The Encyclopedia of Mormonism provides a great wealth of information on the history and social character of Mormonism and the structure and administration of the LDS church and its institutions, but, on the whole, as…
At least the kids were gone, settled among family for the next ten or twelve hours. That gave him some time to pull himself together, to sort things out before tomorrow, before the rest of…
From where we sat on the fourth pew
the three square windows looked like cubes
of shimmery gold
vertically stacked
Who is the “man” Jacob wrestles at the ford of the Jabbok? Critical exegesis has traditionally identified him as an angel, with reliance upon ample evidence in the text: he appears out of nowhere and just as mysteriously disappears; he dislocates Jacob’s hip at a touch; and Jacob himself, at the end of the episode, identifies his opponent as divine: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30).
At the baptismal Erma sings “Que grande es El,”
her voice breaking,
and the woman she has brought to Jesus,
clothed in white on the front row, weeps.
My sister sings Puccini in the shower.
A fever ripped the muscle of her heart
when she was five but now she is almost
twenty-one and lovely. She leaves music
My story might justly be entitled, to borrow a phrase from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Epiphany in the Room of a College Dormitory.” It all began in the spring of 1939, fifty-four years ago, when I…
The picture gathers from a host of things—
From giggles of remembering, not play
By play but one word lifting from another
Into a rearview record, a happy weather
Ever since Mormonism’s founding prophet declared that “No man knows my history/’ writers have been left to imagine it and all its consequences. In short, the Mormon experience is the stuff of literature. Contemporary Mormon…
Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
A study done to see how many polygamous wives there were at the peak of polygamy in the church.