I had the great pleasure of talking with the great Jana Riess (of Twible and Flunking Sainthood fame) at Religion News Service. RNS: You say that the earliest Mormons had a “vision of restorative racial universalism” that shows up in the Book of Mormon’s ideal that the Lamanites will acquire white skin when they become righteous. Mueller: For [...]
I participated in RD's now canonical "10 Questions" series on new books. Other recent contributors include Wendy Doniger, Jason Josephson Storm, and Haroon Moghul. What inspired you to write Race and the Making of the Mormon People? Let me be a bit confessional. I’m not a Mormon, but Mormon culture has probably formed me more than any [...]
At R&P, I wrote about my journey back to church, motivated by my daughter, my father, and Donald Trump. I was late to my own baptism. This past Easter Sunday, my two-year-old daughter and I were scheduled to be baptized at Grace Chapel, a Presbyterian church (PCA) in our adopted hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Anxious to [...]
At Slate, I wrote about how, by agreeing to sing at Trump’s inauguration, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has enraged many Mormons and forced a reckoning over the LDS Church’s values. For much of 2016, Donald Trump’s bombast seemed to be breaking open an unprecedented fissure between the Mormons and the Republican Party that the mogul [...]
