The unifying thesis of the twelve essays contained in When Prophets Die: The Post Charismatic Fate of New Religious Movements is that most new religious movements, though heavily dependent on a single dominant personality, usually…
A student of Zen Buddhism meditated daily on koans assigned by the Zen master. None of his insights impressed the master until one day, after years of thought about these puzzles, the student timidly began…
In May 1988, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University and the Mountain West Center for Western Studies at Utah State University jointly sponsored an interdisciplinary symposium to reappraise, on its…
I wrote this story under a spell. I was living in Salt Lake City, not in the sprawl of the new suburbs, nor even in the politically correct neighborhoods of the East Bench or the Avenues near the university, but in the Marmalade District. Gentrification has since remade the area, but at that time and for much of its history, it was a backwater of decaying pioneer dwellings and odd apartments made from broken Victorian homes, squeezed onto the foothills below Ensign Peak.
My mom could sleep each night
without waking except
when my ear ached so much
I became a nightmare
An eight-year-old Mormon can tell you a lot about Zion. At least I could. In response to Sister Jensen’s questions in Targeteer class, I’d raise my hand to give my rote answer: “Zion is a…
I am a female returned missionary. A decade has passed since I returned from my mission in Germany. Since then I have finished graduate school, lived in Korea for a while, married, had two children.…
They say people nominalize too much.
We tell ourselves, “I am in pain,”
instead of simply, “I hurt.”
“Pain is not a prison you’re locked in,” they say.
“You hurt because you choose to hurt,
and you can choose to not hurt.”
Why do I believe? For many years I did not feel comfortable answering this question. I would explain that my ancestors were among the first members of the Mormon Church and were important religious leaders…