the boughs of love

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.

--Benjamin E Park, author of American Zion: A New History of Mormonism

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, The Boughs of Love 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.

--Jaxon Washburn, Master of Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School; PhD Student, the University of California, Los Angeles