Roanld W. Walker’s study Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young is a valuable contribution to recent Mormon scholarship. Among other things, the book illuminates important questions and concerns of both past and present. Walker…
CAUTION: Men in Trees. Hmmm, one might say. Are these men swaying from limb to limb like the perennial hero, Tarzan? Are these men going out on a limb or barking up the wrong tree?…
The next morning Allison dropped Howard at the Mormon church in Rockwood, which, except for the thin spire, was shaped like a large, sub urban house. Though he had asked, she refused to go inside…
Back from a walk along the Big Wood River in early May
I am the river alive with spring run-off
one moment rushing to be where the calling calls,
the next a pool reflecting or an eddy at play.
Is it not wonderful how modern discoveries confirm previously known gospel principles? A recent, in-depth, scientific study of high school students solemnly concluded that teenagers are not morning people. Latter day Saints have known this…
You’d been the one taken out and talked to during stories of Jesus.
On the scuffed pew you stuffed the blessed bread
in your mouth and blew it out, laughing.
So when they found you in blood at the foot of the stairs,
Maybe it is just sentimental musing, but I think that I remember a time when things were, well, messy. I remember testimony meetings where the eccentric ramblings of older members consumed large chunks of time,…
Do you know this picture, asks
the magazine. Yes, I’ve seen
this man before. I’m sure
that clean, bronze brow, those
dark eyes’ intensity surprised
“I looked it up last night.” Elaine stopped conducting our choir practice to ask if we knew what Hosannah meant. It was dark out, almost 10:00 p.m., and the canyon winds blew cold for October…
I first encountered death at age three when my infant brother, after only one day of life, succumbed to respiratory failure. I have few memories of the viewing, but do recall the delicate blue veins on the side of his infant scalp. There was great sorrow in the chapel. But, as the years passed, his death became an abstraction. Now, over three decades later, after witnessing a fair amount of human suffering and death, both through personal experiences and my professional role, the process of dying is no longer an abstraction to me. I have, in fact, become a reluctant authority.