Kail Lambert, the protagonist in Jack Harrell’s new novel Caldera Ridge, stands in the front room of the small, older home he and his wife Charlene have bought in rural southeast Idaho. While Charlene works…
Don’t let the book cover’s scandalous bare navel dissuade you. Deja Earley’s poetry collection, To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved, is well worth your time as she navigates the truths…
“Joseph Paul Vorst was arguably the most culturally significant Latter-day Saint painter of his time.”So, starts the Church History Museum’s video for the exhibition on the life and works of Joseph Paul Vorst (1897–1947). The video and the exhibition is a joint collaboration between the museum’s curator, Laura Allred Hurtado, and the independent writer Glen Nelson, who authored a catalogue detailing the life and known works of the German-American artist. Both exhibition and catalogue seek to rehabilitate the reputation of an artist that has largely been overlooked. Vorst’s life is beautifully evoked and contextualized on every page by Nelson, who raises questions about conventional definitions of what it means to be a Mormon artist.
Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.
I picture it, a milky glass teardrop
Just large enough to fill my cupped hand.
It floats in an almost-dark cave;
It lights the cave but slightly, casting
Wan shadows, a vessel of music and logic
Unknown among us.
You wake me to the all and the every,
You breathe me to your shattering stillness,
Walk me to the brink of the dream
That jerks alert. You, the nurturing darkness
Remember, it’s a Covenant Path.
On our way we must keep hearts
and minds—as Brigham said—
“riveted on the cross of Christ.”
Your body disrupts the narrative:
Jairus—unaccustomed to want—
calls Jesus to pull his daughter
from death. Jesus comes, touches
the girl; she rises. Just like Jairus
rehearsed it.
Like moths summoned by the gravity of light,
figures lean beneath sinuous white robes, their
point of communion is clear: hands in line with
the flame—its blade toward the earth’s unhealed
Since he was a child, he’d dreamed of himself in one form and woken up, always disappointed, always jolted by the reality and by the way that others looked at him. In the first years,…