Phyllis Barber’s new work, The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand and Sky, spans immense time. The book carries the reader from Barber’s childhood in post–World War II Nevada through adolescence, multiple marriages, children, relocation, ecological…
After his death and resurrection on Earth, Jesus Christ traveled to New Zion—a planet in the Kolob star system—and appeared to its six-eyed alien inhabitants, whom he named the Othersheep. He explained to the Othersheep…
Mormon Tradition and the Individual TalentMary Lythgoe Bradford. Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2015. 185 pp.
Reviewed by Joey Franklin
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.”1 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.2 Tradition, to Eliot, was the deep well of Western literature. Studying the personal essay in school, tradition for me meant the work of the genre’s luminaries—Montaigne and Bacon, Hazlitt and Lamb, Woolf and Didion, Baldwin and White.
For Time and All Eternities. By Mette Ivie Harrison. Soho Press, 2017
Reviewed by Heather B. Moore
For Time and All Eternities is the third installment of the Linda Wallheim mystery series. For Time works well as a standalone—in fact, I read the first book The Bishop’s Wife, but not the second book. I didn’t feel lost, which I appreciated. Linda Wallheim is the wife of an LDS Bishop, and although she and her husband have raised five children together, recent months in their marriage has been rocky. Linda is sympathetic to those who have struggled with a church policy change, and she finds that her sympathies have created a deep divide between her and her husband Kurt. Regardless, they continue to move through the motions of their marriage until the day that Linda’s son Kenneth comes to tell her he is marrying a young woman from a polygamist family. Linda and Kurt are shocked, but they agree to meet the young woman Naomi, who in turn, invites Linda and Kurt to meet her very large family–which includes Naomi’s father Stephen Carter, his five wives, and dozens of children.
States of Deseret. William Morris, editor. Peculiar Press, 2017. Alternative history short story anthology. 109 pages, $3.00.
Reviewed by Barrett Burgin
Last year I presented this scenario to my classmates: what if the Civil War had never ended and Deseret had become its own nation? This idea of an alternate Mormon history really took hold on a classroom of BYU Media Arts students. Later, I found myself similarly fascinated while reading the new alternative history story collection States of Deseret. There is, perhaps, something inherently interesting to Mormons about reimagining our own brief history. Whether it’s a Zionistic yearning for our unfinished theocracy or a regretful wish to rewrite past wrongs, States of Deseret taps into our cultural dance with history and uses it as a platform to entertain, educate, and inquire.
Dialogue 20.2 (Summer 1987): 31–43
Stout’s article is a reminder just how important psychology and psychologists were for mediating these early debates. It really was groundbreaking in LDS print media. He talks about how he believed and presented publicly theories on the cause and cure of homoseuxaity, following Freudian psychology in 1970. “16 years later, “he states, “I can state that what I presented was wrong and simplistic. The evolving change in my views came by examining new research, gaining more clinical experience, and looking for alternative explanations to clarify some of the mystery surrounding the development of human sexuality and specifically homosexuality.” Stout’s overview provides a guide to the updated psychological research from the 1970s and 80s that overturned earlier consensus on the pathologization of homosexuality and on whether it can be cured. He tackles the ethical and moral issues with forced celibacy, but leaves the question as a mystery of paradox of how to proceed on the topic, warning against “extremes” on all sides.
Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…
A knot can be a beautiful thing. A knot can reveal truths about how the world works. Some people are so enraptured by knots, they dedicate their lives to studying them. I’m devoting no energy…
Of the legacy of Joseph Smith, historian Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1936, “The vision perishes; it is the vertigo that endures.” Reading the novel The Prophet’s Wife by Libbie Grant is to feel that same…
Listen to this piece here. I come from a family of Mormons, although perhaps somewhat unorthodox ones. Somewhere in England and what is today Romania, my father’s ancestors heard of a man named Joseph Smith…