Michael Austin’s book aims to convince Mormons that the manner in which the Latter-day Saints have traditionally (since the early 1970s, if not longer) read the Book of Job is wrong and unhelpful and that…
Becca was taking too long. Emma huddled against the iron fencepost and hugged her knees. The chilly breeze had dried her tears, but her nose was still running. She wiped it with the back of…
Timothy smiles as he hands a five-dollar bill to the teenager behind the window. “Keep the change,” he says. The teenager—a red-headed seventeen-year-old with almost as many piercings on her face as freckles—giggles and gives…
The sun streamed unimpeded through the kitchen window, warming Jake’s back as he ate a bowl of cereal. It was a pleasant feeling, but also strange. Usually the light couldn’t get in. His RV blocked…
Every Mormon writer has heard Orson F. Whitney’s claim that “we will yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” Mormon writers have been so excited, overwhelmed, and preoccupied by this statement that we still…
A series of six found poems derived from “Agency, Disability, and Atonement” by J. Mark Olsen.
God lives in silence, Heaven
too far from atmosphere for sound
to vibrate absent oxygen, separate causes
of reverence and calm coincidental
Moses murdered the Egyptian for a wickedness
less miserable than its subsequence: dead children,
every firstborn son (daughters spared the ordination
for being less blessed of our God who murders
whom He chooses and for the least ignominy).
For the premiere production held in the Cafritz Foundation Theatre at the University of Maryland, College Park on December 10–12, 2014. The production was supported by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Second Season Program…
Psychologist William James referred to personal identity as psychology’s “most puzzling puzzle.”The oracle of Delphi’s most famous charge—Know Yourself—affirms that human puzzlement over the nature of identity goes back to the early days of civilization, since the oracle would hardly find this counsel significant enough to utter if everyone already knew themselves as a matter of course. Descartes thought he had solved the problem by locating identity itself in the irreducible fact of consciousness, or the cogito of I think, therefore I am, but in our own day, philosopher-theologian Paul Ricoeur points out that the I implicit in Descartes’s first-person verb presumes itself, rather than proves itself, so that Descartes’s assurance only demands that we ask, “. . . what is this ‘I’”?A person’s very first step toward a definitive declaration of identity—in terms such as I am . . .—has no ground on which to land. Insofar as what constitutes any identity, or human identity, per se, still baffles us, we find ourselves unmoored even before we consider a question such as what constitutes a specific kind of identity.