A Mighty Change of Heart
April 22, 2018I was born in the Church and have always been active in it—more or less. My conviction in the validity of its claims has vacillated over the years. Until recently there always had been in…
DiaBLOGue
Shocks of Grain
April 22, 2018“Whoa.” Benjamin Vaughn pulled back on the lines and stopped his four horse team. It was midmorning and he had just finished cutting his ten-acre patch of barley. With the binder stopped, Ben grasped the…
Wedding Song
April 22, 2018Let the stone whisper to the flower,
The flower to the sun,
And the sun to the stars of heaven,
That Jehovah is come for his bride;
Take, Eat
April 22, 2018Take, eat; this is my body.
Like a deer he came to me,
Parting the ferns,
Like a deer with bright antlers.
I chased him across meadows,
Written in Church, December 23, 1979
April 22, 2018The church of my childhood
was redbrick, too.
Smug and warm inside, I’d
watch the snow battling the windows
New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women
April 22, 2018The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.
Revelation: The Cohesive Element in International Mormonism
April 22, 2018President Spencer W. Kimball, in his address to the Samoa area conference in 1976, pointed out that he is frequently asked at press conferences about what he thinks is the single “greatest” problem facing the…
The Passage of Mormon Primitivism
April 22, 2018Some of Mormonism’s most important ideas appear to lie at the point of a paradox. The president of the Church, for example, is considered to be the divinely appointed mouthpiece of God, a prophet who…
Art and the Church: or “The Truths of Smoother”
April 22, 2018As I tried to figure out why on earth I was chosen for this talk, I could think mainly of reasons against it. First of all, I am a striking example of the failed artist.…
Cheap Shots Miss the Mark | Keith and Ann Terry, Emma: The Dramatic Biography of Emma Smith
April 21, 2018Be advised: a biography that thanks “team members” for accommodating “impossible scheduling” just might be thrown together hastily. And in spite of an attempt to lend an aura of authenticity to the book by acknowledging…