DiaBLOGue

Pioneers

My people were Mormon pioneers.
Is the blood still good? 
They stood in awe as truth 
Flew by like a dove 
And dropped a feather in the West.
Where truth flies you follow 
If you are a pioneer. 

Midwest Pilgrims: We’re Still Here

Midwest Pilgrims is the result of a charge given the women at the Nauvoo women’s retreat held in 1982. It was to go back to their various geo graphical locations and organize similar gatherings. It…

Plymouth Rock on the Mississippi

“So you’re considering a pilgrimage,” I wrote to someone I’d recently met and liked, “nothing would delight me more. You’d have some time away, you’d make new friends, get more deeply acquainted with familiar ones,…

Bodies, Babies, and Birth Control

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 159–175
In this paper I will explore official and unofficial messages that theLDS church has sent to girls and women about childbearing during the twentieth century and the effect those messages have had on women’sreproductive choices.

Temporal Love: Singing the Song of Songs

I have taught from the Gospel Doctrine manuals for a total of sixteenyears, over a period of about twenty-five years. Not one of those manuals mentioned the Song of Solomon. In defiance, I read through…

Eternal Love

Like many baby-boomers, philosopher Roger Scruton as a young man accepted the sexual standards of his generation, eschewing marriage in favor of “experiments” with less binding relationships. Scruton finally did marry when he found that his “experiment had turned into a commitment instead,” but the marriage lasted only a few years. Reflecting on his painful and all-too-common experience, Scruton wrote, “Our years of cohabitation had disenchanted our first love, while offering no second love in place of it.”

How My Mission Saved My Membership

In 1991 I almost joined the Peace Corps. I graduated from college that year with the coveted Peace Corps job offer just as I had hoped for years. The glitch in my plan, however, was…