Senpai
April 12, 2018The first three weeks of my mission in Koshigaya, a small city outside of Tokyo, Japan, breezed by. Despite two months at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, I still couldn’t understand the gibberish that…
DiaBLOGue
Street Symphony
April 12, 2018“I saw Cory yesterday,” Mom tells me when I meet her downtown for lunch. She used to play her harmonica outside Crossroads Mall, before she moved to the ZCMI Center. She doesn’t play her harmonica…
Ecclesiastical Check
April 12, 2018White pawn moves
forward two steps
onto an open square.
A black knight in grace
Becoming Mormon: The Elkton Branch, 1976-81
April 12, 2018On the second Sunday of December 1976, Cloyd Mullins and his two sons, Lynne Whitney and her four children, Bill and Ellen Lilley and their two small children, a pair of missionaries, and Karl Tippets…
Woman Bathing | Authority
April 12, 2018She performs the persistent ritual of cleansing,
the splashing of water
upon her scarlet apple flesh
sullied with blood
A Closer Focus: Challenges in Doing Local History
April 12, 2018The sweep of wide-angle Mormon history is impressive, offering a comprehensive panorama of the Church’s worldwide workings, progress, and achievements. But to see Mormon history only through this wide-angle lens is to miss the rich…
AIDS: The Twentieth-Century Leprosy
April 12, 2018Typically, when an individual contracts a disease, friends and relatives rally to provide needed support. Even terminal illnesses, though reminders of our own mortality, elicit comfort and sympathy. Friends and family form support groups, dispense…
Hands
April 12, 2018In the chapel,
In the straightbacked
Ache of the pew,
We held them—lap toys
Judaism and Mormonism: Paradigm and Supersession
April 12, 2018For some time now, especially since World War II and the shock and guilt evoked in the Western world by the virtual extermination of the European Jews, traditional Christian views of the role of the…
Missionary Court
April 12, 2018Hunched over and rocking a little,
he answered the president in stutters,
and I wrote it all down in the ledger—
the girl’s name, how many times, my pen touching