Fractals
March 15, 2018Dwarfed by other forms of life, the leaves fall
into this world without cadence that changes colors
each time it kisses something goodbye.
DiaBLOGue
Ghazal
March 15, 2018You said to wait but how I wanted to be free again
Find a way to get a taste of the fruit from off that tree again
The Day of Judgment hangs above my neck just like a flaming sword
Each night the angels say it’s time to enter my plea again
The Feather Pen
March 15, 2018The angels’ wings are molting, so I’ll make my pen.
Sound me down to earth or hell, but let me take my pen.
Glazier
March 15, 2018You can’t be afraid of cuts, she says,
showing her hands
beautiful with scars.
Offerings
March 15, 2018The way he leaves a banana-mayo sandwich
on the counter. His special blend
of applesauce with too much cinnamon
brims over a white glass bowl.
The scratchy blue-and-green-car sheets
left folded on the hide-a-bed.
Home Again: Part Three of Immortal for Quite Some Time
March 15, 2018I know the standard plot lines, the ones that move from desire to fulfillment, or from desire to fulfillment to tragedy. As this story follows its meanders I don’t find myself to be a satisfied, fulfilled member of my church, but neither is mine the story of a brave individual triumphantly separating himself from an abusive religion. I live chapters of each of these stories. But always intermediary chapters, it seems, never the climactic ones. Absent is the single seductive strand that engages and satisfies—and falsifies. What will it mean to finish this manuscript? To finish writing about my brother? To finish thinking about him? To abandon him again? To jettison this means of access to our past and present experience?
“Shake Off the Dust of Thy Feet”: The Rise and Fall of Mormon Ritual Cursing
March 15, 2018In July 1830, just three months after the formal organization of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation that promised, “in whatsoever place ye shall enter in & they receive you not in my name ye shall leave a cursing instead of a blessing by casting off the dust of your feet against them as a testimony & cleansing your feet by the wayside.”Subsequently, the historical record is replete with examples of ritual cursing being performed up through the 1890s. While many of Smith’s revelations and doctrinal innovations continue to be practiced by the LDS Church today, cursing has fallen into disuse. Despite this ritual’s unique status as an act of formally calling down God’s wrath upon others, it has received surprisingly little attention in scholarly studies.
Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect
March 15, 2018In an August 2008 letter to Brigham Young University’s student newspaper, a disgruntled student (who believed campus Republicans were deflating his car tires because of his Obama bumper sticker) made this inadvertently revealing statement: “I do realize that although the church itself is perfect, the people in it are definitely not.”He was right about the members, of course, but his naïve assumption that the Church is perfect is as illuminating as it is pervasive among Latter-day Saints. It is also fundamentally inaccurate. Indeed, I suspect that this misconception lies at the heart of many of the struggles the Church and its members find themselves facing in our increasingly complex and information-saturated world.
Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
March 15, 2018While I was serving as a stake high councillor, a Latter-day Saint woman confided in me, “Bones heal faster.” She spoke with the authority of a victim of both physical and emotional abuse. When I confidentially shared her comment with the director of a mental health clinic, he affirmed that many abused women would validate the woman’s statement.Popular opinion notwithstanding, verbal abuse is harder to live with than physical abuse, can be more op pressive than being beaten, and leaves deeper scars.
“And Now It Is the Mormons”: The Magazine Crusade against the Mormon Church, 1910–1911
March 15, 2018From September 1910 through August 1911, in an unusual confluence of focus, four popular national magazines critiqued the Mormon Church and its prophet in a series of articles that Mormon leader and historian B. H. Roberts characterized as the “magazine crusade” against the Church. All of the articles were written by prominent muckraking journalists who sought both to identify church practices that needed to be reformed and to sell magazines by presenting their critiques in a way that would appeal to Progressive America. The articles did, in fact, have at least two long-term effects on the Church: they accelerated the true demise of polygamy in the institutional Church by increasing the resolve of leaders to discipline prominent Church members who had insisted on continuing to encourage, perform, and enter into new plural unions, and they contributed to the Church’s development of effective strategies to defend itself against attack and its appreciation of the importance of competent public relations. The articles also had the shorter-term effect of re-igniting substantial anti-Mormon activity in the United States and Western Europe.