Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2026

Stephen C

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Peck, Steven L. Duane Jeffery: A Mormon Evolutionist. University of Illinois Press, 2026.

Controversy and strong official disfavor failed to shake Duane Jeffery’s tenacious efforts to fit the theory of evolution into the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Steven L. Peck traces Jeffery’s life from his rural upbringing and training as a geneticist through a career marked by conflict around his dedication to taking science into classrooms at Brigham Young University. As Peck shows, Jeffery met resistance from Church leaders with a patient, years-long campaign to build understanding. He corrected misinformation within Church culture and educational systems and defended science’s place in education and faith. Jeffery’s commitment to honesty, intellectual curiosity, and openness encouraged and smoothed often tense conversations about the union of scientific evidence and religious faith. At the same time, his work gave Brigham Young credibility as a research university while his writing and mentorship inspired later generations to continue the dialogue.

An overdue look at a singular figure, Duane Jeffery tells the story of the scientist whose work reshaped how many Church members understand evolution.

Dayley, Glenn. “BYU-Idaho’s Mighty Oaks Prophecy.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 133-142.

No abstract.

Kirk, Mary Ann. “Clarity and Correction: The Women with the Mormon Battalion.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 105-132.

No abstract.

Stainton, Geoff. “Diamond Cockling and the First Edition Book of Mormon.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 76-104.

No abstract.

Christensen, Jessie. “¡ Buen provecho!: Recipes for Mexican Food in The Relief Society Magazine.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 1-32.

No abstract.

Compton, Todd M. ““Having Been Convinced of the Truth of Poligamme I Therefore Enter’d into the Order”: Primary Documents Since In Sacred Loneliness.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 59, no. 3 (2026): 1-44.

No abstract. ChatGPT-generated abstract.

This article surveys significant primary sources concerning Joseph Smith’s plural wives that have emerged or become accessible since the publication of In Sacred Loneliness (1997). Drawing on the Bullock–Kimball list of Smith’s wives, Andrew Jenson’s research notes, D. Michael Quinn’s archival transcriptions, and newly available letters, diaries, and autobiographical accounts, it assesses how these materials corroborate, refine, and complicate existing interpretations. The evidence strengthens the identification of several disputed wives, supports additional possible marriages, revises biographical chronologies, and illuminates the women’s later religious commitments and family relationships. Particular attention is given to secrecy, marriages to women already married to other men, and the emotional and economic hardships of plural marriage. The article emphasizes the importance of evaluating contemporary and retrospective testimony together, acknowledging uncertainties in dates, memory, and provenance. Although the new sources do not fundamentally alter the author’s earlier interpretations, they deepen understanding of the women’s experiences and reveal unresolved questions about the practice of early Mormon plural marriage.

Faulconer, James E. “Who is the Real Jacques Derrida?.” The Interpreter. (2026).

Jacques Derrida and deconstruction are frequently invoked, by both admirers and critics, as arguing for relativism, denying stable meaning, and dissolving the possibility of truth. This essay argues that such characterizations misunderstand Derrida’s project. Beginning with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the collapse of the metaphysical foundations of Western thought and tracing its development through Heidegger, the essay explains Derridean deconstruction as an attempt to think truthfully and meaningfully without appealing to a metaphysical antecedent. For Derrida, the limits of language do not imply that truth is arbitrary or merely subjective. Rather, meaning is structured in coming to be through difference and deferral and—more important—by an anticipation of truth and justice always still “to come.” Deconstruction therefore functions less as the destruction of meaning than as an ethical practice of attending to what texts, practices, and systems necessarily overlook or exclude in order to think what those exclusions point to. Read in this way, Derrida’s thought has unexpected affinities with negative theology, religious hope, and ethical responsibility and may offer Latter-day Saint thinkers useful resources for reflecting on scripture, interpretation, and the limits of human knowledge without either requiring them to become Derrideans or preventing them from doing so.

Lefevor, G. Tyler, Sydney A. Sorrell, Emalee Willis, and Jane H. Bell. ““My love for them can’t be conditional”: how active Latter-day Saint parents foster positive relationships with their LGBTQ+ teens and barriers to doing so.” Children and Youth Services Review (2026): 109261.

Introduction

Although the psychological literature has been clear that parental support is important for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) teens, it is less clear about the ways in whichparents can embody that support and foster strong relationships with their teens, particularly for parents who have strong, conservative religious beliefs. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the ways in which active Latter-day Saint (LDS) parents foster positive relationships with their LGBTQ+ teens.

Method

We conducted a thematic analysis of 19 separate interviews with active LDS parents and their LGBTQ+ teens conducted via Zoom in the United States in 2021 (38 total interviews).

