DiaBLOGue
Mischief and Ethnography Keith Norman. BUC: A Boy among the Saints
December 10, 2021BUC: A Boy among the Saints spans a “year in the life of an unregenerate 10 year old”—the endearing young rascal Wilford Bushman. Wilf, like most in his rural Utah community of Anti-Nephi-Lehi, is “BUC”—“born…
Connecting the Dots Caitlin Myer, A Memoir of Loving and Then Leaving the Patriarchy
December 10, 2021When I was a kid, I loved doing dot-to-dot pictures. Do you know the ones I’m talking about? You began with a sheet of paper scattered with dots and tiny numbers, like a starry but…
Gendering Mormon Studies—At Last! Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petrey, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender
December 10, 2021Women’s and gender studies emerged out of the women’s and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, movements the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vigorously opposed. The so-called New Mormon History flourished around the same time, opening the field to new approaches
From the Garden of Eden to the Zen Rock Garden Charles Shirō Inouye, Zion Earth Zen Sky
December 10, 2021The latest in the Living Faith series, Charles Inouye’s Zion Earth Zen Sky is an autobiographical memoir about growing up as a child to Japanese American immigrants who met in the internment camps during World…
Got Wheat? Christopher James Blythe, Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse
December 10, 2021Growing up in the LDS faith, my parents always dutifully had large quantities of wheat, rice, beans, and all other manner of food stored—food we never ate in our daily lives. While they rarely discussed…
Ceci n’est pas une Mormon Studies Book Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
December 10, 2021When I first sidled up to Make Yourselves Gods, I did so in the spirit of the Mormon Creed: “Mind your own business and let everybody else do likewise” (Trademark: 1842). Yes, I was suspicious.…
Acoustic
December 10, 2021Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…
Hymn to a Maple
December 10, 2021Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…
Salt Lake City, 1957
December 10, 2021Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…