The most beautiful thing about Kathleen Peterson’s “The Woman Taken in Adultery” is not simply that it is a painting about Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I have spent my life trying to listen to Jesus.
Poetry is a kind of embodiment, a conjuring. Through writing, poets can materialize anything whether it’s a hammock in Pine Island, Minnesota or a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain. But in addition to creating wordy,…
More Americans are leaving organized religion, and the fastest-growing faith tradition in the United States for some years now has been “no religion.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not been as…
At the end of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, having semi-retired from her fight for women’s suffrage, decided to create what would come to be known as The Woman’s Bible. This biblical production sought to academically redress gender as it was then seen in the primary text.
The dry wasteland of early Nevada’s Big Muddy Valley is the setting of two recent novels that capture the colorful era when Brigham Young sent a colony of Saints to establish St. Thomas southwest of…
Years ago, I was attending a local discussion group hosted by a fairly traditional (and Christian, though ecumenical) private school near the university where I teach. It was a great discussion, but one participant—a successful…
Lavina Fielding Anderson’s new book, Mercy without End, is a collection of essays, mostly delivered as public presentations and later published, mostly in the 1990s, by one of the most erudite and articulate living women…
Dust clogged my nose and the strong smell of horses, the clump, clump of their hoofs regular-like and slow, the heavy creak of the wheels, and over and above everything else, like sad heartbeats, the solemn thud, thud of the muffled drums. A sort of sigh went over all the multitude, and a woman sobbed out loud once. But mostly folks were quiet. A hush and a fear like the day of doom. You didn’t dare look, and yet it was like something glued your eyes toward that wagon passing, the stars and stripes with the black crepe edgings fluttering clean to the wheels.
Trustworthy
Loyal
Helpful
Friendly
Courteous
Kind
Obedient
Cheerful
Thrifty
Brave
Clean
Reverent
The Jews have a term, “Tikkun olam,” which means “repairing the world.” It is both a statement of belief and a commitment to action by individual Jews to heal, repair, and transform the world. Appropriating the concept and inspired by the Jewish passion for repairing the world, I have coined the term “Tikkun k’nessiah”—meaning repairing or healing the Church. In this essay, I hope to explore the dimensions of what “Tikkun k’nessiah” may mean to those of us who are members of the restored Church at this critical juncture in its history.