Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…
Dust clogged my nose and the strong smell of horses, the clump, clump of their hoofs regular-like and slow, the heavy creak of the wheels, and over and above everything else, like sad heartbeats, the solemn thud, thud of the muffled drums. A sort of sigh went over all the multitude, and a woman sobbed out loud once. But mostly folks were quiet. A hush and a fear like the day of doom. You didn’t dare look, and yet it was like something glued your eyes toward that wagon passing, the stars and stripes with the black crepe edgings fluttering clean to the wheels.
Over the years, the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has expressed a set of theories about the nature and purpose of music. Elder Bruce R. McConkie asserted a divine origin of music: “Music is given of God to further his purposes.” Former Church President Heber J. Grant proclaimed the evangelical power of music when he said, “The singing of our sacred hymns, written by the servants of God, has a powerful effect in converting people to the principles of the Gospel, and in promoting peace and spiritual growth.”
A New York native, Terryl Givens did his graduate work in intellectual history (Cornell) and comparative literature (UNC Chapel Hill). In 2019 he retired from the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair at the University of Richmond…
The scriptures often admonish us to pray continuously. Note that I said “continuously,” not “continually.” “Continually” means repeated with interruptions, but “continuously” means without interruptions. Paul tells the saints in Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing”…
[…] remember the rainbow trout my dad and sons caught and gutted. Tonight it’s a fish fry—enough to feed us all. My sister and I small talk, “Where’s the flour?” and “Can you set the […]
[…] were my children and the cold feet and hungry stomachs were mine to warm and mine to feed. When I returned to One Hundred Birds, I expected to gather up enough sustaining sisterhood to […]
[…] Why was she forced to leave home so young? Why must she work such long hours to feed her children? Why can’t the heart of her husband be softened so that he will stop […]
After presenting my research on 1970s Mormon motherhood at a national rhetoric conference in 2017, a woman in the audience (also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) called my research “old news” and made some harsh and disparaging remarks about my analysis. I was upset by her comments, but one of my co-panelists defended me, and after the presentation, five people came up to talk with me about my research in positive terms. One master’s student wanted to know how she could do similar research.
In this issue, Armand Mauss looks back over the decades since his book The Angel and the Beehive was published, with its seminal theory of LDS assimilation and retrenchment, while Fred Gedicks looks forward to project what kinds of assimilation might be possible for Mormonism over the next several decades. Carmon Hardy looks back at the long history of polygamy and its shadow, while Taylor Petrey takes first steps towards a post-heterosexual Mormon theology.