Adam’s Navel
April 16, 2018A few years ago on a cross-country trip, my brother Paul and I detoured from Interstate 70 in western Missouri for some site-seeing. After stopping at the Far West temple site and the town square…
DiaBLOGue
Scientific Foundations of Mormon Theology
April 16, 2018A 1974 article published in Science identified the Mormon culture as an unusually productive source of American scientists and scholars, an achievement linked to such distinctive tenets of Mormon theology as rationalism, natural law, and…
The Crisis in Europe and Hugh B. Brown’s First Mission Presidency
April 16, 2018Mary Firmage, daughter of President Hugh B. Brown, has recently deposited a large collection of her father’s personal letters in the Church Archives. President Brown wrote part of this correspondence while he was mission president…
“Dear Sister Zina… Dear Brother Hugh…”
April 16, 2018“Mother, do you know your boyfriend is a poor, old, decrepit, forgotten has-been? I can’t see to read, I can’t hear, my nose drips, my hands shake, I drool. Here I come, just shuffling down…
Hugh B. Brown: The Early Years
April 16, 2018In 1969 Edwin B. Firmage taped oral history interviews with his grandfather, Hugh B. Brown. The following essay has been adapted from these memoirs, which will be published by Signature Books in 1988 as An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown.
Hughes Family Reunion
April 16, 2018Southern Illinois in sweltering and wet summer.
Thunder and the whippoorwill sing strange
duets at night.
From southwestern deserts to the closest
Navel
April 16, 2018I drive by a red farmhouse
in the setting sun. Orange morning
darts through rippled glass.
High-glossed linoleum
A Writer Reborn | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Leaving Home: Personal Essays
April 16, 2018At the age of seven Mary Bradford imagined herself presenting a story to a New York publisher, the manuscript “rolled into a scroll and tied with a yellow ribbon” (p. 16). Now in midlife she wonders…
Before Constantine, After Joseph Smith | Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
April 16, 2018Few recent books substantiate the major claims of Restoration faith as well as Graydon Snyder’s Ante Pacem. A professor at Bethany Theological Seminary, Snyder convincingly shows that the early church had structures and cultic forms…
Clayton’s Struggle | James B. Allen, Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton, A Mormon
April 16, 2018James B. Allen has done us all a great favor by writing this interesting biography of William Clayton, a disciple of Joseph Smith. There are many biographies of Mormon leaders, but few about Mormon followers.…