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  • Grondahl 47

    1980. Not sure we’ve made any progress.For other cartoons in this series,  click here.    This cartoon, as always, is posted with the kind permission of    The Sunstone  Foundation  and  Calvin Grondahl.

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  • Ride to Church in Loudoun County, Virginia

    Today’s Ride to Church comes to us from Chelsea in Virginia. We live in Loudoun County, Virginia, about 50 miles west of Washington, DC. My family moved here in 1989 and my husband’s came a few years later. After going to BYU, getting married, and […]

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  • January 2013 YM/YW Lesson Comparison

    The church has finally updated the curriculum for the YW/YM’s programs.   At long last.   We published two comparisons of the YW/YM lessons in 2012–both written diligently and conscientiously by Laura C.   You can read them here and here.   The following is […]

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  • 38 Psaltery & Lyre: Angela Felsted, “Helen Mar Kimball to Joseph Smith”

    "If I were permitted selfishness, I'd ask God to / catch a ram inside a thicket, send an angel down / to smite the chains that bind my will."

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  • Parenthood Juggle: From SAHM to Single Parent

    I couldn't quite believe my bishop had confidence in my ability to be in charge. "Are you sure about this?" I asked him. "My life is falling apart right now."

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  • 37 Psaltery & Lyre: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, “There Will Be Poetry,” translated by Charles Patterson

    "the sun dresses the tattered clouds / in fire and gold . . ."

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  • Guest Post Invitation: The Parenthood Juggle

    I want my daughters (and my son!) to be able to read about other women's struggles. How did they go about deciding what to do and when?

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  • I Am

    “And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.” Exodus 3:14 Sandy Hook Elementary December 14, 2012 I Am the pretty little blonde haired, blue […]

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  • 36 Psaltery & Lyre: Alex Wiggins, “Sometimes I Fear”

    "Sometimes I fear a body knows when it's dying / and relays urgency to the brain / to make a flourish of praise . . ."

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  • Encounters: Easter Morning

    By Jessica This Easter my family and I were visiting London, with the intention of doing tourist stuff and to evaluate our choice to move to England.   We wanted to travel to the city that we were thinking of moving to so we could […]

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  • Encounters: Miraculous Timing

    By Karin I work as a nursing home and hospice physician.   One day, while travelling to see patients on a 100-mile round trip route, I got a call from one of our nurses about a patient who had just arrived home from the hospital […]

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  • Encounters: Flat Tires

    My tire blew as I crossed a bridge on the way to the St. Louis VA at 5:30 on a pitch-black winter morning. I had a cell phone this time, but no AAA and no one to call.

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  • Encounters: I Wish I Was Still Young

    She looked at me again and seemed almost surprised to find me there holding her hand. She thanked me for stopping to talk to her and turned to slowly push away.

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  • The Years of Magical Thinking

    “I know the  truth about Santa Claus, Mom. I know the answers now, the real answers,” my twelve year old son said to me solemnly  last week, waving a Christmas card  featuring the  red-cheeked jolly man in his hand. “You do?” I answered cautiously, treading […]

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  • 35 Psaltery & Lyre: Michael Hicks, “We Gather Together”

    "I've practiced this before, like hard dough rolled / in sugar: how we sweeten survival."

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  • Encounters: How Great Thou Art

    She put her arm around my shoulder, gave me a sisterly hug, and was gone, without saying a word.

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  • 34 Psaltery & Lyre: Sarah Dunster, “Herald”

    " . . . bringing sick, / terrible knowledge and that grey uncertainty / of the world at an end-how it could come / when nobody realizes nobody hears . . ."

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  • On Being a Christmasist

    In the three years since I lost faith in Mormonism, I’ve tried on more than a few labels to describe my spiritual alignment: agnostic, atheist, humanist. I’m not content with any of them. It’s not that they are wrong, necessarily, but each fails to capture […]

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  • Twenty Years

    I stumbled across this Facebook meme a couple months ago and sorta fell in love with it.   I want to put it in a frame next to my girls’ beds so they can fall asleep every night seeing it.   I don’t want them […]

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  • Mormonism is a Skirt, Not a Pair of Pants!

