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…
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What It Means
March 15, 2018I was looking at the morning through the window in the front room like a bear in a cage remembering somewhere there are meadows, and I noticed how much water was running down the gutter…
Eternal Misfit
March 16, 2018For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name. Coldplay[1] Some of the functions in the celestial body will not appear in the terrestrial body, neither in the telestial body, and…
Peculiar People, Positive Thinkers, and the Prospect of Mormon Literature
May 4, 2018As a Mormon writer, I have long been concerned that most of the books and magazine articles published nationally about the Mormons are written by Jews and Gentiles rather than my own people. In show…
Mormon Architecture Today: The Lamps of Mormon Architecture, A Discussion
May 3, 2018FERGUSON: Most Mormons are basically ignorant of architecture and the idea of architecture as much as they are ignorant of art and the idea of art, and there is no chance in the public schools…
A Child’s Christmas in Utah
April 29, 2018It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes.
Church Historians I Have Known
April 25, 2018This talk is necessarily going to be “oral history.” As such it is suspect, as most oral history must be. Time plays tricks on our memories. It beclouds our judgment, confuses people, bends our interpretations,…
Harvey Fletcher and Henry Eyring: Men of Faith and Science
April 19, 2018The year 1981 saw the deaths of Harvey Fletcher and Henry Eyring, men of great religious faith whose superb professional achievements placed them in the first ranks of the nation’s scientists. (See Steven H. Heath’s…
Review: Elizabeth Pinborough, editor, "Habits of Being: Mormon Women's Material Culture"
June 1, 2012
Title: Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture
Editor: Elizabeth Pinborough
Publisher: Exponent II
Genre: Personal Essays
Year: 2012
Pages: 113
Binding: Softcover
Price: Sold Out
By Emily Jensen
Reading underneath my great-grandmother Florence Shepherd Warburton’s pastel paintings in the old rock Warburton home in the tiny town of Grouse Creek, Utah, I connected with Habits of Being—this book of personal essays from women looking longingly at ancestral artifacts for links to those women, some known, some unknown, who came before.
It was a glorious experience, made even more poignant by the fact that it was Memorial Day, one that made me want to write my own essays about my own ancestors, about the women and men who furnished, occupied, and beautified the very surroundings in which I sat. And if there is anything I wish to impart in this review, it’s the need for women and men to search out connections to their past and write them up, then archive them safely. In fact I’ll bold that part, just in case that’s the only sentence you read.
Review: Bringhurst and Foster, eds., “The Persistence of Polygamy”
June 20, 2012
Title: The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy
Editors: Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster
Publisher: John Whitmer Books
Genre: History
Year: 2010
Pages: 306
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-1-934901-13-7
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Blair Hodges
We usually just want the unvarnished truth. Tell us the facts. Drop the spin. Lay it all out on the table. State your case objectively and we’ll decide to believe you or to reject your views. Give us some easy bullet points, a quick overview, a succinct argument, and the jury will return shortly with the verdict. The problem is that we all too often forget we’re all incapable of constructing, let alone judging between, contrasting claims about our past in an “objective” way. This is my non-comprehensive way of explaining our persistent interest in history, of course. “History speaks not only of the past but also of the present.”1