By Michael Farnworth This is the first of a series of columns dedicated to understanding and improving the dynamics of Mormon families. My premise is that we suffer from an exaggerated case of lip service and don’t actually afford the family as much devotion as we claim. Sure, in our church meetings, we talk …
Category: Issue 161–December 2010
Angina: Fiction
By Helen Walker Jones After Magnum, P.I., Myrna Kaufusi walked upstairs to her bedroom. Originally designed as a maid’s room, it wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet. She pulled open her dresser drawer, found her old orange bikini, and laid it on her new quilt with its puffy, three-dimensional blocks. Watching that old …
Update: Issue 161
Hey, Dude, I’m a Mormon A professional surfer happily guides her board over Pacific waves. A couple handles important affairs at the Washington D.C.-based companies they work for. A young man describes his love for professional skateboarding and tries fancy tricks on his board. These are three of the slick, urban, fast-paced stories included in …
Faith By Proxy: A Conversation with Author Brady Udall
If we exclude science fiction and vampire authors, Brady Udall is currently Mormonism’s brightest literary star. Breaking onto the scene with his short story collection Letting Loose the Hounds (1996), Udall has been characterized as a contemporary Charles Dickens. His first novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint (2002), tells the sprawling story of …
Making Ourselves Visible: A Conversation with Author Johnny Townsend
If you’ve been reading Sunstone and Dialogue for the past five years, you’ve run across multiple examples of Johnny Townsend’s work. One of Mormonism’s most prolific short story writers, he is constantly putting out fiction that is, as D. Michael Quinn puts it, simultaneously “insightful, insulting, quirky-faithful, and funny.” Townsend grew up in New …
The Call of Abraham
Their fervor triggers a trip to a different dimension. The members of the Gospel Doctrine class are involved in an energetic discussion of the Abrahamic covenant. In my cocoon, I’m aware of what’s going on, of how dynamic the exchanges are as various class members share ways that being part of that covenant blesses …
Deja Vu?
The real question facing the Church with regards to homosexuality is whether there is a genetic element to sexual preference. Many of the issues to be dealt with are similar to those I faced as a young man knowing that colored men could not hold the priesthood yet being told by my parents that …
Highway to Heaven
They say ghosts are the spirits of people who are dealing with loose ends. Urgent unfinished business can make any death untimely and spawn a haunting. Based on this theory, if my wife died tomorrow, I believe she would feel the need to come back as my driving instructor. She would haunt every car I …
“Look” and Live
Meditation on 3 Nephi 28 What do you want after I’m gone?” Zed swallowed. He had expected the question but still was not ready. No one answered. The question echoed in the silence. Which of you, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? If asked for fish, will you give a …
Tools, Not Idols
The next time someone asks me why Mormons don’t discuss the specifics of temple ceremonies, even amongst themselves, I am going to say this: “To leave each of us free to interpret the temple in our own way; to protect it from correlation.” I used to crave more open discussion about temple rituals so that …