    Skirtism doesn't imply that there exists no universal Mormonism -- for all we know, One True Mormonism is floating out there in the noumenal -- it only requires us to admit that we don't possess it, no matter where we got our beliefs.

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  • Behold, the Condescension of God

    O Come, all ye faithful. O Come, all ye doubtful. Come, all ye sorrowful and shameful and prideful and sinful. You are never so low, but that He has gone lower. You are never so lost but that He will seek you out.

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  • 47 A Mormon in the Cheap Seats: A Faith like Mine

    I now admit, somewhat sheepishly, that one of the reasons I voted for Obama is because of his religious beliefs.

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  • Encounters: Collapsing Inside

    Driving by the cemetery that day, I happened to look right and saw an older man with unkempt hair sitting on a bench outside a gravestone store across from the cemetery, his head in his hands, his shoulders heaving with sobs. And I zipped by at 65 mph.

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  • Grondahl Restored 46

    If you’d like to see other cartoons in this series go to  https://dovesandserpents.org/category/columns/grondahl-restored/ ; This cartoon, as always, is posted with the kind permission of    The Sunstone  Foundation, the publisher, and  Calvin Grondahl. ;

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  • 33 Psaltery & Lyre: Michael Hicks, “Aesthetics Seminar as the Last Supper”

    " . . . seconds when we believed our little thoughts / were stars pricking through a black canopy. / Stars we thought we could sail by to some new home, / a port both necessary and sufficient. . . . "

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  • Put on Your Pants Uke Song

    Every movement needs music. This is a great start.

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  • Pantsgate 2012: There Is Room Enough for All of Us

    There is room enough in Christ for all of us.

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  • 46 A Mormon in the Cheap Seats: Girls Can Change the World

    We're not just losing the voice of someone who would say the same things as everybody else in the conversation.

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  • Heather Wears Pants

    I was pregnant with Stuart, my third (and last) child when I decided I wanted to get a Ph.D.   By the time he was three months old, I had already started my coursework.   It was invigorating.   I was excited to be reading […]

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  • 32 Psaltery & Lyre: Dayna Patterson, “Soft”

    "The doctrine is an egg / in its shell / I can't swallow / God . . . "

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  • Encounters: The Power of Empathy

    "I found out that there is a point where you might as well be literally drowning in rising water, instead of disconnection bills. And when your kids are hungry, you get depressively creative. With everything of value either at a pawn shop or sold, I gathered up some of our many books and took my five-and-two-year-old to the other side of town. "

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  • 45 A Mormon in the Cheap Seats: Pants-Wearing Women Running Wild

    That, my friends, is how you maintain a cultural norm, and in that context, press releases telling women they can decide for themselves what to wear are meaningless.

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  • Friendless in East Texas

    I was born and raised in East Texas and have spent most of my adult life living here or Louisiana.   But my parents are originally from California, which means that I don’t really have the necessary social capital required to happily live here.   […]

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  • Encounters: We Are All Beggars

    When we see physical need in others, it is merely an external manifestation of an inner need we all carry.

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  • Grondahl Restored 45

    If you’d like to see other cartoons in this series go to  https://dovesandserpents.org/category/columns/grondahl-restored/ ; This cartoon, as always, is posted with the kind permission of    The Sunstone  Foundation, the publisher, and  Calvin Grondahl. ;

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  • The Church and Homosexuality

    I hope that, despite our setbacks, the Church will truly listen to its LGBT members and begin to loosen the reins that it has proverbially set upon our backs for decades.

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  • Now is the Time

    And I hope that all of you who have suffered, if you need to sit it out, that you can begin to find solace from afar, if that's what you need.

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  • 31 Psaltery & Lyre: Michael Hicks, “Jesus Is Coming Back”

    "He is walking home from the church in our skulls / knocking the halo from his head . . ."

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  • Encounters: I Passed By

    I was enjoying the beautiful evening as I crossed the Maeser quad, and I heard her before I saw her. I had to look around for the source of the wailing sobs, and finally I saw her through the late dusk, standing over near the entrance to the Brimhall building.

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  • Guest Post Invitation: Encounters

    So throughout this busy month, we here at Doves and Serpents would like to share some stories of what we're calling encounters--moments or exchanges with people, whether strangers, family members, or acquaintances--when we felt like we really connected with someone in an unusual way.

