's journey and sometimes it feels like grunt work. As we discuss, both mindsets are necessary to getting things done in the world.Follow these awesome organizations for more information:Dignity Aid International: Follow on Instagram or Substack | Donate | Volunteer Pads 4 Refugees: Follow on Instagram or LinkedIn | Donate

David Boice has done one of the most interesting public experiments on the internet — 52 Churches in 52 Weeks. What began as a personal search for a spiritual home has become a rare document of the Christian architecture of America: not just what churches teach, but how Churches treat people as they walk inside for the first time. Over dozens of Sundays, David has become a quiet expert in the subtle social technologies of community — hospitality, fellowship, teaching, and the fragile process by which a stranger becomes an insider. At a moment when many of us are asking how “thick community” is built, David’s observations carry unusual weight.

But the institutional dynamics — how Churches greet, orient, and integrate new attendees — are only half of the story. We also discuss the psychology of the newcomer. The imposter syndrome that surfaces without a shared history, ancestry, or education in the faith. The question of legitimacy (“Is this the one true church?”) that mirrors the modern anxiety of dating (“Is this the one true spouse?”). The deeper tension between a spiritual life that maximizes freedom and optionality and a spiritual life that requires commitment. How do we recognize the difference between ambient doubt and genuine warning signs? What does it mean to choose something — or someone — in a world engineered to keep every option open? Mallory, Diana, and David compare notes on the varying anxieties that come from being a convert versus a lifelong member of an organization.

David brings incredible stories from the road — and by now, he’s far beyond the original fifty-two. Some are funny, some are moving, all of them illuminate what it means to belong where you’re still learning the rules. This was a joyful, surprising conversation, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Today’s conversation is about detours, the awkwardness of not meeting cultural milestones, and the discovery that there are multiple paths towards fulfillment.When Joseph Smith traveled to Salem in 1836, he hoped to find opportunities that could ease the Church’s debts. He never found the money. But the revelation recorded in Doctrine & Covenants 111 reframed the apparent failure: “Concern not yourselves about your debts, for I will give you power to pay them. Concern not yourselves about your property, for there are more treasures than one for you in this city.” The treasure wasn’t what Joseph expected — not coins in the ground, but the richness of people, conversions, and unseen futures.

In this episode of The Soloists, Diana and Mallory talk with Emily Snyder — an educator, speaker, and former collaborator with business thinker Clayton Christensen — about what it means to live by that same principle: that even when life withholds the thing you longed for, there are always other treasures to enjoy. Emily shares how she has built a life full of discovery and learning, from setting annual goals that helped her feel joy on her birthdays instead of dread, and adopting an expansive understanding of her role in the world.

Most recently, one such detour led to marriage long past the time of life when Emily felt that she needed marriage to be happy. While speaking at the BYU Women’s Conference, she received a text asking if she was open to set ups. She agreed — and today she shares her life with a man who, in his spare time, teaches others how to firewalk. Emily sees her life as full of treasure — unlooked-for, sometimes illogical, but always worth appreciating.

“Community” is the buzzword of our era. It’s hailed as the antidote to loneliness, polarization, and rootlessness — the magic cure that’s supposed to ground us in the here and now, and provide us deep belonging. But because every organization from Trader Joe’s to the Catholic Church calls their audience a “community”, the word itself is stretched so thin it’s almost meaningless.

Relatedly, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between what we say about community and what we actually do. If we say we want tight-knit community but don’t show up to build it, where’s the evidence that we really want it?

In today’s episode, Diana speaks with writer Michael Perrone about why we avoid the very thing we claim to need. On his Substack Build the Village, Michael explores the architecture of human community and human flourishing, with a special focus on men. In a recent post, he argues that community requires something closer to religious conversion than verbal commitment — we need to submit to a regimen that reshapes our hearts to want it. Without that effort, we drift back into the default individualism of modern American culture, where progress looks like “an ever-expanding personal dashboard with customizable settings.”

So what would it take to actually choose community, and to shape our desires around it? Michael shares five points for consideration. Listen and let us know what you think!

This week, we teamed up with Rebbie Brassfield from Mormons in Media to talk about Hulu’s new reality dating show, Are You My First? The premise gave us the perfect chance to explore what dating dynamics look like when singles don’t have—and have never had—sex.

To set the stage, think of your typical raunchy reality dating show—say Love Island—where a couple dozen singles are thrown together, competing in absurd, often sexually charged challenges for the chance to score a date and maybe hook up. Everyone’s scrambling for a “connection,” or they risk getting sent home. Are You My First? looks a lot like that, except all the contestants lack sexual experience for very different reasons. Some have religious commitments to chastity (we get into the Mormon contestants in particular), some face health or psychological challenges that affect intimacy, and some just haven’t found the right person or the right time.

And here’s the twist: on a show that normalizes inexperience, these contestants often come across as surprisingly raw and genuine. They don’t have the same forced, hyper-confident performance you see on other shows. As Mallory put it, “They’re all underdogs”—and who doesn’t want to cheer for the underdog? But that doesn’t mean they’re all innocent. Some bounce from crush to crush without noticing their own contradictions. Others wrestle with self-trust and vulnerability. A few seem almost incapable of attaching at all.

