Eugene England

Great Books or True Religion? Defining the Mormon Scholar

Why Not Go to a Christian College

I did much of my growing up as a Mormon while doing graduate work or engaged in teaching and administration at Stanford University. Though not a full-blown multiversity on the Berkeley or Minnesota model, Stanford…

The Firegiver

God, forgive my pen its trespass, And I forgive thee the sweet burning That drives it on through thy dominion.  God, if what it might encompass, If shapes of love, thy face, or being Itself are challenged in its…

The Possibility of Dialogue: A Personal View

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. Paul the Apostle These words are an obvious place to begin to consider the possibilities of dialogue about a Christian religion and its cultural heritage. The…

That They Might Not Suffer: The Gift of the Atonement

A deep feeling of estrangement haunts modern life and literature and thought. The feeling is not at all new to human experience, but in our time we seem especially conscious of it. More men seem…

The Tragedy of Vietnam and the Responsibility of Mormons

Are Mormons Christian?

One day last fall as I was getting acquainted with a student who was particularly interested in my Mormon background, the student told of being informed by a religion professor that Mormons weren’t Christians. This…

Maturity For a New Era

This issue begins Dialogue’s sixth year of publication. It was, in fact, exactly six years ago that a group of us—some close friends, some mere acquaintances—committed ourselves to each other in a common venture, the…

Going to Conference

KSL Radio reaches east barely twenty miles past Rock Springs, Wyoming. That’s where we were first able to make out the words of Elder Spencer W. Kimball at 11:30 Friday morning, October 6. His voice…

Responses and Perspectives: The Mormon Cross

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 78–86
Responding to Bush, Eugene England compared the story of Abraham which is uncomfortable for him calling it a cross, to the church wide policy of denying anyone who has black ancestry the priesthood and temple blessings which even though he is uncomfortable with it he does trust in continuing revelation by our prophet.

Letter to a College Student

Your letter caught me by surprise, not because your particular form of unhappiness and your objections to the Church are unique—and not only because I remember you as a person living in quite a different…

The Hosanna Shout in Washington, D.C.

The first time I participated in the “Hosanna Shout” I felt the presence of actual beings from another world joining us in that cry of praise and the following “Hosanna Anthem.” That was in the…

Hanging by a Thread: Mormons and Watergate

We Latter-day Saints not only declare that the Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired but also think of ourselves as standing ready to make a prophesied defense, perhaps even a rescue, of it when it is in particular danger, at some time when it is to “hang by a thread.”

Blessing the Chevrolet

At various times I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things.

Enduring

Edgar to Gloucester in King Lear:                         Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither.  June 1982  I grew up in a safe valley. The years five through twelve, when we are most sensuously…

Faithful Fiction | Levi S. Peterson, ed., Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories, Douglas H. Thayer, Summer Fire, and Donald R. Marshall, Zinnie Stokes, Zinnie Stokes

Good fiction strikes me with that same mysterious combination of exhilaration and grief that comes from new knowledge, from new visions that replace the dear old ones. Because they are good fiction, I recommend that…

“Lamanites” and the Spirit of the Lord

My parents grew up conditioned toward racial prejudice—as did most Americans, including Mormons, through their generation and into part of mine. But something touched my father in his early life and grew constantly in him until he and my mother were moved at mid-life gradually to consecrate most of their life’s earnings from then on to help Lamanites.

“A Matter of Love”: My Life with Dialogue

God sometimes seems to me quite unreasonable. I’ve thought so especially at times when it appears that the one gift he has clearly given me, the gift of dialogue, is also a source of pain…

On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriage

Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 138–154
England shares his reasons for why Joseph Smith introduced polygamy and then removed it as one of the commandments. England argues that polygamy was a faith testing experience which lead them to in his words “worthy to build God’s kingdom.”

Easter Weekend

It might have been 1986, because Easter came in March and I was on my way to Montreal. But I went to see Dustin Hoffman in The Death of a Salesman (bought a ticket at…

Twenty Years with Dialogue: On Building the Kingdom with Dialogue

In the Spring 1987 issue of DIALOGUE, the first of the twentieth-anniversary issues, I was referred to as “the founding editor of DIALOGUE.” That is not true. I was merely one of a group of…

Why Nephi Killed Laban: Reflections on the Truth of the Book of Mormon

Until recently, attempts to vindicate the central claim of the Book of Mormon—that it is a divinely inspired book based on the history of an ancient culture—have focused mainly on external evidences. Such attempts have…

On Being Male and Melchizedek

On 27 July 1989, in the middle of the night, two people stopped their truck on our street, watched until they thought we were in bed, then ran across our front yard, threw a grenade-sized…

On Spectral Evidence

October 3, 1992, the first day of the 162d semiannual LDS general conference, was the 300th anniversary of the action that finally stopped the Salem witch trials. Those trials, perhaps the greatest blot on American religious devotion, had resulted in the deaths of twenty people, all of whom vigorously proclaimed their innocence to the end. 

“No Respecter of Persons”: A Mormon Ethics of Diversity

Dialogue 27.4 (Winter 1994): 79–100
Eugene England addresses issues of inclusion and exclusion reflecting on what it means that “God is no respector of persons.”

Good Literature for a Chosen People

Very early in our history, we Mormons began to identify ourselves symbolically with ancient Israel as a chosen people. We too, we believed, were heirs to the covenant and blessings of Abraham because of God’s…

Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction

The first example of what could be called a Mormon short story was written by an apostle, Parley P. Pratt. It was published in the New York Herald on January 1, 1844, and collected in…

Anhedonia

He said, “She said it means
Unable to have pleasure,
Unable to find it anywhere.
She put me on Zoloft to help.”

Two Trains and a Dream

I. October 8, 1908: A Train

Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading 
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet, 
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit 
to Boston, with his traveling companion.

The Weeping God of Mormonism

[1]In the book of Moses, revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830 as part of his re vision of the Bible, we learn of a prophet named Enoch, who is called to preach repentance to his…

On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriage (vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 1987)

This is an essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea—the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy—that has important religious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and…

Blessing the Chevrolet (vol. 9, no. 3, Fall 1975)

At various times I have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t until I found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my Chevrolet that I really felt what that experience meant to those early Saints, who depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things.