Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, You’ll Never Walk Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957)

By David K. Jones

As a recently converted fan to the Liverpool soccer team, I have been struck by their supporters’ use of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” This show tune is sung before and after each match by tens of thousands of people holding red and white banners above their heads. Both the lyrics and the act of singing are reminiscent of sacramental purposes, renewing the loyalty of each individual fan while strengthening the bond of the entire community. This ritual seems especially meaningful when unity is the most difficult, such as when the team is losing an important match. Becoming indoctrinated to this culture has enabled me to see my Mormon experience in a new light, particularly as the LDS Church faces what might be the most significant test of unity yet felt by my generation.

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Will Self, The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future (Bloomsbury USA, 2006)

By Rosalynde Welch

London, 1593, was the seedy, semous seat of a nascent state. It was in May that a shadowy informant recorded for the benefit of the Privy Council the impious opinions of one Christopher Marlowe. The Baines Note, named for its author Richard Baines, alleged eighteen articles of blasphemy to Marlowe, l’enfant terrible of the Elizabethan literary scene. Among them: (read more…)

Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009)

By Russell Arben Fox

For decades, observers of American society have praised the Mormon people for their work ethic.^[1] While the causes of that work ethic are many, certainly the role of moral teachings from general authorities cannot be discounted as a factor. Those teachings take various forms, of course, but most tend to present our duty to diligently labor in this life as a scriptural command^[2], as well as connecting work with personal and spiritual development. Just recently, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf called work “an antidote for anxiety, an ointment for sorrow, and a doorway to possibility,” and encouraged church members to “cultivate a reputation for excellence in all that we do.”^[3] There is little to criticize about such a sentiment, though it does pose at least one relevant question–is “excellence” something that really can be striven for “in all that we do”?

To a degree, that question was echoed in the title of one of Hugh Nibley’s most trenchant criticisms of contemporary Mormon life: “But What Kind of Work?”^[4] Few contemporary Mormons–besides Nibley–have been willing to attempt a particularly serious answer to the question of how, and in what way, faithful Mormons ought to apply themselves in the realm of work, though Mormon leaders of the nineteenth century were far less reluctant.^[5] Today’s Mormons, then, are perhaps obliged to turn elsewhere for considerations of what kinds of labor are most appropriate for relieving anxiety and sorrow, and opening up possibilities for personal and spiritual excellence. Should any of them choose to look, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work would be a superb place to start. (read more…)

Sara Groves, Tell Me What You Know (INO, 2007)

Sara Groves, Add to the Beauty (INO/Epic. 2005)

Sara Groves, All Right Here (Integrity Media, 2001)

Sara Groves, Conversations (Integrity Media, 2001)

By Troy Keller

Sara Groves is a singer-songwriter of Evangelical Christian music that (to my untrained sensibilities) seems a step above the common fare of popular music, both what is available on the local radio station and in the LDS artists section of Deseret Book. Her sound is both soulful and upbeat and even at times earthy and honest in a Carole King kind of way. But what sets her apart, both within her genre and more broadly, is her skill at delivering Christian messages. In my view, it is this element of theme that most qualifies her for a listen by LDS consumers of lyrical music who may welcome an alternative to the more secular (and generally more vapid) topics sung about in mainstream popular music. (read more…)

Alfred Hitchcock, et al., Vertigo (Paramount Pictures, 1958)

By Joseph M. Spencer

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is an unquestionable master-piece among films. Moreover, one might argue that it serves as a kind of interpretive key for the remainder of the Hitchcock corpus, because it utilizes most radically a filmic trope that appears in films spanning the whole of Hitchcock’s career, from at least as early as The Lady Vanishes (1938) to as late as his final film, Family Plot (1976). I would like to give this trope a name I will explain—namely, “subtractive materialism”—and I would like to spell out its significance in unapologetically Mormon terms. (read more…)

Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol (New York: Doubleday Books, 2009)

By Scott Holley

Ever since the publication of the mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, Latter-day Saint fans have looked forward to the Da Vinci sequel with both excitement and apprehension. Mormon fans eagerly anticipated another page-turning thriller, filled with mystical symbols and legends that resonated with Restoration teachings. Yet Mormon fans also worried that author Dan Brown, having focused an unflattering light on Catholicism, Freemasonry, and other belief systems, would give Mormon history and symbolism a similar treatment. This fear was heightened when the 2004 book Secrets of the Code, one of the many Da Vinci “de-coded” books that popped up that year, revealed a hidden phrase in The Da Vinci Code that many felt referenced Joseph Smith and Nauvoo Masonry. Secrets author Dan Burnstein surmised that “the sequel to the Da Vinci Code will involve a Mormon-Mason treasure hunt.”¹ With the long-awaited release of The Lost Symbol, the Mormon faithful can rest easy that their apprehensions were unwarranted, while Mormon fans likely won’t rest much at all until they finish this highly entertaining yet somewhat conventional story. (read more…)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, ed. Cyrus Hamlin & tr. Walter W. Arndt, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2000 [orig. pub. 1832])

By Terryl Givens

I.

Literature, being more imaginatively expansive than theology, was the first to recognize the impossibility of the predicament.

Perdition, ultimate loss, lies on either side as Eve considers her options in the Garden. She stymies the infinite expansion of selfhood, thwarts her own soul’s insatiability, murders her own human potential. Or she violates the bonds of filial regard, alienates herself from her God and Creator, and defies the divine. The question is not if she will transgress, but how. Not if she will choose the Good, but which Good she will embrace, and which she will shun. (read more…)

Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, tr. Willard R Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 [orig. pub. 1954]).

By Richard Lyman Bushman

People of a certain age remember the exact moment in 1963 when they heard of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. With almost as much clarity, I remember the circumstances of reading Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return. I was sitting on the right side of a United Air Lines flight from Boston to Salt Lake City sometime in the mid-1970s when I encountered Eliade’s astonishing pages on temples and cities in the ancient world. I felt as if I had come home. Finally someone understood my world. I spent the flight reflecting on Eliade’s imaginative reconstruction and my own temple experience. Eliade situated Joseph Smith’s temple theology in the world scene better than any other non-Mormon scholar until Margaret Barker came to the attention of Mormons two decades later. (read more…)

Glen A. Larson, et al, Battlestar Galactica (ABC, 1978)

Ron Moore, et al, Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009)

By James Bennett

A telltale sign that the day’s lesson will be doctrinally suspect is when the instructor begins, as one did at the University of Utah Institute in the fall of 1989, with the bald assertion that the lost tribes of Israel are “not on this earth.” But what makes for lousy CES instruction can be the stuff of great television, at least in theory. In practice, the TV show was Battlestar Galactica, and the greatness thereof depends entirely on your point of view. (read more…)

By Richard Lyman Bushman

Inscribed in steel letters in the stairwell of the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU is the scripture that begins: “And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom [D&C 88:118].” The passage may have been Joseph Smith’s favorite. He quoted it twice in the Kirtland Temple dedicatory prayer, and made the study of the best books the chief work of the Kirtland School of the Prophets. Since his time, all who appreciate the wide compass of Joseph Smith’s search for truth have cited it.

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