The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (usually called Mormon or LDS church) is having enormous success in most parts of the world. Growth is particularly impressive in Latin America. In 1971 there were only 217,500 LDS members on this continent, accounting for no more than seven percent of the church’s total membership.
After Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought was founded by Mormons at Stanford University in 1966, it attracted Latter-day Saint scholars from all over the United States, and soon its success surpassed the expectations of…
What does it mean that Joseph Smith was “a seer, a translator, a prophet” (D&C 21:1)? This is the question addressed by the fifteen essays in this book, the eighth in Signature Books’s Essays on…
When I was twelve, the youth in our ward did baptisms for the dead in the Los Angeles temple. To pique our interest, our leaders told tales of spirits appearing to the living and thanking…
I first met Terry Tempest Williams in January 1999 at a commemoration in Tucson, Arizona, for my uncle, United States Representative Morris Udall. The beautiful eulogies honoring his many accomplishments, particularly his record on the…
On a quiet Monday evening in 1974, two Mormon missionaries visited a Texas trailer house—oddly situated behind a taxidermy shop—at the invitation of the occupant, Bob Klea son, an inactive member of the church. Instead…
H. Michael Marquardt published his early monographs with anti-Mor mons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, but these works exhibited higher scholarly standards than the Tanners’ work. Marquardt co-authored Inventing Mor monism: Tradition and the Historical Record[1]…
Each of these books provides a thoughtful, intimate account of the uneasy co-existence of scholarly life and Mormon orthodoxies. Read together, the long journey of a prominent heretic and the recent conflicts over academic freedom…