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The Proper Order in Which You Found It: from a Brazilian Missionary Journal

March 28, 2018

The bus to Sao Bento up through a complex development of valleys and mountainous jungle. The canopy of trees changes periodically during the slow ascent from the typical street-lining palms to heavier blocked rows of pines; then a tangled, thick, jungle-like fabric of wider trees mixes with hanging moss, vines, and flowering branches. This is then patched with isolated acres of white, pencil-like eucalyptus trees and a darker more majestic body of Pinheiros. These are tall, nut producing pines whose trunks rise up high from the earth and then burst at the top like fireworks with long branches that arch toward the sky and terminate in large green pompoms. 

Coming Home

March 28, 2018

I see you in the glass. 
Welcome home! 
Hard to believe 
You are a man 

Love is a Delicate Chain

March 28, 2018

Here, the heavy brown ones from your father’s coat,
there the ladybugs from Jari’s first grade dress,
and from your birthday shirt, five urgent reds.
You, sorting the buttons while I sewed. 

LDS “Headquarters Culture” and the Rest of Mormonism: Past and Present

March 28, 2018

In December 1830 the founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. announced a revelation which established the doctrine of “gathering” the new church’s members at a headquarters area: “And again, a commandment I give unto the church, that it is expedient in me that they should assemble together at the Ohio. … ” (D&C 37: 3). Prior to that date, believers in The Book of Mormon were concentrated in three locations of western New York State: at Manchester /Palmyra (where the Smith family had lived a dozen years), also at Colesville, and at Fayette. Then from February 1831 to the end of 1837, the church was headquartered in Kirt land, Ohio (near Cleveland). 

Being World

March 28, 2018

I am invidious of mothers’ rubber air 
Connecting them to baby. How they walk 
With young on hip, the way the baby turns and

Mormonism’s Worldwide Aspirations and its Changing Conceptions of Race and Lineage

March 28, 2018

Mormon history contains its fair share of ironies and unintended consequences. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a mission to restore the ancient church, but not for everyone at the same time. In its earliest days, the church was preoccupied with its mission to seek out the descendants of Abraham through Jacob or Israel; these Israelites, in turn, would prepare the world for the millennial reign of the Messiah.

Forever Family

March 28, 2018

Five of his and four of hers were 
step-this-and-that to each other. 

The Church said, “Families Are 
‘Forever'”—in their case it was more

The LDS Sound World and Global Mormonism

March 28, 2018

The expansion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may be described from a broadly phenomenological perspective in terms of sound and silence. My observations here deal with the outer, open dimension of…