Many examples of missionary journals are available from early days of the Church. (See, for example, the diaries collected in Brigham Young University’s online archive collection http://lib.byu.edu/digital/mmd/). In reading through them, one finds that they…
In Perry Miller’s famous essay on the Puritans, he described how John Winthrop and his fellow dissenters left England in the hopes of establishing on the other side of the Atlantic a godly society that could serve as a model for the reformation of the mother country and its church. In the wake of the English Civil War and as the end of the seventeenth century neared, their descendants were plagued by the sense that the mission of their fathers had foundered. “Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill,” wrote Miller, “they were left alone with America.”
Although we may not know it, we live our lives immersed in ritual. Many of our daily exchanges with other human beings are ritualized. We often categorize and compare religions by referencing how highly structured, or not, their liturgical worlds are. I grew up being told that Mormons avoided ritual because it connoted empty practice and vulgar symbolism. The truth is, however, that Mormon temple worship is among the richest symbolic systems of worship in Christianity.
Russell: I wanted to start off this conversation by asking David about the subtitle of his book, “How Religion Unites and Divides Us.” That concern over unity and division has been a serious one for the Mitt Romney campaign. He’s made efforts to bridge divides in order to make his candidacy appealing to a particular segment of conservative Republican primary voters who, generally speaking, have not looked well upon Mormons.
Jennifer is a mother of three—Sadie in high school, Carson in middle school, Jordan in elementary—which means weekdays start at 6:00 A.M. and quickly unspool, devolving into a mad scramble of showers and hair dryers…
You colored me
sienna, azure,
a shape I was becoming,
a bird, perhaps,
Prose will not capture some people, the way
they drift. You can only see them dragging
their furniture through Wyoming night,
down a dark throat of road, the ice
I am ten, sitting on your sofa.
I watch as you paint and talk.
Your voice is a swallow,
which sometimes loops through the Andes,
Above this cold chair
they say vegetable. Voices like calves
bawling for their mother’s teats.
I think yellow squash, summer,
A fire in the pasture undulates
of blue and white and yellow flower,
a fire like a snake, it would seem, iridescent