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.
On Thursday, March 30, 1989, eight missionaries and their new mission president, Wolfgang Paul, were driven from Hamburg, West Germany, to the German Democratic Republic (GDR). They expected a delay of several hours at the border but were amazed when the guards waved them through without the usual search of the cars. President Paul said, “After we crossed the border our joy was beyond description. President Schütze could hardly contain himself. He honked the horn, blinked the headlights, shouted and cried for joy because after fifty years missionaries were again in his country.”
Just about twenty years ago, the editors of Dialogue commissioned a general survey of subscribers. The results were published in its spring 1987 issue under the title, “The Unfettered Faithful,” intended to evoke an image of religiously committed readers who felt free to explore the issues and frontiers of Mormon thought beyond the conventional treatments in official Church literature. The purpose of this article is partly to replicate and compare more recent survey results with the earlier ones.
In July 2004, the LDS Church published True to the Faith, a handbook of doctrines and beliefs arranged alphabetically from A (“Aaronic Priesthood”) to Z (“Zion”): 190 pages of what Mormons are supposed to believe, know, and do. Arguably, in creed-free and catechism-free Mormonism, the appearance of this concise compendium represents a new development. Its closest parallels may be the missionary “white book,” which spells out behavioral rules, the pocket-sized handbooks for Latter-day Saints in the military, or the newest revision of “For the Strength of Youth,” which provides explanations of principles governing correct behavior but is also quite clear about what that correct behavior is. All of these works are contemporary and concise.
Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 58–67
I spoke as a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints/Community of Christ. As a result, I had a decidedly different perspective on Joseph Smith than my co-panelists.