Persona non grata

It looks so small from a distance. When you're immersed in it -- living in Utah or in an LDS household -- Mormonism is like a cage with one small clouded lens to look out through that distorts your every view of the world.

Then one day you step out. You leave home, or you leave the Mormon corridor of Arizona, Utah, and Idaho, and suddenly it's as if it's hardly even there. It's this tiny, unimportant thing that you can forget about for days, weeks, months, even years at a time. You can take it out of your pocket and show people if you like, as an amusing conversation piece at parties. Or you can just not even bother with it at all.

Except that if you come from Mormon stock and your family is LDS, you occasionally have to face the disorienting task of stepping back in. Now, after more than three years apart at our respective universities and one year back together at grad school on the East Coast, Rex and I were about to step back in. Read the rest of the story ->