Volume 11, No. 3

I will tell you now that words come hard for me. Perhaps that is why I value them so highly. And I make no apology for being simple where most men are complex and complex where many men are simple.

When the church orator poses his rhetorical question, “Who’s on the Lord’s side, who?”, no one thinks to suggest Sigmund Freud. Most Mormons associate Freud with lustful sexuality, primitive drives and (somehow) biological evolution. Psychoanalysis,…

Eliciting commitment while maintaining participative membership is a major consideration for organizations such as the LDS Church. Relatively few Mormons, for example, formally leave the Church, but many “fall away” from participation and commitment.  In…

Institutions, structures and traditional roles provide necessary meaning, support and direction in people’s lives. Chaos occurs when they are wholly lost, and yet too much structure and constricting roles, out-of step with a changing culture, contribute to problems which may require psychiatric treatment.

In this century the controversy between science and religion has shifted from natural science to social science. The conflict is less heated because religion is culturally less important now than it used to be. Still…

General History Allen, Edward J. Second United Order Among the Mormons. New York: AMS Press, 1967. $12.50 Reprint of 1936 edition.  Bennett, John C. The History of the Saints: Or an Expose of Joe Smith…

Joseph Smith once wrote of the Bible: “I believe the Bible as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers.”[1] Unfortunately, none of the manuscripts penned or dictated by…

Reed Smoot had become a U. S. Senator, and the “Y” a university, when I began kindergarten at Brigham Young Academy, with Ida Dusenberry as my teacher. Ida Smoot Dusenberry was a younger sister of…

Some circumstances in life lie outside the possibility of comfort. There may be philosophical arguments to support such a statement, but perhaps it will suffice to point out that the scriptures reveal a suffering God. As a matter of fact, sorrow appears to be the effect that we most frequently work on him. Indeed, our “Man of Constant Sorrows” has promised that his way of life is likely to bring a “sword” to our comfort, that his “peace” will be unlike any we might have imagined. 

My earliest memory of Retty Mott is of hurrying past her house as I walked home from Primary. I hurried past because my cousins had told me that she chased people. Once she had leaped out from behind a tree in her front yard and hit Max Peterson with a fire shovel. She had chased him clear to the end of the block, hitting him all the way with the fire shovel . . .

Inside, to the left, in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University, rests the great painting, “The Adoration of the Magi,” by Peter Paul Rubens. To the right, the King’s College Choir prepares to sing. The hinged…

The bus trip from Utah had taken twenty-four hours and now, as the day darkened to evening, it was almost over. I had struggled the night before to sleep, but woke at each little village’s…

(Marriage Song for DJ. and N.J.)

I. Before Sunrise 

Artemis, 
too faint for shadows, 
wanes over the western sands.

Some nights in a small cove 
sea and shore talk endlessly 
(of dapples shallows hollows) 
seeking sun despite the polar 
breath from dark’s yawning throat 

I want to say it’s been swell knowing you, 
even as you grow toward the grave, 
hurt hours when your confinement will set free
that body from its berth within the womb. 

On the hearth kneel astride; 
Now bend, so light laps your 
Body. Set loose your hair: 
Now from the fire’s throat it 

We are the sisters of the sea. 
Something there is in you and me 
That calls us to our very coasts, bids us stand 
Where green-veined breakers moan upon the sand,
Seeking something the old oceans hide. 

“A novel,” Randall Jarrell once wrote, “is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” There is a notion abroad in Mormondom (one I doubt Herbert Harker subscribes to) that there…

Recent research indicates that certain ancient peoples had a much greater interest and proficiency in observational astronomy than they have generally been given credit for in the past. The evidence to support such a position…

As this book about the sainted mothers of Mormonism was coming off the press, President Spencer Kimball was preparing his opening address for the 148th Annual Conference of the Church. Remembering the Utah IWY fiasco…

The Mountain Meadow Massacre was one of the most tragic criminal events in the history of the United States, and William Wise’s book concerning the massacre is similarly tragic in its lack of scholarship and…

In an attractive volume with numerous illustrations, tables, and charts, A. J. Simmonds has told the story of those Cache Valley Latter-day Saints who for various economic, social or political reasons were excommunicated from or…

Homespun suggests ways for women of today to practice pioneer crafts. Individual chapters on log-cabin cooking, preserving and drying foods, homemade remedies, needle arts, quilts, patchwork, dyeing, producing cloth and clothing, rug making, soapmaking, candlemaking,…

As an indulgent and unrepentant reader of novels, I grew tired of the absurd, the pessimistic, the despairing years of the anti-hero. Thus it is heartening to find many of the best novelists now writing…

Obi-Wan Kenobi, that ancient warrior, knight of the Jedi, resembles in many ways Don Juan, the hunter and warrior (and sorcerer) of Carlos Castarieda’s books. Even their names are similar, and both live in the…

The Peoples of Utah, edited by that able scholar, Helen Z. Papanikolas, and published under a grant from the Utah American Revolution Bicentennial Commisson, provides a welcome reassessment of Utah’s many nationalities. It comprises fourteen…