By Boyd J. Petersen Art by Galen Dara We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” The Four Quartets Even with my MTC-level French and greenie cluelessness, when my …
Category: Issue 171
A Modern Conceit: The Separation of Religion and Politics
By Frances Lee Menlove Art by Kelly Brooks “What has our apostasy from peace cost us?” —J. Reuben Clark At the very heart of Mormonism, deep in its DNA, is a yearning for restoration. A yearning to be continuous in our time with Jesus and his followers; a yearning to be in faithful …
The Widening Tent
By John Hatch Art by Chad Danger Lindsay Shivering and disoriented, I stared blankly into my car windows. Piles of snow blackened by car exhaust surrounded the parking lot, and the air was stale with smog. I was terrified. My wife and I had been married just under eighteen months. We were still trying …
The Family Forum: The Nature of Intimacy
By Michael Farnworth Or, right-click here to download the audio file: The Family Forum: The Nature of Intimacy Intimacy is sharing the inner landscape of our souls and the energies of our emotions with another person: from warm, positive feelings such as affection and acceptance to cold, negative feelings such as anger …
“I Could Love Them All”: Nauvoo Polygamy in the Marriage of Willard and Jennetta Richards
By Devery S. Anderson In August 1842, while Willard Richards was fulfilling some church assignments in New York, he penned a letter to someone “I esteem the dearest on earth, & whose absence I continually feel, but be assured that neither time nor distance, can obliterate those emotions of Love, of friendship, of attachment, …
Roundtable: The 2013 LDS Scriptures
With Gina Colvin, Charles Harrell, and Dan Wotherspoon The following discussion is drawn from ideas shared leading up to and in a March 2013 Mormon Matters podcast (Episode 164) about the release of the new version of the LDS scriptures. This edit is approved by all participants. The updates to the LDS scriptures include …
Expiation: Fiction
By Richard Dutcher Art by Galen Dara Or right-click to download the audio file: Expiation CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE: “The following confession was discovered October 7, 1977 in a clear glass bottle, corked, during the exhumation of the skeletal remains of a male, 5’10” tall, in a canyon approximately 7 miles North East of …
The Persistent Impermanence of Memory
By Scot Denhalter Sculptures by Lia Hadley The traditional model for human memory pictured the mind as something like a filing cabinet or an internal disk drive. To remember was akin to retrieving a stored file, a record of a past experience. To forget was merely to misplace a file or find its code …
On Gratitude
By Stephen Carter Based on a sacrament meeting talk given 25 November 2012 in the Orem, Utah 6th Ward. Preparing this talk on gratitude became daunting almost immediately. Before I even began researching, I could already hear an insistent voice trying to take control. It wanted me to say things like, “I have …
Braving the Borderlands: A Borderlander Comes Out–Part I
By D. Jeff Burton In this column and the next,1 “Brett” shares his long-term experiences in the Borderlands and how he recently “came out” to his wife and others. I have condensed and edited email messages we exchanged over several months. I have also changed names and details to protect identities. BRETT: I came …