Stan Larson’s article “The Odyssey of Thomas Stuart Ferguson” (DIALOGUE, Spring 1990) showed the world some of the backstage drama accompanying efforts of Book of Mormon enthusiasts to link the book with demonstrable reality. As…
I go to Brenda’s wedding wearing
her ex-husband’s cast-off temple garments.
“Hey, Brian!” Dead leaned into my room. “Be ready to leave in about thirty minutes.” “Fine,” I replied, not worried that I hadn’t even begun to pack. I rummaged through my drawers and closet and…
With fortune’s damned
quarreling smile,
the neighbors complain
I have enthusiastically accepted the invitation to share my experiences as a “cultural Jew” married to a “cultural Mormon.” Kenneth and I have been married almost twenty-three years. I have lived in Salt Lake City since 1971 and before that for nine months when we were first married.
Let me start by saying that I did not pick the title for this panel —I am not yet convinced that I have survived the experience intact. How ever, after more than fifteen years of…
Friends often ask me what it is like to be an active Lutheran layperson married to an active Latter-day Saint. I think I can best describe my marriage experience by addressing my comments to my…
Members of other religions, or persons with no religious affiliation, take on special challenges when they marry Latter-day Saints. In addition to the same problems any inter-faith marriage might encounter—conflicts over church attendance, child-rearing, value…
I had wanted your wife
to be born to the graces,
elegantly muted
in dove-gray and gloves,
to take tea from fine china,
walk perfumed in silk.
In his carefully crafted and distinguished novel Recapitulation (1979), Wallace Stegner, Iowa-born, Saskatchewan-reared, but Utah-formed, joins his protagonist Bruce Mason on a brief visit to Salt Lake City some forty-five years after leaving home. The seventy-ish Mason, now a successful lawyer, distinguished internationalist and former ambassador, returns to the city of his youth and young manhood to arrange for the burial of his Aunt Margaret. To his surprise, his Gentile return to Zion releases—through an outpouring of nostalgia, memories, dreams and fantasies—the ghosts of unresolved conflicts which have haunted him, consciously and subconsciously, from those early years.