Bernard Shaw once quipped that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms. And one would think that it is likewise a contradiction in terms to refer to Mormon arts. To prove that this is…
With her weak left hand
Rachel measured the mandrakes
For Jacob’s tea.
And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people. Revelation,…
The following is excerpted from a longer interview conducted by Shirley E. Stephenson as part of the Oral History Program at California State University at Fullerton, November 30, 1975.
Among the things Mormon brought into the spotlight by the Sonia Johnson affair, perhaps the least well understood was the LDS notion of “excommunication.” To non-Mormons the process seemed, in Phil Donahue’s widely heard characterization, a “medieval”, anachronism. On the Mormon side, while the notion was hardly a surprise, a remarkable ignorance of the criteria and mechanics was generally evident whenever the faithful tried to “explain” what was going on.
Mormonism has long occupied a unique place in the consciousness of Ameri cans. In the nineteenth century the Mormon Church was all but cast out of America: its prophet-founder ridiculed as a fraud and a…
1936. Sonia Harris is born on the Waushakie Indian Reservation near Malad, Idaho.
1948. She moves with her family to Logan, Utah, where she graduates from high school, works in a bank for one year and then graduates from Utah State University with a B.A. in English.
The third child in a family she describes as “five only children” because they were so far apart in years, Sonia traveled from one small town to another in the wake of her father’s seminary teaching career. When she was twelve years old, the family finally settled down in Logan.
According to a myth which circulated in Utah during the 1870s, Brigham Young had placed a curse on the town of Corinne and prophesied that the community’s ungodly existence would be short-lived. In Corinne: The…
The “words of Isaiah” constitute a body of some of the greatest religious literature in existence, both in an aesthetic and a spiritual sense. As Monte S. Nyman correctly points out in his introductory chapter,…
The challenge of writing religious history is an old one.[1] The ancient Hebrews incorporated history into their scriptures, and Luke the physician is but one of the historians whose writings were canonized in the Christian…