Mira, the protagonist of Marilyn French’s best-selling novel, did not usually buy women’s magazines, but she pored over them at the dentist’s office: “Rate yourself: are you a good wife? Are you still attractive? Are…
Accounts of Emma Hale Smith and her relationship with her husband Joseph are scattered, sketchy and superficial. In 1973 Irwin E. Wirkus published Judge Me Dear Reader, a little twenty-five-page booklet about Emma. This past…
The study of early Utah history has been notably enriched by the recent publication of two contemporary accounts from the 1850s. The Journal of Martha Spence Hey wood, 1850 to 1856 includes Martha’s accounts of…
Most readers of Mormon fiction would quickly agree that the genre still awaits a writer of the stature of Chaim Potok or James Michener, to say nothing of a Joyce or a Faulkner. Perhaps one…
I guess you could say that I’ve been a guest in my father’s house but have confined myself to one room. At any rate, that’s how I felt after visiting Nauvoo for the dedication of…
“Leave his diapers off for a few minutes each day,” said Tina, my wife. “It will do him good.” So I did, and that was how I came to be on my hands and knees…
This time of year in the Willamette Valley is full to bursting, glutted with the harvest. Hazelnut trees, tassled and drooping with nuts, trail their branches in the fat green rivers; grain and corn line…
Some years ago Sidney E. Mead, then professor of American church history at the University of Chicago, argued that the two live movements of the 18th century which shaped American Christianity were pietism and rationalism.[1]…
sallies forth
garbed for the hunt
in shirt of linsey-woolsey
and moosehide moccasins
I am no monk, no flesh-thresher I,
To winnow out, by dank silence,
By hooded hunger and the raw, unflagging flail,
That Adam’s chaff, desire,
Till the husk of me lie powder on the stone.