By D. Jeff Burton This column collects some emails I exchanged with “Bishop Thomas,” who is responsible for a large ward outside Utah. (Names and some details have been changed to protect identities.) I’ve communicated with “Borderland” bishops in the past but this is the first time one has agreed to share his story. …
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Is There Beauty in Your Bucket?
By Elouise Bell THE IDEA OF composing a list of things you’d like to do before shuffling off this mortal coil (as Shakespeare put it) or “kicking the bucket” (as it’s better known in our more advanced civilization) is not new. But with the popularity of The Bucket List, starring those two grand old war-horses …
Purple: Review
Reviewed by Stephen Carter Purple Mary Lythgoe Bradford Dialogue Foundation, 2009 72 pages WE SEEM TO be magnets for beauty. Our childhoods are “cherry tree worlds” haunted by “twanging harpies,” and nourished by “string bean summers.” As we grow, “deep library treasures” take seed in our souls and whisper to us until we start …
Women and the Priesthood: Review
By Heather Olson Beal Women and the Priesthood: What One Mormon Woman Believes By Sheri Dew Deseret Book, 2013 224 pages Sheri Dew recently penned a book entitled Women and the Priesthood: What One Mormon Woman Believes. In one very important way, this book is a step in the right direction. It is a …
A Frontier Life: Review
By Will Bagley A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary. Todd M. Compton University of Utah Press, 2013 613+ xix pages, illustrations, maps, index, bibliography. The LDS Church History Department’s photograph collection contains not only a portrait of Jacob Hamblin but also countless variations of it where he sports better haircuts and …
The Good Patient
By Dana Haight Cattani Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Anonymous To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. 1 Samuel 15:22 I CANNOT COUNT the number of needle pricks I have had in the past two years. Since my cancer diagnosis, …
Questing and Questioning
By Philip L. Barlow I have before me a series of letters a private elementary school teacher reportedly assigned her students to address to God. The letters pose questions. They are often “cute”—after the order of Art Linkletter or Bill Cosby interviewing children on an old-fashioned television program. Here is one by a girl …
Fallen Bodies, Eternal Genders
By Ted Lee Recently, my elders quorum had a lesson on “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” Most Mormons are intimately familiar with it: a document released by the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles outlining a fairly direct summary of current lds beliefs regarding the nuclear family. First released …
Productivity and the Mormon Busyness Ethic
By Roger Terry Or right-click here to download the audio file: Productivity and the Mormon Busyness Ethic Work is an important aspect of what it means to be Mormon. When we talk about the early Saints, we talk about how they wore out their lives helping to build the Kingdom. For …