
Volume 40, No. 2
Summer 2007
The Summer 2007 issue begins with "The Theology of Desire" by Cetti Cherniak, which is part two of an essay on sexuality and sexual expression within the church and reconciles this with modern LDS theology. The next article is one by Barry Laga, titled "Making the Absent Visible: The Real, Ideal, and the Abstract in Mormon Art," beginning with a look at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and uses it to reflect on the difficulty to encapsulate something fully when depicting it in art, this is followed by an epistemological look at the church and how the church answers these deep and fundamental questions about human existence. Also included in this issue are several personal voices, a beautiful pair of fictional stories, and a thought provoking poem titled "Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony."
Contents
Articles/Essays
Making the Absent Visible: The Real, Ideal, and the Abstract in Mormon Art
Barry LagaIn April 1993, President Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, international dignitaries, and Holocaust survivors celebrated the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the monument is one of the most expensive additions to the federal museum system. Its mission, described by the museum’s project director Michael Berenbaum, is to “memorialize the victims of Nazism by providing an exhaustive historical narrative of the Holocaust and to present visitors with an object lesson in the ethical ideals of American political culture by presenting the negation of those ideals.”
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Fiction
Follow Me, Boys
Kristen CarsonThe station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…
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Sister Love
Susan Morgan“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen. “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—” Lynn glanced…
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Letters to the Editor
Letters to the Editor
Letters to the EditorSteven Orton, Remembering Dialogue
Gary Hernandez, Thoughts on Dialogue
Michael E. McDonald, Scriptural Cosmology
Lane Twitchell, An Artist Declares His Independence
D. Michael Quinn, Filling Gaps and Responding to “Silences in Mormon History”
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Personal Voices
Trial of Faith
John Gustav-WrathallOn a recent visit to Utah, I was excited to attend church with my parents at their LDS ward. Regular attendance at my own ward in Minneapolis has become an important part of my life. But perhaps because of the unique role of family-centered piety in Mormonism, I always find special comfort in attending church with my parents. Furthermore, because of my many years of alienation from the LDS Church, my parents find it deeply gratifying that for the first time in twenty years, I want to go with them. Atten dance at church as a family is perhaps an affirmation of the bonds we hope will endure between us in the eternities.
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Once upon July
David Clark KnowltonAt home it was hot . . . days and days above a hundred. I could imagine the leaves of summer wilting in the afternoon heat. But that was so far away on the other side of the equator.
Here it was cold. Although it was July, I had on my parka and a sweater as I walked down a rough, cobble-stoned street shaded by two-story, pastel-colored adobe walls. I listened to the sibilant clipping of Bolivian Spanish and the soft guttural rattle of Aymara as people negotiated prices and shared gossip in the small stores whose light rushed out, like warmth, into the narrow street.
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More Musings on Motherhood
Tracie A. LambI was unprepared when my daughters became teenagers. In fact, I was blindsided by this phase of life. I never claimed to have native talent in mothering; but after years of study and practice, I thought I had gotten the hang of it a little. I have been proven sadly mistaken.
As I expressed in my first essay on motherhood, written more than a decade ago, I found motherhood both exhilarating and overwhelming; but I never doubted that I would be a mother. As a good Mormon girl, I always had marriage and motherhood as my ultimate objectives. Even though I was also a returned missionary with a graduate degree, my life was not complete until I had children.
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Poetry
Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony
Ronald WilcoxSymmetry exists in exact reflections of Love:
Take a patch of chaos circling beforehand,
Sling it past black stars circling at random,
Create light in rings inside particled sparks,
Glowing in random points and recognitions,
Moving and brewing beneath your own hand.
Respond to Word of God inside your mind:
Call the involvement creation, as the eyes
Of the Gods gaze infinity into finite forms.
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Reviews
Dining with the Devil | R. A. Christmas, A Long Spoon: Poems
Robert A. ReesOver the past forty years, Robert Christmas has been one of the best and most consistent poets writing about Mormon life and culture. His distinctive style and voice are readily recognizable. What makes Christmas’s poetry…
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Safe Haven for a Time | Thomas Cottam Romney, The Mormon Colonies in Mexico
Paul H. WrightThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) and its currently jailed leader, Warren Jeffs, recently established the 1700-acre Yearn for Zion Ranch in dry country northwest of San Antonio, amid alfalfa fields, oil…
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Heartfelt Theater | Thom Duncan, Matters of the Heart
Nan McCullochYou might say that Thom Duncan is the founding grandfather of The Nauvoo Theatrical Society. In 1983 Duncan owned Theatre-in-the-Square in Provo, Utah, the first theater dedicated to the production of LDS-themed dramatic works. This…
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A Touching Remembrance | Helen Elizabeth Nebeker, Bittersweet: A Candid Love Story
Richard J. JacobExtracting one’s memoirs from correspondence can be emotionally hazardous. This is especially true if the subject is romance and the sources are love letters. But if the settings, both global and personal, are unusually profound,…
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Volume Art
About the Artists: Bethanne Andersen, Hal Doulgas Himes, Wulf Barsch, Greg Olsen, Liz Lemon Swindle, and David Koch
Issue ArtThe Last Supper (Place Setting) Bethanne Andersen A graduate of Brigham Young University’s BFA and MFA program, Bethanne Andersen initially focused on abstract painting but later moved to New York to study illustration at the…
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