Dialogue 25.1 (Spring 1992): 13–36
A historical analysis of the globalization of the Church. Under President David O McKay, the Church was able to reach out to more people beyond North America and Europe, which led to an increase in membership, temples and missionaries.
We leave the town at noon
For a beach of white pebbles
And small, clean bones. The wind
Whips our sensible skirts, and sun glints
Sometimes when I go to readings given by Nature writers, that new and popular set exploring their private, half-mystical genre, I think for a moment that I’m listening to LDS general conference talks—the histrionic intoning…
The publication of a new book of poetry is an occasion for celebration, particularly when the poetry is by such a generous and great-hearted soul as Emma Lou Thayne. But the title of this volume,…
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