“These 76 quorums were all torn to pieces.” That disturbing report card for seventies quorums came from Joseph Young, senior president of all seventies in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in January…
In this small room
the bishop sits like God
Himself
broad farmer face upon
Edgar to Gloucester in King Lear: Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. June 1982 I grew up in a safe valley. The years five through twelve, when we are most sensuously…
Like an irresistible green vegetation
easing over everything in time,
a sense of comfort crept over my mother,
weaving into her slowly tendrils of death.
In more than 150 years, Mormonism has experienced a series of interrelated and crucial transitions, even transformations. This study de scribes five of these linked transitions as individualism to corporate dynasticism, authoritarian democracy to authoritarian…
Nearly everyone talks about nuclear weapons and our nation’s nuclear policies and strategies. Yet very few of us understand even the most elementary vocabulary of the subject. Why should terms like “counterforce” and “countervalue,” “first…
The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…
From By Common Consent. For another beautiful example of Ashley’s writing, check out her piece from the Winter 2014 Issue: “In Light” released for free for everyone to enjoy.
Ashley Mae Hoiland received a BFA in studio arts and an MFA in poetry, both from Brigham Young University. She served a mission in Uruguay. She now lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband, Carl, and two children, Remy and Thea. She has written and illustrated several children’s books and once headed a project that printed poetry on billboards. More of her writing can be found at www.birdsofashmae.com. We are glad to welcome Ashmae as a guest of BCC.
There I am, a little sprite of a girl, lion-haired and scrape-kneed, taking bouncy skipping steps along the dirt path. Quiet morning sun peers through the leaves like the light through stained glass at the front of a cathedral. As a thirty-year-old, I stand at the top of my childhood hill and look down. I can see my 8-year-old self stopping to bend near the ground and hold some leaves between her fingers. I hear the scuffle and scrape of dust and rocks beneath worn tennis shoes. My tiny self is alone and canopied by the canyon oaks and crooked spruces.
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime…
Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 105–119
This was a prelude to his book-length treatment Same-Sex Dynamics in 19th C. America: A Mormon Example, that looked at “intimacy” broadly defined, before the rise of homophobia in the post-WWII period. It is a fascinating study of changing norms and practices that once allowed for a huge range of bonding practices between people of the same-sex. Quinn himself had come out in the course of researching this article and the book a few years before, and this work remains influential.