October 3, 1992, the first day of the 162d semiannual LDS general conference, was the 300th anniversary of the action that finally stopped the Salem witch trials. Those trials, perhaps the greatest blot on American religious devotion, had resulted in the deaths of twenty people, all of whom vigorously proclaimed their innocence to the end.
This collection of reminiscences about life in a tiny southern Idaho com munity has such an authentic flavor of small-town Mormon country, a flavor which I did not experience first-hand but at a second-generation level…
At age sixty-eight I have lived long enough to know some of the sorrows of this life. More than once I have cried out with the Psalmist: “Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!”
[Tuesday, November 19.] Brother Duvalier—the branch president—had us out to his farm for dinner tonight. Which is to say, he had us out to milk cows with his farmhand while his wife made us dinner. …
As Sterling McMurrin put it, “Every religion needs a saint, and Lowell Bennion is Mormonism’s saint.” Why does a church need a saint? People need a flesh and blood example, a person who has attained…
I. Introduction My previous essay on the historical Jesus in the winter 1997 issue began with the famous cry of Hebrews 13:8 (“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever!”) and proceeded to focus on…
Mirrors tell only the truth, or so they say. And tonight as I stare at my image in the glass, I think I look the same as always: for the past five years I’ve worn…
Shortly after completing The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton in 1967, Fawn M. Brodie wrote to her friend Dale Morgan confessing that she had “been periodically haunted by the desire to do…
The ranger stoops to toss a stick away
and points to a narrow hole dug in the mud.
“Snakes,” she says, “are plentiful this year;
there’s some bubonic plague in rodents here.”
At first, the title of this book seems a bit misleading and confusing. “Friendly fire” became popular during the Gulf War as a description of how American troops were killed by their comrades during desert…