American Trinity
March 16, 2018The other two are more patient than I am. They bide their time. What’s worse, Jonas is always telling me that I am shirking my duty. I haven’t talked to him in over a century.…
DiaBLOGue
The Birth of Tragedy
March 16, 2018For Neal Chandler, il miglior fabbro “Is Mormonism still part of your Weltanschauung?” Aunt Doris asks me every time she sees me. She knows that at 2:15 on Sunday afternoons I’m blessing the sacrament like…
Girl without a Mother to Her Big Brother
March 16, 2018I never saw so many frogs;
neither did you. We walked
the tracks, sometimes stepping
from tie to tie, sometimes
walking the rail—holding
Mother Willow
March 16, 2018You are the gentle willow, who I often
thought looked weak. Your strong-willed
child that made her loud debut among
your branches, hanging
Winterscape: Prairie
March 16, 2018Fallow soil, windblown, is a rigid latticework
Pressed hard against patchwork fields etched with snow.
A river, drawn amblingly, God’s Hancock doodle,
Flows its cursive way across the whole.
Seasonal Ritual
March 16, 2018On Sundays in rows of chaos,
Children shouting over a tinny piano,
Spring was popping popcorn —
Week after week, we took it in armfuls.
Easter Sermons
March 16, 2018I was in the sheep business for years.
Sold off my sheep and got into the cattle business and now I have friends.
The cattlemen talk to me.
I suppose what finally drove me out was the predators.
Gaius
March 16, 2018I cannot look at moths.
One seizes himself from
spade to spade, in
the haggard mat of grass roots, and
I feel impatient with the
inefficiency of frenetic,
blind antennae.
Grandpa’s Hat
March 16, 2018When my father died in February of 2007, I inherited from him many of my grandfather’s Church books—one published as far back as 1846. I knew my grandfather was a bibliophile—collecting, reading, and leaving his underlining and commentary throughout his books. While surveying these books, I unexpectedly found his missionary journal. I didn’t know he had kept one, and his worn leather journal had entries for every single day of his mission from October of 1906 to October of 1908 in the Northern States Mission.
Recompense
March 16, 2018George Handley’s Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River practices theology the way a doctor practices CPR—not as a secondhand theory but as a chest-cracking, lung-inflating, life-saving intervention. The book models what, on my account, good theology ought to do: It is experimental, it is grounded in the details of lived experience, and it takes charity—that pure love of Christ— as the only real justification for its having been written. It is not afraid to guess, it is not afraid to question, it is not afraid to cry repentance, and it is not afraid to speak in its own name.