I can’t say that some of my best friends are Mormons, but I’ve always
had a soft spot for the Latter-Day Saints. Their faith was founded
about 50 miles to our east during the antebellum roil which gave to our
region the appellation of the “Burned-Over District,” as religious and
reform enthusiasms (abolition, women’s rights, spiritualism) set this
land afire. I find the Book of Mormon, well, implausible, but as an
indiscriminate patriot of the Burned-Over District anything or anyone
hailing from these parts is okay by me, from the free-love Oneida
Community to Ann Lee and her celibate Shakers. (And what a rotten
perpetuation strategy that was: a no-sex sect.)
My Mormon-friendliness—and no, I never experimented with LDS—is pretty much limited to rooting for BYU football, though in 1984, when I had quit the employ of Sen. Pat Moynihan and wanted nothing more to do with politics, I rode the Hound to Salt Lake City, where I flopped for a couple of months at the New Grand Hotel, writing derivative Beat poetry and thinking on things. (I got a charge years later when I read in Wallace Stegner’s novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain that his fictive alter ego’s no-good father hung around the New Grand.)
Almost a score of years ago I published a travel book about rural New York (Country Towns of New York) in which I wrote up Palmyra, the Mormon mecca, in whose environs Joseph Smith claimed to have received a visit in 1823 from an angel named Moroni, who directed him to the west side of a glacial drumlin that the Mormons would call Cumorah. There Smith found a stone box containing a set of gold plates upon which was written, in an ancient language, the Book of Mormon.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/just-deseret/
My Mormon-friendliness—and no, I never experimented with LDS—is pretty much limited to rooting for BYU football, though in 1984, when I had quit the employ of Sen. Pat Moynihan and wanted nothing more to do with politics, I rode the Hound to Salt Lake City, where I flopped for a couple of months at the New Grand Hotel, writing derivative Beat poetry and thinking on things. (I got a charge years later when I read in Wallace Stegner’s novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain that his fictive alter ego’s no-good father hung around the New Grand.)
Almost a score of years ago I published a travel book about rural New York (Country Towns of New York) in which I wrote up Palmyra, the Mormon mecca, in whose environs Joseph Smith claimed to have received a visit in 1823 from an angel named Moroni, who directed him to the west side of a glacial drumlin that the Mormons would call Cumorah. There Smith found a stone box containing a set of gold plates upon which was written, in an ancient language, the Book of Mormon.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/just-deseret/
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