In his writings on the sociology of religion, Max Weber contrasts two types of religious leaders: emissary and exemplary prophets. The founders of the great religions of mankind fall into one of these two categories. …
Who made the world, my child?
Father made the rain
silver and forever.
Mother’s hand
drew riverbeds and hollowed seas,
drew riverbeds and hollowed seas
to bring the rain home.
for Harlow Soderborg Clark, surgically deaf
By sheer nerve you’ve gone Van Gogh one better:
cut your ear off from your brain, but
left it blooming in your hair.
You’d auditioned city living just so long—
Dialogue 12.4 (Winter 1979): 90–92
In postscript let me say that I have been accused of forging this letter and of taking unfair advantage of President Smith. Let the readers judge. I am personally grateful that the Church has not been caught in the position of taking a stand that might very well prove to be wrong in the future
These three brief reprints provide interesting insights into early Mormon medicine. The first piece, from an essay entitled “Millerism” in The American Journal of Insanity (January 1845), although not directed at Mormons is relevant to…
The following interview is with a man tried by the state of Utah as a “quack.”[1] His practice is based on massage, herbs, health foods and in reading the iris of the eyes. The trial…
Exegetes as willing and capable as Orson Pratt to combine empirical and theological insights have all but disappeared from the Mormon scene. His successors have retained the enthusiastic optimism of early Mormonism, but they have not replaced the empirical beliefs of the nineteenth century with the more correct information which is available to us now.
As the story goes, and as countless Mormon preachers and teachers have told it, embellished it and retold it for generations, it was a classic confrontation between a conspiracy of falsehood and the heroism of…