Volume 59, No. 3

Faith crisis is pervasive within religious traditions of all flavors. Unresolved, it can lead to departure from one’s own tradition or failure to engage in the first place. I have found it useful to frame…

Tickets to the auction are in short supply. The auctioneers selected the Beehive House on South Temple for the occasion because of its spacious accommodations. The banquet room has been prepared with rows of cushioned…

The preliminary resurrection was a rush. Bob Markham and his wife, Mandy, stood next to their graves in the Alpine, Utah, cemetery, as instructed, and waited. Quite gradually, atoms and molecules started rising out of…

Standing in front of the sink rubbing the soap on my palms and through my fingers, I focus more on my gray hairs in the two inches of undyed regrowth reflected in the mirror than…

Was it foolish or inspired—this idea of smuggling the spirit of Christmas into the canal-side neighborhoods of Thailand? Could a red suit and a cotton beard convey a message where rote memorized discussions had sometimes…

On a trip to England many years ago, walking and wandering the streets of London on a late Saturday night, I thought of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s words, “When a man is tired of London, he…

Beloved, you live unofficially
in decommissioned scripture
condescended to metaphor
a footnote to pages

Wind.

Wyoming howls relentlessly under July sun and we drive on
Past antelope sentinels and endless sage
Trailing dust into unsettling emptiness—

Yet again through this house like a mountain stream
      chatter has run down the pine-framed vistas
            each landing’s distinctive prospect of Tahoe
pressed flat by early August heat

a woman tills
the earth
forever her
shoulders never

Christmas Eve
      snow flurries creeping down the mountains
almost caressing cozy houses, bright-lit stores.
Something like sanctity sits upon the many-breasted hills.

Ryan Davis’s new book, Dispatches from Mormon Zion, is a collection of ten essays, all connected by two central tenets: that Mormonism is magnified and made richer by considering it outside of the narrow confines…

From its early beginnings in the nineteenth century to its influence on contemporary landscapes, Mormonism has played a significant role in shaping American history. By examining the historical trajectory of Mormonism alongside key events in American history, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism offers valuable insights into the intersections of religion, politics, and society. This perspective helps readers contextualize current debates and challenges facing both Mormon communities and American society as a whole.

Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes, the latest book by the longtime policy journalist and public thinker, presents two broad arguments: first, that throughout American history, Christian churches have played an essential role in enabling our liberal…

The triumph of The Dead Fathers is an ending that I don’t dare spoil; it lands as an epic culmination of a subtly expanding panorama I hadn’t seen coming. John Bennion spends nearly five hundred pages in Utah’s West Desert—spare, wind-scoured, abandoned and rediscovered—and then, in the final movements, he opens the aperture until a hermit’s private grief feels communal, even cosmic. If that sounds grand, it is. Bennion delivers the unexpected.

Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age is a thoughtful consideration of both the practices and belief systems of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—colloquially referred to as Mormons—and the religious…

Rebecca L. Davis’s book Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America asks as its animating question, how have Americans valued, expressed, and contained their desires over the course of American history? The first comprehensive history of sexuality published in over thirty years, Davis’s book applies new paradigms and conceptions of the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality to show that neither sexuality nor sexual identities are unchanging facts—they have a history we can and must learn from if we are to solve some of today’s most vexing sexual concerns.

I got the book and felt both the chill of skepticism and a flash of jubilation—mostly at the derring-do of my old friend University of Illinois Press. I was eager to pat the acquisition editors on the back. Could I do the same for the author?

I take my invitation to speak to you today very seriously. I give this message motivated by love and concern and hope for all of us, and I ask you to accept these words in the same way.

Golden yellow paper cubes extending beyond the two-dimensional surface of Susana Isabel Silva’s Partitura modular (2025) create an architecture of shapes resembling a bird’s-eye view of a village or urban center, lingering as a score for a city unheard. Punched holes in the angular surfaces amplify physical contrasts between surface and depth with the illusion of shading. A longer sequence of dots and dashes vertically cuts the composition in half, overwriting the smooth flatness of surface, offering a cryptic linear schism. The work names its terminology provocatively: partitura—a score where notation is as much about absence as presence in a modular topology of silence rendered through paper, cut edges, and the residue of algorithmic notation.