Author: Rosalynde Welch
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Technologies of Family
I experience flashes of poetry, but I was assigned an unreliable muse in the heretofore, alas. My moment of greatest poetic inspiration arrived when I was twelve or thirteen, on a trip across country in our fifteen-passenger Ford van. My mother devised a contest among us siblings to compose the best family cheer, and, motivated…
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Love Requited: Fidelity in Marriage
In honor of Valentine’s Day, a love simile: If married love were chocolate, it would be have to be a bittersweet dark, because no chalky milk or bland white could adequately convey the depth, complexity, and challenge of fidelity in marriage.
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Placing the Indian Placement Program
Two weeks ago I caught a few minutes of a story on NPR about the Church’s Indian Placement Program.
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Unrequited Love
I just finished a ravishing little novel called “The Confessions of Max Tivoli.” It begins, “We are each the love of somebody’s life.”
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From the Pulpit: “A Mantic Celebration of the Holy Spirit”
“I wish to celebrate this morning the reality of the often ignored and too little heralded but very real outpouring of the Spirit of God upon the believing inhabitants of earth–right now, this morning, in the early evening of the last dispensation.”
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Marrow and Fatness: LDS and BMI
My husband’s grandfather once uttered a one-liner that has made its way into family lore. Surveying a particularly, uh, well-endowed session of temple patrons, he said, “We may be a chosen people, but we are a corpulent people.”
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From the Pulpit: Notes on Repentance
In the noble tradition of literary hacks who never miss an opportunity to recycle old material, here are the interesting bits of a sacrament meeting talk I delivered in church today. Repentance is, at its simplest, a turning away from sin and a returning to God.
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An Interview with Neil LaBute
Writer, director and playwright Neil LaBute has been producing provocative and critically-acclaimed theater, film and fiction for more than a decade in the US and abroad.
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For JV on January 17
JV is the kind of person one notices right away in an LDS chapel, the kind of person one remembers. I’d seen her at various stake activities after I moved with my new husband into our micro-studio apartment in a transient-urban ward; when we moved into student housing in the neighboring transient-student ward the next…
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In the Cultural Hall
The danger in telling people you write a little bit is that they then assume you can. Last week a friend from my ward called and asked me to write the libretto for a musical show she has been called to coordinate for the stake; a few of the creative decisions had already been made,…
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The Way to Apply the Truth to (My) Life
As I read yesterday’s text from the David O. McKay reader, “Jesus Christ: ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life,’â€? I was struck by its repeated injunction to apply Christ’s words to our lives—and, more boldly, to extend that application into the world. I frequently hear admonitions of this sort urging me to liken the…
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David O. McKay: Father, Teacher, Prophet
On Sunday I received this year’s course curriculum for RS and Priesthood: a diminutive paperback with a striking portrait on the cover, entitled Teachings of Presidents of the Church: David O. McKay.
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So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen and All the Rest
Please join me in sending off our crack team of guest bloggers, Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson, with our collective thanks. Invariably funny and occasionally controversial, their posts were a delightful addition–and one of them even made it onto the T&S favorites sidebar! We especially thank them for blogging over a difficult holiday period and…
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Springtime in Winter
After you try your hand at composing a haiku, take a chance on writing a Christmas story. All you have to do is supply the ending: a crotchety old cop is assigned to supervise a Christmas shopping trip for two needy kids, and after grudgingly performing the act of service he finds himself
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Labute and the Beasts
Speaking of Mormon masculinity, once-Mormon playwright Neil Labute premiered his new play this week, Fat Pig.
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Welcome Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson
We’re pleased to introduce Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson, our newest guest bloggers and our first co-blogging team.
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Fa La La La La
It’s shockingly easy to make confessions on the internet, and I can’t resist making one of my own:
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A Sense of Place
It’s been five months since my family moved from the edge of the country to the middle, and I’ve never felt so out of place. The change of season is to blame, of course: it happened quite quickly, here, on the day before Thanksgiving, when the low sky let fall flurries of snow and something…
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Reading, Recreation, and Redemption
Well, it must be autumn again. Not only is my house threatening to sail away in a sea of leaves (mostly ugly brown oak, sadly), but I’ve been asked to teach a mini-class on literacy at Enrichment. The rhythm of the schoolyear is hard to resist, and almost every fall I’m asked to give a…
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Notes on the Proclamation
In the fall of 1995 I enrolled in a critical theories seminar; first out of the block was feminism. One afternoon in September, I sat at a carrel in the old reading room on the south side of the HBLL and wrote on the inside cover of my reader a personal manifesto of sorts: “Why…
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Against an LDS Theology of Conscience
I’ve never seen the Disney version of “Pinocchio,â€? but I’ve absorbed by cultural osmosis the image of Jiminy Cricket cheerfully chirping, “Always let your conscience be your guide.â€? Our banal present-day version of conscience—and our uncritical acceptance of the concept as a stable psycho-spiritual category–belies the treacherous history of the idea.
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Bowdlerizing the Book of Mormon
This afternoon at lunch, my angelic three-year-old daughter said causally to her quesadilla, “I’m going to kill you by plunging my spoon into your heart.”
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Dinner Theater, or Do We Consume Media?
It was late spring in London, and just as the weather outside started warming up, things inside started heating up, too.