In July 1984, I attended testimony meeting in my home ward in Salt Lake City. As the previous month’s crop of infants were blessed, I thought that after the sacrament I would go home. It was a Fourth of July weekend and I was sunburned, sleepy, and not much in the mood for testimonies about the star-spangled banner. Besides that, I was hungry. But when the sacrament was over, I stayed. I thought my motivation was guilt, but now I know it was grace.
Juanita Brooks holds an undisputed place among Mormon historians. Her landmark and still definitive history of the Mountain Meadows massacre was first published by Stanford University Press in 1950 and reprinted by the University of…
we come playing flute
and violin the notes
lift limber as the green
aspen see how we sway
It strikes me that Mormon intellectuals, possibly excluding those occasions when Orson Pratt may have had lunch with B. H. Roberts, now constitute a genuine subculture within the larger host culture of Mormonism. We have…
Henry William Bigler marched west with the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War (1846-47) and by January 1848 was an employee of Johann Sutter, constructing a saw mill on the American River northeast of Sacra…
Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 69–75
EVEN A CASUAL REFERENCE to studies treating the Book of Mormon reveals a range of divergent explanations of its origins. At one extreme are those who are skeptical of the book’s claims to antiquity who generally conclude that it is a pious fraud, written by Joseph Smith from information available in his immediate environment.
During the spring of 1984, the editors of DIALOGUE sent a short questionnaire to all of its then-2,300 subscribers plus 600 who had let their subscriptions lapse in the previous year. At that point, the journal had been edited in Salt Lake City for exactly two years.
What kind of God has made this sapphire tide
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan,
outrageously extravagant, a place
fit for the baptism of God or kings
God sometimes seems to me quite unreasonable. I’ve thought so especially at times when it appears that the one gift he has clearly given me, the gift of dialogue, is also a source of pain…
The shop smelled of wood’s death-scent
released, by the carpenter’s skill,
in the spring breeze: nature
spread across the afternoon