I recently had an unexpected opportunity to analyze the ideas and experience the worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Following four months of intense dialogue with a Mormon intellectual and former…
Surprisingly tall, he looks down toward
His six-inch shorter father
And shifts his feet, anxious
For the moment of departure, awkward in uncertainty
The place they put him seemed extravagant —
Sprawling flowers, hovering crowd, artificial grass
To cover up plain dirt.
The coffin shone, wood lustrous as the new organ
Three weeks had passed since Howard and Sylvia Rockwood last made love. Earlier, before the days of silence, they could have begun casually, prompted by any minor conversational motion, finally drawing close enough for physical…
In 1959, while a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I wrote a review of the historiography of Mormonism for Church History which incorporated the major books and articles from 1832 to 1959 in…
Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont stood before his colleagues 12 December 1881 to introduce Senate Bill Number 353, the latest in a series of measures aimed at the Mormon practice of polygamy. The Edmunds’…
Dialogue 21.3 (Fall 1988): 89–91
A personal account of a racist statement a bishop made about people from India, while author’s adopted daughter was from India.
Dialogue 21.3 (Fall 1988): 73–85
I used to love this description because my Mormon heaven seemed far superior to this standard Christian heaven that Twain’s Satan describes. Sexual intercourse does have a place in Mormon heaven, though not as an end in itself. Heavenly residents are busy with activities. Those righteous individuals who become gods in Mormon heaven will certainly be using their intellects as they create worlds and keep them running, and they will undoubtedly be learning continuously. Mormonism never suggested there would be continual music, nor continual church or Sabbath days in heaven.
On 8 November 1845 Saints in the eastern states gathered together in conference at American Hall in New York City and listened to Apostle Orson Pratt deliver an impassioned call to exodus: “Brethren Awake !!…
Short, solid, bull-necked Elder William Tucker, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, would grip your hand firmly and ask earnestly, “How are you, Brother?” (Harvey, April 1986) Elder Loftin Harvey, Jr., several months senior…