On December 4, 1920, apostles David O. McKay and Hugh J. Cannon set off on an around-the-world journey to visit every mission in the world and some of the most isolated congregations of the church.…
I moved from the United States to Finland a decade ago, and in the midst of a good deal of culture shock, I found comfort in what I perceived as the uniformity of Mormonism. I…
In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…
Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below. Mormons are a story-telling folk. The academic study of Mormon folklore began as a way to collect and analyze stories of…
A devil came to an old Mormon on an icy winter night when mounds of snow outside, as big as cars, lay black and cold, nearly invisible. Having searched since the beginning of the world,…
These things happened fifty years ago. It was 1962, the year of the World’s Fair in Seattle. I was twenty-one and had just finished my junior year at Utah State University in Logan. My forestry…
HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured
Time held me green and dying, though I sang,
And spun me off the whinnied fields and out of praise
In his big harvest hands ’til horse and hen and place
Were only memory, then myth, then vacant space
Jim asked me, encouraged me, even begged me
not to do it. You’re surrounded by seedy lies,
he said, don’t sew them into your breasts. Did he worry
it would reflect badly on him? I don’t know,
Reb Tevye is in the shower singing
“If I Were a Rich Man.” He’s eleven,
my son, and suddenly in love
with Broadway music because Mrs. Hale,
whom he affectionately calls
The Bomb, has inspired him. This little football player