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Foreword: Dead Wood And Rushing Water: Essays On Mormon Faith, Family And Culture, Terryl Givens Jan 2013

Foreword: Dead Wood And Rushing Water: Essays On Mormon Faith, Family And Culture, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

The essay is a form particularly well suited for Mormon writers, for it blends a number of their cultural and religious imperatives. We are a confessional people, in both senses of the word. In keeping with Augustine’s principal employment of the term, we are committed to the public profession of our faith. Not merely as an act of evangelizing, but among the more reflective Saints, as an articulated meditation on our yearning for the divine, and a psalmic celebration of God’s gifts. We are also confessional in the more conventional sense: journal keeping, the informality of Mormon worship, public testimony …


Mormonism And The Family (Forum), Terryl Givens Jan 2013

Mormonism And The Family (Forum), Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

When we speak of the family in Mormonism, the term can mean many things. There is an idealized Mormon family, the one described in church magazines, General Conference talks, and Mormon public service commercials. There is the family of the Mormon theological tradition, stretching endlessly off into the eternities, bound together with temple ordinances, the forever family of Mormon bumper stickers. There is another family, product of a more speculative bent in Mormon theology, which comes of an eschatological reading of the Abrahamic covenant, and which imputes to a temple-sealed Mormon couple the right to an endless seed, a posterity …