In countless ways, the dynamics felt familiar—eerily like an LDS singles ward. Sometimes it was subtle, like how people pursued the contestants who looked like they “fit” the future they imagined, rather than the ones they actually felt at ease with.

We had a lot of fun with this one. What did you think? We’d love to hear.

It’s been about a year since The Soloists launched with an episode on the history of singles wards — Latter-day Saint congregations organized specifically for unmarried members of the Church. At the center of each ward is a bishop, whose role is to offer pastoral care but also to navigate members through the repentance process. Today we’re sharing a conversation with singles wards bishops and their wives about shepherding young adults through seasons of loneliness, doubt, and repentance.

We go straight for the elephant in the room — the Church’s sexual standards for single adults — where authority and empathy potentially compete. Our guests today are Cami and Matt Vail and Jeff and Jana Parkin, who all married young, in a different cultural moment, and they readily admit that the world of dating and relationships for today’s single adults feels foreign. On paper, this looks like authority at its most mismatched: leaders who never lived this stage of life are asked to uphold sexual standards for those still in it. In practice, they witness and hold single people’s most intimate stories — the struggles, desires, and despair — and are powerful conduits of God’s love. Could they serve as conduits without deep commitment to the Church and its standards?

In this conversation, we press into that paradox. Should older singles be allowed to adapt standards in a way that suits their age and stage of life? Or are the leaders right, that the boundaries are firm and its consistency that matters most? Who’s right? How are we missing each other? Though Mallory and Diana have had countless singles ward bishops over the years, it’s rare to sit down with them outside of ecclesiastical authority and ask them, openly, about how they approach these difficulties and how serving single young adults has changed them.

Today, we're joined by Annie Kate Peterson, a graphic designer and author of the children's book "What She Sees: A Story Investigating Body Image." She shares about developing anorexia at age 10 during a perfect storm of family stress when her desire to be seen and loved felt like "asking for too much." Bodies are inherently chaotic—they change without our permission, they age, they go through puberty, they jiggle and shift and refuse to stay put. They are a lot like life itself: unpredictable, uncontrollable, constantly in flux. The way we treat or feel about our bodies often speaks to how we are navigating the bigger questions of life — including whether we deem ourselves fundamentally good and worthy of love. There’s a heartbreaking pattern that sets in when we don’t: we punish our bodies, the one thing that seems within our control.This pattern may be especially common in cultures that connect beauty with worth or deprivation with devotion. We dig into why Utah has the highest number of plastic surgeons per capita and growing up with the religious expectation that attracting and securing a spouse was part of fulfilling God’s plan. Annie traces a fascinating historical line from Renaissance beauty ideals celebrating fuller bodies to Protestant "fasting girls" who believed starvation brought them closer to God. That legacy, she argues, still haunts religious communities today, including the Latter-day Saints.

The irony is that this attempt to feel worthy of love works against itself. Annie shares how her recovery transformed not just her relationship with her body, but with everyone she loves. One breakthrough moment came through a letter from her little sister, who said: "I tried looking in the mirror at myself the way that you did, and it was painful. So I stopped." Her sister’s wisdom to walk away from the demon that had consumed Annie's life helped Annie see a different way she could treat herself — with gentleness. The isolation of an eating disorder, Annie explains, isn't just about food—it's about deserting yourself so completely that you can't connect with anyone else. Annie has gathered resources for anyone struggling with body image issues or eating disorders. You can access them here.

As an urban planner, Mike Christensen seeks to improve the invisible infrastructure of public transit that connects diverse people to jobs, resources, and each other — or doesn’t. Mike is on the Salt Lake City planning commission and serves as executive director of the Utah Rail Passengers Association. He has spent years advocating for people whose transportation needs are invisible to those designing the system—much like singles navigating a church culture built around families. Today, he joins Diana and Mallory for a conversation about the unexpected parallels between transit planning and the single experience in the church.

"When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," Mike explains. "If you're used to driving all the time, then everything looks like a parking spot or the lack of a parking spot. If the whole frame of reference is all based on families, then those who don't have those blessings really feel awkward." The metaphor illuminates how easily we turn to the tools we know best—whether cars or nuclear families—when we can't imagine life working any other way. Mike describes a sobering example, where his mid-singles congregation was shuffled between three buildings in 18 months with little to no advance notice, sometimes in response to complaints from married church members. The experience reinforced a sense that singles were "a problem that the church was trying to solve awkwardly rather than really taking a look at us and understanding our needs."

The episode also captures both the isolation and unexpected freedom that can come from living differently than those around you, whether that's taking trains instead of driving cars, or building meaning outside traditional family structures. In his journey form small-town Idaho to studying in Germany to living carless in Salt Lake City, Mike has learned that there are many ways to get around in life, and many ways to thrive.

Learn more about Mike’s urban planing advocacy here.