Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

Tag: mission

  • Grimethorpe

    Grimethorpe

    When I was 19 years old, just after completing my first year at a large university in the American West, I left school to spend two years as a Mormon missionary in the Northeast of England. When I arrived in Britain, I knew little to nothing about the present social or economic conditions of the…

  • The Things I Do Not Remember: September 11, 2001

    Ten years ago, I was living in the LDS Missionary Training Centre (MTC) in Chorley, England, near Preston. I arrived there in early September at the beginning of what was to be a two year proselytizing mission for the Church. While I was at the MTC, I was assigned to live and study with a ‘companion’, the…

  • Bill Bryson

    This is an odd choice, admittedly, for the Favorite Artists series I’ve started here on this blog. It’s not much of a series yet, to be honest, since I’ve only featured one other artist so far, documentary poet Mark Nowak. And Bill Bryson, while a cracking writer of popular non-fiction, isn’t exactly what many people…

  • Mark Nowak

    Mark Nowak

    So, among other things, I’m going to start on ongoing series of features on this blog, one of which will be posts about my favorite artists, called, appropriately enough, “My Favorite People Series.” This post is the first in what I hope will be a long line of posts about all kinds of people that I admire…

  • To be a Carer

    To be a Carer

    I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the medical profession, and more broadly, about health. I’m not certain why, particularly since I haven’t been ill lately, and we tend usually to think of health and healers only when our body is not well, when we are in pain, when health eludes us. So I…