What does it mean to receive beauty for ashes? The phrase comes from Isaiah 61:3, where God promises to bring joy where there was mourning, praise where there was despair, and new life from devastation. In this conversation, we spoke with chaplain and writer Jenna Carson about her journey through two divorces and the hard-won path to healing and renewal. For Jenna, the process wasn’t just about working harder or pushing through pain—it was about surrendering to what she couldn’t control. “I was so held by God,” she shared. “He gives us beauty for ashes.”

Life often demands that we rebuild after devastations we never imagined. When the terms we’ve built our worth upon fall apart, we have to find new reasons to go on. For Jenna, that journey has not only been about finding her own path forward but also about expanding her emotional capacity to hold space for others. Jenna also shares with us how, as a chaplain, her experiences of heartbreak and healing have strengthened her ability to minister to those who feel lost, broken, or unworthy of love. As she puts it, “Divorce is not a failure.”Along the way, you’ll hear about Jenna’s winding path to becoming a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force. Jenna also previously served as a hospital and prison chaplain. She co-hosts the spiritual podcast "Guiding Light." She earned a BA from Brigham Young University, a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, and is a Kripalu-certified Yoga Therapist. Her forthcoming memoir narrates her experience as a female chaplain in a men's penitentiary.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

“Why is boredom painful? Shouldn’t it just be boring?” Adam S. Miller asks in his book The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom & Addiction in an age of Distraction. In this conversation, Mallory and Diana spoke with Adam about boredom has to teach us, including in our relationships with other people. How does boredom impact the way we read and respond to others? How does our dread of being bored with someone shape our relationship decisions, especially around romantic relationships? What do we find on the other side of boredom, when we sit with it and avoid finding distractions?

The answer, according to Wallace, is that we learn to actually pay attention, and then the world opens up to us. Adam calls this a religious moment: its not the moment when “whoosh!—the magic happens and the world seems full of a pantheon of idols able to satisfy. It’s the moment when—fshzzt—the spell breaks, the credits roll, the lights come back up, and the world must be cared for, again, as just whatever it is.” When we can pay attention, we can finally just be with ourselves and others.

We hope you enjoy this episode! And please consider taking our community survey, as a chance to share how you’re repsonding to some of our conversations.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

Like an itch that won’t be scratched, many of us walk around fearing that love is scarce in our lives, that there’s not enough of it to go around. For that itch, the Wayfare essay ”Overflowing with Family” by Dr. Amy Harris offers triumphant relief. Amy is a genealogist and professor of family history at Brigham Young University. In this conversation, we spoke with Amy about her essay and about the family relationships—living and dead—that make us who we are and provide generous company through the life course, but that our culture leads us to undervalue and overlook. Our special focus today is sibling relationships.

Sibling dramas fuel some of our greatest cultural stories. The bible opens with the most iconic sibling rivalry of all time, the one between Cain and Abel, which ends in Cain asking God, “Am I my brother’s Keeper?” and running in shame from his failure as a brother. In modern media, the Stark family in Game of Thrones stands out for their dogged loyalty to each other. As Mallory puts it in this conversation, there’s a romance to sibling relationships (not that kind of romance—calm down). There’s a will-they-won’t-they- stick-together dynamic, as though sibling relationships are ultimate test of our capacity to love.

It’s easy to undervalue siblings because they’re always there. It can be hard to even see our siblings, because they’re always there. Sibling relationships train us to pay attention for no other reason than that “those living, breathing people… belong to me and I to them.” Simone Weil once wrote that our souls have a “violent repugnance for true attention,” but also that we “have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving [us] their attention.”

Whether you have many siblings or none, whether your siblings are chosen or the inherited kind, there are lessons from this conversation on the abundance of love that is always available to us if we learn how to look for it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

Provo, Utah is widely known for its hyper-earnest dating culture. What happens when you bring that to reality TV? We talk to a 2nd season winner of Provo's Most Eligible, Scott Anderson, about his experience on the show and the questions he’s haunted by years down the road. What motivates people to go on reality shows? What is it like trying to grow close to someone on camera? Towards the end, we discuss how men and women tend to approach “singleness” differently. Why does it seem like women are so much more willing to talk about it? Why do some people treat it as an ailment to recover from, and others as a situation to learn to thrive in? Hats off to Scott for the unusual candor he brought to the conversation.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

Today, we’re sharing a conversation that we recorded with Dan Wotherspoon for his podcast, Latter-day Faith. Dan is a very talented interviewer and drew out perhaps the tenderest conversation we've had yet. He asked how our faith has transformed as romantic disappointments and the slow slipping away of time have made our lives look different than what we expected. We talk about courage — facing our own lives without flinching. We talk about perspective—appreciating the abundance of life and avoiding catastrophic thinking. We talk about worthiness — how we’ve grappled with fears that we’ve done something wrong. We talk letting go of “why” questions, and focusing on “how” questions — how do we live? .What is the next step to take? What is expedient for today? We talk about embarrassment — how embarrassing it is that relationship status features so highly in how we evaluate ourselves, how embarrassing it is to have others speculate about your life, and how embarrassing it is to belong to a religion that outsiders rarely see the magic of. We finish off talking directly about this— why we’ve both stayed in the Church, though it has a role to play in fueling dreams that haven’t come to pass, and sometimes struggles to walk with us in the life that remains. We can’t wait to hear what resonates with you!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Mallory and Diana will be doing a live event with Adam Miller on Thursday, February 6th, at 5pm MT/7pm ET. The event will be on zoom, and anyone is welcome to join! We’ll be discussing boredom in relationships, and how the fear of being bored impacts romantic decision-making. Tickets can be purchased here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

