August
April 4, 2018Ahumming stillness. In the orchards up and down the valley
the pith of summer turns slowly to juices. Ripeness:
what my grandmother knows, hunched in her silence.
DiaBLOGue
Learning from the Land
April 4, 2018Long after my father’s kindeys failed, I keep in a willow box under my bed the two letters he wrote to me in the thirty years since I left home. Mother did practically all the…
The Greening
April 4, 2018Pluck them out one by one
Melancholy, dearth, unableness
Squeeze out the poisons
Scratch away the sting
Without Purse or Scrip
April 4, 2018[1]Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints see pro claiming the gospel to all people as an important part of the church’s responsibility. Many elements of their missionary efforts have not changed…
Laying Our Stories Side by Side: Grandma, Janie, and Me
April 4, 2018I turned from the calendar to find the diary in my bookcase. It was hard to miss; the orange and red cover stood out like a sister at a priest hood meeting. I started to reach for it but stopped and just looked at it. A voice in my head rose above the confusion, “The prophets have said to keep a journal.” Yet I could not pick up the journal and write.
New Paradigms for Understanding Mormonism and Mormon History
April 4, 2018Within historically-oriented religious faiths, such as those deriving from Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, any effort to develop new paradigms for understanding their historical development, especially in their formative stages, is inextricably intertwined with efforts to…
On God’s Grace
April 4, 2018My first inklings of the possibilities of God’s grace in my life came through two personal experiences. The first occurred during a family Christmas dinner. My youngest sister had brought her boyfriend. They were leaving…
Origami Birds
April 4, 2018I release my pretty doves
and they ascend like sparks
to disappear. And look
how restless I am,
Inside the Salt Lake Temple: Gisbert Bossard’s 1911 Photographs
April 4, 2018Dialogue 27.3 (Fall 1994): 68–97
For faithful Mormons, the thought that someone had violated the sacred confines of the eighteen-year-old Salt Lake temple, which he desecrated by photographing, was “considered as impossible as profaning the sacred Kaaba at Mecca.”
Properties of Water
April 4, 2018In the dark,
a cat will fly on rain-slicked blacktop
like a bat,
hydroplaning, flicking malevolence sideways
out of fluorescent eyes.