My mother was an enthusiastic, devoted member of the Relief Society—the old Relief Society, the pre-block-meeting-schedule, pre-Correlation Relief Society. She belonged to a Relief Society that LDS women chose to join by paying a small…
The 1960s marked for Latter-day Saints the commencement of a new era of consolidation and growth that have led to multiple changes in the Relief Society. The organization experienced the automatic enrollment of women in…
The doctrine of divine providence states that God is the supreme governor of the world—past, present, and future. Different versions of the doctrine depend on different interpretations of governance. The strongest version of this doctrine comes from the Calvinists who assert that each and every event in the history of the world is planned by God and happens only because God wills it, including anything that humans do.
Engaging in doctrinal speculation, and then later adopting these speculations as religious dogmas, is as old as recorded history. One example is the adoption of the traditional geocentric, flat-earth cosmology of antiquity into the doctrinal…
This essay had its origins in a projected review of Jan Shipps’s Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). I have expanded it into an assessment…
Mike Oborn, Song of Songs
Robert M. Price, Reply to Professor Hamblin
Janis Mars Wunderlich, born in Akron, Ohio, in 1970, received a BFA J from Brigham Young University (1992) and an MFA from the Ohio State University (1994). She has given numerous lectures and workshops throughout…
This morning I light red candles
and set them on the sill,
daring the breeze
through an open window
to tease the flames.
Last spring I wrote an essay for the March 2004 AML symposium in which I argued that the most effective poets writing from the LDS culture are those who provide a counterweight to the main…
Collections of scholarly articles often display their strengths in their parts rather than in their functioning as a unified whole. After all, the structure of such volumes invites readers to pick and choose and, if…