Is There a Role of Poetry in Culture?

For this episode, we were happy to bring on someone that’s been on our list for a long time  — scholar and writer James Goldberg.

James is a fascinating person and Latter-day Saint, and brings a truly unique perspective to our faith. In his words, his family is Jewish on one side, Sikh on the other, and Mormon in the middle. He works as a historian at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is also a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator. He’s won the Association for Mormon letters awards in both the Drama and Novel categories, for different works, and has been a finalist in the Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Criticism categories. He’s also one of a rotating cast of scholars on BYUtv’s Come Follow Up series. 

Our conversation was wide-ranging and it turns out James has interesting insights to share on just about anything — so we covered several topics, including how Latter-day Saints can approach the Old Testament, wrestling with other difficult scripture or history, and the virtue of the slow, distilled process of creating poetry. We also discussed James’s book of poetry, Let Me Drown with Moses and its provocative title, including the virtue of choosing faith in a chaotic world while maintaining our own moral compass.