Winter 2004
The Winter 2004 issue begins with "Embodied Mormonism: Performance, Vodou, and the LDS Faith in Haiti" by Jennifer Huss Basquiat, which takes a look at the many different cultural and religious influences in Haiti and how they all end up blending together and influencing each other among the Haitian people. This is followed by B. W. Jorgensen who elaborates on the need within the Mormon community for short stories focused around the Mormon marriage in all the forms they may take, to provide guidance to the married members as they navigate a task as difficult as marriage. Next up is O. Kendall White and Daryl White who take a look on how both the LDS and RLDS church view homosexuality as well as their official policies regarding how they are supposed to live their lives and upcoming changes that may be coming regarding both churchs' stances on the matter. Finally, we have Kristine Haglund Harris who writes a review of the 1989 Primary songbook, and how women and children fit into and have shaped doctrinal changes throughout the twentieth century. Also included in this issue are a pair of fictional pieces and several beautiful works of poetry.
In Haiti religions are rarely understood to be autonomous from one another. It is not unusual for seemingly disparate mythological systems to coexist not only across the Haitian landscape, but also within individual Haitian practice.…
In a now canonical article in 1912, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” George Lyman Kittredge applied the term “marriage group” to a subset among Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath (and her polemic and confessional prologue), the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Franklin. Later scholars sometimes enlarged the group or questioned the inclusion of various tales, but it has persisted as an object of critical attention. Obviously, in proposing a “marriage group” of contemporary Mormon short stories, I cannot expect to discover the kind of “conversation” or “debate” that Chaucerians from Kittredge to Kaske and beyond have analyzed.
The respective websites of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and the Community of Christ,[1] provide explicit access to the public images both churches wish to project. Upon these websites, each denomination…
In 1989, the Primary Association released a new songbook for Mormondom’s children, its first since 1969. Evaluating it for a professional hymnody publication, one reviewer commented: “This handsome volume’s 8V2 x 11″ pages exude a special kind of coziness…. The plentiful decorative illustrations use pastel colors exclusively—and so, in their way, do most of the songs…. [F]or every song about a specifically Mormon doc trine or practice, at least four would fit into practically any Christian, in deed any civilized context.”
There are no waves on the bay side of the peninsula. The tide simply licks up and back, up and back on the sand shore. Beyond the shore, tall sailboats of vivid blues, greens, and…
3 She held the umbrella close to her head, limiting her vision to the circle of stones at her feet. Anna watched her companion’s hemline bounce in time to the click of her heels against…
David S. King has led a life exceptional for its combination of public and ecclesiastical service. His parents were Vera Sjodahl King (1891-1955) and William Henry King (1862-1949), a four-term U.S. Senator from Utah. Born…
D. Jeff Burton, Tolerance for “Cultural Mormons”
Gerry L. Ensley, Joseph, Peepstones, and Pirates
Dan Vogel, Serving Two Masters
Gary James Bergera, Civility, Compassion, Honesty
Richard L. Bushman, Fair-Minded People
Sarah Barringer Gordon, Jana Riess, and Valeen Tippetts Avery, An Excess of Zeal
Ralf Gruenke, Room for Reason and Study
Doug Ward, Respecting Opposite Opinions
Sacred, subtle slavery, the mother’s task
That burden of creation’s holy power.
To love a clot of flesh and never ask
If it deserves its soul at chosen hour.
My family and I drove hours one Sunday to see
a meadow in the mountains of Arizona. We stood
behind a split-rail fence. “It’s beautiful,”
my dad said. “It’s for sale. If we had money
we’d buy it.” And we climbed the fence
and wandered that acre of wildflowers and ferns,
ate fried chicken and picked up our litter,
and went home.
This morning I light red candles
and set them on the sill,
daring the breeze
through an open window
to tease the flames.
Krakauer’s success has come as a writer of narrative nonfiction. He is best known for Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (New York: Villard,1997). In Under the Banner of Heaven:…
Collections of scholarly articles often display their strengths in their parts rather than in their functioning as a unified whole. After all, the structure of such volumes invites readers to pick and choose and, if…
Last spring I wrote an essay for the March 2004 AML symposium in which I argued that the most effective poets writing from the LDS culture are those who provide a counterweight to the main…
Janis Mars Wunderlich, born in Akron, Ohio, in 1970, received a BFA J from Brigham Young University (1992) and an MFA from the Ohio State University (1994). She has given numerous lectures and workshops throughout…
