Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.
Benjamin Franklin purportedly offered some counsel for those wanting to be remembered long after they are dead and buried: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”Sage advice. But for many, if not most people, their writing talents or life events doom them to being remembered on little more than census rolls and tax lists. In the annals of history, most will never be mentioned in so much as a footnote. Even that widely sought-after but short-lived fifteen minutes of fame eludes most people, and only a small circle of friends and family will hold them in remembrance after they die.
According to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter, “the LDS church” or “LDS Mormonism”), Joseph Smith’s motivation to start a new religious movement began with a particularly difficult epistemological problem.
Orange lightning burns
the Detroit sky tonight.
We just got out of the temple,
two hours of white stillness,
The moon is up, and the fire has burned down.
Benjamin stoops, coaxes embers to life.
“Hello,” he says.
“Cold?” I ask.
“Not so much,” he says.
Boo and Yamba climb fast, finding trail in dusk, and I follow
on stiffening mud and snowcrust from last week’s first snow.
They skirt Cliff Lake then Petit, Linear, and so between glacial morains,
taciturn boys bewildered by plunging cold and this sudden-setting
behavior of water. The lakes bend in each ascending basin,
Very bold,
I saw a star fall from heaven,
Kindle a fire in the valley of decision.
There could be nothing upon earth
So exquisite
My sister once died,
alone, on the operating table.
They brought her back of course
—no harm done—
is a volatile fuel
that blazes you far
into the white desert
like some 50s speed test pilot
The world was divided into three. Three shards of sagebrush and sky. That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…