Religion Commons^™

Fine, Thanks, Darlene Young

BYU Studies Quarterly

This doctor, yet another one I hoped would be able to help when others couldn’t, calls me “Sweetheart.” Is there anything more patronizing? He pats my shoulder. He thinks I’m crying because I feel lousy and he can’t figure out why. I’m crying out of fury that he, and everyone in his office, treats me like a child, like I don’t have a brain and a life and better things to do. And fury that I’m crying in front of him. And, yes, a little bit because I feel lousy.

Wandering On To Glory, Patrick Moran

BYU Studies Quarterly

In my suburban town, commuting is a fact of life, every bit as much as sowing and reaping and harvesting probably were for my agrarian forebears. It’s simply a given that work is far away and that a good portion of every day is spent getting there in the morning and then getting back again later on.

The Work Of Their Hands, Taylor Cozzens

BYU Studies Quarterly

When I turned eighteen, I took a job as a laborer for a construction company that was building dormitories on a university campus in High Point, North Carolina. It was a new world for me, one of mud, concrete, and rebar. The Lulls, excavators, and flatbeds crawled around the job site, engines roaring, back-up beepers blaring. Meanwhile, the chop saws competed with the quickie saws to see which could scream the loudest as they sliced through wood, metal, and concrete. I soon came to know the tingling in the fingers after using a Sawzall and the smell of hot metal …

Constructively Broken, Sarah D'Evegnee

BYU Studies Quarterly

“Crazy world. Cockeyed.”

Mr. Savo, in The Chosen, by Chiam Potok

Jewels, Michelle Forstrom

BYU Studies Quarterly

The first time it happened, I was seven. My grandma had mailed me a tiny ring for my birthday, an aquamarine set in silver. I clapped my hands and couldn’t stop jumping when I saw it. It was the first piece of jewelry I had ever owned; like wearing a piece of the sky. I took it everywhere—presenting my hand to the world, palm down, as if I were queen. It was the most beautiful ring in the history of rings.

Aviophobia, Kim Webb Reid

BYU Studies Quarterly

The January day SkyWest Flight 1834 smashed into a private two-seater plane midair over my elementary school, I was at recess. Some of us snatched at clothes drifting down from the sky because we thought they should be handed over to the school’s lost and found. We didn’t know yet of all the lost things that could never be returned: a jagged wing blocking my friend’s front door; a pilot’s black leather seat perched on my neighbor’s roof; the lives of ten passengers, captains, and crew. Grown-ups spoke in whispers about the carnage found in backyards and closed roads and …

No Words, Elizabeth Dodds

BYU Studies Quarterly

After all these years, I’m still afraid of getting a brain aneurysm. Just a few weeks ago in church, my head started hurting, and I reached up and felt a vein throbbing on the side of my skull. I leaned over to my uncle sitting beside me and whispered, “What if it’s a brain aneurysm?” He laughed and said it wasn’t. “But how can you be sure?” I thought. Because I looked up brain aneurysms a long time ago and found out that they have no symptoms. No warnings before they hit you like an air bag. Wham. Suddenly, there’s …

The Bass Coupler, Marilyn Nielson

BYU Studies Quarterly

Being called to play the organ for the first time, as a pianist, felt like being asked to ice skate for the U.S. Olympic team because you did such a good job walking into the arena. “You already know how to walk, after all,” the coaches reason. “This is basically the same thing—a stride lengthened here, a leg elevated there. You’ll pick it up in no time.”

To Live, Wendy M. Payne

BYU Studies Quarterly

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

Emily Dickinson

Quds, Bentley Snow

BYU Studies Quarterly

The part that got me was that I had to take off my Chacos to enter the sanctuary. I was irked at first, drifting at the back of our group—apathetic, iPod on—deliberately detached and not in the mood for ceremonial inconveniences. I looked into the sanctuary’s square, open-air center. The floor, I had to admit, was beautiful—thin blue rivulets streamed deep within white marble—but imagine how many feet had mixed their oils with the dirt that faintly coated it. Red wooden poles lined the edges of the square, rising out of white pedestals to support the red tiles that sloped …

On Fear, Food, And Flight, Elizabeth Brady

BYU Studies Quarterly

I’m having trouble eating.

