Volume 49, No. 3

According to his official history, that’s all Joseph Smith said to his mother after God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him while he prayed by himself in the woods. Whether or not Presbyterianism was true was a more pressing question for the young Joseph Smith than it is for most of you. Sometime in the mid-1820s, Lucy Mack Smith and several of Joseph’s siblings joined a Presbyterian church. Joseph must have wrestled with his mother’s choice. Like his father, though, he never joined any Protestant church. But it was surely a major point of controversy and discussion in the family. 

Mary Cooper and James Oakey, my maternal great-grandparents, married in 1840 and settled in Nottingham, England. Victoria was on the throne, and occasionally the citizens of Nottingham came out to pay honor as the queen in her carriage passed through on the way to Belvoir Castle. Mary gave birth to seven living children. James became a designer and maker of lace and also helped to develop new lace-making machinery.

Polygamy is, for many Americans, Mormonism’s defining feature. Even now, over a century after the main church abandoned the practice, images of Latter-day Saint polygamy persist in the popular and scholarly imagination. Most accounts of Mormon polygamy have either emphasized sexual experimentation and marital reform on the one hand or biblical primitivism on the other.While these accounts are at least partly true—Joseph Smith did believe that he was replacing a failed system of marriage, and he and his colleagues frequently invoked Bible patriarchs to explain their behaviors and doctrines—polygamy was also a solution to a specific set of contemporary cultural problems—remarriage after bereavement—refracted through biblical interpretation.

My first entry into the world of so-called Mormon polygamy began on June 17, 2010 when I attended the second annual conference of Safety Net, an organization that seeks “to assist people associated with the practice of plural marriage, whether an active polygamist or exiting polygamist.” Safety Net strives for neutrality toward the actual practice of plural marriage so they can “meet physical, emotional, and educational needs.”The goal of their annual conferences is to increase awareness of the issues surrounding the practice of plural marriage, present individual stories of polygamy, and discuss resources available to those wanting to leave polygamous family structures.

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 broke a centuries-old tradition within Roman Catholicism of service until-death of its top leader. If, as many expect, Pope Francis I eventually follows Benedict’s lead, it is likely that a new and enduring tradition will have been effected.The astounding transformation of the Roman Catholic Church under the younger and energized Francis underscores the importance of Benedict’s courageous decision. 

The famous couplet coined by Lorenzo Snow in 1840, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,”rears its head every now and then, inspiring both awe and some confusion among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints while causing at least a degree of discomfort for Church leaders and spokespeople who are trying to make Mormonism more palatable for our mainstream Christian friends and critics. Some observers have even suggested that the Church is intentionally downplaying this doctrine.Nevertheless, the couplet found its way into the 2013 Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manual Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, and this distinctive doctrine also appeared prominently in previous manuals containing the teachings of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.

Darin Cozzens’s second collection, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories, contains Emus and Mormon spinsters, ill-fated wedding ceremonies and wheelchair races in the dementia ward, washtub nostalgia and the ambiguous values…

When reading Karen Rosenbaum’s short story collection Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives, I kept thinking about the end of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s haunting conclusion: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”So it is with the women who populate Rosenbaum’s fourteen stories in this collection. The past defines them, breathes always within them.

At the last Association of Writiers & Writing Programs conference, a famed historical literary figure stood for pictures and selfies next to booths piled high with books. He was bald except for a tuft of…

The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy and a leading figure in the rationalist movement. Descartes was weary of past authority and of knowledge gained through the senses.…