Visible from Here
March 16, 2018I put down the phone and stare at nothing,
everything of my farm past settled into a moment
like colors pushed back through a prism
gone singular and clear:
DiaBLOGue
Dark Energy
March 16, 2018Mathematicians say the universe is a leaking wonder
of heat and cold: immense pressures
sucking and exhaling, not elegant
as they’d imagined . . . “preposterous.”
Four Passes on Mount Horeb
March 16, 2018In winters it soothed me,
the wind blistering peals
through naked willows in the dark
outside my bedroom window,
while warm and bound I marked
lost spirits sounding in the cold.
from “A Paris Journal”
March 16, 2018July 5, 2009. What an idea, a Sunday outdoor market in Paris featuring not antiques, imported fruit, or cast-off clothing, but birds. As good a way as any to worship, so we take a quick…
Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures
March 16, 2018Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it.
Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology
March 16, 2018Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology” was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times. To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article.
The Persistence of Mormon Plural Marriage
March 16, 2018This essay addresses the remarkable perseverance of Mormon polygamy.I argue that its survival is chiefly explained by the emphasis it was given in the nineteenth-century Church. The cardinal significance early leaders granted plurality in their teachings, combined with spirited defenses in its behalf, so gilded the doctrine that its enduring attraction was assured. A great deal of research studying patriarchal marriage has occurred in the last thirty or so years.
A Community of Abundance
March 16, 2018I have never spoken on Mother’s Day in church before, nor have I wanted to. One cannot talk in church on Mother’s Day without venturing into territory like women’s role in the Church and its relation to motherhood. Antique maps mark such territories with warnings like “There Be Dragons”; in that territory, there is no safe ground for man.
The Great Vigil of Easter
March 16, 2018My parents, in a nice haphazard sort of a way exposed me early on to the basic classical literature and ideas that they thought I needed to know. The raciness of some of the Greco-Roman myths was not lost on them, but they thought that perhaps the myths were not much more risque than the stories that I was likely to encounter in the scriptures (which is true) and besides, surely it was better to learn about the birds and bees from the Greeks and Romans than from the gossip and innuendo of schoolchildren or the pages of a magazine.
Truly Significant | Edward Leo Lyman, Candid Insights of a Mormon Apostle: The Diaries of Abraham H. Cannon, 1889–1895
March 16, 2018Abraham H. Cannon was Mormon aristocracy. The son of long-time First Presidency member George Q. Cannon, he accepted a call as an apostle at age thirty. During the latter portion of his life, the period covered in Candid Insights, he was also deeply involved in some of the most prominent business concerns of Utah Territory—banks, securities, printing, mines, and more. He served in these areas during the tumultuous period of the first Manifesto and the economic depression of the 1890s leading up to statehood. Also from the age of nineteen until the time he died at thirty-seven, he kept a diary.