By Bob Mesle The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics These are the parts of the work which it was possible to conceal in a place of safety before they could be seized by the police. They have been retrieved from their garden hiding-places …
Category: Issue 162–March 2011
Poem: In Memory
By Becky Kennedy The dark unwrapped itself, as around the hawk that brush-painted the sky when the trees were shaggy with dusk. It cycled down; its prey leapt from the grass to greet it, a wild rabbit about as long as a girl’s arm that became a flash of life; and you covered your …
The Prophet Claude: Fiction
By Jack Harrell Claude Winn was in the garage changing the oil on his motorcycle when he heard the message on the radio. Claude was a big man with a gray and black beard and a sun-browned baldpate on the top of his head. The hair he had left was long and tucked behind his …
The Family Forum: Passing on the Shame
By Michael Farnworth We can be active in the Church, attend the temple, pay our tithing, read the scriptures, have Family Home Evening, pray, and teach our children the doctrines of the Kingdom but, without knowing it, we can still be mean-spirited, petty, manipulative, demeaning, and hostile when disciplining our children. Take me for example: …
Braving the Borderlands: Protecting and Strengthening Your Marriage
By D. Jeff Burton During the past month, I have exchanged emails with “Will” (not his real name), a professional with a young family, concerning his movement into the Borderlands and the troubles he has confronted. While reading his responses to my standard questionnaire, I saw that Will’s marriage was suffering the stresses common to …
Borderlands: A Play–Part II
Continued from Part I SCENE SEVEN (BRIAN and PHYLLIS sit in the office, waiting.) PHYLLIS: I don’t know why we’re doing this. We don’t need you. BRIAN: Whatever. PHYLLIS: I run this car lot. I decide who works here and who doesn’t. BRIAN: I was told to wait here for Dave. Is that …
Borderlands: A Play–Part 1
Introduction Borderlands marks a place of intersection, a liminal space where roads end but new paths begin, where no horizons reveal themselves but also where collisions do us harm. I’m a believing, practicing Mormon, and Mormonism is at its most essential a religion that preaches literally endless human possibilities, eternal progression, and growth. But we …
The Pros and Cons of Writing Confessional Memoir in the Mormon Milieu
By Phyllis Barber Or, right-click here to download the audio file: The Pros and Cons of Writing Confessional Memoir in the Mormon Milieu (This paper was delivered at the International Conference of the American Literary West, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, October 2010) Because the focus of this occasion is the American Literary West and …
A Pre-World War II Prophecy
This regular Cornucopia column features incidents from and glimpses into the life and ministry of Elder James E. Talmage as compiled by James P. Harris, who is currently working on a full-length biography of this fascinating Mormon apostle. The column title is adopted from the statement inscribed on Elder Talmage’s tombstone: “Within the Gospel of …
Happy Birthday, KJV
This year, the King James Version of the Holy Bible turns 400 years old. Reflecting on this quadricentennial reminds me of something literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote: Here it is, that old tongue, with its clang and its flavor, sometimes rank, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter; here it is in its concise solid stamp. Other …