The Time It Takes To Age, Rebecca Smylie

BYU Studies Quarterly

We moved to Africa for my husband’s job, and those first months in Dakar, Senegal, were hard. We had a newborn and were sleep deprived. The antimalarials gave me bad dreams. We were living out of suitcases, we found dead birds in the back bedroom, and our three-year-old couldn’t seem to stop crying. Increasingly, we heard her fighting with a row of new imaginary friends, who were more often than not consigned to time out in the “bird room.” How would I survive two years?

Stranded In The Stars, Sheldon Lawrence

BYU Studies Quarterly

My wife asked me if I had the keys, but only after the car door locked shut, so her question was asked in suspense and hope—waiting to see what damage had been done to our trip to the sand dunes. I did not have the keys. I had left them in the car so they would not get lost in the sand. Our spontaneous trip to the dunes just got more interesting.

Shaping The Earth, Erika Price

BYU Studies Quarterly

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding.

But water will wear away rock,

which is rigid and cannot yield . . .

This is another paradox:

what is soft is strong.

—Lao Tzu

Saying Goodbye, Josh Weed

BYU Studies Quarterly

My mom was a beautiful, intelligent woman.

Blue, Cindy Gritton

BYU Studies Quarterly

Air—so tantalizingly close—remained painfully out of reach as I stared frantically up through the serene blueness of the swimming pool water. Such a beautiful color that blue was. Vivid and as permanently etched into my memory as thinking out what I would yell as soon as my head (hopefully) broke the surface of it one more time, because I knew I could only do it once more, knew it was a miracle I’d surfaced twice already, that after this next time, blue would turn to black and after that, I would not be walking home. “LET GO!” I screamed and …

The Tiptoe, Robbie Taggart

BYU Studies Quarterly

"My theology stresses the reality of continued, continuing revelation," writes the author of this essay. "God speaks, not spake. . . . But it is sometimes a real wrestle to know when he is speaking and what he wants. It takes attentiveness, and patience. Sometimes weeks pass without a whisper." He illustrates this idea with a story about stalking squirrels with his four-year-old son. After almost seeing one, the author, who has asked God to grant his son this simple wish, prays in silent resignation, "Well, thanks for trying." But then the wish is granted in a spectacular manner.

Life Revised, Martha A. Parker

BYU Studies Quarterly

The author of this personal essay describes how, at age nineteen, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Four years later, the unthinkable happened. After losing her ability to walk, she was informed by her doctor that she was one of only 350 out of 110,000 people currently taking Tysabri worldwide who had developed a condition called Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML), a brain infection. Her cerebellum was slowly being eaten alive. Of those 350 people, only 15 percent had survived. In other words, her chances were slim. This essay is the story of her battle with PML and the impressive lessons …

Enticing The Sacred With Words, John Bennion

BYU Studies Quarterly

Evoking the sacred with words "is like trying to breathe joy as if it is air or to catch the wind in a butterfly net." In an effort to help the students in his writing classes capture the sacred with words, John Bennion of the BYU English faculty employs unusual methods, taking his students out of the classroom and into the wild, where they confront nature and themselves face to face. Rather than requiring writing that preaches, Bennion encourages expressive or exploratory essaying. His own essay depicts some of the successes his students have experienced.

Trailing Clouds Of Zombies, Eric D'Evegnee

BYU Studies Quarterly

This personal essay draws parallels between zombie apocalypse movies and parenting. The author's deliberate decision to have a large family reminds him of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, in which the terror comes from the characters' deliberate decisions about how to survive the sheer number of pervasive and persistent undead. His children are equally "pervasive and persistent, and they outnumber me significantly." But he finds a "zombie epiphany" in realizing that his panic over the challenges of raising children is calmed by the joy of special moments in which his children teach him to see beauty and joy.

