DiaBLOGue
Essay for June 9, 1998
March 31, 2018Today is June 9, 1998. I have been forty-three for two days. My father, Robert Wallace Blair, is teaching spring term; he will retire when the term ends after thirty-four years as a linguistics professor…
Clay
March 31, 2018On the sill, torsos wrenched out of clay
still bore the sculptor’s mark, the print
of cocked thumb and nail. Tortured, vaguely
female, they shamed us. We crowded in,
Hard Day for Professor Midgely: An Essay for Fawn McKay Brodie
March 31, 2018The year 1998 found the nation in the grip of a sex scandal in the White House, a sex scandal in which a president (named for Thomas Jefferson) flatly denied “improper sexual relations,” believing, evidently,…
Poetic Aspirations
March 31, 2018
Good Literature for a Chosen People
March 31, 2018Very early in our history, we Mormons began to identify ourselves symbolically with ancient Israel as a chosen people. We too, we believed, were heirs to the covenant and blessings of Abraham because of God’s…
Ella Smyth Peacock: Seeking Her Place in the West
March 31, 2018Like the early Mormons whose beliefs she would eventually adopt, landscape artist Ella Smyth Peacock early on sought refuge in the west.[1] She was born in 1905 in Germantown, near Philadelphia, a city created in…
The Zion University Reverie: A Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment of Brigham Young University’s Academic Climate
March 31, 2018On June 5th, 1996, Assistant Professor Gail Houston of the Brigham Young University English Department was denied tenure and promotion at BYU.[1] In compliance with typical university procedures, Professor Houston quickly appealed the decision.[2] Members…
Scriptural Chastity Lessons: Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife; Corianton and the Harlot Isabel
March 31, 2018I’m going to risk starting with an impression I will not try to document but suspect many Mormons would share: that in the church, when we attempt to teach chastity to youth (say in Sunday…
Leonard J. Arrington: Reflections on a Humble Walk
March 31, 2018History itself—and historians in particular—will for years to come continue to assess the importance of Leonard J. Arrington to Mormon and western thought. From 1972, when he was appointed Church Historian, to his retirement as…