Follow Me, Boys
March 21, 2018The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…
The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…
“John Durham Peters may well be the most original thinker in the broad field of communication and media studies in the United States.” So claims Michael Schudson, professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego.
After our two-day honeymoon in West Yellowstone, we move into this one-bedroom place above the Modern Plumbing & Heating building in Rigby. There’s a door right on Main Street that opens up to a barn-red…
I sat in the bed facing the two smiling demons—leaders of the great Satan/Wal-Mart Organization that ran the hospital. They were trying to convince me that I should let them adopt a clone of my five-year-old daughter Emily. She had been created by new genetic techniques developed by their powerful company and they insisted, “Her place will be great in the new world order.” Over the last few days, however, they had lied to me so often I knew it was a sham. Despair seemed to overwhelm me at the thought of the strange global changes that had recently taken place under this evil organization’s machinations. But I was resolute. I would never let them have the copy of my daughter.
I was in Beijing during the first week of June 1989, ostensibly to explore legal and policy options relating to the “one-child” policy with China’s State Family Planning Commission. As it turned out, they wanted…
Dialogue 41.4 (Winter 2008): 121–147
In this essay, I shall begin by describing what we can learn about our Mother in Heaven from the scriptures. I then will draw from those descriptions some (very modest) suggestions for how we might actually worship, or at least honor, Her in ways that should not be considered offensive or heterodox by traditionalists. This essay is therefore a little exercise in religion-making. It is my hope that I will be able to express my mediating thoughts in a way that will not be deemed offensive by those of either school of thought on the subject.
At nineteen, a Mormon missionary in Brazil, I felt foreign in every part, torn from language. “Boy, it’s cold out,” I’d quip to the natives. “No, Elder, hot” they’d say. “The word is hot.” At…
On March 13, 1852, two men, one white and armed with a rifle, the other a Goshute armed with bow and arrows, confronted each other in the Stansbury Mountains west of Tooele, a small, two-year-old settlement some twenty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The first man, Jacob Vernon Hamblin, a lieutenant in Utah’s Nauvoo Legion, had been given specific instructions by his military and ecclesiastical superior to kill all Indians, as they had been raiding the whites’ cattle. However, when Hamblin and the Goshute faced each other in the mountains, neither could kill the other despite multiple arrows loosed at Hamblin and multiple attempts to shoot the Indian. Finally the Indian fled after Hamblin threw a stone at him. This was a tense, dangerous, yet almost comic confrontation that would profoundly shape Hamblin’s subsequent life. He concluded that the incident was a sign given him from God that he should not kill Indians and that, if he followed this directive, he himself would never be killed by them.
I first heard the tales of Hugh Nibley, the brilliant and eccentric LDS scholar whose fertile and fecund brain defended and expanded the faith of thoughtful Church members, virtually at my mother’s knee. I remember as a child listening rapt with wonder at the accounts of his marvelous ability with languages, his wartime service with Allied Army intelligence, and his vast knowledge of things ancient and arcane.
Badge and Bryant Braunhil were first cousins, but they could have passed for fraternal twins, having—both of them—bright blue eyes, big grins, and unkempt blond hair. They lived in Linroth, a Mormon town in northern…