On 24 September 1977, a group of fifteen Latter-day Saint women met for a luncheon at the home of Anna Taylor in Orem, Utah. The group, including Taylor’s sister-in-law Fern Smoot Taylor, Wanda Scott, Florence…
I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”
A drum was beating that night as my family and I entered the elementary school gymnasium. Animal skins were stretched across a portion of hollowed-out tree, two flat brown hands pounding on their surface. Instantly…
Pancha Robinson was doing dishes at her mother’s sink and watching her husband Rick, who was out in the backyard with the children. Gloria, Pancha’s sister, was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with a…
Luke had a dream. When I first married his daughter Marie, she warned me that he believed dreams were a form of personal revelation. But it was not until the summer of 1952 that I…
Historical Christianity is a remarkable composite of diverse religious cultures, a mixture that even today, after two millennia, is still mixing, blending things that often will not blend and fusing the unfusible. Sometimes severe, chaste,…
At first glance, people from a middle-class, educated, medically, technically, and industrially sophisticated country may be tempted to see the culture of a developing country as not merely different but as a polar opposite. We…
She rarely blew her cool and never ever swore, but—”Dammit! Hell!” The metal stirring spoon rebounded off the sink and took a bite out of the kitchen wall. The real Tracy Sequaptewa? She glared at…
19 JANUARY: Belgrade must be the smoggiest of all cities. If you look closely, you can see farmers through the haze plowing fields between runways. President told us in Vienna that if it ever does…
Paula had the aisle seat. Her younger brother Tony was in the middle, next to Sugar, and the two of them pressed against the window and each other and pointed at cloud formations. Down below…