Produced by Brigham Young University and presented by the Deseret Sunday School Union of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1969, the short film Johnny Lingo is among the best-known texts in the LDS Church, familiar even to people who never made it through more than a few pages of the Book of Mormon.
Dialogue 43.1 (Spring 2010): 1–36
And in fact, what might it mean that God “used” evolution tocreate life’s diversity? Was this a choice for God among other al-ternatives? Do Wildman’s pessimistic conclusions hold for Mor-monism? Does evolution imply a noninterventionist Deity? Arethere more optimistic views possible, some of which may actuallysuggest that evolution enhances and expands our view of God?
Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 1–10
In Winter 2010, Chris Smith and I published an article in Dialogue demonstrating that no more than ~56 cm of papyrus can be missing from the interior of the scroll of Hôr—the papyrus Joseph Smith identified as the Book of Abraham. John Gee has responded by claiming that our method is “anything but accurate” and that it “glaringly underestimates the length of the scroll.” He states that “Two different formulas have been published for estimating the original length of a scroll,” then attempts to show that “Hoffmann’s formula approximates the actual length of the papyrus,” whereas “Cook and Smith’s formula predicts a highly inaccurate length.” The fact is, the two formulas are completely equivalent. They are both exact expressions of an Archimedean spiral and they yield precisely the same results, if correctly applied.
It is a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you Cambridge veterans and to be asked to represent the huge cohort of LDS women who have sat in these pews—those who have preceded me and those who have come after me. What an opportunity this has been to recall some of my happiest and most vivid memories. What happened to me here? Just about everything important that has happened in my long and eventful life.
Michael Slade has been photographing all over the world for the past twenty years. A Cache Valley native, Slade received his B.A. degree in photography from Utah State University (1994) and is currently an MFA…
Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2013):188–206
The scripture I have in mind, of course, is the Book of Mormon. What follows is a Gentile’s appreciation—even recommendation—of this well-known but largely unread example of worldclass scripture.
Polygamy and blood atonement, whatever their real-world drawbacks, can make for profitable novels. If Zane Grey were still alive, he might be plotting another sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage in hopes of riding the titillation wave created by Big Love, Warren Jeffs, and the Yearning for Zion fiasco. Yet shifts in readership that have accompanied the media innovations of the last century have led the descendants of Grey’s initial audience to spend much more time looking at flickering screens than at badly printed pages, greatly reducing the market for the kind of pulpy tales Grey wrote.
HBO’s popular Big Love series and David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel The 19th Wife (New York: Random House, 2008), stand as evidence that polygamy remains a perennial topic of interest for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. It…
Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical letter, is a striking beginning for his papal contribution to Catholic social teaching. In a sense, the encyclical confirms one piece of conventional wisdom about his papacy—that it is a work of consolidating the monumental legacy of John Paul II and, less directly, the ecclesiastical and theological developments of the whole post-Vatican II period.