“Tanner Spiral” is an exploration of my great-grandfather’s (Henry S. Tanner) family. He decided to take his first polygamous wife ten years after the first Manifesto. He had already been the mission president of the…
After admonishing his people to follow Christ and be baptized, Nephi said, “Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life” (2 Ne. 31:20). I see a paradoxical tension between the concepts of “enduring” and “having a perfect brightness of hope.” The word “endure” connotes little in the way of pleasure; its etymological root is “hard.” In French the word dure, which comes from the same Latin root, means “difficult,” “harsh,” “severe,” or “stern.” On the other hand, the words “perfect brightness of hope” connote light and optimism, warmth and peace. The two concepts don’t seem to go together.
In a remarkably deft work of scholarship, Samuel Morris Brown offers a rich and compelling view of early Mormonism’s sacramental and theological emergence up to the death of Joseph Smith Jr. This book makes many…
I am a relative newcomer to the academic side of Mormon history. I never traded photocopies of photocopies of historical documents. I only know of the most scandalous shenanigans in the field through my reading of secondary treatments such as Turley’s Victims and my own limited sleuthing of such primary sources as issues of the Seventh East Press and federal court records. I did start researching in the old LDS Church Archives on the first floor of the Church Office Building in 2006 and I have sometimes been denied access to materials requested, but I personally only know a field of increasing access, openness, and—as evidenced by the Joseph Smith Papers Project—institutional support.
as extracted from a series of emails James Goldberg discovered in his junk folder I am—without question—an American. If I’ve ever doubted that, it was clear the moment I walked into the humidity and human…
Andrew Solomon has written about mental health, politics, and culture for the New York Times and the New Yorker and is the author of four books. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. In his most recent book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Solomon explores what it means to be a parent in the context of adversity. Dialogue board member Gregory A. Prince interviewed Solomon on March 28, 2011, in New York City.
To the young ravens which cry
Songs in the night,
Stormy wind fulfilling,
Saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed
There are many myths mistaking the domestication of Hydrangeas,
not least: the degree to which color can be manipulated or controlled.
White Hydrangeas never can be pink, red can’t bloom in southern soils.
Leda, when Helen leapt
in your womb was it
like this? Ankles swollen
under the weight
Otis Redding and Ulysses knew something about sitting
at the edge of the world, trying to remember
the changing shades of the sea at home,