Our society is afflicted with a tumorous disrespect for law. Ordinary citizens and public figures reject the requirements of law and boldly substitute some other set of values to justify clearly illegal behavior. Widely publicized…
The ultimate fate of American minorities is to become tourist attractions. . . . But the tourist boom means the same thing in Utah that it means in Vermont, the same thing it means wherever the past has been piously “restored,” roped off, and put on display—not the vitality but the decadence of a way of life.
Such is the devastating indictment of Mormonism by Christopher Lasch in the January 26, 1967, New York Review of Books
In 1930, when B. H. Roberts published his six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned journals were silent. But he himself, with pardonable pride, had described his work as “monumental.” One Mormon, answering Bernard De Voto’s contemptuous description of Utah as an intellectual desert, hailed Roberts as “another Gibbon.” Although hyperbolic, the favorable judgment was in general well deserved….
Among many Mormons there exists a genuine distrust of psychiatry. Apprehensions arise partly from misconceptions about psychotherapy and partly from a stigma that many attach to anything associated with emotional disorders. Many believe “If you live your religion, you won’t need a psychiatrist.” For many, to visit a psychiatrist would be to admit emotional and spiritual failure. Mormons might enter psychotherapy with not only the usual fears and anxieties concerning an unknown experience that lies ahead…
It is currently fashionable to look ahead to see what the future is likely to be, and, if what is seen is unsatisfactory, to consider alternative futures and means necessary to achieve them. This is…
The urban age—with all its complexities, opportunities, and monstrous problems—is upon us. How are Christians—and Mormons—responding to this new environment? This article will present exploratory research com paring Mormons and non-Mormons and will be followed…
Write on your doors the saying wise and old, ‘Be bold! Be bold!” and everywhere, “Be bold; be not too bold!” Yet better the excess than the defect; better more than less . . . . Longfellow, Morituri…
This is a very disturbing film. Members of the Church ought to be warned to avoid it and to keep their children away from it. Its philosophy is “loaded”! It assumes that the immoral is…
Woman Is My Idea, a comedy by Don C. Liljenquist, was produced and directed by Don C. Liljenquist at the Belasco Theatre in New York on 111 West 44th Street on Wednesday, September 25, 1968.…
The irreverence in the Church today “is not irreverence of disdain for spiritual things, but rather the irreverence of undeveloped spirituality.” So writes the author of Worship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…