This work contains over 800 blessings performed 1835-1995 by the presiding patriarchs of the LDS Church; Uncle John Smith (brother of Joseph Smith Sr.), John Smith (son of Hyrum Smith), Hyrum G. Smith (great-grandson of Hyrum Smith), Joseph Fielding Smith (great-grandson of Hyrum Smith), and Eldred G. Smith (great-great-grandson of Hyrum Smith). Although Mormonism offers many unique practices and rituals, patriarchal blessings stand out among them because of their personal...

This extraordinary collection of poems, "Salt," draws inspiration from an element so common in the Great Basin we almost forget it’s there. We float in it, we race across it, and when the wind blows the wrong way, we can even smell it. Recognized as one of the most important local poets, Howe was invited in 2011 to write the foreword to the anthology "Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first...

As children, we were told the stories of Paul as didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient. As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple—an ascetic hermit whom Tertullian dubbed “the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.” What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New...

Recognized as a Mormon classic twenty years after its release, The Backslider features longstanding Christian conflicts played out in a scenic, sparsely populated area of southern Utah. A young ranch-hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. He is saved by an epiphany that...

Born in rural Idaho in the 1930s, her family moved to Bountiful, Utah, and then Salt Lake City in the late 1930s and mid-1940s. She and her sister married a son of a Mormon fundamentalist leader. In this captivating biography, we learn of her struggle as a teenager to obtain a college education and to succeed as a nurse only to become one of the most sought after midwives...