Note: There were a couple articles in the latest issue of Dialogue that were labelled as “Research Articles” but were more in the personal essay genre, which is fine! Personal essays are great, but this list would be huge if I included all the major personal essays published every month, so I have to draw the line somewhere (I also exclude purely personal devotional pieces). Just a side note in case people think I’m picking and choosing what to include. I try to include every research article or academic book that is published per month (also not including reviews), and if I miss one let me know. 

Park, Benjamin E. “The November 2015 Policy and the Long History of LDS Ecclesiastical Exclusion.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 59, no. 1 (2026): 75-83.

Chat-GPT created abstract. 

Benjamin E. Park’s article argues that the LDS Church’s November 2015 policy—classifying members in same-sex marriages as apostates and restricting ordinances for their children—should be understood not as an isolated rupture, but as part of a longer institutional pattern of ecclesiastical exclusion. Park situates the policy in the immediate context of Obergefell v. Hodges and the legalization of same-sex marriage, but traces its deeper roots to earlier LDS efforts to police communal boundaries after the end of public polygamy. He compares the 2015 policy to the Church’s treatment of fundamentalist polygamists in the 1930s, especially restrictions on baptizing children of excommunicated plural-marriage families, and to late-twentieth-century disciplinary actions against Mormon feminists who challenged patriarchal gender norms. Across these episodes, Park contends, Church leaders used apostasy classifications, disciplinary mechanisms, and family-centered boundary-making to defend a particular vision of gender, marriage, and institutional order. The article concludes that the 2015 policy was a recurrence of longstanding exclusionary practices used during moments of perceived cultural threat, revealing an enduring tension between LDS institutional coherence and the diversity of Mormon lived experience.

Beardsley, Amanda. “From Protest Poster to Meme: The Visual Language of Queer Dissent at BYU.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 59, no. 1 (2026): 167-179.

Chat-GPT created abstract

Amanda Beardsley’s article examines the visual culture of queer dissent during the 2019–2020 protests at Brigham Young University, focusing on how LGBTQ+ students and allies used protest posters, meme imagery, and social media to challenge the university’s Honor Code policies. The article argues that these posters functioned as both activist art and digital-age political speech, translating internet meme fluency into a public grammar of religious and institutional critique. Drawing on examples such as “Shocked Pikachu,” “Karen” memes, Impact-font image macros, rainbow imagery, and ironic religious slogans, Beardsley shows how students used humor, satire, and familiar digital forms to express betrayal, solidarity, and resistance. The posters’ movement from campus spaces to Instagram, Twitter/X, and other online platforms demonstrates how queer Mormon dissent operates within a digital counterpublic, where voices often constrained within LDS institutional settings can circulate more freely. Ultimately, the article frames the BYU protest posters as a significant fusion of agitprop, meme culture, and queer Mormon identity formation, revealing how contemporary protest increasingly unfolds across both physical and networked public spheres.

Davis, Kate. “Heavenly Bodies: Mormon Male Homoerotics in the Sacred Art of Arnold Friberg.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 59, no. 1 (2026): 1-22.

Chat-GPT created abstract

Kate Davis’s article analyzes the sacred art of Arnold Friberg as a site of Mormon male homoeroticism, arguing that his famously muscular Book of Mormon heroes helped construct an idealized vision of twentieth-century Latter-day Saint masculinity. Focusing on works such as Friberg’s depictions of Ammon, Captain Moroni, Nephi, and the resurrected Christ, Davis situates these images within broader American traditions of muscular Christianity, mid-century masculine visual culture, and LDS efforts to assimilate into mainstream respectability after the end of polygamy. Drawing on queer theory, feminist theories of the body, and histories of Mormon gender formation, the article argues that Friberg’s art does more than reflect religious ideals: it actively inscribes them onto the male body, presenting spiritual greatness as physical virility, whiteness, strength, and heroic dominance. While Friberg’s paintings are not explicitly sexual, Davis contends that their lingering attention to sculpted male bodies produces a homosocial, homophilic, and homoerotic visual language—one that simultaneously reinforces hegemonic masculinity and opens unexpected space for queering Mormon male identity.

Petrey, Taylor G. “History and Theology of Trans and Nonbinary Identity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 59, no. 1 (2026): 23-55.

Chat-GPT created abstract.

Taylor G. Petrey’s article traces the history, lived experience, and theological significance of trans and nonbinary identity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The article shows that LDS teachings on trans identity have shifted over the past half century, moving from early conflations of transgender identity with homosexuality to more detailed contemporary policies that distinguish gender identity, social transition, medical transition, priesthood participation, temple access, and church activity. Petrey argues that these policies rest on contested assumptions about binary “biological sex,” eternal gender, creation, embodiment, and divine order, while often failing to account for the actual experiences of trans and nonbinary Latter-day Saints. Drawing on Church handbooks, public statements, memoirs, interviews, survey data, and emerging trans LDS theology, the article highlights how trans members negotiate institutional exclusion through personal revelation, reinterpretations of “eternal gender,” appeals to divine creation, and expansive models of divine embodiment. Ultimately, Petrey contends that Latter-day Saint theology contains interpretive resources for including trans and nonbinary people, and that their exclusion is not an unavoidable doctrinal necessity but a contested theological and institutional choice.

