The following chapter is excerpted from One More River to Cross, the title of the first novel of a trilogy to be called Standing on the Promises being published by Deseret Book beginning in August…
A friend writes: In a walking excursion last fall through the old block lying between Fifth and Sixth East, Seventh and Eight South—in a narrow alley behind Charon’s Mexican Bakery—I came across a shop of…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (usually called Mormon or LDS church) is having enormous success in most parts of the world. Growth is particularly impressive in Latin America. In 1971 there were only 217,500 LDS members on this continent, accounting for no more than seven percent of the church’s total membership.
Ever since his great synthesis, Darwin’s name has been a source of discomfort to the religious world. Too sweeping to be fully fathomed, too revolutionary to be easily accepted, but too well documented to be…
The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force,
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails.
I am twenty-one years old.
I lie in the golden light of a Korean September afternoon. I have curled myself up on the musty, avocado-skinned sofa that occupies a large corner of the living room. A small living room in a small apartment, which occupies the floor above a cosmetics store that seems to sell only furniture.
“Have you heard the really bad news?” my editor, Doc, asked almost off handedly as he wound the film in his camera.
Then came that pause.
Historians have long believed that history does not consist simply of recounting the past according to the Rankean ideal of telling it “as it really was.” The process of researching, selecting, and emplotting historical evidence within a narrative structure is often idiosyncratic, and may be employed to further a host of goals. Within communities, history represents a way of appropriating the past in order to serve the needs of the present. Maurice Halbwachs’s work emphasizes the role history plays as the “collective memory” of a community. Halbwachs argues that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by the people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” This process involves the retention of useful historical emplotment points coupled with the suppression of those “facts” which threaten to undermine a community’s structures.
Martin Harris is known for being a Book of Mormon scribe, witness, and financier. However, little is known about his activities while living in Kirtland, Ohio, for over thirty-five years. This article will present what…
To write is to siphon the clouds, the stars, the wind and rain through the pen. It’s like holding a root into the earth of the soul. It’s like a channel from the sun to…