Taking Up the Cross
March 28, 2018About this time last year, my wife and I went on a brief cruise to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.[1] It was so brief that we had only one stop—Nassau. However, neither of us had…
DiaBLOGue
Bring Them Unto Christ
March 28, 2018It was midnight, at a fast-food barbecue near Oxford, Mississippi. I was driving from New Orleans to Lamoni with two colleagues on the Lam oni School Board, returning from a national convention. We were driving straight through the night, a 20 hour drive, and we were hungry, so we got off Interstate 55 near Oxford, Mississippi, to get something to carry out.
The Proper Order in Which You Found It: from a Brazilian Missionary Journal
March 28, 2018The 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, 2018I see you in the glass.
Welcome home!
Hard to believe
You are a man
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.
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…