Legend has it that in the year 988 A.D., Prince Vladimir, ruler of ancient Kievan Rus’, brought Christianity to the Slavs. The apparent catalyst for his own conversion was a plea from Emperor Basil II of Constantinople. A renegade general had gathered an army to march on the Christian capital, and the emperor begged Prince Vladimir for an army to buttress the defense of his throne.
I sit at the wheel as I did
when I was young.
My hands pull the
warm plastic sediment
Late morning heat shimmers off the hood of my battered Honda. Nothing in sight ahead but more parched fields stretching under an opal sky. A box of cassette tapes in the back seat rattles a…
If you haven’t been living in a cultural bomb-shelter (or serving a mission) over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed a strange media obsession with my generation. Twenty-somethings, they call us. Sometimes slackers. Or Generation X. Even Generation X-cess. None of which I had any say in, nor from which I can escape. Fortunately, I am Mormon and accustomed to being called names.
Not their felon, not their lackey, you.
After the sclerosis of your tissues,
the emulsifying of your fluids,
reprieve
Since its New York debut three years ago, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—the most sustained treatment of Mormonism to play on the Broadway stage since Jerome Kern’s The Girl from Utah in 1914—has earned a…
Halfway between here and Oregon, the Lighthouse Bookstore
opens along some residential street we browse unwittingly
when reading after dark, where the words and road signs
blur and the sky clouds up and thunders.
Mormonism seems to have adopted a position on the relation between reason and revelation. The two concepts frequently appear alongside each other in publications and talks by church apostles, officials of Brigham Young University, and others on topics concerning education, academic freedom, and the like. In most of these appearances, reason and revelation are intended to mark a division between two modes of learning. The position is for the most part uniform: one can learn things by reason or by revelation, but when the content of a revelation conflicts with what is supported only by reason, reason must give way to revelation.
One day we were healed
by a man in a tent.
You remember. We had driven
streets of Four Castle,
We borrow the title for this issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought from Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. In this play Harper Pitt, an agoraphobic Mormon…