Here’s the Church
April 16, 2018While the organist pumped
“Let Us All Press on in the Work of the Lord,”
and the chorister napped her arms
like a whooping crane, and some sat there
DiaBLOGue
The Man at the Chapel
April 16, 2018I wrote to my mission president for the last time almost two years ago during the final week of my mission. I think I expressed my love to him and my gratitude for the example…
Doing Huebener
April 16, 2018Everyone is insecure in some way. But only a schizophrenic or a Theatre Person would alleviate that insecurity by becoming someone else. As a Theatre Person I had been a queen, a bitch, an unwed…
Polygamy, Patrimony, and Prophecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston
April 16, 2018Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs.
A Voice from the Past: The Benson Instructions for Parents
April 16, 2018In February 1987 at a fireside for parents, President Ezra Taft Benson delivered an address called “To the Mothers in Zion.” In October 1987, he delivered a parallel address in the priesthood session of general…
Failed Friendship
April 16, 2018Sisters nod and smile,
inclining intimately toward her in the crowded room.
Years of testimonies shared and friendships deified
linger in the worn cushions and heavy curtains.
She brushes jostling shoulders, turns and feels
How Do You Spell Relief? A Panel of Relief Society Presidents
April 15, 2018The idea for this panel sprang from last year’s western Pilgrimage reunion, an annual meeting of women. We were sitting around observing who’d become a Relief Society president and being amazed. We tried to figure out what it could possibly mean and came to no conclusion but decided it would be interesting to talk about.
Humanity or Divinity? | Martin Scorsese, dir., The Last Temptation of Christ
April 15, 2018Outside the San Francisco theater where we saw The Last Temptation of Christ, Christians paraded with guitars, bullhorns, sandwich boards, and placards (some in Cantonese) protesting the blasphemous portrayal of their Lord and Savior. Anti-semitic…
History of Historians | Davis Bitton and Leonard Arrington, Mormons and Their Historians
April 15, 2018That such a volume as this could be written at all is happy testimony to the development of a Mormon historiographical tradition. Its appearance at this late date, however—over a century and a half after…
What Do Mormon Women Want? | Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective
April 15, 2018Early in my academic career I determined to study neither Mormon history nor women’s history, so I was at first somewhat hesitant to review this book which obviously dealt with both. As a historian I…