Chantal Mukamurera is Rwandan.  She was born in Burundi, raised in Rwanda and grew up in Germany where she joined the LDS Church and married.  She's been Catholic, Mormon and is now preparing for the priesthood ordination in the Community of Christ.  

Chantal has moved across countries and religious traditions.  She has had to watch a genocide that took the lives of her loved ones.  She has also had to reevaluate the faith that had her heart for most of her adult life.  Chantal's journey is a lesson in gracious transition and change.

When Azul Uribe was 11 years old she was sent from Mexico to live with her Grandmother in the US.  She lived there for 15 years when she tragically discovered that she was undocumented.  After a 2.5 year battle in the courts she was deported to the Mexico with a 10 year ban from reentering the US, leaving behind a life, friends and loved ones.

In Part One we discuss how Mormonism's American cultural imperialism plays out in Mexico.  In Part Two we talk about how it came about that she was deported.

When Azul Uribe was 11 years old she was sent from Mexico to live with her Grandmother in the US.  She lived there for 15 years when she tragically discovered that she was undocumented.  After a 2.5 year battle in the courts she was deported to the Mexico with a 10 year ban from reentering the US, leaving behind a life, friends and loved ones.

In Part One we discuss how Mormonism's American cultural imperialism plays out in Mexico.  In Part Two we talk about how it came about that she was deported.

During the month of May 2017,  we look at Mormonism across the world and how an American religion makes its way into cultural, national and social systems beyond the United States.  We discover that Mormonism isn't the clean and tidy fit that some have romanticised it to be.  Mormons outside of the United States invariably pay a heavy tax in trying to negotiate the cultural, social, economic and political demands placed on them by their Utah-based faith tradition.

Nepia Mahuika is a 6th generation LDS who was asked one too many times to choose between being Mormon or Māori.  

John Bonner (clinical social worker, singer and grower of flowers) joins me to talk about his growth into manhood as young and gay in one of the most religiously conservative areas in the Mormon corridor.  He shares his story of trying to make sense of his young self in a religious and social context in which his kind of manhood was daily rejected.   His story is heartbreaking but tinged with moments of delight as he gradually learns to accept, understand and love himself notwithstanding a faith tradition that has shown how little it values him.

Blaire Ostler joins me to discuss God -   God as feminine and masculine; God in Mormon theology; God as a plurality; God as a creator; God without the biological need to procreate; the God of our own imagination ...and much more.

Daniel Hernandez, PhD Candidate at the University of Auckland, is Mayan but grew up in Rose Park, Salt Lake City, Utah among a mostly Tongan and Samoan community.  As both observer and participant in the various cultures of 'Brown Utah' we discuss Kava and the importance of cultivating and preserving traditional practices that build connection to home islands.

(Kava as a root extract  from a plant found in the Pacific Islands and is consumed as a drink in ceremony.  Both Kava drinks and the ceremonies associated have come under General Authority criticism from time to time.  BYU-Hawaii and some local leaders have banned it outright.)

The Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh began life as Muslim, converted as a teenager to the LDS Church, served a mission, taught LDS Institute and then, responding to a call, she attended Duke Divinity School.  Following a period of discernment, she was recently ordained a Baptist minister.

Her call to ministry is part of a colourful journey into finding a God for all and for the least.  God is too often the product of a White Western Patriarchy and as a Black, Brown women whose spiritual life was percolated in the intersection of different faith traditions Fatimah is passionate about  preaching a God that holds, loves and ministers to everyone.

The Book of Mormon has been claimed by the LDS Church to be a history of Native Americans.  While this proposition has been scaled back over the years it's still somewhat present in a literalist view of the text.  But why is it that Native Americans are only rarely and then selectively consulted in the conversation as to the book's origins?  Surely the church and Mormon scholars, if they take seriously this claim, should be beating a determined path to the door of Native Americans to receive their wisdom and input.  But they aren't.  

Thomas Murphy (Mohawk) and I discuss this dynamic;  why it might be? And, what is the potential for the faith in allowing for the very voices that are central to the Book of Mormon narrative. 

Chris Smith is not LDS but has been fascinated with the tradition since he dated the local Mormon bishop's daughter in high school.  His research as a religious historian has lead him to the conclusion that Joseph Smith sought to resolve 19th Century America's political conundrums allegorically through the Book of Mormon.  He argues that Joseph's hope was that one day the church he established would redeem the USA and become the Kingdom of God on Earth.  

The Book of Mormon is not, he argues, a literal history of an extinct Native American civilization unless the civilization was experiencing exactly the same political, social, economic, racial and cultural issues that characterized antebellum USA.