Our Top Ten Essays of 2024
Plus: Looking Ahead to 2025
Here are the most popular essays we published in 2024. Send a link to one of these (or another of your favorites) to a friend or family member!
Lusterware
I have been thinking lately about an Emily Dickinson poem I first heard twenty-five years ago in an American literature class at the University of Utah. I remember feeling intrigued and somewhat troubled as the professor read the poem since he was reported to be a lapsed Mormon. “Was that how it felt to lose faith?” I thought.
Spiritual Cartography
A few months ago, my sister asked me to talk to a friend who had just learned that Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy left in its wake broken hearts, painful feelings, and for many a sense of betrayal. Over and over, she asked questions like:
There Are No Teams
On May 9th, 1969, in the midst of ongoing tensions about segregated swimming pools, Fred Rogers did something simple yet moving on an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. He invited a Black police officer played by François Clemmons to dip his feet in a pool with him.
Costly Love
Human love is relational; human love cannot be meaningfully conceived outside of and apart from a field of individuals who affect and are affected by one another. “When we are deeply connected to others, it is not clear who is affecting whom, and the causal direction does not really matter.” Does such a claim apply to God as well as to persons? It does …
Washing the Clay from My Eyes
In 2002, my wife and I and our young family were preparing to move to Virginia for a job opportunity. We traveled from our home in Salt Lake City to southern Utah to visit my parents in advance of our move. By that point, my dad had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years and had also been diagnosed with chronic leukemia and Parkinson’s diseas…
The Gold Plates
I am a skeptic by nature. My instinctive reaction to stories of divine intervention is doubt. I am dubious about prayers for lost keys. (Which doesn’t prevent me from offering such prayers. Consistency can be a hobgoblin.) For the most part, skepticism has served me well. As the dramatist Wilson Mizner quipped, “I respect faith, but …
Women at Church: 10 Years Later
Twelve years ago I spoke to a Latter-day Saint conference. As I was speaking, ushers went up and down the aisles, gathering notecards upon which members of the audience were writing down questions they wanted me to answer during the Q&A period. After I finished my prepared remarks, I was handed the stack of notecards while still standing on the stage. I…
The Atonement of Love
As an exceedingly earnest missionary in the early 1990s, I found myself transfixed by one prominent story about the Atonement. It had to do with the way that our individual sins affected Christ’s suffering. I knew then with perfect clarity that every time I committed a minor deviation from the White Bible (the then-current missionary handbook, a pocket-…
Remembering Melissa Inouye
After a long battle with cancer, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye died last week at age 44. Melissa will be remembered, I suspect, for the qualities that caught my attention the first time I heard her speak about ten years ago: her rare candor and compassion on the hard problem of Zion belonging across social division. On the issues that perennially draw Latter…
A Developing Church
“Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we try to pervert this order we shall produce a forced fruit that will have neither ripeness nor flavor and that will soon spoil. . . . I would like no more to require a young child be five feet tall than that he have judgment at the age of ten.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Ok, that was 11 essays for those of you counting, but I couldn’t bear to leave one off the list.
ADDITIONAL 2024 HIGHLIGHTS
SPECIAL SERIES
From Terryl Givens’ column Wrestling with Angels to James Goldberg’s Tales of the Chelm First Ward to Kathryn Knight Sonntag’s incredible poetry section, there is so much to explore on the Wayfare website. Click the links below to begin a journey of discovery.
WE PUBLISHED AN EPIC POEM OF THE RESTORATION
Post Lucum
Were I to tell today to you today,
You’d find your self bereft of sanctity,
For none can speak and truth convey thereby--
The sacred is to know apart from all.
My mind’s a blast that rends and brakes the earth,
It speaks a shatt’ring with a singeing tongue.
Two New Print Issues
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HELP US REACH AN EXCITING MILESTONE
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LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025
We have some exciting plans for 2025, including a special issue on peace, new serializations, another summer festival and incredible writing, poetry and art arriving in your inbox each week.
If you are able, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Paid subscriptions and donations are how we financially compensate and support the talented artists and writers we publish. We could not do this work without you, and are so grateful for any support you are able to offer.
WORK WITH US IN 2025
If you’re a writer or an artist, let’s work together in 2025! Find a link to our submissions page below. If you’re interested in partnering with us in some other way, write us at info@faithmatters.org.
Merry Christmas!
