Mormon Land

American Zion is the story of the Bundy family, famous for their armed conflicts in the West. With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage.

Decades before Melville and Twain composed their great works, a farmhand and child seer named Joseph Smith unearthed a long-buried book from a haunted hill in western New York State that told of an epic history of ancient America, a story about a family that fled biblical Jerusalem and took a boat to the New World. Using his prophetic gift, Joseph translated the mysterious book into English and published it under the title The Book of Mormon.

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century.

For hundreds of years in ancient Mesoamerica, the Nephites and Lamanites continued a feud started by a single family. This family crossed the sea from Jerusalem to settle in a Promised Land, clinging to the promise that God would protect them as long as they remembered him. Inspired by the narratives found in the Book of Mormon, Tales from the Promised Land is a collection of exciting short stories set against the backdrop of the ancient Americas.

A 14-year-old boy struggles with family relationships and accepting the beliefs he was taught as a child. While on the vacation of a lifetime, driving from the United States through México, Central and South America, he visits ruins and reads scripture. As his feelings and opinions begin to clarify, he decides to express his feelings through mazes of scenes representing his religious interpretations, with short write-ups intended to help other young people discover what took him so long to understand.