Essays

Hagoth favors essays that can trace their lineage back to Michel de Montaigne; whether narrative, analytical, or devotional, these essays lean ruminative, conversational, meandering, impressionistic, and are reluctant to wax didactic. But that doesn’t mean you won’t find the occasional poem or piece of fiction here as well.

Gollum as Christ Figure in The Lord of the Rings Finale

John Ronald October 16, 2022

We’ve all read the books before and we’ve all seen the movies, so at this point Gollum’s role in the final destruction of the Ring

LDS “Low” and “High” Art in The Singles Ward and How Rare a Possession

Will Swenson October 11, 2022

The curious paradox of how our ostensible “Low Art” is so much less accessible than our ostensible “High Art.”

Revisiting Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and “You Can’t Pray a Lie”

Marion Hall October 9, 2022

Ponderizing a line from an old David A. Bednar talk.

On Robi Draco Rosa’s “Vagabundo”, Mission Music, and The Terrible Questions

Jacob Bender October 4, 2022

A Latin Rocker reminds us: if we’re not preparing for eternity, then just what do we think we’re doing here?

On General Conference and Unwitting Inspiration

Hagoth October 1, 2022

October 2003. I was a missionary, and our top investigator agreed to watch General Conference with us at the stake center. I was worried she

On Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” Whims, and Impressions

Spencer Antolini September 26, 2022

Go visit the Carthage Jail visitor’s center in Illinois, and you will be treated to brief video on the life of Joseph Smith. It opens with the following quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 Harvard Divinity Address: “It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake…”