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Lessons from Baltimore’s Black Mormon Matriarchs on Discovering God’s Compassion | Laura Rutter Strickling, On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City

January 24, 2020

“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.

A Barometer for Mormon Social Science | Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church.

January 24, 2020

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.

Death in a Dry Climate | John Bennion, Ezekiel’s Third Wife.

January 24, 2020

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. 

Hymn #49

January 23, 2020

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. 

Land and Line

January 23, 2020

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…

Singing in Harmony, Stitching in Time

January 23, 2020

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?

Proving Subcontraries: In Memoriam, G. Eugene England, 1933–2001

January 23, 2020

This essay originally responded to a call in the announced theme for the 2009 Annual Conference of the Association for Mormon Letters: “Proving Contraries.” It explicitly honors, as the AML Conference theme implicitly honored, the memory of Eugene England, who first brought that phrase (from a June 1844 letter of Joseph Smith) to the attention of many, if not most or even all members of the LDS literary community. And it attempts to continue and extend some of Gene England’s effort to explore the tensions and even to heal some of the divisions in contemporary LDS community and experience by “proving contraries.” It consists of two history lessons and an elementary logic lesson, followed by some applications to LDS culture and literature.