{"id":55007,"date":"2026-10-30T03:43:48","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T09:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=55007"},"modified":"2026-10-27T13:49:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T19:49:35","slug":"cutting-edge-latter-day-saint-research-october-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2026\/10\/cutting-edge-latter-day-saint-research-october-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, October 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wilkinson, Lori Motzkus. Sacred Pens and Public Voices: Latter-day Saint Women in Dialogue with America<\/i>. University of Illinois Press, 2026.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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In the view of many Latter-day Saint women, the religious restoration propounded by Joseph Smith unleashed forces important to female progress. Lori Motzkus Wilkinson examines how LDS women used their agency and sought women\u2019s rights filtered through their religious lens.<\/p>\n

Though intellectually connected to figures outside the Church, the LDS women saw them less as women’s rights activists to emulate and more as speakers of truths that, regardless of the origin, should be embraced and harnessed. Wilkinson reveals how Emmeline B. Wells, Susa Young Gates, and other Latter-day Saint women supported and upheld institutional LDS authority and utilized the importance of women\u2019s roles in the home and society as mechanisms for women\u2019s advancement. Even as LDS women continued to engage with prominent national thinkers, their writings and lives demonstrated that they connected with the larger sphere of women\u2019s rights activism before drawing on the LDS concept of women\u2019s divine nature to reshape those ideals to uniquely religious ends.<\/p>\n

Original and eye-opening, Sacred Pens and Public Voices<\/i> revises established narratives about how LDS women interacted with and used ideas taken from national women\u2019s movements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Taylor, Emily D. S., Johanna M. Jensen, Joseph S. Blanchard, Emma Crowe, John Bentley White, and Jenae M. Nelson. “Developing Interfaith Friendships Through Shared Purpose: Emerging Adult Mentors in an Interfaith Sports Leadership Program.” Religions<\/i> 17, no. 10 (2026): 1177.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As religious diversity increases, identifying contexts that foster positive relationships across faith traditions has become increasingly important. Many interfaith initiatives emphasize dialogue and religious literacy, yet these largely cognitive approaches can inadvertently foreground the doctrinal differences they hope to bridge. Drawing on perspectives of lived religion, embodied spirituality, and intergroup contact theory, we argue that sport\u2014an embodied, cooperative practice shared across cultures and traditions\u2014offers a distinctive context for interfaith formation, one in which relationships emerge through shared bodily activity and common purpose rather than doctrinal negotiation. This qualitative study examined mentors\u2019 experiences in Y-Sport: Greater Purpose and Performance, an interfaith sports leadership program developed through a partnership between Brigham Young University and Baylor University. Although both communities profess faith in Jesus Christ, we use interfaith\u2014consistent with the field of interfaith studies\u2014to denote engagement across two distinct, historically estranged religious communities, without prejudging either community\u2019s Christian identity. Eleven Protestant and Latter-day Saint mentors completed semi-structured interviews analyzed using the team-based coding approach developed by Dollahite and Marks in the American Families of Faith project. Four themes emerged: (1) discovering common ground through shared purpose, (2) developing relationships marked by love, belonging, and friendship, (3) appreciating religious differences without perceiving them as threatening, and (4) experiencing personal and spiritual transformation. Participants consistently reported that their shared commitment to serving youth and strengthening faith in Jesus Christ became more salient than doctrinal differences, fostering authentic friendships while preserving distinct religious identities. Consistent with intergroup contact theory, these findings suggest that embodied cooperation organized around a shared purpose may cultivate meaningful interfaith friendships, with implications for interfaith education, mentoring, and peacebuilding.<\/p>\n

McLain, Adam. “Artificial Love and the Mormon Theology of Physicality in Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse.” Religion and AI Romance in Popular Media: Wired for Love<\/i> (2027): 15.<\/strong><\/p>\n

No available abstract<\/p>\n

Freeman, Erik J. A Radical Convergence: Latter-day Saints and Their Utopian Socialist Origins<\/i>. University of Illinois Press, 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the nineteenth century, socialists and workers from outside the United States converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and flocked to Mormon communities to build a social utopia. By 1890, working-class immigrants or their children comprised two-thirds of the LDS population in Utah.<\/p>\n

