The Third Nephite
April 17, 2018Shortly after sunrise Otis Wadby was driving to work in Circleville. He stayed nights with his son in Junction, his wife having expelled him from his home in Circleville because he had taken up with…
DiaBLOGue
Of Quiffs, Quarks, and God
April 17, 2018Science is full of strange twists and unexpected developments—so many, in fact, that we are rarely surprised anymore by its most recent revelations. But one of the biggest scientific surprises of the twentieth century has…
And Baby Makes Two: Choosing Single Motherhood
April 17, 2018As a school teacher in Tooele—junior high science/English—I carpool the forty miles from Salt Lake City every day. I had always assumed, as teens turned into twenties, that someday I would be married and raise…
Promise to Grandma
April 17, 2018When Sarah Roundy Sylvester was fighting death in the fall of 1938 she must have felt her life was unsuccessful. The promises of a good education, the status of a significant and unusual Church assignment,…
Nativity
April 17, 2018The eyes of the beasts shine into my own.
The archangel’s hair is on fire. I stumble
through the mudprints of cows and ewes
toward the damp side of the cave
Eastward to Eden: The Nauvoo Rescue Missions
April 17, 2018These were the words of Brigham Young to his Mormon followers at the first Sunday services held at Winter Quarters on a wind-swept rise of land on the west side of the city’s proposed Main Street. Daniel H. Wells and William Cutler had brought the sobering news into camp just two days before that Nauvoo had been overrun in the skirmish known as the Nauvoo Battle. The subsequent sufferings of the dispossessed and starving citizens of Nauvoo spurred Brigham and his fellow apostles into even greater relief action than that already underway. “Let the fire of the covenant which you made in the House of the Lord, burn in your hearts, like flame unquenchable,” he re minded the Saints, “till you, by yourselves or delegates . . . [can] rise up with his team and go straightway and bring a load of the poor from Nauvoo . . . [for] this is a day of action and not of argument” (Journal History, 28 Sept. 1846).
“In Jeopardy Every Hour”
April 17, 2018When my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abigail, and I went to the hospital, I left the pie crusts and rolls I had mixed up that morning on the kitchen table along with the dress pattern I had bought for my new niece. It had been months since I had felt this energetic, and so that morning I had begun a few projects while I waited for our sixth child to be born. The telephone awakened me from my after-lunch nap; the pediatrician wanted to see me in his office to discuss Abby’s blood test results.
They Have Closed the Church My Father Helped Build
April 17, 2018where he sawed through his finger
now perpetually stiff,
paid three assessments
Evenings: His Church Calling
April 17, 2018The sound burrs in my head
like a racket of angry birds
swirling from the sky.
He’s gone again;
Objectivity and History
April 17, 2018In the early 1960s, a crisis occurred in the academic field of the philosophy of science, spilling over into the philosophy of history and the philosophy of social sciences. The crisis emerged from research in…