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No More Sister than St. Nick

Listen to an interview about this piece here. The new young Bishop Fredning had not asked Vernie to prepare and narrate the Christmas program. For the first time in twenty-seven years, the bishop of the…

Three Christmas Hymns: A Christmas Hymn; The Babe of Bethlehem; Away in a Manger

A Child’s Christmas in Utah

It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes. 

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Passover: A Mirrored Epiphany

How many years from Bethlehem 
Until the awful eloquence 
Of wine and lamb 
And bitter herbs 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Christmas Sonnets from Other Years

1937 | 1940 | 1944

Woman-child | Relief Society Course of Study, Learn of Me

As a teenager I read my dad’s old priest hood manual written by T. Edgar Lyon. Later I found even older manuals for MIA and Sunday School by other Mormon authors such as E. E.…

Lowry Nelson’s Utah | Lowry Nelson, In the Direction of His Dreams, Memoirs

Lowry Nelson was one of Utah’s greatest intellectual products. At age ninety-three, this, the final volume of an autobiographical trilogy rounds off Boyhood in a Mormon Village and Eighty: One Man’s Way There. Nelson’s new…

LDS Assumptions | Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, and Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

The only major LDS science-fiction writer, Orson Scott Card recently won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for Ender’s Game (1985) and nominations for the Hugo Award. Speaker for the Dead…

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No More Sister than St. Nick

Listen to an interview about this piece here. The new young Bishop Fredning had not asked Vernie to prepare and narrate the Christmas program. For the first time in twenty-seven years, the bishop of the…

Three Christmas Hymns: A Christmas Hymn; The Babe of Bethlehem; Away in a Manger

A Child’s Christmas in Utah

It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes. 

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Passover: A Mirrored Epiphany

How many years from Bethlehem 
Until the awful eloquence 
Of wine and lamb 
And bitter herbs 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Christmas Sonnets from Other Years

1937 | 1940 | 1944

Woman-child | Relief Society Course of Study, Learn of Me

As a teenager I read my dad’s old priest hood manual written by T. Edgar Lyon. Later I found even older manuals for MIA and Sunday School by other Mormon authors such as E. E.…

Lowry Nelson’s Utah | Lowry Nelson, In the Direction of His Dreams, Memoirs

Lowry Nelson was one of Utah’s greatest intellectual products. At age ninety-three, this, the final volume of an autobiographical trilogy rounds off Boyhood in a Mormon Village and Eighty: One Man’s Way There. Nelson’s new…

LDS Assumptions | Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, and Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

The only major LDS science-fiction writer, Orson Scott Card recently won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for Ender’s Game (1985) and nominations for the Hugo Award. Speaker for the Dead…

Views of Brigham | Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses, and Newell G. Bringhurst, Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier

Brigham Young: American Moses makes several important contributions. First, it relies on and quotes extensively from primary sources. Readers will glean a number of new insights. Particularly helpful is Arrington’s chapter on Brigham’s youthful life…

Christmas Morning—1906

By now the Christmases of my life—all but one—have escaped re strictions of time and place and have arranged themselves, undated, in an intricate mosaic of memories, which can be instantly evoked by such small…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Just Enough Truth for Christmastime

In a couple of weeks, I’ll pack up my truck and with my roommate head for Utah. We’ll be there the week before Christmas, skiing and visiting friends and family. We both bought new skis…

Famine Relief, the Church, and the Environment

Consecration, Stewardship, and Accountability: Remedy for a Dying Planet

The Church and the Community: Personal Reflections on Mormon Intellectual Life

Freedom and Grace: Rethinking Theocracy

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

Satan’s Foot in the Door: Democrats at Brigham Young University

Palm Sunday

“We Mormons lack ‘joy in the Lord,’” Bishop Lewis told his counselors and the ward secretary at the start of bishopric meeting on Palm Sunday morning. They listened attentively. “The name of Jesus is the…

Rudger Clawson’s Report on LDS Church Finances at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Rudger Judd Clawson, born 12 March 1857 in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a polygamist and the first Mormon convicted and imprisoned (1884-87) for violating federal law (Edmunds Act of 1882) regarding unlawful co habitation.[1]…

The First Christmas Eve at Home

The air above my parents’ roof is cold. 
It pushes smoke back down the chimney, 
forcing me to turn off the fire alarm 
and open both windows. 

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Awake all night where no night conies 
she trasmits waves into the sky 
from sixty feet beneath snow. 
Some arc into the solar winds 

Sunday Morning — Eight Days Before Christmas, 2001

On death, I have thoughts 
That bread and water 
Can not satisfy: 
Because they are gone 
Jack, John, Eugene, and Ruth. . . 

