Since leaving the Church, I have been puzzled that my many Mormon friends have not shown interest in engaging with me over the reasons for my disaffection. Arguing such points does not interest them nor me, but the elephant in the room is hard to...
After finishing graduate work in linguistics and education at BYU in 1976, I found professional work in the translation department of LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Even though I thought I already knew a lot about language from my study of...
When I began missionary service for the Church in 1962, I was given a “plan for teaching the Gospel” to use in converting others to the Church. This plan was usually referred to as “the discussions” and contained teaching...
Some years earlier, the war in Vietnam had been gaining momentum and arousing greater domestic opposition. As consternation grew in the Church membership over this issue, especially among the many families with young men being conscripted into the war, Hugh Brown,...
An LDS doctrine that had always strongly appealed to me was free agency: that God respects our right to choose, and that it is our ethic to likewise respect unconstrained choice for all people. That notion was badly shaken when I was first...
