I appreciate the magnanimous spirit of Dialogue in printing my essay and this reply. Dr. Bushman’s courteous and able polemic is regrettably marred by some historical inaccuracies and by a tendency to set aside historical…
The Reverend Mr. Walters’ article on the first vision raised quite a stir among Mormon scholars when an early version circulated about a year and a half ago. The essay was clearly another piece of…
Since the year 1838, when Joseph Smith, Jr., set down the official account of his first vision, the story has continued to grow in importance in the eyes of Mormon leaders until it has come…
Sister Ruth, family, in-laws, friends and relatives, Brothers and Sisters, it is an honor, but a humbling experience, to be invited to speak at the funeral of a great man, a great soul. I appreciate…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Psalm 137:4 If anybody asks me where I’ve been, I say Utah and China. When I realized that “Southern Far East Mission” didn’t mean…
In one of the earliest books of imaginative literature about the Ameri can West (published in 1826), novelist-editor-missionary-biographer Timothy Flint reveals a common impression of the time that “in travelling towards the frontier, the decreasing…
Dear Sirs:
I am responding to your invitation to those who have “something to say.” By way of identification, I am a returned missionary from Chile, a graduate in History from BYU, a former President of the Young Democrats at BYU, and currently in my second year as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English in Lesotho.
Of the subject of my study, only fragments and copies of fragments are left. These are “Joseph Smith’s Egyptian Papyri” numbers 1, 10 and 11, and the three Facsimiles of the Pearl of Great Price. But these are enough. I have glued them to a roll of paper 10×150 centimeters long (according to Doctor Baer’s indications), and I have a pretty good idea of what PJS (as I shall call this document) must have looked like before it broke into pieces over a century ago.
Today the Church finds itself in an environment far different from that of fifty years ago. Gone are the simple orthodoxies of the nineteenth century which included the literal interpretation of the Bible and the…
In an effort to keep Dialogue’s readers abreast of current research on the subject “Mormons and Mormonism,” the second issue of each volume (Summer issue) is devoted to a listing of theses and dissertations accepted by Ameri can colleges and universities on the aforementioned subject. Our sources of information are primarily Mormon Americana, a bi-monthly bibliography prepared at Brigham Young University, Dissertation Abstracts, a publication of University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and commencement programs of the Utah universities.