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  • Worshipping in Exile

    How do I worship in Exile?

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  • Grondahl Restored 44

    If you’d like to see other cartoons in this series go to  https://dovesandserpents.org/category/columns/grondahl-restored/ ; This cartoon, as always, is posted with the kind permission of    The Sunstone  Foundation, the publisher, and  Calvin Grondahl. ;

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  • Words, Words, Words

    Earlier this week, someone I didn’t know, someone I’ve never met, just a woman in pain, mistakenly thought I had taken something of hers, or rather, someone of hers. In a fog of unstable hurt, she lashed out at me. The attack was virtual, a […]

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  • 30 Psaltery & Lyre: Elizabeth Pinborough, “Recantation”

    "A wickedness presses / in my breast. I cannot / pluck it out. It is a rolled up / Torah scroll I cannot read."

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  • Fish Out of Water

    I'm terrified of this new dating scene because everyone is filled with experience and knowledge that I lack.

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  • Three Things

    We have two children together, ages 4 and 7, and they spend most of their time with me. Except for when I was attending the singles ward.

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  • Grondahl Restored 43

    This cartoon, as always, is posted with the kind permission of The Sunstone Foundation, the publisher, and Calvin Grondahl.

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  • 29 Psaltery & Lyre: Alex Wiggins, “Cleaning our keyboard”

    "It's weird how we erode. / In the valleys, shed pieces of me / fell from busy fingertips and mingled / with cracker crumbs, bacon bits, / stranded grains of rice . . . "

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  • Soul to Soul Foundation: Supportive Networking for Effective Mental Health Care

    Today’s guest post comes to us from Michelle and Cami, who recently launched Soul to Soul Foundation, an organization committed to assisting people suffering directly and indirectly from mental illness. From the Outside, by Michelle My sister once asked our older brother what his pain […]

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  • 28 Psaltery & Lyre: Kris Bluth, “Truth of Consequences”

    "She called me at 11:00 on / Saturday night and asked if / I could have sex with her."

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  • Random Snippets From My Own Feminist Journey OR A Few Things I Learned About Being a Woman

    Around that time, I also got it into my head that I would like to be President of the United States when I grew up. I sent multiple letters to the White House.

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  • Nearly True: Man Reading Moran Uncovers Repressed Grooming Memory

    Since I had no idea what she was talking about, I assumed her question had to do with fine-tuning the performance of our new house cleaning service by paying for a more expensive option involving, perhaps, additional personnel from Brazil.

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  • There you are

    How old were you when you last felt completely like yourself without checking in with the rest of the world to see if you were "acceptable"?

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  • 27 Psaltery & Lyre: Angela Felsted, “it starts”

    Angela Felsted is a musician, poet, and nature lover. Her work has appeared in issue fifteen of Drown in Your Own Fears, in Chantarelle's Notebook, and on her blog.

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  • I Don’t Know What to do With my Breasts! And I Think I’ve Experienced Some Sexism

    Although it would take a lot more life experience for the lesson to sink in, it was important to have a sense at a young age that I wouldn't settle for just any attention that came my way, to know that I would rather be alone than feel small and humiliated or like a body part that just happened to have a person attached to it.

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  • “I Hate the Feminists”

    I wish 17-year-old me could've had a good chat with Caitlin Moran. Perhaps Moran could've helped me realize that feminists are on my side, not something scary and Other.

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  • I Am a (Mormon?) Feminist

    My first official introduction to feminism came in an undergraduate class on Feminist Theory at BYU (an idea that now makes me chuckle, it seems like such an oxymoron).

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  • I’d Rather Pretend I Don’t Have One

    Some parts of How to Be a Woman are so funny, they left me in bed, shrieking with laughter. I'm talking about legs sticking up the air, writhing in the bed, gripping the bed sheets laughing.

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  • 26 Psaltery & Lyre: Kris Bluth, “What’s Playing on God’s iPod?”

    "Falling snow without wind . . ."

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  • Dudes–How To Be A Woman is a Must-Read!

    Feminism can, and should, be explained in a way to men that is not only understandable, but also sympathetic, without making them feel like complicit conspirators in the patriarchal society they inherited, but did not intentionally design.

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