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.
DiaBLOGue
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…
A Teenager’s Mormon Battalion Journal | David L. Bigler, ed., The Gold Rush Diary of Azariah Smith
April 13, 2018Since the publication of the Hosea Stout Journals in 1964, the University of Utah Press has made a significant contribution to the study of western history by publishing a number of important diaries, journals, and letter collections. The Gold…
A New Synthesis | Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830-1846
April 13, 2018Exiles in a Land of Liberty is part of the University of North Carolina’s “Studies in Religion” series. The author, Kenneth H. Winn, is a relative newcomer to Mormon studies and, if this book is…
Mormonism’s First Theologian | The Essential Parley P. Pratt with foreword by Peter L. Crawley
April 13, 2018At least one Latter-day Saint in the early days of the Church truly understood what it means to have the heavens open and God speak after centuries of silence. Par ley Parker Pratt, one of…
Utah’s Original “Mr. Republican” | Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics
April 13, 2018I first encountered Reed Smoot more than two decades ago while researching the life and political career of Parley P. Christensen, a Utah political maverick who became the Farmer-Labor party nominee for president in 1920.…
A Poetic Legacy | Clarice Short, The Owl on the Aerial
April 13, 2018If Clarice Short had not chosen to become a great educator, she might have developed into a major poet. Her poetic output, excellent in quality but admittedly limited, reveals her as a woman dedicated to her…
Clawson and the Mormon Experience | David S. Hoopes and Ray Hoopes, The Making of a Mormon Apostle: The Story of Rudger Clawson
April 13, 2018In 1879 a young Mormon missionary named Rudger Clawson watched as an anti-Mormon mob in Georgia killed his companion. Through bluff and bravado Clawson survived the assault and brought his companion’s body back to church…
Delusion as an Exceedingly Fine Art | Franklin Fisher, Bones
April 13, 2018About fifteen years ago, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher invited Franklin Fisher, a young and aesthetically bearded professor of English at the University of Utah, to read from his novel in progress at a gathering of the…
Two Covenant Systems | Rex Eugene Cooper, Promises Made to the Father: Mormon Covenant Organization
April 13, 2018Historians of American religion often see a connection between Mormons and Puritans, if only because most early Saints came from New England. However, many studies which have mentioned similarities between these religions have done so…