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From the 1920s to the 1940s, Leo Sowerby created popular secular works while his sacred compositions led admirers to call him the “dean of American church musicians.” Yet in time, Sowerby’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Canticle of the Sun and the rest of his corpus lost favor with the A-list symphonies and prominent musicians who had once made him a fixture in their repertoires. Joseph Sargent’s biography offers the first focused study of Sowerby’s life and work against the backdrop of the composer’s place in American music. As Sargent shows, Sowerby’s present-day marginalization as a composer relates less to the quality of his work than the fact that today’s historiographical practices and canon-building activities minimize modern church music. Sargent’s re-evaluation draws on a wide range of perspectives and composer’s music and writings to enrich detailed analyses of musical works and a career-spanning consideration of Sowerby’s musical language and aesthetic priorities.

In these ten stories (three of which appear here for the first time), Levi S. Peterson demonstrates his continuing engagement to take seriously the duty of the fiction writer to illuminate and entertain. His subject remains Latter-day Saints caught between the polarities of conscience and passion. Among the stories are sober tellings of rape and misogyny, defiant statements of ascendant feminism and the worship of Heavenly Mother, and—most abundantly—narratives about impermissible love that sometimes lead to heartbreak and other times forges unexpected couplings destined to last a lifetime. Once again, Peterson shows himself as a peerless master of the English language, the tools of his craft, and the artistry of creative fiction.

"Remember Lot’s wife," Jesus warned, yet the woman he refers to remains an enigmatic, nameless, speechless, biblical figure known only for being transformed into a pillar of salt. Who was she? What lessons were readers meant to take from her fate? Early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpreters, as well as readers today, have all wrestled with these questions. Josey Bridges Snyder analyzes examples from Second Temple literature, early rabbinic midrash, early Christian writings, and Islamic tradition to trace how the cultural, theological, and historical contexts of these interpreters influenced their understanding of the narrative. This book not only uncovers new insights into the ancient text and its many readers but reveals that interpretations are rarely as novel as they may seem.