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
DiaBLOGue
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…
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…