It would be difficult to say too much in praise of John Phillip Walker’s new contribution to Mormon historiography, a field that is bursting with recent major studies. Walker’s book deserves a place on the…
Come, my child, hark to the tale
The poets weave for our world:
Hear the prophets sing the song
Of earth rolling on her wings—
Our family had just finished the pre-service reception, and Brother Holbrook, the funeral director, had just closed the doors to the Relief Society room. As Mother’s surviving sisters and their families filed past the coffin…
Since my conversion to the Church almost fourteen years ago, I have struggled on various levels to come to terms with the atonement of Jesus Christ. At times, while young deacons passed gleaming trays among…
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.