[ad_1]
Admirers disagreed.
“As a author and podcaster, Laura Hales had the uncommon mixture of being good and personable, mental and approachable,” Patrick Q. Mason, who holds the Leonard J. Arrington chair of Mormon historical past and tradition at Utah State College and has written extensively on the church, mentioned by e-mail. “She demonstrated do deep dives into fraught topics whereas remaining personally loyal to the church.
“Insatiably curious and a lifelong learner, she excelled at translating difficult points for broad audiences.”
Laura Elizabeth Harris was born right into a Latter-day Saints household on Aug. 12, 1967, in Madison, Wis. Her father, Alfred, was an agricultural engineer, and her mom, Margaret (Lewis) Harris, was a trainer.
The household lived in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan whereas Laura was rising up. In 1988 she graduated from Brigham Younger College with a bachelor’s diploma in worldwide relations. That very same yr she married Brian Dursteler; the couple had 5 youngsters earlier than divorcing in 2005.
Ms. Hales earned two grasp’s levels, in skilled writing at New England School in New Hampshire in 2013 and in North American historical past at Arizona State College 2020. She and Mr. Hales, who had already written a number of books on polygamy (a observe the mainstream church has not endorsed for greater than a century), married in 2013.
Ms. Hales mentioned that the concept for her podcast arose in 2016 when a church member in Sweden, the place she and Mr. Hales have been presenting at a convention, complained to her that books on the church have been laborious to pay money for in that nation, and that the one podcasts obtainable have been both antagonistic or overly devotional. “There isn’t a center floor,” the person informed her, so she set about making an attempt to supply one.
Ms. Hales took up many matters in her writing and on her podcast, however she handled polygamy so usually that in 2015 she wrote an essay for The Millennial Star, a weblog maintained by church members, entitled “Why I Write About Polygamy.” Within the essay, she talked about that she and her husband had given a lot of shows on the topic.
[ad_2]