Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic Among Mormons
Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time.
Read more
Too Long Ignored | Ronald G. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe for Zion
Although George Darling Watt (1812–81) is perhaps best known in the LDS Church as the first convert in the British Isles, he also recorded Brigham Young’s sermons in shorthand for more than sixteen years, preserving…
Read more
Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder | William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858
In this first volume of a planned two-volume documentary history of the Utah War, editor William P. MacKinnon has assembled a treasure house of previously unexploited documents to illuminate the decisions, actions, and bungling on…
Read more
Full Lives but Not Fulfilling | Paula Kelly Harline, The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women
This book is a gem. Paula Kelly Harline’s writing shines. She has compiled excerpts from twenty-nine diaries and autobiographies of women who lived in polygamy between 1847, when the Mor mons first arrived in Utah,…
Read more
