The Private Investigator
September 2, 2022Listen to the podcast version here. The doorbell rang as I hung up the phone, and then I heard my father’s deep, imposing voice fill our entryway. I stood and walked slowly into the unlit…
DiaBLOGue
Ministry of angles
September 2, 2022Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…
Morning Light
September 1, 2022Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…
The New Calling
September 1, 2022Podcast version of this piece. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt,…
Smoot in New Light
September 1, 2022The eight essays in this collection describe and interpret the US Senate’s investigation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the Progressive Era. Nominally an investigative hearing on the election of Utah…
England’s Life of Paradox
September 1, 2022The attacks of September 11, 2001 are a spectacular reminder that the struggle between religion and politics is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Eugene England’s life, which ended just weeks before those attacks,…
Establishing Zion in the Heat of Battle
September 1, 2022On April 13, 2021, President Biden announced that the United States would be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, indicating a shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Saints at War: The Gulf War,…
An Assortment of Meditations
September 1, 2022Samuel M. Brown’s Where the Soul Hungers is something of a grab bag of sundry reflections on the gospel. As Brown himself explains, the book is intended to be part “pure devotions” and part “philosophical…
The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists
September 1, 2022The ten stories that comprise Losing a Bit of Eden sustain Levi Peterson’s position as one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West. Each story is well grounded in a particular time…
Tender Rills
September 1, 2022Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…