DiaBLOGue

In August 1967, I delivered a sermon in the Palo Alto Ward entitled “What the Church Means to People like Me.” DIALOGUE published it that winter and the Saints’ Herald reprinted it the following year.…

I suspect you’re less interested in such talk than Shakespeare and I. I’m twenty years closer to death than most of you, and poor Will is centuries gone. But you’re closer than you think. And it may be that all of us would do well to get, in some ways, closer still. For a people who manage to watch 251 murders a year on TV, we Americans—and more especially we Mormons—give death short shrift. 

In what is clearly the most original and provocative of the essays in the BYU published collection Arts and Inspiration, Karen Lynn argues that two funda mental factors undermine the arts, particularly literature, in Mormondom.…

Dialogue 16.2 (Summer 1983): 39–45
This paper examines Isaiah’s prophecies in their historical context and compares their meaning as a message for his time with the expanded meaning that Christians — and specifically Mormons — have since applied to them thousands of years later.

Almost a year after Patriarch to the Church Hyrum Smith was killed, the Times and Seasons, the official church newspaper in Nauvoo, carried an editorial entitled “Patriarchal,” with the prefatory note: “As the nature of…

William Smith, younger brother of the prophet Joseph Smith, has been easy to dismiss but difficult to deal with. More often than not, he has been described with adjectives like violent, wicked, unstable, and licentious.…