Scott Abbott

House of the Temple, House of the Lord: A View from Philadelphia

The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs (Heraclitus).  Three steps. A terrace. Five steps. A terrace. Seven steps. A terrace. Nine steps. A final broad terrace. Stone sphinxes (one…

Mormonism, Magic and Masonry: The Damning Similarities | William J. Schnoebelen and James R. Spencer, Mormonism’s Temple of Doom

The lurid title notwithstanding, this little book is not a sequel to Indiana Jones, but rather an expose of damning parallels between Mormonism, magic, and Masonry. The authors (most of the story is Schnoebelen’s, with…

Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching: Mary and Richard Rorty

When philosopher Alastair MacIntyre came striding into my Vanderbilt University office brandishing the New York Times in October of 1985, I knew something was up. “Congratulations,” he said, “your church has just entered its Renaissance period.” I was used to seeing him walk into Furman Hall on Ash Wednesdays with a gray streak on his forehead, and we had talked about Mormonism, but I had no clue what he was talking about. He showed me the front page of the paper. It was the Mark Hofmann bombings—murders to cover up Hofmann’s forgeries. “It only took you 150 years,” Alastair noted. “It took us a millennium and a half.” 

Immortal for Quite Some Time (an excerpt)

I’m Lila, a heat-drugged woman announces, edging her weight out of an overstuffed room into the hall. How can I help you? I explain we are his family. She says she is sorry. He seemed like such a nice man. 

Immortal for Quite Some Time, Part 2

(after the autopsy, after the funeral, after AIDS)

I’ve started to read John’s missionary letters from Italy. Nearly one a week for two years. From what Mom told me when I asked about them, I expected requests for money, reports of trouble, and depressed silences. John communicated all of that, of course; but his letters are profoundly uplifting as well (or is it fraternal nostalgia I’m feeling?).

Home Again: Part Three of Immortal for Quite Some Time

I know the standard plot lines, the ones that move from desire to fulfillment, or from desire to fulfillment to tragedy. As this story follows its meanders I don’t find myself to be a satisfied, fulfilled member of my church, but neither is mine the story of a brave individual triumphantly separating himself from an abusive religion. I live chapters of each of these stories. But always intermediary chapters, it seems, never the climactic ones. Absent is the single seductive strand that engages and satisfies—and falsifies. What will it mean to finish this manuscript? To finish writing about my brother? To finish thinking about him? To abandon him again? To jettison this means of access to our past and present experience? 

Mormons Are a Different Country | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife

Mette Ivie Harrison’s new novel is a work of genre fiction. Like other mysteries, The Bishop’s Wife revolves around a crime the main character eventually solves. In this case, a young woman disappears, leaving her husband both bereft and suspect. The husband first turns to Bishop Kurt Wallheim for help, but it is the bishop’s wife, Linda Wallheim, who becomes involved in the case. Like other mysteries, including Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries, whose characters lend Harrison’s their approximate names, there will be subsequent volumes, for this is “A Linda Wallheim Novel.”