Some time ago I visited a web site for Mormon misfits (www.misfitmormon.com). As I read through the posts there, I wondered to myself, “What kind of eldritch creatures might these ‘Morms Out of the Norm’ be?”

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John Remy’s article “Saving the Dead: A Comparative Study of Post-funerary Rites in Japanese and Mormon Culture” in the November issue of Sunstone came to me, rather serendipitously, at a time I had been thinking about the very anti-Reformationist relationship we Mormons have with our dead.  Like the Roman Catholics, we perform an obligation we [...]

While serving a mission in Peru a couple of years before its first stakes were formed, my companions and I routinely requested of our baptismal candidates that they remove Catholic images from their homes. In doing this, we believed we were following a mission directive. I can’t now remember ever hearing such a directive delivered [...]

I was stunned to recently read that the human mind wanders every six to ten seconds. That means an unattached thought crowds in on my conscious attention up to six hundred times an hour or 9,600 times a day. –These pants give me a wedgie. Why didn’t I notice that at the [...]

In priesthood meeting last Sunday, we discussed the seldom mentioned topic of needing to follow the prophet.  A fellow read President Woodruff’s call for “intelligent obedience” which was then tied to his caveat that the Lord would never allow a prophet to lead the people astray.  The thought struck me that one would not need [...]

A Motley Vision: Interview with Eric Samuelsen

In my last article “Bad Stories,” I commented on the relative value of dark as opposed to lighter themes or subjects in Mormon narrative art forms. Reader comments generated a tangential and tantalizingly brief discussion of the problem of didacticism: making a story’s central theme explicit rather than implicit. I’d like to reopen [...]

In the 2006 Sunstone Symposium panel discussion, Art from the Dark Side of Happy Valley (#SL6271), Richard Dutcher said Max Golightly, his professor at BYU, had once told him, “The first, great Mormon writer is going to be excommunicated.”
In years past, I would have seen this prediction as a form of posturing, but I have [...]

Here’s a list of films that many feel belong to the category of Mormon Cinema.  Feel free to suggest additions or just to quibble, but remember our working definition of Mormon Cinema.

When I was asked to participate in a panel discussion of Mormon Cinema at Sunstone West in Claremont, my first reaction was to wonder what exactly Mormon Cinema might be.  Of course, I realized that there was something out there to which we can point and say, “That’s Mormon Cinema,” but it is always difficult [...]