When I first read Paul Toscano’s jeremiad I thought it was too harsh and angry. But on revisiting it three years later I say, “Yes!” to many of his points; for the ones I quibble…
One of the ironies of my life is that I decided in 1963 to leave the Catholic church as it was becoming more open to join the Mormon church as it was becoming more closed.…
Sleepless with fever,
under one small lamp you stared
at a cherry wood cabinet, dark whorls
spiraled like galaxies and polished
“Liberal spirituality” is the title and theme of this essay. A double entendre is intended—suggesting the interdependence of a free and abundant spiritual life. My aim is to explore the nature and possibilities of liberal spirituality by reflecting on some of the key experiences and major ideas that have shaped my philosophy. I am concerned here with the essential values at the core of religious experience, a state of mind and an approach to life. The Mormon church has been but one of the anvils against which I have forged my identity.
Often when entering sleep
I start awake, your form having drifted
into vision, your name embedded
in the thickness of my tongue.
Whose poem this is, I think I know—
New England bard of spring and snow,
But eighth-grade teachers don’t explain
The depths to which the poets go.
Mine is the interesting challenge to comment on “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology/’ The bill of particulars that Lavina Fielding Anderson has presented is comprehensive and disturbing, her recommendations are…
Early on, in class, the smooth new pencils,
the ice-white paper, copper-bladed rulers,
all spoke order, a progression of lines.
Dialogue 26.1 (Spring 1993): 23–82
The clash between obedience to ecclesiastical authority and the integrity of individual conscience is certainly not one upon which Mormonism has a monopoly. But the past two decades have seen accelerating tensions in the relationship between the institutional church and the two overlapping subcommunities I claim—intellectuals and feminists.
The fairytales were wrong:
to identify big feet
with wicked stepsisters, ugly with unloved,
princes and frogs with anything