No single feature of Mormonism strikes many perceptive non-Mormon observers with greater force than Mormon literal-mindedness. For instance, in his monumental and largely sympathetic monograph The Mormons published in 1957, Thomas F. O’Dea wrote that…
Gray day with a brown leaf refusing
at the end of a wind to drop,
why is the crabbed clinging
so intricate a part of the dance?
On 26 October 1969, Indonesia was “dedicated for the preaching of the Gospel by Elder Ezra Taft Benson.” The Church initiated its standard missionary program. Door-to-door tracting began in Jakarta on 20 January 1970.[1] Plans…
Excessive multiplication of bureaus results in a bureaucracy, which we may define as any administration in which the need to follow complex procedures impedes effective action. A bureaucrat usually works by fixed routine without exercising…
only from the nesting hollow
of our bed
will I say how cold it’s been
so cold
The developmental history of the Church shows most conspicuously, perhaps, not in purposes and theology but in details. A twentieth-century visitor to the nineteenth-century might be most struck not by the pioneer conditions as by…
In his landmark organizational study, Max Weber outlined three forms of authority: traditional, charismatic, and legal. Originally charismatic under Joseph Smith and to some extent under Brigham Young, by the late nineteenth century, leadership in…
By 1900, the general leadership of the Relief Society, the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association, and the Primary Association had together made plans for a woman’s building for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…
Institutional vitality has characterized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints from its organization with six members in 1830 to over five million by 1982. Its capacity to govern and manage an ever-enlarging…
I was a sophomore at BYU in 1953 when my parents called one Sunday from Calgary to tell me what we had already anticipated: that a new stake had been formed there. My father had…