I was anxious to review this biography of the founder of eight nineteenth-century newspapers in and near western Illinois (including the Warsaw Message), the author of The History of Hancock County, and, especially, the author of…
You don’t have to be consumed with genealogical passion to profit from this new work of far-reaching and fundamental importance, though those who are will buy it as a matter of course and use it…
Samuel Johnson coined the phrase, and Virginia Woolf gave it its place in the language: the “common reader.” That per son, Doctor Johnson wrote, by whose common sense, “uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the…
John Roche published a very thick book of essays a number of years ago. He was, he lamented, an essayist in an age when the essay was not flourishing. Fortunately this did not prevent publication.…
Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…
Ardmoore told Carmen Stavely, who’d been away in Idaho visiting family, that what happened that Sunday morning was absolutely confidential. The bishop had instructed all who’d been present to keep the matter strictly to themselves;…
On the first Sunday after my fourteenth birthday, I was given the responsibility to watch over the Church and see that all the members did their duty, and also to prevent iniquity, hardness with each…
William B. Smith was a difficult man. Like so many who feel denied power and recognition, he was probably best described as being his own worst enemy. Certainly he could not be stereotyped as the…
Dialogue 18.2 (Summer 1985): 116–127
Women in the Mormon Church are encouraged toward traditional roles and attitudes that discourage personal, familial, and societal change. The ideal female role is that of a non-wage-earning wife and mother in a nuclear family where the husband is the provider and the woman’s energies are directed toward her family, the Church, and perhaps community service.
Ever since the classic triumverate of the good, the true, and the beautiful was set up as the literary ideal, the good—meaning the virtuous or moral—has had less success than either the true or the…