The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) and its currently jailed leader, Warren Jeffs, recently established the 1700-acre Yearn for Zion Ranch in dry country northwest of San Antonio, amid alfalfa fields, oil…
Over the past forty years, Robert Christmas has been one of the best and most consistent poets writing about Mormon life and culture. His distinctive style and voice are readily recognizable. What makes Christmas’s poetry…
Symmetry exists in exact reflections of Love:
Take a patch of chaos circling beforehand,
Sling it past black stars circling at random,
Create light in rings inside particled sparks,
Glowing in random points and recognitions,
Moving and brewing beneath your own hand.
Respond to Word of God inside your mind:
Call the involvement creation, as the eyes
Of the Gods gaze infinity into finite forms.
“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen. “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—” Lynn glanced…
The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…
I was unprepared when my daughters became teenagers. In fact, I was blindsided by this phase of life. I never claimed to have native talent in mothering; but after years of study and practice, I thought I had gotten the hang of it a little. I have been proven sadly mistaken.
As I expressed in my first essay on motherhood, written more than a decade ago, I found motherhood both exhilarating and overwhelming; but I never doubted that I would be a mother. As a good Mormon girl, I always had marriage and motherhood as my ultimate objectives. Even though I was also a returned missionary with a graduate degree, my life was not complete until I had children.
At home it was hot . . . days and days above a hundred. I could imagine the leaves of summer wilting in the afternoon heat. But that was so far away on the other side of the equator.
Here it was cold. Although it was July, I had on my parka and a sweater as I walked down a rough, cobble-stoned street shaded by two-story, pastel-colored adobe walls. I listened to the sibilant clipping of Bolivian Spanish and the soft guttural rattle of Aymara as people negotiated prices and shared gossip in the small stores whose light rushed out, like warmth, into the narrow street.
On a recent visit to Utah, I was excited to attend church with my parents at their LDS ward. Regular attendance at my own ward in Minneapolis has become an important part of my life. But perhaps because of the unique role of family-centered piety in Mormonism, I always find special comfort in attending church with my parents. Furthermore, because of my many years of alienation from the LDS Church, my parents find it deeply gratifying that for the first time in twenty years, I want to go with them. Atten dance at church as a family is perhaps an affirmation of the bonds we hope will endure between us in the eternities.
In April 1993, President Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, international dignitaries, and Holocaust survivors celebrated the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the monument is one of the most expensive additions to the federal museum system. Its mission, described by the museum’s project director Michael Berenbaum, is to “memorialize the victims of Nazism by providing an exhaustive historical narrative of the Holocaust and to present visitors with an object lesson in the ethical ideals of American political culture by presenting the negation of those ideals.”