Carmack, Stanford. “A Comparative View of Causative Constructions in the Book of Mormon.” (2026). The Interpreter. 

One type of English frequently found in the Book of Mormon is the finite causative construction. For example, “they caused that he should be bound” (Alma 30:29). There are 136 finite instances after the verb cause. Twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts do not have any finite causatives. The King James Bible has only three in more than 300 contexts. A subtype of the finite causative is the ditransitive causative. The King James Bible does not have any. The Book of Mormon has twelve. The most found in another text is four. This usage was obsolete around the year 1725. John Bunyan employed one ditransitive causative in about forty writings. Neither that nor his limited finite causative usage prompted pseudo-archaic imitation. In many ways, it is clear that there was no Bunyanesque influence on Book of Mormon English. The comparative evidence indicates that the Book of Mormon’s causative complex did not originate with Joseph Smith.

Davis, Ryan A. “Spanish Mormon Westerns: Popular Literature, Religion, and US–Spain Relations during the Franco Regime.” Hispanic Review 94, no. 2 (2026): 249-271.

This article explores the degree to which popular literary novels in Spain reflect the evolving relationship between Spain and the United States after World War II. The specific texts analyzed here are a selection of Spanish Mormon Westerns (SMW), which come in two types. The first are pseudotranslations of American texts and import an image of America (the West, Mormons, etc.) based on American stereotypes found in works like Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In SMWs of the second type, Mormonism serves as a foil for the Catholic characters who are portrayed as the heroes of the stories. In this way, the second type of SMW follows the model of José Mallorquí’s El Coyote by vindicating the legacy of Spain’s colonial past in the American West.

Miner, Dashiell. “Bearing One Another’s Burdens: A Latter-day Saint Hermeneutic of Organizational Ethics in Medicine.” Welcomed: Building Communities of Faith at Stanford 1, no. 1 (2026).

Chat-GPT created abstract. A personal aside, after I found out that Richard Rorty’s wife was LDS, I had the idea to reach out to Mary Rorty for an interview about her husband  (one of the greatest American philosophers of the 20th century) for my BYU honors thesis. She generously gave a whole afternoon and evening to the ah schucks BYU undergraduate. I never did the official paperwork to get an honors thesis out of it, but I did turn it into a Dialogue article.

This essay develops a Latter-day Saint hermeneutic of organizational ethics in medicine, arguing that LDS scripture offers a useful moral vocabulary for addressing institutional responsibility in health care. Building on Mary V. Rorty, Patricia H. Werhane, and Ann E. Mills’s argument that hospitals need organization ethics because moral failures often arise from fragmented roles, secrecy, diffuse authority, and structural pressures, the essay reads Mosiah 18, Doctrine and Covenants 121, and Doctrine and Covenants 104 as resources for thinking about medical institutions. Mosiah 18’s covenant to “bear one another’s burdens” expands medical ethics beyond private compassion to shared institutional responsibility. Doctrine and Covenants 121 frames legitimate authority as persuasion rather than domination, offering a critique of bureaucratic secrecy, coercion, and self-protection. Doctrine and Covenants 104’s language of stewardship reframes clinicians, administrators, and boards as accountable caretakers of patient trust, professional labor, institutional integrity, and community health. The essay concludes that LDS concepts of burden-bearing, stewardship, truth-telling, and accountable authority can complement secular organization ethics by helping hospitals distribute moral responsibility, protect the vulnerable, and create structures where ethical conflict is addressed collectively rather than left to isolated individuals.

Stone, Michelle. “Constructing Helen: Absences, Ambiguities, and Adjustments in the Historiography of Helen Mar Kimball.” Journal of Mormon Polygamy 2, no. 2 (2026).

Helen Mar Kimball is generally considered one of the best-documented of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. However, while the narrative of Helen as Joseph Smith’s fourteen-year-old wife has achieved near-universal acceptance among historians and in popular discourse, its evidentiary foundations have received surprisingly little scrutiny. This study traces the historiographical development of the narrative of Helen’s May 1843 sealing to Joseph Smith at age fourteen from scattered nineteenth-century sources to its crystallization as scholarly consensus, arguing that its apparent cohesion reflects accumulated interpretive choices rather than broad or consistent documentary evidence.

Across successive generations of scholarship, institutional claims and retrospective accounts have frequently been privileged over contemporaneous documents and Helen’s own extensive published writings. In addition, chronological tensions have been harmonized rather than interrogated, contemporaneous sources that do not explicitly mention a sealing have been interpreted as evidence of it, and Helen’s sustained silence regarding any marriage to Joseph Smith across decades of public and private writing has been overlooked or treated as incidental.

