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.
His name, distant to me,
opened your mouth to blackness.
It seemed you laughed before
the half-crow caw fell out.
Dialogue 24.1 (Spring 1991): 86–98
In preparation for the Independence Temple that was dedicated in 1994, an RLDS member shares ideas about temples in general.
Always she is there on that far island
in my mind, where it is always night,
and the moon tears into a world of leaves,
and is torn. A child, she steps
Latter-day Saints may be surprised to discover that Joseph Smith did not reject the importance of grace. Indeed, he developed a profound and novel view resolving many problems presented by the grace freedom dichotomy in…
I confess I have invented a word
for the thing I am and the thing I have done.
It is a pleasant word and may be spoken
to young children or written in their books.