Love is a Delicate Chain
March 28, 2018Here, 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.
DiaBLOGue
LDS “Headquarters Culture” and the Rest of Mormonism: Past and Present
March 28, 2018In 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, 2018I 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, 2018Mormon 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.
About my Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever
March 28, 2018Run your finger across the arc of my cheekbone.
Notice how it curves like the hull of Noah’s ark
that propelled life through earth’s watery death.
Root and Branch: An Abstract of the Structuralist Analysis of the Allegoryof the Olive Tree
March 28, 2018The Allegory of the Olive Tree, as found in Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon, is one of the most complicated and enigmatic of texts. These com plications, however, can be resolved when the…
Forever Family
March 28, 2018Five 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, 2018The 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…
Dig
March 28, 2018I began to dream I
was soil and you
were a plant that grew
in me, root hard
The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Guatemala, 1948-1998
March 28, 2018The U.S.-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is rapidly becoming a worldwide church, particularly since the 1950s. One major reason for this is the church’s ambitious evangelization program: In 2000 it had 60,000…