One of my heroes is Hugh Nibley. I know. I know. How cliche for a Mormon Studies guy. Though it seems almost equally cliche to dismiss Nibley. In my second semester of graduate school at the University of Utah, I took a graduate seminar in ethics and public affairs. It was a small group. I was the only active Mormon. However, most of the regular participants in the seminar were very familiar with Mormonism. Jason was a returned missionary who had served in Japan. He worked at Sam Wellers Bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City. He was gay and had left the Church. Another participant in the seminar, Arlyn, was somebody I knew a bit better. He was active in the College Democrats and we had been in some classes together before. He was the youngest member in our little group. He was LDS and he came from the tiny Mormon enclave of Shelley, Idaho. He was also gay. The professor, Luke Garrott, was not LDS. However, he engaged Mormonism. This is something which none of my other professors at the University of Utah did. I never found any of my professors at Utah to be “anti-Mormon,” but instead they were completely uninterested in Mormonism. I took many of Garrott’s classes as an undergraduate. He was my graduate advisor for a time and I had been his TA. He was the person who had introduced me to Mormon historian Leonard…