One document central to these patterns is Helen’s May 28, 1843 patriarchal blessing, which challenges the traditionally accepted dating for the sealing, yet has frequently been overlooked. Equally important is the late-appearing, unprovenanced autobiographical 1881 letter, which, despite being first catalogued in 1975 and diverging from the full body of Helen’s writings, has functioned as the primary interpretive lens through which all other sources have been read.

This study does not attempt to adjudicate the historical question of whether or when a sealing occurred. Rather, it analyzes how that conclusion emerged, became stabilized, and was transmitted within the historiography. It demonstrates that the current consensus rests on a documentary foundation that is less stable and more contested than has generally been recognized.

Campbell, C. William. “When is a Resident also a Pilgrim?: LDS Temple Attendance in Cardston, Alberta, Canada.” Anthropological Quarterly 99, no. 1 (2026): 153-191.

Not all sacred pilgrimages are far-flung, once-in-a-lifetime, or extraordinary. Some pilgrimages are local, routine, and mundane. Scholarly literature examining the former kind of pilgrimage has blurred the supposed boundaries between pilgrim and tourist, enabling a flourishing of literature focused on religious tourism. My research, on the other hand, argues that attending to the latter kind of pilgrimage enables a similar blurring of boundaries—this time between pilgrim and resident. Based on fieldwork conducted in a small, rural, Latter-day Saint (LDS) community in Canada that is home to an LDS temple, I demonstrate that the desire to live close to a temple, in order to enable routine attendance, factors prominently in Latter-day Saints’ decisions about where to live. In this, the resident-pilgrims impact the viability and stability of the resident economy. Consequently, this essay’s arguments are two-fold. First, that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) practice regular, routinized pilgrimage in the form of temple attendance. Second, that the experiences of pilgrims living close to these pilgrimage sites problematize the seemingly discrete categories: pilgrim vs. resident. This research contributes to an emerging anthropology of Mormonism attentive to the LDS Church in its globalized contexts. It also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of pilgrimage—one which becomes accessible only through anthropological inquiry premised on observant participation in the local, routine, and mundane aspects of religious life.

Kim, Seungju, G. Tyler Lefevor, Carson K. Miller, and Peter J. Jankowski. “Is Religious Coping a Protective Factor, and for Whom? A Moderation and Subgroup Analysis on Loneliness and Suicide Attempts Among LGBTQ+ Adults Raised as Latter?Day Saints.” Suicide and Life? Threatening Behavior 56, no. 2 (2026): e70088.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: LGBTQ+ adults face elevated rates of loneliness and suicide attempts, yet little research has examined whether religious coping—a protective factor for people generally—effectively mitigates these risks for LGBTQ+ adults raised in theologically conservative, cis/heteronormative religious traditions.

Method: This longitudinal study examined whether religious coping moderates the relationship between loneliness and suicide attempts among 369 LGBTQ+ adults who at some point in their lives were part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints, a notably cis/heteronormative tradition, across levels of immoral views of same-­ sex sexuality and demographic subgroups.

Results: Contrary to expectations, religious coping generally exacerbated rather than buffered the loneliness-­ suicide relationship, with greater religious coping strengthening the loneliness-­ suicide relationship among White and transgender/gender-diverse adults. Religious coping buffered the impact of loneliness on suicide attempts only for adults of Color and non-­ religious adults.

Conclusion: These findings challenge assumptions about the universal benefits of religious coping for LGBTQ+ adults raised LDS, suggesting that suicide prevention research should assess individuals’ views of the morality of same-­ sex sexuality rather than promoting religious coping universally, as this may inadvertently increase risk for certain LGBTQ+ adults in similarly theologically conservative religious contexts.

Taylor, Kelly E. “A New Reading of Lehi: A Rhetorical Context for Understanding His Teachings about the Fall of Adam and Eve.” The Interpreter. (2026).

Based on Lehi’s teachings in 2 Nephi 2, many Latter-day Saints conclude that it was necessary for Adam and Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit to acquire the ability to have children. While this appears to be a straightforward reading of the text, it sets up the dilemma of conflicting commandments—obedience to one of the two commandments they were given in the Garden of Eden would require that they disobey the other. In this article, the author argues that the larger rhetorical context presents a different framework in which these teachings may be read—one that does not raise this dilemma. Lehi presents his teachings on the consequences of the Fall in two parallel chiasms. The rhetorical links within and between these chiasms (and with the other sections of Lehi’s teachings) suggest that God’s purposes for mankind may not have been frustrated if Adam and Eve had obeyed him. While their Fall was likely inevitable, it may not have been a required element in God’s eternal plan for his children. Rather, it might have been something he expected and for which he prepared.