Nothing We Needed to Know
March 26, 2018And then, to show how it was done,
Mrs. Jackson, the Home Ec. teacher,
bent from the waist, the way you drink from a tap,
and demonstrated how to let the breasts
DiaBLOGue
A Frank Analysis of a Troubling Legacy | Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage
March 26, 2018Armand Mauss, professor emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University, has produced the authoritative and definitive study of the evolution of Mormon conceptions of race and lineage. As a practicing Latter-day Saint,…
Charismatic Leader and Organizing Genius | Robert V. Reminin, Joseph Smith
March 26, 2018In this biography of Joseph Smith by a non-Mormon historian, we have a short, readable, mostly chronological narrative that presents Joseph Smith and Mormonism as the products of a particular historical period. A professor emeritus…
Identifying the Sites at Mountain Meadows | A New Look at Old Sites on Mountain Meadows: Historical Topography, by Morris A. Shirts and Frances Anne Smeath
March 26, 2018This slim volume is intended by its publisher to inaugurate a series of monographs devoted to the study of the infamous 1857 massacre of over 100 emigrants by misguided Mormons and their Indian allies in southern Utah. The massacre was initially treated…
Coyote Laughter
March 26, 2018The flask lay under a loose plank on the back porch. To someone lifting the board there was only an empty space, but when Wayne knelt and reached to his elbow beneath the adjacent board,…
Another Death
March 26, 2018One Saturday morning Jimmy wondered about himself as he lay in bed instead of watching cartoons on TV or shooting baskets through the hoop under the eaves. They didn’t have a garage, but they didn’t…
Cemetery Life
March 26, 2018My yellow 1946 house faces Provo’s peculiarly Mormon-Utah-style cemetary. Tall trees line small lanes which are set at precise right angles, a perfect grid made by Latter-day pioneer planners. The lanes come complete with miniature…
Scenes from the Movie
March 26, 2018I spent my 1970s boyhood in one of those remote subdivisions that had begun sprouting up along the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains in the westernmost part of the Salt Lake Valley. From just about…
Plinka! Plinka! Plinka!
March 26, 2018We had to get to Glendora, California, to comfort our daughter, whose husband had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, the previous Sunday morning. When we finished loading the car and turned the key, nothing happened. The…
Power and Powerlessness: A Personal Perspective
March 26, 2018In his book Power and Innocence, Rollo May defines power as “the ability to cause or prevent change.” May identifies five kinds of power: exploitative, “the simplest and, humanly speaking, most destructive kind of power”; manipulative, which is “power over another person”; competitive, “power against another”; nutrient, “power for the other”; and integrative, “power with another person.”