Multi-level Marketing
March 20, 2018You may not appreciate this but
I once ran into Hugh Nibley—
at Smith’s market in Provo—
you know, the guy who wrote all
DiaBLOGue
Glaucus
March 20, 2018We can’t say what Glaucus knew
From watching storms crush and reshape
The surge, what voices he’d heard
When the tide swelled onto the beach,
The Scholar as Celebrant | Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture
March 20, 2018Terryl Givens is doing a great deal in People of Paradox, winner of the Mormon History Association’s 2007 Best Book award. He offers an ambitious interpretation of Mormon beliefs and then sets out to show…
Candor, Craftsmanship, and a Worthy Subject | Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball
March 20, 2018In 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…
Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon
March 20, 2018Listen 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…
The Gilded Door
March 20, 2018It 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…
“Rising above Principle”: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1953–61, Part 1
March 20, 2018Contemplating 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.”
“The Grandest Principle of the Gospel”: Christian Nihilism, Sanctified Activism, and Eternal Progression
March 20, 2018In 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.
A History of Dialogue, Part Four: A Tale in Two Cities, 1987-92
March 20, 2018The 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.