Erik J. Freeman uses the lives of radical converts to explore the international socialist politics that permeated the early Church. These energetic newcomers fueled LDS expansion even as they laid the foundation for a global religion. At the same time, utopian socialists within the Church helped lay the groundwork for later political and social movements and progressive ideas. The Church in the United States pivoted toward capitalism after the turn of the century, but socialist thought remained\u2014and remains\u2014an important thread throughout LDS communities around the world.<\/p>\n

Provocative and sweeping, A Radical Convergence<\/i> tells the surprising story of utopian socialism’s place in Church history.<\/p>\n

Sheridan, Thomas E. Zion\u2019s Last Frontier: LDS Ranchers, Federal Regulators, and the Clash of the New West in Capitol Reef Country, Utah<\/i>. University of Arizona Press, 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Zion\u2019s Last Frontier<\/i> is a historical ethnography that documents the uniquely Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) ranching community around Capitol Reef National Park in south-central Utah over the last 150 years.<\/p>\n

From the arrival of the first LDS pioneers in the 1870s to fifth- and sixth-generation descendants of those pioneers today, anthropologist Thomas E. Sheridan documents their ongoing struggles with the federal and state agencies that control 96 percent of the land they ranch. Changing policies and management philosophies profoundly impact the ranchers\u2019 livelihoods and ways of life. Sheridan argues that the ranchers should qualify as Traditionally Associated People. Only one allotment on the Park remains, but the Park still allows ranchers to drive their cattle on horseback along the few canyons that cut through the Waterpocket Fold as they move their herds from their traditional summer grazing lands to their winter grazing lands.<\/p>\n

Pushing beyond binary arguments, Sheridan offers an empathetic look at the lived experiences of rural communities often mischaracterized in debates over public lands and environmentalism. Tensions have been aggravated by a massive increase in the number of tourists that swarm the area in the warmer months and a steady increase in the number of seasonal residents who build second homes there.<\/p>\n

Zion\u2019s Last Frontier<\/i> provides an in-depth look at the clash of cultures between the agrarian Old West and the New West of tourism and second-homers that is playing itself out across so many parts of the rural West today.<\/p>\n

Archer, Seth. “The Other Slavery and the Spirit of Pestilence.” Ethnohistory<\/i> 73, no. 4 (2026): 541-563.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This essay examines a ritual killing by equestrian Utes during a measles outbreak in 1849 Utah. A close reading of a handful of firsthand accounts, alongside a consideration of tribal histories and anthropological scholarship on band societies, reveals the incident as a cultural response to mortality stemming from the new malady. In the process, the author illuminates the nature of Indigenous captive slavery in the nineteenth-century American West. While Mormon settler pressure on natural resources would soon squeeze equestrian peoples, leading to armed conflict across the region, western Utes operated from a position of strength in 1849. In fact, measles would prove a temporary setback for raiding bands, whose hegemony over pedestrian societies expanded in the 1850s. The author considers various explanations for the ritual killing, ultimately arguing that it is best understood as a companion or \u201cmirror\u201d sacrifice\u2014evidence of Ute cultural persistence amid various adaptations to a colonial market in enslaved people.<\/section>\n

Reed, Steven. “Jacob 2: 30 and the Exception Clause: A Contextual Reassessment.” Journal of Mormon Polygamy<\/i> 2, no. 3 (2026).<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Book of Mormon, Jacob 2:30 has long been used in the Latter-day Saint community as doctrinal justification for polygamous practices among those considered to be God\u2019s people. This conventional reading of the verse suggests that God may authorize men to have many wives and concubines if he commands them to \u201craise up seed.\u201d While such a reading is grammatically possible, this paper argues that it imposes a meaning that the text does not require and that it overlooks grammatical and lexical patterns within the surrounding sermon and the Book of Mormon as a whole. The proposed reading asserts that rather than being an exception clause for polygamy, Jacob 2:30 reiterates and punctuates the claim of the surrounding sermon, that when God is in direct command of his people, he instructs them to be monogamous; otherwise, they will hearken unto the things written concerning David and Solomon.<\/p>\n

