Religious images have long been used in Latter-day Saint worship and instruction. Paintings, illustrations, and graphic works served a devotional function among the early Church members. Not only did the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo use…
Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage.
Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 11–68
Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.
Dialogue 38.3 (Fall 2005): 26–54
When the 1984 conference approved Section 156 , which also indicated that the soon-to-be-built temple in Independence would be dedicated to the pursuit of peace, it became clear that the largest “schism”—separation from the unity of the Church—in the history of the RLDS Church was in the making.
Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 39–59
This paper will deal with a more specific form of creationism, which is often termed “creation science” or “scientific creationism” (these terms
will be used synonymously).
Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.
“It was not a self-consistent ideology but a movement—a tremor in the earth, a lift in the wind, a swelling tide . . . an exhilarating sense of discovery, a utopian hope that women might…
Because some leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have endorsed and promoted racism in their theology, practices, doctrine, curricula, and culture for much of its existence, an organized, multifaceted approach is…
Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 167–180
This tendency to rewrite Relief Society history continued from the
1850s into the 1990s.
Editor’s note: In light of the Washington Post piece on “The Genesis of a church’s stand on race” we bring back from the archives the famous article cited therein. This essay originally appeared in Dialogue 8 (Spring 1973).[p.54]
by Lester E. Bush, Jr.
There once was a time, albeit brief, when a “Negro problem” did not exist for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints During those early months in New York and Ohio no mention was even made of Church attitudes towards blacks.