Somehow I missed that Eugene Woodbury had posted an essay titled Pelagius and the fools on his Web site. Or perhaps I knew about it and then forgot about it and then rediscovered it. Whatever the case it’s a fantastic read. So go read it.
It was written as a response to an essay by Stephen [...]

Nothing Forgettable Here: The Human Meaning of Irreantum’s Recent Poetry
I.
In their introduction to the poetry section of A Believing People (found online here), Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert comment that “much [early] Mormon poetry,” like “most of the popular poetry written during that era [the nineteenth century],” is “derivative and didactic” and thus “regrettably forgettable.” [...]

The beautiful thing about the mainstream media is that when it decides to cover a story, it has the people and resources to do so (and strict deadlines). Here’s a round up of coverage of the LDS Film Festival:
Mormon films: walking a fine line — A report on a panel discussion at the festival moderated [...]

Mormon Artist is a new on-line magazine that is imressive in its ambitions, and even more impressive in the fact that it seems to be meeting those ambitions. This is a publication to watch. After having just released the third issue, I interviewed Mormon Artist editor and founder Ben Crowder. The magazine can be found [...]

Here’s #4 in Jonathan Langford’s series The Writing Rookie. Don’t miss an awesome usage of the word ’stroppier.’ ~Wm
Author’s Note: This is adapted from something I sent out as part of an occasional print-blog series that gets mailed to miscellaneous family and friends. Just so you know.
For the complete list of columns in this [...]

My awesome parents sent me one of the AMV in Deseret Alphabet t-shirts for Christmas. I had asked for it, of course. But that did not diminish the excitement of opening the gift.
My first impressions:
1. The white on black looks really cool. And the size of the lettering is perfect.
2. The weight of the t-shirt [...]

In this edition of Jonathan Langford’s guest column The Writing Rookie he describes a phenomenon I know well — it is an odd combination. Click here for the list of columns in the series. ~Wm
Walking (I believe I once read) is a process of continually falling and catching oneself. Always, at every point [...]

The American religious experience has a long tradition of using scriptural metaphors and few were as adept at using these metaphors as Martin Luther King Jr. His speeches are awash in applications of scriptural language and events to the needs of his day. His people were chosen Israel being brought to the promised land. Stripped [...]

I always get a little more introspective around the New Year.  (I know it took me a few weeks to get this posted here, but,  hey, it’s still January.)  Lately I’ve been asking myself, “Laura” –yes, I do talk to myself and, sometimes, address myself–”Laura, what books have impacted you the most in your life? [...]

In school, my marketing professors taught that businesses would avoid a lot of errors if they would introduce new products only after studying the intended market for the product first. Too many products are created only to find that there isn’t a market for them — no one wants to purchase them. Its kind of [...]

Some exciting things have been happening with Reading Until Dawn over the past week (at least I think they’re exciting) as I’ve made some changes and tried to get this bird off the ground.
First off, Reading Until Dawn has evolved forms, from “journal” to open-ended “anthology.” Though this is basically just a semantic switch, it [...]

for Stephen Carter in partial fulfillment of a promise
but especially for greenfrog, who showed me a bit of backbone
When a subject and object look at one another, there is no subject and no object, there’s only relation, the scope of which extends beyond either creature’s ability to fully grasp it.  You can’t grasp it, but you [...]

With the new year, I’ve been going through drafts and notes for AMV posts, and decided to begin by finishing this one which I started back in October 2007:
I recently read Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, the text of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he presented at Harvard. There’s a lot that [...]

We have a new year, perhaps not too different from last year, but, like every new year, with a certain degree of promise and expectation for something better.
Traditionally, the New Year brings New Year’s Resolutions, and even New Year’s Predictions in the media or as party games. In that vein, I came up with a [...]