Access Utah

In 2005, David Roberts and two of his mountaineering friends caught sight of what appeared to be a granary beneath an overhanging cliff a thousand feet above a Utah ranch. After rappelling down the cliff, Roberts and his companions discovered a settlement--and a mystery. This enormous granary was large enough to hold fifty-seven bushels of corn, weighing a ton and a half. Yet Roberts and his friends--some of the most experienced climbers in the world--had enormous difficulty reaching the site. In fact, they were the first people to reach the remote site in more than seven hundred years. How could the ancient natives have managed to lug so much grain up this sheer cliff, especially considering there is no conclusive evidence that they possessed rope technology? For more than 5,000 years the Ancestral Puebloans occupied the Four Corners region. Just before 1300 AD, they abandoned their homeland in a migration that remains one of prehistory's greatest puzzles. Northern and southern neighbors of the Ancestral Puebloans, the Fremont and Mogollon likewise flourished for millennia before migrating or disappearing. Fortunately, the Old Ones, as some of their present-day descendants call them, left behind awe-inspiring ruins, dazzling rock art, and sophisticated artifacts ranging from painted pots to woven baskets.

USU Philosophy Professor Charlie Huenemann, writing for 3quarksdaily.com says that "we all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too...What is left unsaid speaks volumes. We might resign ourselves to this fact - the inescapable limits of what's sayable - but in fact a great many minds have sought to construct the perfect language."

In "Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. She says she wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened. But she was terrified that she might forget something, she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. "Ongoingness" is a spare, meditative work standing in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary. In this collection of essays, Manguso confronts issues of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.

The recent excommunications of prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints got us wondering about the practice of excommunication, and related practices like shunning and ostracizing. Does excommunication have different meanings across various religions and cultures? Why are some individuals cut off and others not? How should religious institutions respond to unorthodox opinions and beliefs among their members?

In 2005, historian James Whiteside bought a Harley Davidson Heritage Softail, christened it "Old Blue," and set off on a series of motorcycle adventures. Over six years he traveled more than 15,000 miles. In his new book "Old Blue's Road" Whiteside recounts his travels to the Pacific Northwest, Yellowstone, Dodge City, Santa Fe, Wounded Knee, and many other places and considers the ongoing struggle between Indian and mainstream American culture, the meaning of community, the sustainability of the West's hydraulic society, the creation of the national parks system, the Mormon experience in Utah, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and more. Whiteside reflects on the processes of change that made the American West what it is today and the complex ways in which the West's past and present come together.

LaDonna Redmond became a food justice advocate after her son developed food allergies and she found that the healthy food she wanted to feed him wasn't available in her Chicago neighborhood. She says that fair and equal access to healthy foods affects the health and well-being of the community and that food justice is tied to social justice, to issues of violence, poverty, and immigration. She advocates for dismantling the "food industrial complex" and returning to the "tables of our ancestors" to make our own food.

Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases, but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers."Letter to a Future Lover" is a collection several dozen brief pieces written by Ander Monson in response to library ephemera-with "library" defined broadly, ranging from university institutions to friends' shelves, from a seed library to a KGB prison library-and addressed to readers past, present, and future.

Nancy McHugh, professor of philosophy at Wittenberg University in Ohio, says the fear of bacteria, hormones, and antibiotics is rampant in our society. She is interested in the ways we go about making knowledge and ignorance about food and its relationship to health and argues that these practices have led to a new food movement, "clean eating," which in turn has generated a new eating disorder, orthorexia, or righteous eating.

Sociologist and Mormon scholar Armand Mauss says that as a relatively new religious movement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has followed a developmental trajectory similar to many other such movements. In the next few years, however, as the church enters its third century it is likely to face many new and unprecedented challenges. Mauss will consider how the church and its members might cope with these challenges, including the definition of gender in church life, and navigating issues of faith vs. doubt, in a lecture, “Mormonism’s Third Century: Coping with the Contingencies,” sponsored by USU’s Religious Studies Program this afternoon at 4:00 in Old Main 121 on the Utah State University campus.

Kara Richardson Whitely knew she could reach the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. She had done it once before. But she failed in a second attempt, struggled with food addiction and looked for ways to cope with feelings of failure and shame. Her weight shot to more than 300 pounds. Deep in her personal gorge, Whitely decided the only way out was up. She resolved to climb the mountain again-and this time, she would reach the summit. And she would do it without waiting for her plus-sized status to disappear. "Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds" is the story of her ascent from the depths of self-doubt to the top of the world.