In the interests of full disclosure, I hasten to acknowledge that I was involved in the early stages of editing this manuscript and, as I recall, continuously urged Edward Kimball, whom I count, with his…
Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…
It sat on a quiet end of Main Street, just a block down from the Shore line State Bank and the Sunshine Laundry. Within its dark cavern, you could lose yourself in fantasy. It was…
Contemplating the 1952 U.S. general elections, David O. McKay, lifelong Republican and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, eagerly anticipated a Republican sweep. At the news of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decisive win as the thirty-fourth American president, McKay was elated. “In my opinion,” the venerable seventy-eight-year-old Church leader recorded, “it is the greatest thing that has happened in a hundred years for our country.”
In February 1895, the editors of a small journal known as The Index (an obscure periodical produced by the Mutual Improvement Association of Salt Lake City’s Twentieth Ward) submitted the following inquiry to ten prominent Church leaders: “What, in your opinion, constitutes the grandest principle, or most attractive feature of the Gospel?” The Church leaders’ answering letters were published in The Index and shortly thereafter as a symposium in the pages of The Contributor, one of the many Church magazines in publication at that time. One respondent said that eternal marriage was the grandest principle. Two more replied that love was the most crucial component of the gospel. Another answered, in essence, that all the principles of the gospel were so grand that he could not choose just one. Interestingly, there was a consensus among the remaining six Church leaders (among whom were such well-known leaders as Joseph F. Smith, B. H. Roberts, George Reynolds, and Orson F. Whitney) that the grandest and most attractive feature of the gospel was the doctrine of eternal progression.
The late 1980s seemed like an ideal time to edit an independent Mormon periodical like Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Linda and Jack Newell of Salt Lake City were about to finish their five-year tenure as editors, and anyone taking over the job could foresee an efficient and successful operation ahead by just continuing what their predecessors had established. Crucial to that success was maintaining the tradition followed from the beginning that Dialogue change hands every five or six years, allowing new blood to provide fresh perspectives and ideas to what was, in actuality, a labor of love. When the Newells stepped down in 1987, they, like their predecessors, looked forward to enjoying the intellectual insights in the journal from a standpoint other than that of sheer exhaustion.
Lee Udall Bennion and her husband, Joseph Bennion, both descend from a long line of pioneers. They live in Spring City, a Utah village, where Lee paints and Joe makes pottery, which he fires in…
Dear Readers, This journal completes Levi Peterson’s twenty-volume editorship of Dialogue. I have had the privilege of chairing the board in both his first and last years and welcome this chance to say thank you…
Little did I know that when I was contemplating having a second child that I would be blessed with a very challenging, incurable neurological mystery. I didn’t know that there would be so many sleepless…