Descending Order
April 6, 2018Snow falling into the pond
leaves you weak with its metaphor
of sadness, as though all that makes you
could be instantly broken down,
DiaBLOGue
God: CEO or Master of the Dance?
April 6, 2018My text is a poem and a scripture since as I age I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between beauty and truth.
Untitled
April 6, 2018Sing a song of sixth sense,
a pocket full of Why;
four and twenty Reasons,
beams in your eye.
A Passage Back
April 6, 2018
Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach
April 6, 2018Out along the shore the sky is wide.
Ducks fly, drafting like cyclists in Central Park
but unfettered, their path dictated only by season, instinct,
and windshifts. Below with me
The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young
April 6, 2018Mormonism, America’s unique religious manifestation, has a remark able past. Nourished on the spectacular, the faith can count heroic martyrs, epic treks, and seemingly supernatural manifestations. Deep in the Mormon psyche is an attraction to prophetic posturing and swagger. In particular, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Brigham Young are icons who have come to dominate the Mormon world like mythical colossuses.
Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century: Marketing for Miracles
April 6, 2018In recent years social scientists have found it theoretically useful to understand church growth or decline in the context of a “religious economy.”[1] In this conceptualization each society has a “religion industry” in the same…
Mormonism in Modern Japan
April 6, 2018“Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?” For some years now such a…
Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand
April 6, 2018For the earliest nineteenth-century LDS missionaries in the Pacific, a strong appeal of the British Crown colony of New Zealand was the high concentration of English-speaking settlers among whom they could proselyte. Elder Addison Pratt,…