Religious Movements in Contemporary America is a collection of 27 papers, mainly based on field work, on “marginal religious movements in the United States”—such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pentecostals, Spiritualists, Satanists, Hare Krishna, Scientology, and…
It’s nice to know there was something to talk about in Manti last winter. I’m refer ring to Joyce Eliason’s Fresh Meat/Warm Weather, a confessional autobiography disguised as a first novel, which has a lot…
The fiddles are tuning in Mormon historiography. Not only is there a great deal of activity as new histories are written and old classics revived; there is, more importantly, a new professionalism. Mormon scholars have…
Family Kingdom was written primarily for a non-Mormon audience, written, as the author says in his Preface, to satisfy the “insatiable curiosity” and correct the “amazing amount of misconception regarding the institution of plural marriage…
Dialogue 9.4 (Winter 1974): 74–75
Review of An Egyptian Endowment by Hugh Nibley, which discusses the papyri that Joseph Smith allegedly used to help translate the Book of Abraham. Hugh Nibley decided to state his case, but allow readers to form their own conclusions after reading it.
Car window turned to shale from sun
burst, the car parked some summer
Sunday there before the church
house. Voices sing: “Spirit
The flaws of Mormon fiction are many. But so are the possibilities.
As an epigraph to their anthology A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert quote Orson F. Whitney’s 1888 Contributor essay, “Home Literature”:
We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not yet exhausted. His highest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundation may now be low on earth.
Dialogue 9.4 (Winter 1974): 21–34
Foster points out that in 1842 an unpublished pamphlet was written called “The Peace Maker” that expressed its support for polygamy. It is the first-known defense of polygamy before 1852.
Just over ten years ago I was approached by four young Mormons who were affiliated with Stanford University in one capacity or another. They wanted to know if there was a library market for a…