Spring 2002
The Spring 2002 Issuefeatures reflections and tributes honoring Eugene England, a prominent figure in Mormon literature and scholarship."For Eugene" serves as an introductory tribute, setting the tone for the heartfelt remembrances that follow. Levi S. Peterson discusses how England's work was "salvaged for Mormonism," emphasizing his contributions to the faith and literature. Douglas Thayer shares personal memories in "The Long Cast," highlighting the depth of England's influence on those around him. Stephen Carter offers insights in "A Brief Tour of England," recounting his year spent with England and the impact of their interactions. Allison Pingree reflects on the personal connections forged over "A Dining Room Table," illustrating how shared meals fostered community and understanding. And more. This issue celebrates England's legacy, underscoring his role as a mentor, friend, and influential voice within the Mormon community.
I appreciate the opportunity to pay tribute to my life-long friend, Eu gene England, but my need to honor him properly may lie beyond any hope of my doing so. I feel Eugene’s loss so…
I feel greatly honored to be asked to speak at this memorial service. I hope I can add a dimension to our mutual recognition of Gene’s virtues and qualities. I suppose that Charlotte and the…
I want to talk about Gene as a fisherman, with a slight metaphorical emphasis. Gene’s father was a meat fisherman who believed in catching big fish and lots of them, using whatever method or bait…
We in Utah Valley State College’s Center for the Study of Ethics were sardines, but we were happy sardines. Our office (formerly a mythical beast called a “faculty lounge”) housed the chair of the humanities…
If the tapestry that is my intellectual and spiritual life, Eugene Eng land’s influence not only figures as a prominent color, but helps to shape the pattern of the weave itself. Many of the moments…
Brigham Young said there never was a time when he did not know Joseph Smith. What Brigham meant, I believe, is that when he first met Joseph Smith there was such a deep and immediate…
At various times I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things.
This is an essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea—the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy—that has important religious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and…
[1]In the book of Moses, revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830 as part of his re vision of the Bible, we learn of a prophet named Enoch, who is called to preach repentance to his…
This is the saddest story I have ever told. Not because The Chevrolet is gone, but because it probably is not.
This much is known. During the Christmas season of 1973, Gene and Charlotte England traveled to Salt Lake City from Northfield, Minnesota. They made the trip in The Chevrolet—a brown stationwagon of uncertain origin.
Many years ago Virginia Sorensen wrote me a prophetic letter. She had just read my article, “Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots.” She sounded breathless: “For years and years/’ she wrote, “I have believed—for what reason, I wonder, since I never really lived in the houses where the true tradition was but could only visit a while, and listen, and pause always by the gate where I could hear and see it?—that I was the one to tell this story you speak of. Almost I have heard The Call!”
Much has been written about the heroines in Virginia Sorensen’s adult fiction, their real-life counterparts, and inspirations. By contrast, relatively little attention has been given to her male characters and the family figures on whom many were based. As a self-proclaimed family chronicler, Sorensen found in her male forbears, indeed all members of the Eggertsen family, a significant source of information and ideas for her fiction.
[1]Describing her research for The Proper Gods, a novel about the Yaqui Indians and their culture, Virginia Sorensen said her work had been “an excursion into cultural anthropology” that she thought would continue the rest…
A few years ago while visiting a used bookstore in the Old City (Gamla Stan) section of Stockholm, I asked the proprietor whether he had any materials about Mormons. He brought out a small and likely unique (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″) 39-page pamphlet titled, “Om Mormonerne” (About the Mormons), by S. B. Hersleb Walnum, a “Prison Priest,” published in Bergen, Norway, in 1852.
“If there was every a person, in terms of social justice in our society, for fairness, it would have been David O. McKay. Had it been up to him, alone, he would have given the Black the priesthood that quick!” So spoke one general authority recently, who was called to his position by President McKay and who discussed with him the issue of ordination of Blacks.
Brigham Young said there never was a time when he did not know Joseph Smith. What Brigham meant, I believe, is that when he first met Joseph Smith there was such a deep and immediate…
Here they go, Carma without her cane—she’ll hang onto Dan if her legs give way—through the glass doors into the maze of parents and teenagers and little brothers and sisters, milling, waving, shrieking, whimpering. “I…
I originally wrote this essay for a panel discussion at the second Counterpoint Conference for Mormon Women in 1994 in Salt Lake City. The eight years since then have changed the relative position of women…
On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer and five troops of the Seventh Cavalry met a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors near the Little Bighorn River in Eastern Montana. They were surrounded and…
for Gene England at Utah Valley Hospital, 2001
When I heard about Gene’s surgery, I
thought, “Even with half a brain he’d still
be ten times smarter than me!”
I didn’t go for vinegar
but for the smell of life
for organic tomatoes
not mall tomatoes of feldspar
or other inorganic stuff
Absently, I opened the medicine cabinet
in my folks’ house (searching for a comb),
then stood stunned as you wafted out
like a genie, so generous with cologne
The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force,
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails.
I. October 8, 1908: A Train
Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet,
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit
to Boston, with his traveling companion.
Musky as the cedar drawer
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk,
a genie scent, improbable and
distant as the sound of hooves on sand
—for Beth Rich
She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on
the sun to map the journeys:
I am Ron involved in me now Norma’s gone.
Norma knew me more than my mind only.
I know me only in eyes gone dead as mirrors.
More than I Norma knew me in my eyes.
The garden heaves with what does not belong—
plastics, agent orange, rubber cement, land mines
that won’t biodegrade, disintegrating corpse
bones, sanded into earth by worms
You do not have to do it again
any of it. Only if you care to.
You do not have to hold onto being anyone, anywhere.
Enough is more than plenty.
Gene’s criticism is a stone upon my mouth. He accused:
“You resurrect words I like, like bodies brought too often
from the tomb to be surprising, interesting, new.” Like Clint, who
loved saying “portico,” and Gene himself: speaking all that religion
In an episode in The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, the main character chastises his friends who have masqueraded as Mormon missionaries to res cue him from placement with a Mormon family. The friends have…
Church going is not usually one of the primary images associated with New York City, but it seems that “the city-that-never-sleeps” may not be such a godless metropolis after all. New York Glory is an…
It is fitting that the 1850 exploration of the Mormon corridor through the Great Basin area of Brigham Young’s State of Deseret and the settlement that followed a year later received attention from Utah historians…
