BYU Studies

Volume 58:2 (2019) - In her thought-provoking book,  On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City , Laura Rutter Strickling captures the complex conversion narratives of fifteen Latter-day Saint women who found space for themselves within a “historically White church”. The book provides powerful accounts of individual spiritual journeys while also grappling wi...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - When the author’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, he came face to face with his failure as a husband to be her full partner. “The simultaneous, stark revelation of her mortality and my personal failure left me wanting to sit alone in a room and cry my way through the smothering chaos rather than accept the painful transformation that beckoned. But there was no time to stare, h...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - When the author’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, he came face to face with his failure as a husband to be her full partner. “The simultaneous, stark revelation of her mortality and my personal failure left me wanting to sit alone in a room and cry my way through the smothering chaos rather than accept the painful transformation that beckoned. But there was no time to stare, h...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - “On a cold, blustery day in 1839 in Commerce, Illinois, a small skiff appeared on the Mississippi River. As rain poured from the sky, a woman huddled in the vessel, trying to protect a two-month-old baby in her arms. She was trying to reach Commerce from Montrose, Iowa, hoping to procure a few potatoes and some flour for her six children. The woman was Mary Ann Angell Young, w...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - The oil painting Ed’s Slot, Provo River is 34″ × 40″ on linen canvas and was completed in 1994.I had painted a few fly-fishing paintings prior to this one. I was interested in capturing the brilliant light of sunset as it shines up Provo Canyon at the height of autumn color. I asked my friend Sean, who fishes the river a lot, if he would model for the painting. He eagerly agre...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - The Creator Praises Birds, a poem by J.S. Absher. This poem won first place in the 2018 Clinton F. Larson Poetry Contest sponsored by BYU Studies.

Volume 58:2 (2019) - “The figure of a well-known and beloved fisherman is missing from the Provo River. When I turn off of U.S. Highway 189 in Provo Canyon, Utah, and cross the bridge to enter Vivian Park, I look upstream and downstream for him, but he isn’t there.” The missing fisherman is President Thomas S. Monson, who passed away in 2018. This reminiscence by his son tells of an avid and succe...

Volume 58:2 (2019) - This poem won honorable mention in the 2018 Clinton F. Larson Poetry Contest sponsored by BYU Studies.

Volume 58:2 (2019) - In September 1923, all the missionaries of the Eastern States Mission gathered in Palmyra, New York, for a conference commemorating one hundred years since Joseph Smith had a vision of Moroni and first saw the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon came. Before that date, the elders of the mission had spent the summer doing “country work”: preaching in rural areas without p...

Introduction to the BYU Studies audio journal project