I discovered Ed Geary’s essays by chance — a friend happened to mention them to me: “You’ve got to read them; they’re about growing up in Utah, and they’re excellent.” Curious, but not so curious…
At least once a decade, it seems, someone publishes a book about the Latter-day Saints without taking the necessary “trouble” to adequately research the subject. Stanley Hirshon was judged guilty of this offense in 1969…
“Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in advanced age,” Lord Chesterfield told his son in 1747, but “if we do not plant it while young it will give us no…
God gave David nightmares. The flame-eyed giant hurling thunderbolts from the mountain of heaven, hair and beard blown back by the storm of righteous wrath—it was he who haunted the boy. *** David knew his father…
A white pillar will glow from the sand as I die.
Those backyard trees will shake their empty pods
against the sky. My moldy body will sink
into its bed, smothered by sinners.
Grey clouds, March-heavy hung over
an old and mottled snow that day
we brought him there to you.
That fine white burst of bush blossom
Has come again. Blast
ing through the winter crust
And scattering the afterbirth of spring,
One of the least known rites of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the sacred hosanna shout.
My mother was eighty-four, a widow of six months, and badly crippled with arthritis in the fall of 1981. She was also virtually blind. For the past six months, her eight children had watched anxiously…
It was one of those crisp November days in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I heard the news. Snuggled under a quilt, I was reading to my two young sons when the telephone interrupted us. It was…