front cover of Mercy without End
Mercy without End
Toward a More Inclusive Church
Lavina Fielding Anderson
Signature Books, 2020

These eighteen essays span more than thirty years of Lavina Fielding Anderson’s concerns about and reflections on issues of inclusiveness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including her own excommunication for “apostasy” in 1993, followed by twenty-five years of continued attendance at weekly LDS ward meetings. Written with a taste for irony and an eye for documentation, the essays are timeless snapshots of sometimes controversial issues, beginning with official resistance to professionally researched Mormon history in the 1980s. They underscore unanswered questions about gender equality and repeatedly call attention to areas in which the church does not live up to its better self. Compassionately and responsibly, it calls Anderson’s beloved religion back to its holiest nature.

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front cover of Sisters in Spirit
Sisters in Spirit
Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective
Edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson
University of Illinois Press, 1987
This book of essays about Mormon women, all written and edited by scholars who are themselves Mormon women, is a brave and important work. Readers will fully appreciate just how brave and important it really is, however, if they can see how this work of historical theology fits into the history of historical writing about Mormon women, as well as how it fits into Mormon history itself.
 
"The women who contributed to this book are among the best of the Mormon literati . . . [they] hold that there is hope within the church for change, for reform, for expansion of the place of women." -- Women's Review of Books
 
"Historians of women in America have a great deal to learn from the history of Mormon women. This fine set of essays provides an excellent introduction to a subject about which we should all know more." -- Anne Firor Scott, author of Making the Invisible Woman Visible.
 
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