Three Poems for My Mother
April 15, 2018For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses
DiaBLOGue
Explorations in Mormon Social Character Beyond the Liahona and Iron Rod
April 15, 2018Richard Poll, hands clasped, leaned forward and strained to clarify, with labored sensitivity, two kinds of ideal-typical Mormons, the Iron Rod member and the Liahona Saint, whose characteristics he had recently detailed in a controversial…
Why the King James Version?: From the Common to the Official Bible of Mormonism
April 15, 2018The excellence of the King James Version of the Bible does not need fresh documentation. No competent modern reader would question its literary excellence or its historical stature. Yet compared to several newer translations, the…
On the Edge of Solipsism | Larry E. Morris, The Edge of the Reservoir
April 14, 2018Comparisons, they say, are odious, yet I find it difficult to comment on Larry E. Morris’s new novel, The Edge of the Reservoir, without referring to Anne Tyler’s latest novel, Breathing Lessons (New York: Alfred…
A Double Dose of Revisionism | Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri
April 14, 2018Each year first-class presses add to the growing number of excellent Mormon monographs. Twenty-nine major studies appeared in 1988 alone. These two volumes from the University of Missouri Press and the University of Oklahoma Press…
Latter-day Saints, Lawyers, and the Legal Process | Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900
April 14, 2018The attitude of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints toward lawyers and the legal process is well documented and has been widely discussed ever since Joseph Smith studied law hoping to be admitted to the bar. What has…
Twin Contributions | Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869
April 14, 2018While Gene Campbell lived through much of the twentieth century (1915-86), the focus of much of his historical research and interest was the nineteenth century. His earlier research and writing on Brig ham Young, Fort…
Reconciliation
April 14, 2018Introduction So we do not lose heart, though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Cor. 4:16) I come from a religious tradition that does not celebrate…
Grief
April 14, 2018She had begun falling asleep at odd moments—not when she was sitting in a chair, reading a book, or anything like that—but rather when she was doing things that ordinarily kept a person awake, like…