Christmas Conflict: 2001

How were we to know 
            through the thick, smoking days, 
            the awful rubble of terror 

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

As though he were sculpted there, so still
is the only Shama thrush of the winter
dripping melody among dropping needles
high in this raining forest of ironwoods 

Dining with the Devil | R. A. Christmas, A Long Spoon: Poems

Over 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…

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…

Thanksgiving Turkeys, Paradox, and Godhood

Review: Guilty as Charged? Mormonism in Nazi Germany David Conley Nelson. Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany

No More Sister than St. Nick

Listen to an interview about this piece here. The new young Bishop Fredning had not asked Vernie to prepare and narrate the Christmas program. For the first time in twenty-seven years, the bishop of the…

Three Christmas Hymns: A Christmas Hymn; The Babe of Bethlehem; Away in a Manger

A Child’s Christmas in Utah

It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes. 

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Passover: A Mirrored Epiphany

How many years from Bethlehem 
Until the awful eloquence 
Of wine and lamb 
And bitter herbs 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Christmas Sonnets from Other Years

1937 | 1940 | 1944

Woman-child | Relief Society Course of Study, Learn of Me

As a teenager I read my dad’s old priest hood manual written by T. Edgar Lyon. Later I found even older manuals for MIA and Sunday School by other Mormon authors such as E. E.…

Lowry Nelson’s Utah | Lowry Nelson, In the Direction of His Dreams, Memoirs

Lowry Nelson was one of Utah’s greatest intellectual products. At age ninety-three, this, the final volume of an autobiographical trilogy rounds off Boyhood in a Mormon Village and Eighty: One Man’s Way There. Nelson’s new…

LDS Assumptions | Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, and Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

The only major LDS science-fiction writer, Orson Scott Card recently won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for Ender’s Game (1985) and nominations for the Hugo Award. Speaker for the Dead…

Views of Brigham | Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses, and Newell G. Bringhurst, Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier

Brigham Young: American Moses makes several important contributions. First, it relies on and quotes extensively from primary sources. Readers will glean a number of new insights. Particularly helpful is Arrington’s chapter on Brigham’s youthful life…

Christmas Morning—1906

By now the Christmases of my life—all but one—have escaped re strictions of time and place and have arranged themselves, undated, in an intricate mosaic of memories, which can be instantly evoked by such small…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Just Enough Truth for Christmastime

In a couple of weeks, I’ll pack up my truck and with my roommate head for Utah. We’ll be there the week before Christmas, skiing and visiting friends and family. We both bought new skis…

Famine Relief, the Church, and the Environment

Consecration, Stewardship, and Accountability: Remedy for a Dying Planet

The Church and the Community: Personal Reflections on Mormon Intellectual Life

Freedom and Grace: Rethinking Theocracy

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

Satan’s Foot in the Door: Democrats at Brigham Young University

Palm Sunday

“We Mormons lack ‘joy in the Lord,’” Bishop Lewis told his counselors and the ward secretary at the start of bishopric meeting on Palm Sunday morning. They listened attentively. “The name of Jesus is the…

Rudger Clawson’s Report on LDS Church Finances at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Rudger Judd Clawson, born 12 March 1857 in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a polygamist and the first Mormon convicted and imprisoned (1884-87) for violating federal law (Edmunds Act of 1882) regarding unlawful co habitation.[1]…

The First Christmas Eve at Home

The air above my parents’ roof is cold. 
It pushes smoke back down the chimney, 
forcing me to turn off the fire alarm 
and open both windows. 

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Awake all night where no night conies 
she trasmits waves into the sky 
from sixty feet beneath snow. 
Some arc into the solar winds 

Sunday Morning — Eight Days Before Christmas, 2001

On death, I have thoughts 
That bread and water 
Can not satisfy: 
Because they are gone 
Jack, John, Eugene, and Ruth. . . 

Christmas Conflict: 2001

How were we to know 
            through the thick, smoking days, 
            the awful rubble of terror 

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

As though he were sculpted there, so still
is the only Shama thrush of the winter
dripping melody among dropping needles
high in this raining forest of ironwoods 

Dining with the Devil | R. A. Christmas, A Long Spoon: Poems

Over 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…

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…

Thanksgiving Turkeys, Paradox, and Godhood

Review: Guilty as Charged? Mormonism in Nazi Germany David Conley Nelson. Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany