MORMON EXPERIENCE, SCHOLARSHIP, ISSUES & ART t The LDS Church and Utah Politics by Rod Decker 9 1997 Washington, D.C. MAIL ORDERS TO: SUNSTONE 343 North Third West Sunstone Salt Lake City, UT 84103-1215 8011355-5926 [email protected] Tapes are $8.00 each + 10% postage Symposium Include check or credit card number Audio cassette order form (VISA, MC, AMEX, DISC) -1. Inside the Mormon Hierarchy: Everything the -14. Confessions of a Mormon Psychic Spy: What Strengthening the Members Committee Didn't My Seven Years as a Government Remote Want You to See Viewer Taught Me about the Gospel -D. Michael Quinn -Paul H. Smith -2. "The Sealed Book" Symbol in Earliest -15. Directive Force: Normative Schemas in Mormonism-Isaiah 29 and the Three Mormon Popular Music Witnesses -Suzanne Cloud Tapper -Anthony Hutchinson -17. Do Clones Have Souls? Mormons and -3. Nauvoo in the 1840s: Conflict between the Bioethics Mormons and the Non-Mormons -Nancy Stowe Kader -Roger D. Launius -18. Pillars of My Faith -4. Beyond a Shadow of Certitude: Field Notes -Todd Eskelson from a Stupor of Thought -Kathleen Flake -Neal C. Chandler -19. Environmentalism and the Restored Gospel: -5. Encountering God in My Profession Ecological Arguments from Latter-Day -Gordon Banks Scriptures -Rebecca Chandler -Mark Bigelow -Charlee Hodson --Russell Fox -6. God Has a Neck; Why Don't Church Leaders? -20. The Sacred and the Mundane: Mormon -Lynn Matthews Anderson Feminism on the Internet (A Reader's Theater) -Rands/Ensign/Banks/Hodson -7. What Do I Believe? Ideas that Animate My Religious Life -21. We See What We Believe: The -Annette Lantos Heterosexualization of Gay Men and Lesbians in the LDS Church -9. Spiritual Living Lessons by the Ultimate Relief -Jeffery R. Jenson Society President-Sister Fonda Alamode -Laurie Mecham Johnson -22. The True Order of Basketball -Neal C. Chandler -10. The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine -23. The Ethical Dilemmas Presented by the 1977 -Keith E. Norman International Women's Year Conference: A Twenty-year Retrospective -11. Preparing Girls and Young Women for Full -Martha Sonntag Bradley Participation in the Gospel -Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger MORMON EXPERIENCE, SCHOLARSHIP, ISSUES, & ART October 1997 Volume 20:3 Issue 107 FEATURES Ian G. Barber ..................BEYOND THE LITERALIST CONSTRAINT: PER- SONAL REFLECTIONS ON MORMON SCRIP- TURE AND RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION Rod Decker. ...................THE LDS CHURCH AND UTAH POLITICS Brian Evenson. .................PAST AND PRESENT: MARNI ASPLUND- CAMPBELLS POETRY J. Scott Bronson ................. ALTARS: A ONE-ACT PLAY POETRY Russell Salamon. ................MUDDY BROWN SUNSTONE (ISSN 0363-1370) is published by The Sunstone Robert Cooperman. ..............SUBWAY MANIA Foundation, a non-profit corporation with no oficial Georganne O'Connor .............CHINCOTEAGUE ISLAND, VIRGINIA connection to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anicles represent the op~nionsof the wnters only. Paul Swenson .................. STRANGE GODS SUNSTONE is indexed in Rellgon index One: Pend~cals,the Anita Tanner. .................. LEAVING ALCATRAZ lNtx lo BWk Revim5 in Religion. Religion Index~s-RIOIRITIIBBR Askold Skalsky. ................. PHOTOGRAPH: ELLIS ISLAND, 1949 1975 on CD-ROM, and the ATIA Refigon Datahe on CD-ROM. published by the American Theological L~braryAssociation, 820 David Feela. ...................THE EVOLUTION OF GOD Church Street. 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Each mood brought a new interpretation, a new in- sight-to the poem, life, Frost, and, of TOUCHED BY THE MASTERS' HANDS course, myself. His better poems resonate with more moods and occasions; the lesser poems are not so accessible, and I found my- self not quoting them as often. Frost's poems, especially the better ones, are particularly accessible because they are metaphors-speaking of one thing in terms By Elbert Eugene Peck of another. When you take something like a star, it can mean many different things to many different people, and even different DECADE BEFORE performing The Poetty of Robert Frost. His early poems things to the same person, depending on missionary discussions in one's particularly resonated with the idealistic mis- their needs and circumstances. For Frost, all A own words became the program, I sion experience, such as feeling an affinity for things are metaphor-a philosophy that has rebelled and did it to avoid that intolerable, the earlier labors of those "whose thought[s] influenced me greatly At first, a hearty ro- rote task. But the first semester back from the I had not hoped to reacW4 and Frost's "testi- mantic, I sought metaphors everywhere for field, on my own, 1 memorized "The Touch mony" that everything we experience on everything and gave several silly church of the Master's and."' I did so because as a earth we agreed to in a pre-mortal life.* talks, like the one wherein I compared missionary I had heard Santa Rosa California So, at Bw, after memorizing the tale of church life to a symphony (not a bad com- Stake President Sid Peterson movingly recite the old violin and several other doggerel dit- parison) but I drew the analogy to ridiculous it, and I wanted to use it to similar effect in ties, I naturally next photocopied and pasted ends and preached obvious morals. I was like my sermons. I still can recite it, but none of on "to memorize" notecards Frost's "Mending Myra Welch whose violin ballad concludes: my friends let me get past "'Twas battered Wall." After that small step lightly taken, "And many a man with his life out of tune is and scarred, and the auctioneer. ." poem led on to poem, and (sigh) that made battered . is auctioned cheap. ." In con- Over the next four years, walking from all the difference. trast, Frost usually tells a story; the hearer King Henry Apartments through Kiwanis My memorization method was long and does the