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Sing a song of sixth sense, 
a pocket full of Why; 
four and twenty Reasons, 
beams in your eye. 

Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach

Out 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

Mormonism, 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

In 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

“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

For 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,…

Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia

In April 1994 some sixty LDS professionals and business people from around Australia were invited to meet with the Pacific Area presidency in a Sydney conference unique to the Mormon church in this country. Quite…

Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?

With the assistance of her family, Marta Angelica Solizo forms and paints incredibly detailed ceramic Nativity scenes. A standard set con sists of fourteen pieces: three sheep, a bull, four donkeys laden with corn, squash,…