Luke’s Train Ride
April 12, 2018[…] Dolly were to arrive in Indonesia, our house had been plastered with signs in both Indonesian and English saying, “Go home you American Dogs.” I had learned that our lives were in jeopardy and […]
[…] Dolly were to arrive in Indonesia, our house had been plastered with signs in both Indonesian and English saying, “Go home you American Dogs.” I had learned that our lives were in jeopardy and […]
[…] of her that makes up part of me. I know I should not torture myself with this search. It is too painful, and it is impossible. I go through her things in an attempt […]
The unifying thesis of the twelve essays contained in When Prophets Die: The Post Charismatic Fate of New Religious Movements is that most new religious movements, though heavily dependent on a single dominant personality, usually…
[…] yet really my own. It is convenient and sensible to stay in a church when one knows that breaking a strong and successful legacy will scar family relationships. More to the point, if security is […]
[…] images flashed in my mind of dried-up people, withered like the lawns and gardens in the record- breaking summer drought. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Chapman, sat in the same chair every day, her once-imposing […]
[…] terms a “rabbinical metamorphosis.” Rudolf Glanz in Jews and Mormons (1963) mentions far more extreme examples among English “Anglo-Israelites,” including circumcision and seventh-day Sabbatarianism. Wilson notes that a New Englander in Santayana’s novel The […]
[…] only way that is truly free for a peasant: it comes to you. Ever since the ground- breaking studies of Gerd Theissen in the early seventies, the itinerant radicalism of Jesus and of the […]
[…] True religion has never been respectable. If you are laughed at, laugh along. If you are criticized, search your souls. Jesus did not say, “count my sheep.” He said, “feed my sheep.” Do not […]
The prophet Joseph Smith once told Nancy Rigdon, whom he was attempting to persuade to become his plural wife, that whatever God required was right, no matter what it was (374). Smith went on to…
At the baptismal Erma sings “Que grande es El,” her voice breaking, and the woman she has brought to Jesus, clothed in white on the front row, weeps.