By Darin Cozzens It was those two wheelchairs in that nursing home in Billings last week that got me thinking again about the movie. Ben-Hur and I go way back. April 4, 1960. It was a Monday night. I remember because it was my eighth birthday, the age of accountability, according to Mormon doctrine. …
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Laughs Precede the Miracle: How Calvin Grondahl and Pat Bagley Changed Mormonism
By Lynne Gorton Cropper SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 1830, the Mormon Church has had to deal with disparagement from outsiders. In the Church’s early days, the stress created by unfavorable media attention sometimes resulted in violence as is evidenced by Joseph Smith’s 1844 decision to destroy The Nauvoo Expositor’s printing press. In an attempt to protect sacred …
Dandelion Mama
By Tracy McKay-Lamb PACKING MY HOME feels like undressing the dead. Taking pictures off the walls and clearing the mantle, disrobing my home and making her a blank canvas again upswells all the sediment from the bottom of the sea. All the hopes and joy I felt while setting up my beautiful home now rise on …
Four Single Men that I Hope Never Marry
By P.Q. Gump Sunstone’s sixth issue (Summer 1977) included a cover article titled “Endangered Species: The Single Mormon Man.” The following is a condensed reprint of a sidebar authored by Orson Scott Card under his pseudonym P.Q. Gump. AS A DIVORCED woman with a child, my dating life (such as it is) naturally includes a …
Sneaking Up on Sex
By Jean Marie S. Place AT AGE 25, I politely asked my nervous boyfriend to give me my first kiss. He granted the request, but reluctantly. At age 30, I was five measly years removed from the Virgin Lips Club but despite valiant efforts to get married, still quite virgin everywhere else. So when I …
To Russia with Love
By Elna Baker I’M 28 YEARS old and I’m flying to Siberia to tell my parents that I recently lost my virginity. Most children wouldn’t do this. Most parents don’t want you to do this. But my family is Mormon and we’re very close. And Mormons believe a very specific thing, which is that sex before …
Single Men in Nineteenth-century Mormonism
By Jeffery Ogden Johnson BEING SINGLE IN the Mormon Church has always been a challenge. An unsigned 1849 Frontier Guardian article, published by apostle Orson Hyde in Kanesville, Iowa, unequivocally declared: That man who resolves to live without woman, and that woman who resolves to live without man, are enemies to the community in which they …
Movie Reviews: The Cokeville Miracle and Freetown
Reviewed by Stephen Carter The Cokeville Miracle and Freetown are fascinating glimpses into how Mormons approach faith-promoting stories, and how those stories interact with the core message of the gospel. The Cokeville Miracle If you haven’t heard about the Cokeville miracle: in 1986, David and Doris Young (played by Nathan Stevens and Kym Mellen, repectively) …
The Epistles of Kishkumen and Gadianton
By Marty Nabhan Or, right-click here to download the audio file: The Epistles of Kishkumen and Gadianton An assemblage of the reportings and communicatings of Kishkumen and Gadianton, who founded a band of robbers and murderers. I, Kishkumen, leader of the band of patriots who seek to keep their acts …
Not as the World Giveth: Poetry
By Javen Tanner 1. Consumed by silence, in a clean house, myself as a child notices he is alive, notices his own breath in everything he touches. He experiences the present as a memory, each object as a photograph: he sees his father’s clenched jaw in the corner of the hearth, his mother’s …