Each spring the Christian world celebrates the most important week in history—Passion Week or Holy Week, the time between Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his atonement, death, and resurrection. Throughout the world the majority…
9/11. For seeming forever, a call for help. Since 2001 a blast of grief swallowed like debris from the heap of rubble and human remains on the streets of Manhattan, of the New York until…
At the Japanese American National Museum
a pile of small stones, most
no bigger than my thumb, each
with a single kanji,
It’s a boggy acre, surely. Is there any greater conundrum than human sexuality? Is there any aspect of our lives about which it is more difficult to generalize? Is there anything in our experience so…
What if the Resurrection were not pent
for the vast reendowment of all flesh
but occurred as if by chance, like birth
(that miraculous appointment), and just
as unnoticed. What if these were the terms?:
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…