Nielsen, Michael. “A Reception History of Jacob 2: 30 Among Some Anti-Polygynous Book of Mormon Believers.” Journal of Mormon Polygamy<\/i> 2, no. 3 (2026).<\/strong><\/p>\n

The pro-polygyny, \u201cloophole\u201d interpretation of Jacob 2:30 in the Book of Mormon has proven convincing and has been widely disseminated inside and outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, alternative, anti-polygyny interpretations of Jacob 2:30 have circulated among other, lesser-known believers in the Book of Mormon\u2019s scriptural status. This paper briefly delves into the specifics of these historical interpretations among Reorganized Latter Day Saints (RLDS, now Community of Christ); Bickertonites or members of The Church of Jesus Christ based in Monongahela, Pennsylvania; and Hedrickites or members of The Church of Christ-Temple Lot. They rested assured that their interpretation of Jacob 2:30 was in harmony with the scriptural canon\u2019s contextual totality and that it precluded any reinterpretation of monogamy as the permanent, idealistic form of the marriage relation. A short history of the loophole\u2019s earliest interpretational history is touched on to contextualize its origins in Joseph Smith Jr.\u2019s Mormonism. All interpretations, whether pro- or anti-polygyny, were more or less polemical due to the historical memory of Joseph Smith Jr.\u2019s connection with plural marriage as well as the strong emotional currents that stirred within a topic that concerned sexuality and religious salvation.<\/p>\n

Tallie, T. J. “Conjugal States: The Queerness of Nonmonogamy in Settler Worlds.” In Conjugal States<\/i>. University of Minnesota Press.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While marital monogamy is often posited as inevitable and essential, it was in fact a negotiated practice inflicted onto occupied lands to enforce social control and white settler reproduction. Conjugal States<\/i> makes an ambitious and far-reaching investigation of how colonizers used monogamy to symbolize modernity, weaponized against Indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Columbia\u2014and how this process was complicated by the emergence of the Mormon Church.<\/p>\n

In Conjugal States, <\/i>T.J. Tallie reveals how the queer destabilizing potential of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth century clashed with the broader aims of colonization, resulting in legal action against plural marriages and fears of Mormon \u201ccontamination\u201d in other settler spaces. As colonial powers attempted to delineate and justify their occupation, monogamous marriage became a key method of performative civilization. By analyzing the fraught debates concerning gender, marriage, belonging, and race that arose between British settlers, Christian missionaries, South Asian migrants, and Indigenous peoples in contested territories around the world, Tallie reveals how marital practices and prohibitions shaped the contours of colonial life.<\/p>\n

A deeply archival work, Conjugal States<\/i> illuminates how both monogamous marriage and colonial power were predicated on the precarity of their own control. Tallie tells the story of the enormous repercussions of this global phenomenon, providing a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wilkinson, Lori Motzkus. Sacred Pens and Public Voices: Latter-day Saint Women in Dialogue with America. University of Illinois Press, 2026. In the view of many Latter-day Saint women, the religious restoration propounded by Joseph Smith unleashed forces important to female progress. Lori Motzkus Wilkinson examines how LDS women used their agency and sought women\u2019s rights filtered through their religious lens. Though intellectually connected to figures outside the Church, the LDS women saw them less as women’s rights activists to emulate and more as speakers of truths that, regardless of the origin, should be embraced and harnessed. Wilkinson reveals how Emmeline B. Wells, Susa Young Gates, and other Latter-day Saint women supported and upheld institutional LDS authority and utilized the importance of women\u2019s roles in the home and society as mechanisms for women\u2019s advancement. Even as LDS women continued to engage with prominent national thinkers, their writings and lives demonstrated that they connected with the larger sphere of women\u2019s rights activism before drawing on the LDS concept of women\u2019s divine nature to reshape those ideals to uniquely religious ends. Original and eye-opening, Sacred Pens and Public Voices revises established narratives about how LDS women interacted with and used ideas taken from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":55015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2968],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-literature-review"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/latter-day-saint-research-small.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55007"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55017,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55007\/revisions\/55017"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}