The story explores the crazy rules of homo-vs-hetero public displays of affection among missionaries — and it was written by one of the stars of the last Sunstone Symposium! check it out!
Losing you [when you joined the church] was like a guillotine blade that beheaded the loving richness I had in my life. [After you joined the church] I saw you withdraw from life. The relationship between your withdrawal from life and your involvement in the church appeared to be proportionally…
Years ago, on a cross country road trip, an LDS friend of mine broke an axle in the middle of Nebraska. He found a payphone, called his father in Utah, got the phone number of the region’s stake president, and called the man, a stranger. Then the Mormon machine…
Thanks to some of my believing Mormon friends, the blog post, “Will Your Child be Rich or Poor? 15 Poverty Habits Parents Teach their Children,” has been hovering on my radar, popping up repeatedly in my Facebook feed and even landing in my inbox via mass email. When I finally…
My guess is that this good sister’s plight was probably exacerbated by the realities of serving (i.e., living) in Asia.
I’m a fairly standard-issue American male and can count the number of times I’ve shed tears on one hand. One was when I returned home from Brazil and realized how cold and uncommunicative the people of my country of birth suddenly seemed to me. The other was after about six months into my first stay in Taiwan. I love my life here, but it is a much less expressive culture than even that of the US. Adapting takes time and, unlike the easy adaptation to the greater warmth of a Latin culture, finding one’s place in a colder society like Taiwan’s can often feel like compromising one’s humanity.
Thank God for my Taiwanese wife, her intellectual curiosity, and her dedication to living a polyglot lifestyle.
Looks like a good book!
The coldness of that relationship where someone who “loved her best” would only allow her to touch his sleeve when he clearly knew she was in real distress is stunning!
Visitor — right, but you have to understand that in that culture, he would see his refusal to comfort her as being a noble sacrifice.
Loved this article, well-written (congrats holly). Thanks for the tip chanson.