Straw
April 2, 2018The straw of the cut grain
Gold mounding the hill
On the way down from my house
On the mountain
DiaBLOGue
Building Wilkinson’s University
April 2, 2018During his twenty years from 1951 to 1971 as seventh president of BYU, Ernest L. Wilkinson molded the lackluster Provo school into a showplace of LDS educational values. “More than any other single cause,” his successor observed, “[Wilkinson’s] remarkable and relentless leadership … is the key to the present stature of Brigham Young University.”
At Fifty-Nine
April 2, 2018I was reading the other evening from an old and friendly book by the late George Sheehan entitled Running and Being: The Total Experience, published in 1978 by Simon and Schuster of New York. This…
Reflections on LDS Disbelief in the Book of Mormon as History
April 2, 2018Dialogue 30.3 (Fall 1999):90–103
To average LDS church members in 1909, Roberts’s New Witnesses for God substantiated their beliefs and further embellished his stature for them as a historian and defender of the Book of Mormon. But only thirteen years later Roberts was to change his mind and that dramatically.
Hymn
April 2, 2018Lately I can’t get over the feeling that there is a man in my bed: a big man with thick, wavy hair and a broad, barrel chest that goes up-and down, up-and-down all night long…
Birthday Dreaming
April 2, 2018Sixty-four years ago my grandmother was shifting in her sleep, admiring her growing belly with gentle hands, welcoming the October nightfall that enclosed her like prayer. That’s how pregnancy is, ordinary things move on without…
One Nation Under Whose God? How Religion Was Excluded from the U.S. Political System
April 2, 2018Recently returning from ten years of foreign service in the Middle East, a friend mentioned that he was frequently asked how the United States successfully excludes religion from politics. My friend noted that to Middle…
“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”
April 2, 2018Days after his death, I felt him
newly jovial alongside me. And weeks later,
when I again dreamed him young,
handing me a pail of watercress,
C. Thomas Asplund: Quiet Pilgrim
April 2, 2018I am not a historian. But my limited exposure to the discipline tells me that writing history involves arriving at definitions of “eras,” “cultures,” and “movements.” In my work in literary theory, I have been…
Renegotiating Scylla and Charybdis: Reading and the Distance between New York and Utah
April 2, 2018Readers unpacked Brian Evenson’s nationally-published collection of controversial short stories, Altmann’s Tongue, in diverse (perverse) ways. Jerry Johnston, a columnist for the Mormon church-owned Deseret News, observed, “The word ‘macabre’ comes to mind. He is…