MORE THAN eleven years AGO ON 31 December 1982 a film entitled The God Makers premiered at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, before an audience of 4,000 Evangelical Protestants.1 According to Ed Decker,…
A man’s last wish
should be sacred.
I want to be wrapped
like a ball of roots
THIS ESSAY IS A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION of the major developments in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since the mid-twentieth century, not a comprehensive history. It is a study in large part of…
Dialogue 27.1 (Spring 1994): 109–123
My own analysis of the state of Mormon history suggests that the field, while other factors have also been at work, suffers from some of the exclusiveness and intellectual imperialism that were nurtured during the glory days of the “New Mormon History ” in the 1970s.
She’s not Abraham’s Sara,
who laughs and talks
to angels
as if the state of her womb
The story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides invaluable insights into the birth of a new religious tradition in a nineteenth-century American setting. Among other things the Mormon experience affords an…
BEGINNING IN THE 1930S UTAH HISTORIOGRAPHY began to grow rapidly in sophistication. Although the causes of that maturation have yet to be studied closely, it seems clear that federal relief programs for writers under the…
Dialogue 27.1(Spring 1994): 1–72
Smith discusses the importance of plural marriage in Nauvoo to church history. He shows that after Joseph Smith passed away, Nauvoo polygamy numbers rose.
The tapping of the shower is
the insistent brush of reeds
along the Charles and the slap
of oars I’ve just left.
It is not that I miss you now
but I miss it—when I
swallowed your finger the first night
and restrained myself in deference to