I 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.…
If 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…
In 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…
About 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…
Historians 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…
Cool, waist-high,
shallowerthanremembered;
eight years ago, it seemed
that I would float.
Anyone who has worked with Mormon music has likely experienced the frustration of being unable to learn much about its past —such things as composers, per formers, and institutional policy and practice. Collections of folk…
A drum was beating that night as my family and I entered the elementary school gymnasium. Animal skins were stretched across a portion of hollowed-out tree, two flat brown hands pounding on their surface. Instantly…
All morning: rainwater
off the roof onto pebbles
washed smooth of pale soil
in the garden.
Anthony Hutchinson’s A Mormon Midrash?: LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered (DIALOGUE, Winter 1988) is a heroic and important article that deserves careful examination. Hutchinson’s provocative and illuminating themes range from modern scholarly techniques, through King James…