The Boughs of Love

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In this call for a renewal within the Latter-day Saint tradition that is as fervent as it is sincere Nathan Kitchen has offered us a gift. This memoir provides a compelling glimpse not only into Kitchen's own moving experience but into the world of paradoxes pain and progress inhabited by those who aim to balance both queer and Mormon identities. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>--Benjamin E Park author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>American Zion: A New History of Mormonism</em></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Like the prophet-historian Mormon Brother Nathan Kitchen deftly chronicles the history of his people while standing as a witness to their labors sufferings miracles and eternal worth in the eyes of God. Interweaving secular history soul-searching religious memoir striking anecdote and Christ-saturated imagery Kitchen keeps a fixed foot on the reality of the past contextualizing the present while longing for yet more glorious and redemptive futures for the queer Latter-day Saint. His book is engrossed with such thoroughly Mormon concepts as covenant belonging unmerited grace the ongoing restoration and the sacred-if not essential-nature of questions in our spiritual journeys. An act of holy consecration </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Boughs of Love </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>is as much an accessible sprawling roadmap of the pitfalls and progress of queer identity within the LDS tradition as it is a testimony of the expansive hope that the Restored Gospel of Christ can offer to all members of the family of God.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>--Jaxon Washburn </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Master of Theological Studies Harvard Divinity School; PhD Student the University of California Los Angeles</span></p><p></p>