Tempering: Of Tree Houses And Tragedies, Kylie N. Turley

BYU Studies Quarterly

This personal essay recounts a mother's worst nightmare: her seven-year-old son's 22-foot fall from a tree house onto a railroad tie, resulting in multiple skull fractures and serious brain trauma. The essay, however, is more than a recitation of the ride in the ambulance, the short stay in the emergency room, and the helicopter trip from Provo to Salt Lake City. The author delves into her own feelings and gives a candid, even brutal, self-analysis of her response to the unfolding tragedy: "They say you can tell who a person really is in a crisis. If they are right, then …

Pools Of Living Water: No Longer A Thirsty Land?, Bruce C. Hafen

BYU Studies Quarterly

St. George native Bruce Hafen tells how the settlers of this southern Utah town shaped and were shaped by the harsh terrain. His ancestors, who were among those Mormon pioneers who settled here, brought with them principles of faith, sacrifice, and hard work. It is crucial that today's people pass those principles to future generations through example and sharing family histories. Hafen compares the southern Utah desert landscape to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia, especially as both are changed by rare occasions of rain that create "pools of living water" (D&C 133:29). This talk was presented at the annual meeting …

Quotidiana, Eric D'Evegnee, Patrick Madden

BYU Studies Quarterly

Some LDS readers have an intriguing tendency to venerate obviously scholarly research while turning up their noses at what they consider less "academic" work. These readers are missing out on a potentially impactful genre. Eugene England wrote, "It is the personal essay that seems to me to have the greatest potential for making a uniquely valuable Mormon contribution both to Mormon cultural and religious life and to that of others." If that notion is true, reading works like Pat Madden's collection of personal essays, Quotidiana, should be added to our academic diet to refine and broaden the value we place …

How Country Music Can Improve Your Marriage, Greg Hansen

BYU Studies Quarterly

This light-hearted personal essay describes one man's "quest to become the Perfect Husband, the Ultimate Man, the Guy My Wife Dreams Of." Greg Hansen, a professional musician, has discovered one secret weapon: country music. "Before becoming the Highly Improved Guy I am today, I would come home after a long day in the recording studio, ready to de-stress and download, my full ration of words completely used up for the day. My wife would want to talk, but I just wanted the remote. Now, because I have memorized so many country songs on the way home, I always have the …

The Hoarse Whisperer, David M. Kirkham

BYU Studies Quarterly

In this personal essay, David Milo Kirkham recounts his interactions with the animal kingdom. From his early banter with his neighbor's sheep and his trapping and killing of nuisance skunks in his rural community to his later encounter in the Bavarian Alps with a beautiful red fox, Kirkham both entertains and provokes serious thought about our relationship with God's other creatures. "Who are the animals?" he asks. "Our relationship to them seems complex. I know some people see it in black and white: kill them, dominate them, or protect them all at any cost. But to me it is complex. …

A Local Faith, Nathan B. Oman

BYU Studies Quarterly

On October 22, 1844, men and women across America were disappointed when the world did not come to an end. They were the followers of a lay Baptist preacher named William Miller. Beginning in 1833, Miller, a native of New York's Burned-over District, began producing elaborate biblical commentaries indicating that Christ's Second Coming was imminent. Working with these writings, his followers converged on October 22 as the day of the Savior's coming, much to their ultimate disappointment.

On Music Angels: God Only Knows, David M. Kirkham

BYU Studies Quarterly

The trek from my office at the Air Force Academy history department to the faculty parking lot was long enough--about a ten-minute walk--sufficient time for some substantive thinking. One winter evening in about 1992, as I made the walk, my Comparative Revolutions course weighed on my mind. As I pondered how I might introduce the next day's discussion on causes of revolutions, I climbed into my 1987 red Dodge Colt more out of habit than deliberation. At the turn of the ignition key, the radio's boom broke my reverie and jarred me back to the reality of my immediate surroundings. …

Yellow Shirt Riddles, Holly R. Hansen

BYU Studies Quarterly

The essayist explores various issues surrounding her divorce as a young wife. The most intriguing is the pivotal argument she can't remember. Her brain has somehow blocked the memory of it, so she has to tell the story through the eyes of her ex-sister-in-law. Using images of falling off a snowy mountain, tying quilts, and breaking one of two identical pitchers, she tries to make sense of this life-changing experience.

We Who Owe Everything To A Name, Lynda Mackey Wilson

BYU Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Abraham's Tent, Heather Farrell

BYU Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.