In November 1976, seventeen months into his Hamburg mission and 152 pages into his memoir about that mission, Bruder (i.e., Elder) Roger Terry and his companion bicycled into the German countryside, seeking a farmer who…
“Dear God, Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me,” Alice Walker’s main character Celie writes at the start of The Color Purple.Similarly, Georgia, a real-life Black Mormon woman in current-day Baltimore stands up in testimony meeting with a written poem in hand:
Heavenly Father
I don’t understand
why my tears
fall on deaf ears.
Latter-day Saints studies has long remained the prerogative of scholars in the humanities, lacking commensurate scholarly attention in the social sciences. Periodically, however, a promising piece of social science research is promulgated by investigators seeking to understand the Mormon movement “on the ground.” Though usually insightful, these comparatively rare works vary with respect to ambition and sophistication.
Twenty-three years after Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power and twenty years after Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, the long-awaited third volume of D. Michael Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy series extends his study of Latter-day Saint General Authorities…
Brooke Larson is a tree hugger—literally.
She hugs a female gingko in Central Park after pissing at its base. This reminds her of a tree she once hugged in Jerusalem. She walks tree to tree down sidewalks in Salt Lake City.
Deep into the narrative and mission of The Legend of Hermana Plunge, a new memoir by Angela Liscom Clayton, in a chapter focused on the consistent catcalling and unwanted advances she faced as a missionary…
Rachel O’Brien Rockwood Wainwright Harker—the narrator and eponymous heroine of John Bennion’s new mystery novel Ezekiel’s Third Wife, has four last names, none of which is superfluous. Together, they tell a remarkable story about our heroine in the years before the novel begins. Here is the digest version.
This morning I helped a friend bury her dog
A dog that she once didn’t want
Taken in under duress
But in time grew affection for.
Doug Himes is an artist whose work strikes me as both ethereal and earthy with the ability to speak in both lithe lines and grounding colors. In other words, his art exhibits a specific Mormon…
Spring 1911. Seated in her parlor on the farm they lease, Bertha Hansen shivers as she slips her needle through beige linen. Heinrich has booked a trip to Germany, a visit home, but as departure draws near, uneasiness envelops her like the white mist of their native marsh. Does danger await them, a great storm perhaps, and is the chill she feels a premonition? Or is it simple bad humor, a wife’s irritation with a husband who squanders money on steamship tickets when they’re saving to buy a farm?