Sunstone Podcast

What if a voice started talking to you while you were all alone, soaking in a nice, warm bath? What if that voice told you that everything is a fiction — and that fictions are the single most important innovation in the history of humanity? What if you debated and argued with this voice until suddenly you found yourself overflowing with love, gratitude, and a genuine curiosity about everything in existence? In this episode, Stephen Carter talks with author Glenn Ostlund about his book “Bathing with God.” (A less salacious book than the title might suggest, but give it a chance!)

The LDS Church is more enmeshed in white supremacy that most Latter-day Saints realize. Education professor Roni Jo Draper talks with co-host Blaire Ostler about how systemic racism shows up in Mormon conversations about education and how we can start to dismantle it.

The Book of Mormon is simultaneously the most central and the most problematic part of the Restoration movement. In this episode, John Larsen introduces a new series in the Sunstone Podcast where he will be exploring various approaches to the Book of Mormon, revealing both its problems and its power.

As Ijeoma Oluo wrote, “White people, talk about race with other white people. … Take some of the burden of racism off of people of color. Bring it into your life so that you can dismantle racism in the white spaces of your life.” But how do white people talk constructively about race amongst themselves? In this episode, Karin Peter, Liz Martin, and Stephen Carter (none of them race scholars, all of them white) try to take a few steps in that direction.

Christian and LDS doctrine both teach about the resurrection of the dead. But how will that resurrection occur? Lincoln Cannon, Jordan Roberts, and Blaire Ostler have a theory that it will be accomplished through technological means. How does new technology and old scripture support their assertion? And what complexities does their theory pose?

LeiLoni Lee grew up as a Black person in a small, largely White Utah town. She loved her experience in the LDS Church until the day a “trusted adult” told her that her dark skin was the sign of a curse. Then, at age 12, she began to realize that she was Queer. Blaire Ostler talks with LeiLoni about how Mormons can be better allies to both the Black and Queer communities.

With the advent of COVID-19, physically going to church has taken on the aura of a life-and-death proposition. Jana Riess and Stephen Carter discuss how we may have reached a historic period where the way we worship changes forever.

In her new book, “Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem and Racial Innocence,” Joanna Brooks reveals uncomfortable truths about how White supremacist attitudes were built into the LDS Church—and how they still function today. Joanna Brooks and Mica McGriggs talk with Stephen Carter about how racism became part of the Church’s structure and what we can do to dismantle it.

Taylor Petrey, author of the new book “Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism” talks with Ben Park and Lindsay Hansen Park about the many ways LDS teachings on gender and sexuality have shifted since World War II.

Every great book has a great backstory,” says the blurb on the back of “Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books” Editor Joseph Geisner and contributor Daniel Stone talk with Lindsay Hansen Park and Josh Allred about their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past.