Sunstone Magazine

Sunstone

Sunstone Issue 127, May 2003
Director of Publications and Editor	Stephen R. Carter
Categories	Mormon studies: scholarship, issues, literature, and art
Frequency	about four times per year
First issue	Winter 1975
Company	Sunstone Education Foundation
Country	United States
Based in	Salt Lake City, Utah
Website	Sunstone
ISSN	0363-1370

Sunstone is a magazine published by the Sunstone Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, that discusses Mormonism through scholarship, art, short fiction, and poetry. The foundation began the publication in 1974 and considers it a vehicle for free and frank exchange in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The magazine's motto is Faith Seeking Understanding.

In the 1960s-70s, independent Mormon studies associations and publications were emerging, including the Mormon History Association and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The Journal of Mormon History and Exponent II were both launched in 1974, and in that same year two graduate students at divinity schools, Scott Kenney and Keith Norman, hatched plans to create a scholarly journal for Mormon students. Gathering student volunteers but lacking funding, the team produced and sold a Mormon history calendar in Utah and California. They were encouraged by the Dialogue staff, including editor Robert Rees, who suggested the name "Sunstone," an architectural symbol from the Mormon temple in Nauvoo. After struggles and delays, the first issue was printed in November 1975.

The publication faced early challenges. The time and effort to produce each issue was demanding on the volunteer staff, and the first several issues had a different editor for each issue, under the leadership of Kenney and Peggy Fletcher. For Orson Scott Card's ghost-edited issue in Summer 1977, Card had convinced the board to change to a cheaper and more accessible magazine format. Facing financial troubles later that year, Sunstone merged with the New Messenger and Advocate, a new LDS news magazine with plenty of advertising, which further influenced the Sunstone format. In 1978 Kenney returned to edit three more issues before retiring from the venture, and passing the editorship to Fletcher and Allen D. Roberts who would also go on to start its symposia. The magazine kept its approach for a popular audience while emphasizing intellectual issues, but it eventually dropped its student emphasis.