Results

We found several ways that parents contributed to the development of positive parent-teen relationships, including fostering communication and connection, respecting autonomy, offering unconditional love and support, providing an LGBTQ+ affirming family environment, being an advocate and ally, and demonstrating adaptation, education, and preparation. We also found several ways that parents’ behaviors posed a barrier to fostering strong, supportive relationships, including demonstrating conditional acceptance, denying autonomy, invalidating their teens’ LGBTQ+ identity, demonstrating fumbling support, and past and present prejudice.

Conclusions

Results highlight several concrete ways that conservatively religious parents—and parents generally—of LGBTQ+ teens can foster strong and supportive parent-teen relationships and highlight ways that active LDS parents manage to foster these relationships despite tension between their religious beliefs and affirming their teens’ LGBTQ+ identities.
Smith, Ken R., Tim A. Bruckner, and Alfred Emery BLDG. “Ceremonies and Cigarettes.” MPIDR Working Paper Series. 
Note, I usually don’t post working papers, but Ken Smith is probably the top name in LDS Demography, and the Max Planck Demographic Institute is one of the top names in demography in general (although I’m a little biased since I interviewed for a position there once upon a time), so it’s just a matter of time before they land it somewhere, plus it’s interesting.

This study considers the relation between institutional adaptation and long-term behavioral change. Often, behavioral interventions weaken over time as prior norms reemerge. As a contradictory case, we focus on the practice of tobacco abstention within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although originally taught in 1833, tobacco abstention was not standardized until a 1921 requirement of tobacco abstention for Latter-day Saint temple participation, a powerful symbol of collective attachment. Drawing from this narrative, we offer an analytic framework called symbolic resonance (SR) that accounts for how behaviors embedded within symbolically resonant institutions can promote durable normative change. We then compare this case to broader U.S. tobacco trends to illustrate SR’s diagnostic value. As an empirical demonstration, we compare changes in tobacco-related health outcomes both before and after the 1921 ban by temple participation utilizing the Utah Population Database. We find that tobacco-related health advantages were confined to later cohorts who engaged in temple rituals. These results suggest that institutions may influence behavior durability when expectations are paired with symbols. SR provides analytic leverage for understanding connections between organization, individual behavior, and health beyond the Latter-day Saint case.

Peterson, Lance T., Angela Baerwolf, Sarah C. Peterson, and Katelyn Opperman. “Acceptance Journeys of LDS Families of Their LGB Child: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.” Families in Society (2026): 10443894261471608.

Family acceptance is strongly associated with improved mental health outcomes for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ+) youth. Using podcast interviews with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (CJCLDS), we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore how CJCLDS parents came to accept their lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) child. We analyzed 10 episodes and produced four themes characterizing families’ acceptance journeys: Self-education and internal reflection/growth, creating support and finding community, encouraging spirituality, and sacred advocacy and spiritual work. We expound on these themes demonstrating how parents navigated thorny church culture and doctrinal issues, ultimately leaning into their faith in a loving God. Implications include research on theological affirmation for LGBTQ+ youth as well as clinicians helping parents strive for maintaining connection and flexibility with their LGBTQ+ children.

Goodman, Nathan P., and Jordan K. Lofthouse. “Polycentric Solutions to Stigmatization in Salt Lake City’s Queer Communities.” In Rainbow Liberty, pp. 119-138. Routledge.

Salt Lake City famously houses the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS Church). The LDS Church is dominant throughout Utah. It opposes same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, does not recognize same-sex marriages, and opposes social and medical transition for transgender individuals. Despite this, Salt Lake City is home to many robust formal organizations and informal groups that provide friendship, mutual assistance, and other forms of social support for queer individuals. For example, the Utah Pride Center facilitates youth and family programs, provides education, promotes community health, and organizes the city’s pride festival. Other queer organizations and associations in Salt Lake City include the Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, Equality Utah, Stonewall Sports Salt Lake, and UAF Legacy Health, among others. Queer Utahns have engaged in Tocquevillian self-governance by creating formal and informal groups to address a diversity of needs and challenges. This chapter analyzes how queer individuals have used civil society and markets to address political and social pressures that are sometimes antagonistic to their preferences and interests. The main implication is that polycentric social arrangements can help LGBTQ individuals live healthier, happier, and more connected lives when a dominant culture is not particularly welcoming.

Comments

6 responses to “Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2026”

  1. Chad Nielsen

    There’s more than one article in the Dialogue issue.

