We like to pretend that things were different back then, back when gods and giants roamed the earth. What would the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson need with thirty-second attack ads? Would Alexander Hamilton haggle over a top marginal tax rate? Or would Benjamin Franklin try to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee? Certainly the idols of our tribe were above such nonsense.
When I first learned that Reid L. Neilson, the managing director of the LDS Church Historical Department and an old friend from BYU days, was planning to publish a few dozen letters from Wilford Woodruff…
The 2010 videogame Epic Mickey, before its release, was looking to be one of the more controversial games of the year. And that’s without any sex or decapitation. What made it so controversial? Because its Mickey was a bit more adventurous and scrappy and dangerous than the carefully controlled Mickey Mouse that developed in the animated cartoons. But that Mickey was never the only Mickey—or even the original Mickey.
Brock Cheney’s history of Mormon food, Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers does much to fill a surprising lacuna in Mormon history. Although a number of books on food and religion exist, there is little academic exploration of the role that food played in the shaping and development of Latter-day Saint culture. While Cheney’s work reads a bit like a church potluck, lacking the unity of a well-constructed menu, it nonetheless provides interested readers and academics alike with a variety of tempting morsels to inspire further exploration.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often perplexed when they are accused of not being Christian. We worship Christ, acknowledge him as the divine Son of God, and believe our hope for salvation centers on the atonement made possible by his sacrifice. Christ is central in Mormon scripture: his birth, death, and atonement are foretold by Book of Mormon prophets, revealed through terrestrial signs, and revealed in the flesh in Christ’s ministry to his “lost sheep” of the New World. Mormons celebrate Christian holy days such as Easter and Christmas. The very name of the Church points to Christ as our center.
Albert Einstein famously wrote: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God, of course, but A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman do, and ask the same questions in their book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision. Written from the point of view of faithful LDS scientists and engineers, Bushman and Howe (an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab) attempt to tackle a question that has long fascinated me: what can we learn if we analyze God’s creations as the master work of the master Engineer?
With Mitt Romney’s loss and the end of the 2012 campaign season, many have declared an end to our current Mormon Moment. But while America’s recent attention to the Mormons may have been unusually focused—particularly…
Jesus and I were the only white people in the sanctuary. One summer, while outside Washington, D.C., on a college internship, I walked across the street to church. When I opened the door and went inside, I saw only black people—with one prominent exception: Above a side door, the church displayed a picture of Jesus. It was Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ. I wasn’t sure how church members felt about white visitors, but I didn’t think it appropriate to leave a church simply because of race. So I sat down. In this church, the deacons sat at the front and looked out at the congregation during the service. I wondered what they thought about a twenty-year-old white kid sitting in their church. It turns out they were extremely welcoming. I also wondered why a group of African American Baptists had a picture of a white Jesus.
I was looking at the morning through the window in the front room like a bear in a cage remembering somewhere there are meadows, and I noticed how much water was running down the gutter…
Shawn Tucker conducted this interview with Tom Mould in April, 2013, in Elon, North Carolina. In 2011, Utah State University Press published Tom’s book Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition. Shawn is Tom’s colleague at Elon University, and Tom interviewed Shawn as part of his field work. A brief excerpt of the book follows the interview (reprinted with the kind permission of the Utah State University Press).