Long Divisions
April 17, 2018It is alive, the Colorado, its heavy brown waters pulsing through limestone and sandstone layers gouged out before it learned manners from the government and Glen Canyon Dam. “She don’t give a hot sheep shit,”…
DiaBLOGue
“I’d Rather Be…”
April 17, 2018One of the popular bumper stickers of the fifties and sixties told us, “I’d rather be dead than red.” An even more succinct version declared, “Better dead than red.” I remember these slogans because they…
House of the Temple, House of the Lord: A View from Philadelphia
April 17, 2018The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs (Heraclitus). Three steps. A terrace. Five steps. A terrace. Seven steps. A terrace. Nine steps. A final broad terrace. Stone sphinxes (one…
Memoirs of a Marginal Man: Reflections of a Mormon Sociologist
April 17, 2018Near the beginning of my professional career at Brigham Young University, a community sage (who had observed a continuing struggle to merge the intellectual with the spiritual at the institution) asked me: “Harold, are you…
Drawing on Personal Myths
April 17, 2018
Christ’s World Government: An End of Nationalism and War
April 17, 2018The tenth Article of Faith states the Mormon belief that “Christ will reign personally upon the earth.” This is usually taken to mean that Christ will literally return to the earth at the Second Coming…
Religious Tolerance: Mormons in the American Mainstream
April 17, 2018The transformation of the Mormon Church from a radical nineteenth century socio-religious movement into a respectable denomination in the twentieth century raises sociological questions on whether or how distinctive Mormon elements can survive in our…
Uncle John Smith, 1781-1854: Patriarchal Bridge
April 17, 2018John Smith, brother of Joseph Smith, Sr., and uncle of the Prophet Joseph Smith, was an unspectacular, though far from ordinary man. Amid the troubles and uncertainties following the June 1844 martyrdom of the Prophet…
The “Lectures on Faith”: A Case Study in Decanonization
April 17, 2018The “Lectures on Faith,” seven 1834-35 lessons on theology and doctrine prepared for the “School of the Elders” in Kirtland, Ohio, were canonized in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants by official vote…
Determining and Defining “Wife”: The Brigham Young Households
April 17, 2018Utah satirist Al Church, among other suggestions on how to survive as a gentile in Utah, offered this tip: “Ask guides at the Beehive House how many wives Brigham Young had. (Of my last four…