LDS theology and culture has a great deal to say about “the home,” but home’s material dimensions assumed new importance as a global pandemic confined members to their houses and brought church, school and the workplace within their walls. At the same time, environmental disasters placed many homes in peril, prompting questions about the sustainability of our current patterns of living. Increased reliance on our houses paradoxically revealed how unstable they often are. The “Building Zion” issue explores through poetry, personal essays, fiction and criticism the complex meaning of LDS homes past and present.
Alternation between loss of home and finding refuge in promised land are core themes in the Church’s pioneer heritage as well as The Book of Mormon. The individual pieces in “Building Zion” contextualize the long history of displacement and rebuilding within the LDS experience and highlight how such patterns continue today, with particular attention to how the pandemic, migration and environmental change are impacting LDS families, homes and communities. This issue aspires to provide a resource for those thinking about the changing role housing and communities within LDS life as well as an impetus for imagining ways of living that foster families, congregations and environments better equipped to meet today’s needs.
Natalie Brown holds a PhD from Columbia University, where she studied the impact of housing precarity on several nineteenth-century writers. She regularly writes on the meaning of housing in contemporary LDS culture.
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