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I'm celebrating today's memoir release by resigning from the Mormon church
After years of work, The Accidental Terrorist, my memoir of Mormon missionary life, is out today! And what better way to celebrate than to mail a letter that, honestly, is years if not decades overdue... 10 November 2015 Member Records...
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17 years in the making, THE ACCIDENTAL TERRORIST is available today
I lived it almost thirty years ago. I started writing it almost seventeen years ago. Today, at long last, The Accidental Terrorist is here. (Quick, lock your doors!) What more can I say to you about it? I hope you'll...
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The Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith's first novel
This essay is excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, available everywhere November 10, 2015. WARNING: This essay contains graphic descriptions of primitive surgery that some readers may find disturbing. In January 1994, when I was 26...
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The Mormon Bishop Challenge: Marry a same-sex couple
Is there a religious equivalent to the term "civil disobedience"? As in, a term for defying one's church leaders when you find their edicts unjust or immoral? Something more warm-sounding than "heresy"? Oh, well. For lack of a better term,...
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Books and reviewers and blurbs, oh my!
I've been making Stamps.com work overtime as I mail out a ton of advance reading copies of The Accidental Terrorist, and it's beginning to pay off. My little book—okay, okay, it's not so little—is attracting some crucial early bits of...
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Mormon underwear is about to get its closeup
Not many people outside of Utah may be aware of it, but a controversy is brewing—and it has to do with Mormon underwear. Specifically, it has to do with the portrayal of Mormon underwear on network television. As reported by...
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Joseph Smith's "capital" idea
As I was working through the very final set of revisions on The Accidental Terrorist, I had to hunt down the original source of a well-known Joseph Smith quote on the topic of the accuracy of the Bible. I found...
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My prescient and fiery memoir cover shoot
We had no idea that what we were really doing was a cover shoot for my memoir. It was the late summer of 1987. I was stationed with my assigned mission companion, Elder Tim Bishop, in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. We...
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Please help me "Close the Book" on my memoir project!
My sixteen-year quest to publish my memoir The Accidental Terrorist is nearly over. I feel like I've been fighting my way down the field all that time, sometimes making progress, sometimes getting stopped cold, sometimes losing big ground. But now...
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The Falcon and the Snowman and me
In 1985, I was a far bigger fan of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny than just about any other musician. The album that infected me was 1982's Offramp, which sounded unlike anything else I'd ever heard. I became a hardcore consumer...
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