Annette Hampshire’s Mormonism in Conflict: The Nauvoo Years is simultaneously refreshing and exasperating. To her credit, Hampshire strives for a degree of methodological and theoretical rigor that has been sadly absent in most Mormon historiography.…
Religious conflict, dissent, and schism rarely have been examined in a critical, balanced, and systematic fashion. Social order, harmony, cooperation, and conformity commonly are considered normal, desirable, and good; while social change, conflict, competition, and…
In five short years Judith Freeman has established herself as a serious contender in the arena of American fiction. Her first major work was a collection of short stories, Family Attractions, published by Viking Penguin…
The boy liked to visit his Polish grandparents in their small, brick bungalow just around the corner from the parish church. The neigh borhood was clean, orderly. Almost everyone was Polish or Irish, and everyone…
When Aunt Iona died in August, I was glad I didn’t have to visit the nursing home anymore. Iona was my great-aunt, my long-dead Grandma’s sister. I loved her, of course, but when I heard…
The flashing red lights, which transposed the familiar objects of our yard into illusionary images, seemed no stranger than the events of the evening. Three hours earlier we’d been a happily pregnant couple. Now we…
For many years, I have read with increasing interest the abundance of articles and essays dealing with the way men and women should behave—both within the Church and in the world at large. At varying…
I approach God—
the distance is immense.
My vision is clear,
I am not.
I thought again today of how I used to sit at forums and devotionals so that I could watch the signer for the deaf club. I knew the manual alphabet and recognized a sign or two, but mostly I watched without understanding, the signer’s hands, eloquent and expressive, echoing the words of the speaker. I’d see “thank you,” a hand to the lips and then out; I’d identify the rapid-fire finger spelling of a name—much too fast for me to read. And at the end of the prayers, that beautiful sign “the Lord, Jesus Christ,” the letter “L” moving diagonally from the left shoulder to the right hip, and then a finger in the palm of each hand. I was always crying long before the prayer.
Last summer I was asked to respond to a paper on the LDS garment, given by Colleen McDannell at the Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium. Her paper, to appear as a chapter in her forthcoming…