DiaBLOGue

Straw

The straw of the cut grain 
Gold mounding the hill 
On the way down from my house 
On the mountain 

Building Wilkinson’s University

During his twenty years from 1951 to 1971 as seventh president of BYU, Ernest L. Wilkinson molded the lackluster Provo school into a showplace of LDS educational values. “More than any other single cause,” his successor observed, “[Wilkinson’s] remarkable and relentless leadership … is the key to the present stature of Brigham Young University.”

At Fifty-Nine

I was reading the other evening from an old and friendly book by the late George Sheehan entitled Running and Being: The Total Experience, published in 1978 by Simon and Schuster of New York. This…

Reflections on LDS Disbelief in the Book of Mormon as History

Dialogue 30.3 (Fall 1999):90–103
To average LDS church members in 1909, Roberts’s New Witnesses for God substantiated their beliefs and further embellished his stature for them as a historian and defender of the Book of Mormon. But only thirteen years later Roberts was to change his mind and that dramatically.

Hymn

Lately I can’t get over the feeling that there is a man in my bed: a big man with thick, wavy hair and a broad, barrel chest that goes up-and down, up-and-down all night long…

C. Thomas Asplund: Quiet Pilgrim

I am not a historian. But my limited exposure to the discipline tells me that writing history involves arriving at definitions of “eras,” “cultures,” and “movements.” In my work in literary theory, I have been…