The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a schizophrenic church. Its ultimate concern is with things beyond—life after death, justice-in-judgment, salvation, exaltation—and with their earthly preparation—baptism, repentance, endowment. But at the same time…
Many people have observed something unusual about my relationship with my wife and people in general. Often, I have been asked by individuals wondering what my secret is, “Kennedy, do you know what you’re doing?”…
A short time ago, in Brigham Young University Studies, I published an article about Japanese and English poetry; I ended it with the statement that poetry in both languages carries the hallmark “Made on Earth…
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. Samuel Butler the Younger, Life and Habit Reader who…
Corn grows in my father’s backyard garden
in ten green files, each row a week taller,
the tallest now past two months, nearly ripe.
The years he’s planted gardens range beyond
the year that I was born in early spring,
but memory recalls three different plots
Not many years after Voltaire delivered himself of his much maligned observation that history is a pack of tricks we play on the dead, historians began to attempt to prove him wrong by telling us…
Dudley Dean is a forty-year-old befuddled jack-Mormon professor of English. Wife Hannah has left him and married one of his teaching colleagues—a maudlin, oversexed boor named Ashton—and his devout Mormon mother has just died. Dudley…
Readers of Dialogue who have been searching for a sympathetic, read able, and reasonably accurate introduction to Mormonism to present to their non-Mormon friends may well consider Carl Carmer’s The Farm Boy and the Angel.…
So Stevenson be glad—
Whatever your life was, your dreams were,
I do not know and you cannot care,
Fallen like a stone on that hot street.
Adlai Stevenson died in Palermo.
In the airport. His face was pasted
On the newsstand, bobbing in and out among
Jabbering Sicilians, their sweaty hands
Sticky with orange soda pop,