In a time of the Chautauqua and the public meeting hall, when cultural values were established and reinforced by pulpit and lectern, there stood in the very heart of Brigham Young’s Zion the Liberal Institute,…
“Every man’s life,” wrote Emerson, “is a secret known only to God.” Certainly this must be said of Solomon Spalding, much of whose story remains obsure. The events of his life suggest a pattern of…
Late in the summer of 1833 one Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, recently excommunicated from the Mormon church for “unchristianlike” conduct toward some of the sisters,[1] learned of a manuscript written some twenty years before by the late Reverend Solomon Spalding which was similar to the Book of Mormon. His interest piqued, he set out to investigate this story, principally through interviews with former residents of Conneaut, Ohio, where Spalding once had lived.
One of the notable intellectual activities of the 19th and early 20th centuries was development of the view that the Old Testament was a composite of ancient documents of varied age and source. Although the…
Dialogue 10.4 (Winter 1977): 10–45
A great value of these early manuscripts is that for the most part they substantiate the correctness of the present Book of Mormon text—fully 99.9% of the text is published correctly. In textual criticism, however, evidence should be weighed, not counted, since a unique reading in a reliable source may be better than any number of readings in less reliable sources.
The publication of two biographies of major figures in Mormon history within a year is no small event. That both Donna Hill’s Joseph Smith (Doubleday, 1977) and Samuel W. Taylor’s Life of John Taylor have…
From Quaker to Latter-day Saint is an unfortunate title. Neither interesting nor particularly descriptive, it combines with the design and size of the volume to suggest one of those wearying biographies of a minor figure…
Seldom does the motivation for a book begin with a serendipitous finding. Such, however, was the case for this partial biography of Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism. The author, a specialist…
Prospective Latter-day Saint readers of Donna Hill’s biography of Joseph Smith will want to know two things: Is there anything new, and is it sympathetic to the Prophet? The answer to both questions is definitely…
Little of the Mormon fiction published thus far has dealt significantly with the central issues of Latter-day Saint religious life. On the one hand there is the propagandistic fiction, found chiefly in the church magazines,…