Michael Austin

Why Stand Ye Gazing Up into Heaven [When] the Kingdom of God Is Within You?

In giving my remarks a title, I have quite promiscuously mixed two statements from the New Testament that come from different speakers, at different times, addressing different audiences for different reasons. I even supplied my…

Review: Heavy Lifting on Broken Ground Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon

Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon cannot quite be described as “groundbreaking.” It covers ground, the editors acknowledge right up front, that has been broken many times before. In their introductory essay, Elizabeth Fenton…

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

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. 

The Mormon Church and the Language of My Faith

It is no easy thing to command a language to change. Language just sort of happens, and those who make the rules eventually have to get on board or become irrelevant. Only pedants and fools…

Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater-than-Average Joy | Grant Hardy, ed., The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition.

For serious readers of scripture, the publication of a major study edition is cause for great rejoicing. The HarperCollins Study Bible and the major Oxford Study Bibles (the Jewish Study Bible, the Catholic Study Bible,…

Peck’s Peak | Steven L. Peck, Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck; Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist

If someone ever asks me what kinds of things Steven Peck writes, the best answer I can give goes like this: the BYU biology professor and raconteur writes primarily in the fields of evolutionary biology, speculative theology, literary fiction, computer modeling, poetry, existential horror, satire, personal essay, tsetse fly reproduction, young-adult literature, human ecology, science fiction, religious allegory, environmentalism, and devotional narrative. You know, that kind of thing.

The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time

Theology for the Approaching Millennium: Angels in America, Activism, and the American Religion

Since its New York debut three years ago, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—the most sustained treatment of Mormonism to play on the Broadway stage since Jerome Kern’s The Girl from Utah in 1914—has earned a…

Murder, with a Side of Philosophy | Paul M. Edwards, The Angel Acronym

Paul Edwards’s first mystery novel, The Angel Acronym, is not exactly a religious novel, but it is a novel in which the characters spend a great deal of time talking about religion. And the religion…

Colonizing the Frontier between Faith and Doubt | Levi S. Peterson, A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography

It would be difficult for me to overstate the influence that Levi Peterson has had on both my spiritual and my intellectual development, “The Confessions of St. Augustine,” which I found by accident a few…

A Big Task for a Small Book | Paul C. Gutjahr, The Book of Mormon: A Biography

Paul Gutjahr’s The Book of Mormon: A Biography is one of the inaugural offerings from Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books—a series that proposes a new lens for studying major religious texts such…

Our Bickering Founding Fathers and Their Messy, Flawed, Divinely Inspired Constitution

We like to pretend that things were different back then, back when gods and giants roamed the earth. What would the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson need with thirty-second attack ads? Would Alexander Hamilton haggle over a top marginal tax rate? Or would Benjamin Franklin try to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee? Certainly the idols of our tribe were above such nonsense. 

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Two poems that I read during my sophomore year of college ended up changing my life. The first of these, John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” changed it quickly by helping me decide to change my major from accounting to English. It wasn’t so much that I was impressed with Keats for being such a good writer as much as I was impressed with myself for being such a good reader and for sort of understanding “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It made me feel smart, perhaps for the first time in my life, and I decided that I liked feeling smart and wanted to spend the rest of my time in college understanding poems and feeling like a genius. So I majored in English. In fact, I majored in English three times. As a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and, eventually, as a professor of English literature I continued to teach “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in a variety of courses more or less the same way that I originally understood it the first time I read it. 

Vardis Fisher’s Mormon Scars: Mapping the Diaspora in the Testament of Man

Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below. “Religion is like smallpox. If you get a good dose, you wear scars.” —Vardis Fisher, We Are Betrayed  In 1940, Vardis Fisher…

The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife; Tim Wirkus, City of Brick and Shadow

Mystery fiction and Mormonism grew up together. The first modern writer of mystery tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), was an exact contemporary of Joseph Smith (1805–1844). The most famous literary detective in the English-speaking world, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, got his start in A Study in Scarlet (1887)—a novel set partly in Utah among the Latter-day Saints. And during the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Mormon mysteries became a recognizable sub-genre in series by Robert Irvine, Gary Stewart, and Sarah Andrews, and in bestselling single installments by (among many others) Tony Hillerman, Stephen White, Karen Kijewski, and Scott Turow.