By Dana Haight Cattani I HEAR THE telltale thump. Walking to the window, I confirm what I already suspect. In spite of our decals and shiny reflector tape, another sparrow has flown into one of the panes along the back side of our house and fallen to the deck below. In vain, I watch the …
Category: 174
All She Wants is Art: Doug Himes
By Andi Pitcher Davis THE LAST MAJOR work of Cy Twombly’s life was one of art’s most romantic projects—installing a massive mural on the ceiling of the Louvre. Three thousand five hundred square feet of pure, nearly uninterrupted blue, bright as the Virginia sky. “It’s a color not bought in a bottle or matched …
Patience and Punishments
By Lia Hadley IT WAS SPRINGTIME and the air was full of a new, tender warmth that invited me to unzip my jacket as I made my way home from the tan brick elementary school on the far side of the field that separated it from my neighborhood. I walked past the Burton’s house, our …
The Dawning of a Brighter Day: An Analysis of MormonsandGays.org
By Robert A. Rees IT WOULD TAKE a calloused heart not to rejoice over the Church’s recent website, www.mormonsandgays.org. Jim Dabakis, head of Utah’s Democratic Party, was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune as saying that producing the website “can’t have been easy” for the Church, but the messages by Church authorities (including those by …
The Mahan Report: Introduction
By Ron Madson and Joshua Madson WE ALL HEAR voices. The question is: which voices do we listen to and which do we ignore? And more importantly, which voices are so embedded in our “deep heart’s core” that they unconsciously shape our thoughts, words, and actions? “For more are the children of the desolate …
Blood and Horror on this Earth
By Gina Colvin (An earlier version of this article was posted 9 September 2013 at Patheos.) THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of Mormons all over the world attend temple services on a daily basis, all of them watching a metaphorical reenactment of the creation story. Included in this drama is an exchange between God and Satan. …
Faithful Disagreement: A Model for the Saints
By William D. Russell THE COMMUNITY OF Christ has faced several divisive issues in recent history, the main ones being racial justice, women’s ordination, and LGBT ordination. Though some of these issues were handled well, we experienced significant fallout over others. The 2013 National Conference in the United States, where same-sex marriage was accepted as …
Mormonism and an Aesthetic Sense of Life
By Robert C. Hunsaker HOW TO LIVE—and live well—is a perennial problem. Our personal style of living—our sense of life—corresponds directly to general life satisfaction, or the lack thereof. As Carlisle Hunsaker puts it: A sense of life is either one of our most precious possessions, or the source of our private hell. …
Why I Stay
By Carol Lynn Pearson YEARS AGO WHEN my husband Gerald and I made the outrageous decision to self-publish my poems, I wrote this simple piece that became the title poem of one of the books: A WIDENING VIEW When my eye first opened Behind the viewfinder, There, in closeup, Was a flower— The only …
The Earth as Sacrament
MORMONISM DOES NOT accept the common religious belief that the earth is either mundane or evil, or that the realm of the sacred is far from the material world. On the contrary, Mormonism is a richly material religion investing a broad set of earthly objects with sacramental purpose. A sacrament presents us with an object …