    Other books that came out this month (and I recognize some of these don’t fit the filter):
    * The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson Volume 3 (Signature Books)
    * Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, 2nd ed., Newell G. Bringhurst (Greg Kofford Books)
    * An Infinite Heaven, by Terryl L. Givens (Faith Matters)
    * Creature: The Life and Loves of May Swenson, by Stephen Carter (Signature Books)

    Two that snuck in last month at the very end:
    * Mormonisms in Asia: Stories of Global Faith and Local Lives, ed. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp (University of Illinois)
    * Educating for Eternity: The History of Latter-day Saint Primary and Secondary Schools, by E. Vance Randall, Scott C. Esplin, and Casey Paul Griffiths (BYU RSC)

  2. Stephen C.

    Thanks Chad! I included all the research articles–so not including memoirs, poetry, etc. For example, there was a Greg Prince piece labelled a “research article,” but it was more of a personal memoir, so I didn’t include it, but let me know any I might have admittedly missed.

  3. Gary Bergera

    Though I never had a class taught by him, Duane Jeffery was for me one of the most important members of BYU’s faculty during my undergraduate and graduate years. His impact continues to this day, not quite fifty years later.

  4. Ivan Wolfe

    No official abstracts, but here’s the opening for the following:

    Dayley, Glenn. “BYU-Idaho’s Mighty Oaks Prophecy.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 133-142.

    The 1938 Golden Anniversary issue of the Ricks College yearbook, the Rixida (as in Ricks and Idaho combined), is dedicated to the “men of vision …who a half-century ago planted the seed that has grown into our Ricks College. …” On the title page for the “Administration” section of the yearbook, we find a statement regarding the destiny and growth of the Bannock Stake Academy, the forerunner of Ricks College and Brigham Young University-Idaho. The statement is attributed to Jacob Spori, the Academy’s first president. “The seeds we are planting today will grow and become mighty oaks, and their branches will run all over the earth.” This is the earliest published version of Spori’s statement, printed fifty years after he is said to have made it and thirty-five years after Spori’s death in 1903.

    Much has been made of Spori’s prediction—some say prophecy—reportedly delivered at the founding meeting of the Academy, November 12, 1888, in Rexburg, Idaho. Administrators, faculty, students, educational leaders, and general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the school’s sponsoring institution, have repeated this “Mighty Oaks Prophecy” (M-O-P) in speech and in writing hundreds of times over the years since 1938. The images of the acorn and the oak tree became branding icons for Ricks College and are currently used at Brigham Young University-Idaho. They have been painted on walls and printed on T-shirts, water bottles, stationery, and mugs. A giant bronze acorn holds a prominent place in the Career Center on campus.

    However, recent research casts a shadow on Spori as the source of the M-O-P, shifting the light to another early southeast Idaho educational pioneer and colleague of Spori’s, Sarah A. Barnes, as the probable source of the M-O-P.

    Kirk, Mary Ann. “Clarity and Correction: The Women with the Mormon Battalion.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 105-132.

    The story of the Mormon Battalion and its march from Iowa to California in 1846–1847 has been told by many authors, beginning with Daniel Tyler in 1881.1 The narrative of the wives who accompanied the Battalion is less well-known and often misunderstood. How many women became part of this story and when? Who were the original laundresses? This article will clarify and correct the overall narrative and a few individual stories about the women based on primary sources that may not have been available or clear to earlier historians. It will also provide a unique perspective into the roles and experiences of women with the Battalion and how that might have differed from other military units during the Mexican-American War.

    No contemporary day-to-day accounts written by the women themselves during the march have been found, although some men who had journals sometimes included stories about them.

    Stainton, Geoff. “Diamond Cockling and the First Edition Book of Mormon.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 76-104.

    The first edition Book of Mormon1 did not enter the published world quietly. The author/translator, Joseph Smith stated he was translating from metal plates that had the appearance of gold.2 This led to various attempts at stealing the plates, including an invasion of the simple log cabin the Smith family called home. Financing the publication led to the breakdown of the marriage of Martin Harris, an early follower, and the forced sale of much of his farm. Its first chapters were pirated and published in a local newspaper before the book was published, and it was rejected by the local population when it did become available for sale.

    Papers have been written, debating the typographical errors and subsequent changes8 to the “most correct” book, but if one was to examine any one of the surviving five hundred to seven hundred copies of the first edition today, there is on the title page a distortion or imperfection so obvious that dealers in rare books use it as a first identifier of its authenticity. Yet it has been ignored by scholars, almost as if it were hidden in plain sight.

    This paper is designed to bring this identifier to a wider audience as we tell the story of materials pushed to their limits, postulate as to its causes, examine whether this distortion is unique to the first edition or a feature common in the world of bound books and whether scholarship exists both within and outside of the Mormon academic community that addresses the subject.

