Nola de Jong Sullivan was raised in Provo, where, after sojourns elsewhere, she presently resides. Her art interests began in grade school with painter Flora Fisher and received further development in the art classes of…
Growing up as an avid comic reader, I was always disappointed with illustrated stories of the Book of Mormon. The figures were usually static, the action canned, and the flat progression of dialogue was easy…
The year 2005, marking the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joseph Smith, Jr., witnessed the publication of two important book-length studies on Mormonism’s founder. The first, Richard Lyman Bushman’s long-awaited biography Joseph Smith:…
The chokecherry where we camped one June
hung low over the water, sheltering
brown shade beneath its branches
so clear the water revealed crooks in our legs
All that has gone before makes the now, somehow.
Whys are sucked deep into the darkened spirit’s
black hole where desperate reaching retrieves
distraught questions from God’s battered children.
Response comes in increments,
not yes or no, butmaybe, no matter, not yet.
And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. . . . And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. Moses…
The evening before Jim Wilson’s family moved, he and Bob Olding rode their bikes down to the Provo River to swim one more time. The last five boys were just leaving the hole, so Bob…
I float in the corner of the university diving pool. My legs, which are more muscular and dense than my torso, pull me down. Closing my eyes, I’m rocked by the wake from a diver. Sound disappears with my ears under water. I arch my belly and lift my heavy legs higher. My body is buoyed up in a manner that feels like faith.
In the introduction to his epic short story, “A River Runs Through It,” Norman Maclean wrote that his primary aim was to let his “children know what kind of people their parents are or think they are or hope they are.” This sentiment captured my initial purpose in crafting this essay. Dealing chiefly with my evolving spiritual life, it is the story of a youth whose extended family took religion seriously, even seriously enough to live peaceably with its great diversity of belief; it is the tale of a free spirit butting heads with a tightly disciplined institution; and it is the record of a family spiritual legacy, one noticeably different in beliefs and loyalties than the typical Latter-day Saint has come to know and cherish through his or her heritage.
The growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has recently slowed in Japan, as elsewhere, adding to the decades-long challenge for the Church of a low activity rate within the country. Latter-day Saints often say that conversion is more of a process than a one-time event. The same is true with LDS enculturation, or acceptance of this American-based church by other cultures as a legitimate part of their societies. Both conversion and enculturation require that people get to know something new and accept it as part of their personal being or their society’s character. As such, both processes are types of internalization, one at the individual level and one at the societal level.