On Reading a Blank Page
March 22, 2018I once sat on a plateau’s edge
It began on my back, with updrafts.
They rose along the white escarpment
DiaBLOGue
Jonah in the Belly
March 22, 2018So this is how you’ll preserve
me, Lord? in a slosh of brine?
Go ahead, though I’ve borne no fruit, torn
loose from my roots and gone my own way.
You Can Count on the Fingers of Your One Hand the Reasons
March 22, 2018Whether you were driving in from the east or the west you got to our mother’s from Canal Street here in southern Ohio. There at the big Mc Donald’s in Nelsonville you took the crossroad…
An Interview with Darrell Spencer
March 22, 2018In addition to many stories in quarterlies, Darrell Spencer has published four collections of stories, Bring Your Legs with You, Caution: Men in Trees, Our Secret’s Out, A Woman Packing a Pistol, and a novel,…
Swimming in the Sea of Azov
March 22, 2018For the first and only time, my wife sent my father a letter. I have since retrieved the letter and have it still. It is two deckle sheets neatly typed on the electric portable I…
Studying Mormons: One Franciscan’s Encounter with the World of the Latter-day Saints
March 22, 2018Since my teenage years, I have been interested in all things Mormon. I have given countless hours to studying the history, corporate structures, leadership, scriptures and theology of the Latter-day Saints. It has led me…
Yesterday’s People
March 21, 2018It would take a detailed map of Ethiopia to help you locate the village of Lalibela more than four hundred miles north of Addis Ababa. Save for a lyrically beautiful name, there is little to distinguish this place except that it contains some of the world’s most amazing monuments to religious devotion—the “mysterious subterranean, monolithic rock hewn churches,” as one travel guide describes them.
The Divine-Infusion Theory: Rethinking the Atonement
March 21, 20181 have always wondered about the meaning of the atonement. Why was it necessary for Christ to suffer? What did his suffering accomplish? How did it work? Growing up as a Latter-day Saint, I was…
Premortal Spirits: Implications for Cloning, Abortion, Evolution, and Extinction
March 21, 2018Dialogue 39.1 (Spring 2006): 1–18
Perhaps no other moral issue divides the American public more than abortion. In part, the controversy hinges on the question of when the spirit enters the body. If a spirit were predestined for a given mortalbody and that body is aborted before birth, the spirit would, technically,never be able to have a mortal existence.
Clyde Forsberg’s Equal Rites and the Exoticizing of Mormonism
March 21, 2018Supposedly, now is an auspicious time to be doing scholarship on Mor monism. According to a 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Mormon studies has received a “surge of scholarly interest” from specialists in various…