Sisters
April 13, 2018My sister and I had no whispered secrets
between us, shared no hollyhock days.
DiaBLOGue
Why Am I Here?
April 13, 2018I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”
For Meg — With Doubt and Faith
April 13, 2018In times of drought, it is hard to remember times of flood. After yet another California winter without sufficient water, we take quick showers, rarely flush the toilet, let our lawn grow long to hide…
Being Baptized for the Dead, 1974
April 13, 2018It throbbed a little, the gash in my left palm.
I pressed the gauze, something to finger
while we waited —boys here, girls over there,
all of us wearing jump suits heavy enough
Scripture in the Reorganization: Exegesis, Authority, and the “Prophetic Mantle”
April 13, 2018From the earliest days of Mormonism, Latter Day Saints have held distinctive views about scripture. Particular, even peculiar, Latter Day Saint understandings of scripture surface at the very foundations of the movement. Historian Jan Shipps…
Dale Morgan, Writer’s Project, and Mormon History as a Regional Study
April 13, 2018At the 1968 annual meeting of the Utah Historical Society, Juanita Brooks read a paper about the Southern Utah Records Survey of the early and mid-1930s that had been a forerunner to the Federal Writers’…
In the Back Lot at Hillview Manor
April 13, 2018On any given Thursday,
Papa adjusts the strap
And plucks out a phrase or two
The Eastern Edge: LDS Missionary Work in Hungarian Lands
April 13, 2018On the periphery of his thoughts, iron wheels clanked, March winds scratched past windows, a swaying passenger wagon groaned, and a steam engine chugged rhythmically. The tracks traversed the massive Iron Gate gorge, a slit…
Words for Late Summer
April 13, 2018Cornmeal, dusted over these loaves
like pollen. And I wish again
for the old unwritten recipes: brown breads,
chicken baked in a wrap of cornmeal,
family reunion picnics I can’t match
with my own.
How Can a Religious Person Tolerate Other Religions?
April 13, 2018When I was in my early twenties, a prominent American rabbi, Yitz Greenberg, once heard me lecture to a Jewish group. I was offering comparisons between Judaism and other religions. Afterward he complimented me on…