The human mind seems irresistibly compelled by (at least) two incompatible intuitions: first, that as morally responsible beings we are able to do other than what we do; second, that what happens now could not…
Family sentinels, we watch flames grab scrub oak
roughly on the shoulder of our dysphoric mountain,
shiver as three firs’ tired arms collapse in slow motion
silence.
For the first fourteen years of his tenure as president of BYU (1951-65), Ernest Wilkinson was largely occupied with expanding the school’s size and its academic reputation. His goal of creating the world’s most important…
The extraordinarily yet often highly conflicted connection between religious and sexual impulses and expression has long been noted by scholars.[1] Dynamically expansive new religious movements, in particular, often experience sharp polarities between efforts to control,…
Women keep the secrets of men
by candlelight and telephone,
growing in their wombs.
I 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.
Sir 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.
Dialogue 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.
The 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.
The 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,…