Dialogue 3.3 (Fall 1968): 142–145
In response to Fawn Brodies’s biography of Joseph Smith, F.L. Stewart published a book called Exploding the Myth About Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet.
A superlative is an automatic challenge, and when Mrs. Brodie calls City of the Saints “the best book on the Mormons published during the nineteenth century,” my impulse is to disprove it. At surface glance…
The writing of history is fraught with difficulties because the historian has no direct access to the past. Through newspapers, diaries, journals, and public documents prior events may be glimpsed as shadows, but even then…
Fantastic Victory is without a doubt the most ambitious attempt by any “Mormon scholar” to set the recent Arab—Israeli conflict into some perspec tive. Cleon Skousen, in the amazingly short period of less than three…
The speed with which photographs of the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri were published once they came into the possession of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a gratifying contrast to the secrecy with which their previous custodians surrounded them. The definitive edition of the documents will take time, but in the meantime the Egyptologist can show his appreciation by taking advantage of the opportunity to make preliminary studies.
Only in a city can a full cast of characters for the human drama be assembled; hence only in the city is there sufficient diversity and competition to enliven the plot and bring the performers up to the highest pitch…
It is through the performance of creative arts, in art, in thought in personal relationships that the city can be identified as something more than a purely functional organization . . . Lewis Mumford Perhaps it is presumptuous to…
If you like fresh air, 25¢ hamburgers, and security, New York may not be the place for you. If you want a Rinso-clean wash you can hang in the backyard, where crickets sound at night, and neighbors who are people much like you, the city probably isn’t your bag.
. . . one key to urban development should be plain—it lies in the widening of the circle of those capable of participating in it, till in the end all men will take part in the conversation. Lewis Mumford…
Belief in the eternal and the infinite, the omniscient and the omnipotent succeeded, over the milleniums, in exalting the very possibilities of human existence . . . Lewis Mumford One of the most pressing theological questions of our time…