    Christensen, Jessie. “¡ Buen provecho!: Recipes for Mexican Food in The Relief Society Magazine.” Journal of Mormon History 52, no. 4 (2026): 1-32.
    In a 2010 roundtable about interdisciplinary Mormon history, Kate Holbrook gave a presentation titled “Religion in a Recipe,” describing the rich possibilities presented by recipes as sources for theological and historical analysis. While recipes may seem like an insignificant part of the historical record, an analysis of a recipe reveals a considerable amount of information about its author and the time and place in which it was written. As Holbrook observes, a close reading of recipes discloses multiple insights into lived religion, the practices and culture that make up the daily experience of religious adherents. Commentary included with recipes contains information about writers’ lives, tastes, motivations, and relationships. In addition to this commentary, the ingredients authors choose and the directions they give reflect the specific circumstances in which they lived. What the author of a recipe chooses to explain, and what she does not, demonstrates the presence or absence of assumed cultural knowledge available to her readers.

    Recipes are also intimate texts, like diaries and letters. As Marion Bishop writes, they allow us to recreate the “memory and presence” of their authors. Similarly, in an editorial from The Relief Society Magazine from 1963 about “The Modern Homemaker,” Louise W. Madsen states that “Quite frequently it is not an elaborate dish that is remembered, but some family favorite into which mother stirred a little of herself—something that evokes a remembrance of mother’s personality and of the taste and flavor of family life.” In studying the oral culinary traditions of Mexican and Mexican-American women, Meredith E. Abarca found that “kitchen talk, written in cookbooks or memoirs, or spoken as in the case of ethnographic research on food as voice, offers moments of seizing subjectivity and narrative authority, which allows women to embrace the power of their own history—its pain, its suffering, its joy.” The Latter-day Saint women who contributed recipes to The Relief Society Magazine established themselves as unique creators who were essential to the building of the “world-wide sisterhood” that was the Society’s stated goal.

    Oman, Nathan B. “”All Other Religious Sects Shall Have Free Toleration”: Recovering the Early Mormon Conception of Religious Freedom.” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 52 no. 4, 2026, p. 33-75.

    On March 1, 1841, the City Council of the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois, adopted “An Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies,” which declared:

    “Be it ordained by the City Council of the City of Nauvoo, That the Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Latter Day Saints, Quakers, Episcopalians, Universalists, Unitarians, Mohammedans, and all other religious sects, and denominations, whatever, shall have free toleration, and equal privileges, in this city.”

    Among contemporary Latter-day Saints, the statute is often cited as evidence of their longstanding support for religious freedom. For example, in 2017, Von Keetch, a long-time attorney for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who eventually became a high ecclesiastical leader in the church, cited the Ordinance as an early example of the fact that “Latter-day Saints believe in defending the religious freedom of everyone.”2 Likewise, in Latter-day Saint publications, the Ordinance has become an important touchstone for interfaith dialogue, demonstrating an early commitment to Muslim toleration.3 In a different context, the Norwegian philosopher Tore Lindholm, in seeking the origins and justification for religious freedom in international human rights law, cited the ordinance as an important example of a religiously motivated commitment to religious freedom, placing Joseph Smith with Roger Williams as an early proponent of a broad conception of freedom of conscience:

    “Mormons, when in majority positions, have sometimes been accused of not practicing the high standards they preach. However that may be, their revealed doctrine of inclusive or universal religious freedom, penned by their prophet Joseph Smith, appears to break new ground in exemplifying an appropriate self-understanding for an emerging and proselytizing minority religious community immersed in a modern plural society.”

    In their different ways, these uses of the Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies constitute an understandable search for a usable past, employing a municipal law from the 1840s as a touchstone in contemporary debates about freedom of conscience and religious pluralism. Despite these uses, however, there has been little effort to understand the Ordinance within its historical context. When we examine the history and use of the Ordinance in the 1840s, a more complex picture emerges. The law did more than state an aspiration for universal toleration. It created a concrete legal offense that was to be enforced by Nauvoo’s criminal justice system. Today, lawyers and scholars think of religious freedom in terms of government action that threatens it, but the “Ordinance in Relation to Religious Societies” was directed entirely against private conduct.

  5. svbob

    Christianity and evolution. It is very simple. Genesis recapitulates the first 200k years of the human species. We lived in the Garden of Eden as hunter/gatherers. We did not have to labor or plant or harvest. We just lived off the goodness of the earth. It was women who selected for intelligence in their mates who brought about the modern world. It was women who created the calamity of choices and the curse of knowledge.

  6. Carey Foushee

    Really enjoying reading https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/who-is-the-real-jacques-derrida

    Thanks for posting!

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