A Name and a Blessing
March 31, 2018I raise you my just born daughter
to the Father of All Lights.
He has set a flame in you;
this fire connects you to the trees
the earth and creeping things.
DiaBLOGue
Reflections on Mormon History: Zion and the Anti-Legal Tradition
March 31, 2018Sir Henry Maine, our first great modern legal historian of the English language and law, in describing the paradigmatic shift from early feudal European society to a world of secular, territorial nation-states and market economy, observed that we had moved “from status to contract.” “Status” assumes an immutable condition not changeable by individual choice and action. “Contract” assumes that one can change existing conditions by choice and action. No statement describes with more insight the nineteenth-century Mormon concept of Zion.
If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?
March 31, 2018Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.
Luke 7:37
March 31, 2018The alpha and omega sat at meat.
The woman could not speak. She only knelt
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet
Flowed like river waters to the Delta.
“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology
March 31, 2018The issue of sexuality, its expression or non-expression, even questions about its very nature, torments American culture. Various philosophies and systems of morality abound which advocate chastity, promiscuity, sex solely for procreation, sex for recreation,…
Courting
March 31, 2018I. Prayer
Bless us as we try to find
ourselves,
each other.
If the Din of Cities Makes the Moon
March 31, 2018If the din of cities makes the moon
shine dimly in the night;
if the touch of concrete and tin
drowns the sound of water;
Celebrating Utah’s Centennial | Jean Bickmore White, Charter for Statehood: The Story of Utah’s State Constitution
March 31, 2018Charter for Statehood chronicles Utah’s constitutional history from its territorial days through the present. Dr. White, emeritus professor of political science at Weber State University, employs her vast skills in state and local history and…
A Test Case for Heresy and Gender Discourse | Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, and Joan Smyth Iversen, The Antipolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880-1925: A Debate on the American Home
March 31, 2018The nineteenth century saw the rise and fall of many “crusades” that have been painstakingly examined by scholars, including abolition, temperance, and nativism. Yet the equally important campaigns to eradicate polygamy and stem the tide…
Wandering Souls in a Familiar Valley | Susan Palmer, The Tabernacle Bar
March 31, 2018In prose that can hum alternately with the wry empathy of Barbara Kingsolver and the lyricism of Leslie Marmon Silko, Susan Palmer’s The Tabernacle Bar explores the spiritual dilemmas of the citizens both in and…