This isn’t just an episode on dating, though we spend substantial time there. What we’re really straining at is a glimpse of love — a word that can feel as flaccid and overused as a discarded tissue — as a particular, substantive force that we can cultivate in our relationships. Borrowing from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, our guests Venerable Tien Nguyen and Jonathan Makransky translate Buddhist principles to the many situations in modern dating where love and care seem persistently absent — rejection, hook-ups, ghosting, failed relationships, and the endless agony of waiting.

This likely isn’t your first time philosophizing about what love is and it certainly won’t be your last, but add this conversation to your queue for a wise, fresh, and rejuvenating answer to sociological observations of waning love attachments and modern pessimism about dating.

Jonathan Makransky and Venerable Tien Nguyen met as students at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) several years ago. Now, Jonathan works for HDS coordinating Multi-religious Ministry Initiatives, and Venerable splits his time between two Buddhist temples, one in Boston and one in Providence, RI.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

We’ve been looking forward to a conversation on “chosen families” for a long time. The concept is especially meaningful to those whose relational support doesn’t take the shape of a traditional family, but who experience deep intimacy, growth, and loyalty within other “relation-shapes.” Historically, this has included LGBTQ individuals as well as the unmarried. As one listener recently said to us, “singleness allows opportunities to establish some of the best friendships-- so many of my best friends I've had along the way have been my fellow single ladies.”Yet there are many reasons the idea of chosen family receives pushback — namely, as we explore in this episode, the suspicion that if relationships are built on preference and positive vibes they will likely not survive the grief and interpersonal friction that family life requires. One writer even suggests that chosen family can scan as “another means of self-branding, self-curation, exclusion — a cynical shorthand for establishing worth through association, without the baggage or responsibilities associated with “real” family.” Thus, the question: can we really choose our families, or does real family depend on something beyond the scope of our choosing?

We dig into all of this with doctor and writer Samuel Brown, whose study of the restoration’s “adoption theology” insists that family must embrace both chosen and unchosen aspects of life. As he wrote in a 2013 article Believing Adoption, “Perhaps that sometimes desperate dance between the chosen and the inescapable is part of the work of making us divine.” This conversation of was a thoughtful and gritty deep dive into restorationist understandings of the family, ways we could better live up to its possibilities, and how to respond when family life takes us to our breaking points. We were also honored to hear Sam share about the harrowing grief following his wife Kate’s passing, which you can read more about from his piece in Wayfare.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

Subscribe to our new Substack!It’s just us this week—Mallory and Diana—for an introspective end-of-year conversation. We ask ourselves Where did the Soloists come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? and how we’ve changed since coming together to work on this project. We also share love from listeners: emails, DMs, and reviews that crack open what it means to live courageously with major parts of our lives unsettled.

If you’ve been listening a while, you’ll have noticed that the two of us love to discuss the experience of being on the margins of an already-marginal religion. In part this is because our religious identities profoundly shape our social and romantic lives and its useful to talk about. But its also because we believe that the places where we feel most odd, misunderstood, and rejected by the world also offer the keys to understanding, forgiving, and finding love within it.

Here, we discuss how we find Christ in the gritty, awkward experience of bearing a “mormon” identity in the world (which is the name many still know and call us by, despite the Church’s preferences.) Similarly, Christ can be found smack dab inside the sore spots of the soloist life.

Finally, we have an announcement! We just shifted platforms over to Substack where we can have more two-way conversations with listeners. You’ll here more about it in this episode. Subscribe to join us.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

This week, we’re joined by Candice Gutierrez, Dusty Hulet, and Cheryl Johnson to talk about The Art of Gathering, and how to plan parties that can genuinely change people’s lives. Candice says parties are about interpersonal alchemy; people come in feeling one way and leave feeling another way, and the way you design the event shapes this transformation. Cheryl believes gatherings can be a lifeline for those who live alone or without guaranteed social support in their day-to-day lives, and mentions how just seeing a party invitation in their inbox can remind a person that they matter. Dusty thinks that “the crushing weight of sobriety” forces Mormons to go out to the edge of creativity in how to get people to relax and have a good time at parties. This conversation was all parts fresh, funny, and wise, and we can’t wait to hear what you think.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com

Send us a text

This week we teamed up with our beloved friend Rebbie Brassfield who runs the up-and-coming Mormons in Media Instagram (now a podcast!). As we enter another kind of "mormon moment" as the world fixates on Latter-day Saint lifestyle influencers, Rebbie leads the public in watching closely all the references to Mormonism in media, tracking where representation is going, and making a case for more diverse media portrayals. 

We also get into a fun discussion of Stehanie Myer's Twilight series, and how that shaped our perspective on relationships grow up.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com