One cannot read or write about the Book of Mormon without acknowledging a position with respect to its truth claims. Even to profess no stake in any such claims is to take a position. People…
David Hyrum Smith was Joseph Smith’s last child, born several months after the assassination of his father. He followed his oldest brother, Joseph Smith III, and his mother, Emma, into the RLDS Church and became a…
To social scientists, missionaries are a great unknown. Perhaps the most important agents of social change around the globe, they have competed with scholars whose goal is to understand and appreciate people rather than to…
As a missionary in Denver, I served in a Spanish-speaking branch—a re warding and sometimes frustrating experience. Because of the limited size of the congregation, I wondered about the segregation and whether the Spanish speaking…
As a missionary in Taiwan many years ago, I often reflected on the historical significance of our work. President Hyer numbly reminded us that we were only the most recent phase of an historical process…
Joseph Smith’s polygamous relationships have been a topic of great interest and controversy among Mormons and non-Mormons alike. The reactions of the women whom Joseph Smith took as plural wives and the way in which…
The 150th anniversary celebrations of the exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Rocky Mountains saw the publication of several significant new works in Mormon history. Surely one of the most significant contributions of these is…
Author Richard E. Bennet describes his book as:
. .. not so much a study of the train or of the trek, but of a religious exodus of one of the 19th century’s most persecuted and despised groups of religionists—the Latter day Saints—who were bound neither for Oregon nor for California but either for survival or extinction. This was not just another march westward “across the wide Missouri” in fulfillment of America’s Manifest Destiny; rather, it was a destiny in motion yet to be mani fest, for it was not at all certain that this enterprise of Joseph Smith, Jr.—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—would ever survive to live a new day. The story of the Mormon exodus is that of a religion in torment, desperately seeking to save itself from persecution, to rid itself of its own detractors and obstructionists, and to find it self in some unknown valley, “far away in the west.” It was Mor monism in the raw and on the move—forging a new identity while seeking a safe refuge in the tops of “the everlasting hills” (xiv).
This is the story of my father’s demise. It wanders when I tell it, and I never know when to bring in the polygamy, so I just do and let matters take care of themselves.…
If I looked up the road from the irrigation ditch, I could see the church house bumping stiff and dark against the sunset’s blaze. “The old church house/’ people called it now. “The old churchhouse,”…