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Fighting over “Mormon”: Media Coverage of the FLDS and LDS

March 19, 2018

Establishing legitimacy is a fundamental process that is basic to social organization. All organizations intending to grow or continue to exist require widespread acceptance and some degree of congruence with the surrounding culture. In the months following the raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ (FLDS) ranch in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) began an initiative to distinguish itself from the many polygamous groups that have branched out of the Mormon trunk over the years.

“Who’s in Charge Here?”: Utah Expedition Command Ambiguity

March 19, 2018

Many Utahns may call the Utah War of 1857-58 “Johnston’s Army,” but the U.S. Army and most historians surely do not. It seems to me that this shorthand label for the war trivializes, personalizes, and localizes it, much as the term “Seward’s Folly” was used to deride the secretary of state’s 1867 push to purchase Alaska. By focusing on Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston—or at least on his name—this label’s users have, in effect, taken his Utah War leadership for granted.” They should not . . .

Becoming a “Messenger of Peace”: Jacob Hamblin in Tooele

March 19, 2018

On March 13, 1852, two men, one white and armed with a rifle, the other a Goshute armed with bow and arrows, confronted each other in the Stansbury Mountains west of Tooele, a small, two-year-old settlement some twenty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The first man, Jacob Vernon Hamblin, a lieutenant in Utah’s Nauvoo Legion, had been given specific instructions by his military and ecclesiastical superior to kill all Indians, as they had been raiding the whites’ cattle. However, when Hamblin and the Goshute faced each other in the mountains, neither could kill the other despite multiple arrows loosed at Hamblin and multiple attempts to shoot the Indian. Finally the Indian fled after Hamblin threw a stone at him. This was a tense, dangerous, yet almost comic confrontation that would profoundly shape Hamblin’s subsequent life. He concluded that the incident was a sign given him from God that he should not kill Indians and that, if he followed this directive, he himself would never be killed by them.

About the Artist: Emily Plewe

March 19, 2018

Emily Plewe grew up in Centerville, Utah, and attended Wellesley College where she studied art and literature. She then pursued a master’s degree at BYU. Emily and her husband, John, who is also an artist…

Practicing Divinity

March 19, 2018

Here, the author of this letter instructs his readers to live a life of piety, or godliness. He explains that the power of God has given us all the tools we need to live this life, and that it is in this way that we participate in the divine nature. Then he outlines a set of practices including goodness or virtue, knowledge, self-control, endurance, mutual affection, and love. This is the path to becoming divine. 

Marrow: A Review of Richard Dutcher’s Mormon Films

March 19, 2018

In Richard Dutcher’s latest film Falling, a rich scene revealing the subtle conflict between the demands of commerce and artistic endeavor is focused around the word marrow. The protagonist, lapsed Mormon Eric Boyle, a suffering videographer and aspiring screenwriter, is failing to sell his latest story to a well-tanned and successful Hollywood producer. After rejecting Eric’s work, the producer complains to him that if he wants to make it in the film business, he needs to do something different, something new.

When Your Eternal Companion Has Fangs | Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn

March 19, 2018

As a teacher of language and literature, I am probably supposed to sneer at Stephenie Meyer’s novels. They are not just genre fiction but, by blending urban fantasy and romance, genre fiction twice over; they are not only written for the young adult market, but they also avoid offending the sensitivities of Mormon readers; and their prose does not insist that you stop and weep over its sheer beauty.

Reading the Mormon Gothic | Stephenie Meyer, Twilight; New Moon; Eclipse; Breaking Dawn

March 19, 2018

Mormons and vampires—a strange combination, indeed. Stephenie Meyer first brought them together in her mock-epic series of Twilight novels, a contemporary literary phenomenon that sprang, true to the classic gothic impulse, from the author’s vividly persistent dream. The series tracks Isabella (“Bella”) Swan and her “vegetarian” vampire beau, Edward Cullen, as they first meet in Forks, Washington, fall into forbidden love, and, after conquering a series of increasingly threatening obstacles, live happily ever after as immortal husband and wife.