Writing a one-volume treatment of modern Mormonism that avoids being overshadowed by the movement’s gripping nineteenth-century history and focuses instead on what Mormonism is today is a challenge for any author. Bushman, a scholar who…
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, critics regularly bemoaned what they regarded as the New Mormon History’s exceptionalist viewpoint. Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount may finally shatter that perception. Or, alternatively, it may…
The debate over the Mountain Meadows Massacre could be said to have two narrative as well as physical poles, one positioned in Arkansas and the other located in Utah. The Arkansan pole is a sixteen-foot-high…
After more than thirty years as a historian and after writing dozens of book reviews, I confess that this one has been the most difficult response that I have ever had to write. Perhaps it…
In some ways, this volume is just the latest in a long line of books written on the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Historians, journalists, and others have told this story and furnished analyses from a variety of angles and perspectives, suggesting this devastating tragedy’s multiplicity of explanations and implications. Nonetheless, this book is sui generis, in that it was supported by the LDS Church with astonishing commitments of financial and human resources. All three authors are practicing Latter-day Saints, and are employed by or are retired from the LDS Church and the LDS Church History Department (xv; back jacket flap). The participation of Richard Turley, now assistant Church historian, signals an unprecedented degree of official cooperation.
But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly home . . . Heb. 11:16 “You don’t have to go,” she whispered, the morning grogginess in her voice betraying an urgency that was…
We wake to cold, though it’s mid-spring,
so silent at sunrise
we both raise the pleated blinds
and look out: everything a shock
of ice . . . each draped petal and twig
from weeping cherry, wire on the chain link
fence—evenly glazed and still.
This morning makes no shadow, compresses
with its grayness and that knot
I learned to grow against winter
long ago in Wyoming.
Before Joseph Smith saw God, he had this pretty thought
that you can know the world by putting your face in a hat
to look at a rock. Which makes sense if you think about it,
since a rock is able to know what rocks know; especially
a good rock, and even inferior stone: enough to keep a rock
rock, to keep any pebble what is most likely for it to be.
How many times had he dashed past me?
He’d run and run, climb onto the thick
stone walls, stretch his arms into the ribs
of morning light, shake his head,