R. A. Gilbert’s book, Casting the First Stone, is one of an increasing number of written responses to uninformed attacks by Fundamentalists against new religious movements and any other religious group which does not fit…
Although Hugh Nibley has often argued that there is no such a thing as a Mormon theology (theology being intrinsically incompatible with continuous revelation), a number of Nibley’s followers have produced what in any other…
Marjorie Newton’s 60-page biography of Charles Wesley Wandell, Hero or Traitor, inaugurates the John Whitmer Historical Association’s scholarly monograph series. Those who have read her prize-winning Southern Cross Saints: The Mormons in Austrailia will be…
This is not just another book on science and Mormonism. Mercifully ab sent, for example, are inconclusive and dubious attempts to harmonize different scriptural versions of the Creation with each other and with modern scientific…
I suppose we all share the same space at one time or another. One can search out these spaces, as I have. Outside Paris I spent an afternoon mulling about in Malmaison, Napoleon and Josephine’s…
Within the last month, six Latter-day Saint scholars in Utah, representing both liberal and conservative ends of the spectrum, have been served with notices by their ecclesiastical leaders to appear before church courts, called “disciplinary councils,” to answer to charges of apostasy or conduct unbecoming a member of the LDS church. Within the last two weeks, beginning on 14 September 1993, one of the six has been disfellowshipped, four have been excommunicated, and the sixth court is scheduled for the morning of the 26th. The church denies that it is conducting a purge.
As a somewhat minor consumer of professional counseling and psychotherapy I would like to offer some comments on Mark Koltko’s essay, “Latter-day Myths About Counseling and Psychotherapy,” which appeared in the winter 1992 issue of…
This essay examines Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s treatment of Romans 7 in the Joseph Smith Translation or “Inspired Version” of the King James Bible QST). First, Smith’s modifications of the chapter are compared to the…
When I lay in a hospital very badly injured from the crash of my experimental airplane, a visitor asked me if I thought my injuries were a judgment for my sins. I remember saying no, and I even remember wondering that anyone should be so silly, let alone so tactless, as to ask such a question. But I don’t remember who asked it, and I don’t really want to. The asker and I have some differences in philosophy and theology that are so deep and irreconcilable that it would be difficult for us to continue to be friends if those differences surfaced again.
It was my father who taught me to love Emerson. I can remember him wanting to know what authors I was studying in my tenth-grade English class, and then, at the mention of Keats or…