We must truly listen to each other, respecting our essential brotherhood and the courage of those who try to speak, however they may differ from us in professional standing or religious belief or moral vision . . . and then our dialogue can serve both in truth and charity.        —Eugene England, 1966 It is […]

I WAS CONVINCED when I was a youth that the most boring meeting in the Church, perhaps in the world, was a quarterly stake conference. In those days, they were held every three months and included at least two, two-hour sessions on Sunday. The most interesting highlights to us children were the quavery songs literally […]

THIS IS AN essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea — the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy — that has important reli­gious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and no clear official doctrine. I attempt here, in the spirit of a venerable tradition in Mormon […]

…. For a moment Abijah felt stunned; in this, his first real emergency, he had almost forgotten God! He turned to Brother Tuckett. Clory, sitting on a boulder near-by, wondered at the sudden purpose in Brother Tuckett’s movements. What were they going to do? And then she saw Brother Tuckett appear with the bottle of […]

WHEN I WAS quite young, I had two profound spiritual experiences, more like encounters, that became the grounding realities of my life. One convinced me of the personal reality of the Savior and that what he most fundamentally requires of us is total consecration of our means, our time, and our talents in service to […]

WHEN JOSEPH SMITH was born, 172 years ago this December 23, Brigham Young was already an active boy of nearly five, sharing his parents’ struggles for survival on the western frontier. Brigham, like Joseph, was born in Vermont. But in 1803, when Brigham was only two, he was taken to a homestead about 100 miles […]

IT MIGHT HAVE been 1986, because Easter came in March and I was on my way to Montreal. But I went to see Dustin Hoffman in The Death of a Sales­man (bought a ticket at the last minute from a scalper), so it must have been two years earlier on my way to Boston. When I […]

Edgar to Gloucester in King Lear: Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. June 1982 I grew up in a safe valley. The years five through twelve, when we are most sensuously attached to the landscape and when, I think, the foundations of identity are firmly laid, I lived in gardens […]

I became increasingly perplexed. Was my fundamental loyalty to the lovely, unified truths that had been given by God to Mormon prophets or to the exciting, diverse new ones I was learning from the full range of human curiosity and dreams?