I first encountered Thomas F. O’Dea through his book The Mormons which I read with considerable excitement. Here, it seemed to me, was a person professionally concerned with the development and enhancement of the scholarly…
Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1979): 19–31
Within two years of his assasination, however, the Church was torn by succession struggles that led to dispersion. Almost a century and a half later, the whereabouts of many of these saints is still unknown.
Communication is a matter of infinite hope. It is the emotion we feel when we send these fragile words however tentatively or forcefully out to others. Even those who write secret diaries, shrouded in cryptic codes, or who shout anonymous messages on subway walls, or who carefully hide parchment and golden plates in caves to come forth several millennia later all do so with the same expectation: that someone, somewhere will read and understand.
We looked a lot like the picture in the Dialogue logo, although, of course, we didn’t know it then. Gene and Charlotte England, Karl Keller and I were taking lunch on the lawn at the…
Though set in Salt Lake City, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a “Mormon novel”, even in the way that Scowcroft’s The Ordeal of Dudley Dean is—which does not mean it will not interest Mormons.…
Wright Morris once said, “The ‘subject’ of Wolfe, Hemingway, and Faulkner, however various the backgrounds, however contrasting the styles, pushed to its extremity, is nostalgia.” He should have included Fitzgerald, and even then the list…
For several decades Bingham, Utah was a turbulent mining town. Built on the edge of the “greatest hole on earth,” its inhabitants slaved for gold and then for copper. One day Bingham disappeared, consumed by…
Writing a book of short stories/sketches about a group of missionaries in France is picking a hard door to knock on—missionary work is surrounded with ideals, taboos, and nostalgia—but Gladys Clark Farmer makes it swing…
J. Kenneth Davies, a long-time student of Utah labor history, has been interested in the relationship between the labor movement in Utah and the Mormon Church. Deseret’s Sons of Toil is intended to be a…