Joseph Smith’s place in western religious history is on the verge of creative reevaluation. Two years ago American literary critic Harold Bloom’s casting of Smith as a Gnostic prophet linked by vision to the occult…
Frank’s photos—
are like his fiction—
show clean, hard lines.
The morning promised no bright sun. No blue sky. Only dust from the desert’s chalky red soil. “Lord in heaven,” Rosalinda said to herself. She stared out the window, worried about her garden. She couldn’t…
Keith Larson spent the first year of his mission in the southern Taiwan port city of Kaoshiung. After a four-month stint in Tainan, central Taiwan, he was glad to be transferred south again to the…
Elbow-deep in shallow water
with porcelain pressed against my breast
I dragged the sudsy washcloth
over your squirming body
Ephesians 2:8-9 (KJV) speaks of salvation coming through the grace of God: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:/ Not of works, lest any man should boast.” The interpretation of these verses is controversial.
More than ten years after the original appearance of an essay might be too long to wait to respond to it, but the republication of Eugene En gland’s “Dawning of a Brighter Day: Mormon Literature after 150 years” as the inaugural essay of Wasatch Review International (vol. 1 [1992], no. 1) calls for a response.
In 1975 I enrolled in the divinity school at the University of Chicago, where I hoped to earn a Ph.D. under Norman Perrin, a distinguished British New Testament scholar. But a call I made at the same time to the head of the LDS Church Education System in Salt Lake City stopped me cold in my tracks. He told me that if I wanted to teach New Testament for the church I could do so with a Ph.D. in physics or family counseling— anything but a degree in New Testament studies. That attitude has created a vacuum in serious New Testament studies among Latter-day Saints. One way to fill this void is to become a member of the Westar Institute of Sonoma, California, whose goal, among others, is to expose the public to serious biblical scholarship.