DiaBLOGue

In a recent New Era article (August 1972) Arthur Henry King made an incisive comment about Mormon literature: Mormon artists, he said, “need not write especially for Mormons, and they need not write especially on…

When so many biographies of early Mormons are made immaculate (and superficial) by filial piety, it borders on the tragic when an historian seeking to write an objective life of Sidney Rigdon fails in many…

With vivid cunning 
she draws rounded 
petals of smoke 
within her mouth, 

at his execution, 
Mountain Meadows, Utah, March 23, 1877 

I want to say I used what strength I had 
to save those people. It went on. I could not

It was in the year 1930, after an unusual “calling” from the Church, that I made a momentous personal decision: to enter the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and work toward the Ph.D. degree in Biblical Studies. I had been teaching seminary for four years, but now, impressed with the need for greater understanding of the background of the Scriptures and convinced that I could make my best contribution to the Church only after studying under the finest Biblical scholars in the country, I became one of several Church educators who decided to take what, for a Mormon, would be a most unusual step. What follows are my personal reminiscences concerning why we went to the Chicago Divinity School, what we did there and the ultimate value of this experience. 

I remember the warm Indian summer nights of 1959.1 drove with both windows of my Volkswagon wide open so I could smell the burning leaves and autumn fields as I passed through Sandy and Draper…

This poignant observation by Dale L. Morgan was written even before World War II, and the erstwhile Utah sons and daughters spoken of are themselves now grandparents. Moreover, it is doubtful that anyone any longer has any hopes of closing the “wounds” through which they departed. Indeed, the “wounds” have long since come to be regarded instead as gateways to worldly opportunity. With worldly opportunity has come worldly achievement, which has in turn brought worldly respectability; and respectability is always a problem for a “peculiar people.”