When Charles the Hammer conquered Friesland in 692 C.E., he generously offered baptism into the Christian religion to the defeated Frisian chief Radbod. Just as he was stepping into the font, Radbod hesitated, wondering aloud…
All good history is as much about the present as it is about the past. Sillito and Staker’s volume, which includes biographical sketches of dissenters ranging widely across the 180-year history of the LDS church,…
One afternoon while eating my sandwich in the faculty lounge of the English Department at the University of Houston, I couldn’t help but notice a 1989 dissertation that was nearly a foot thick: Court of…
They are overmatched from the beginning.
Even the black block numbers on their backs
seem to loom on the jerseys that hang slack
and flap about their narrow bodies, smooth
Quarry workmen slice open the past,
pry limestone chunks with picks,
shave each delicate layer
with a chisel and a sledge.
Brady Udall has given the same sort of message to readers of his fiction. In an interview with the journal Irreantum, Udall said, “I don’t want to teach readers a lesson of any kind. I simply want them to have a hair raising, heart-thumping, mind-numbing, soul-tearing experience.”
With a neighbor who couldn’t tolerate light,
I took stairs in the dark,
felt for knobs and shapes
of cabinets in windowless rooms. At home,
Philip Roth once noted that American writers were divided into two camps: “palefaces,” followers of the refined genteel tradition of Henry James and William Dean Howells with their elevated sensibilities and decorous language, and “redskins”…
“A crackerbox,” my mother called it,
Her marriage’s first scene.
My first home, my brother’s, tucked
Far back for remembering,
The place where she dyed feedsacks
To curtain the windowscreens.
A new litmus test of righteousness has swept the church: the shunning of all R rated and the de facto acceptance of all PG and PG-13 movies. I don’t like litmus tests. They are too…