Russell Arben Fox

A Book of Mormon for the Ages | Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon

For intellectually inclined, scripture-studying Mormons of a particular age, the path of Book of Mormon scholarship has been fairly straightforward. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was the work of Hugh Nibley,…

Ezra Taft Benson: Christian Libertarian | Matthew L. Harris, ed., Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

Years ago, I was attending a local discussion group hosted by a fairly traditional (and Christian, though ecumenical) private school near the university where I teach. It was a great discussion, but one participant—a successful…

What Size of City, and What Sort of City, Could (or Should) the City of Zion Be?

At a session of general conference in 1949, Elder John A. Widtsoe shared an interesting message with the assembled Saints—a message that contained, so far as I have been able to discover, the strongest agrarian sentiment ever formally expressed by a major Church leader in the whole history of the LDS Church:

Spare the Rod

At 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, I talked with Death on a mountain.

It’s hardly a mountain. It’s barely a hill. 

I’m writing this, and so I can call it a mountain if I want. Besides, I’m from Wichita, Kansas; a sudden forty-foot-elevation hill is a genuine geographic landmark.

Four Reasons for Voting Yes

I don’t live in California, and so the questions of what I thought of Proposition 8 and of my Church’s involvement in it were never presented to me with any more force than that of…

Six Voices on Proposition 8: A Roundtable

Dialogue 42.4 (Winter 2009): 106–141
After Prop 22 passed, it was overturned by the courts as a violation of the equal protection clause of the CA constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage devised a new proposition to amenda the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage and the LDS church announced its public support and activism for the measure in the summer of 2008 before the november election. It was a deeply contentious issue bringing national attention to the church whose members provided the bulk of the funding for its passage, nearly $40m. The issue was a breaking point for many in the church and the above roundtable attempts to offer a variety of legal and religious arguments for and against the measure. 

Mormon Authoritarianism and American Pluralism

Russell: I wanted to start off this conversation by asking David about the subtitle of his book, “How Religion Unites and Divides Us.” That concern over unity and division has been a serious one for the Mitt Romney campaign. He’s made efforts to bridge divides in order to make his candidacy appealing to a particular segment of conservative Republican primary voters who, generally speaking, have not looked well upon Mormons.

E-mails with a Young Mormon about Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon | Adam S. Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon

Russell Arben Fox: Okay, Megan, I’ll start.  Miller prefaces his book with the statement that “Here, my work is personal. I mean only to address the real beauty and real costs of trying to live…

Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes | David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics; Richard Davis, The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics; and Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

The term “liberalism” with all its rhetorical permutations—self-identifying as a “liberal,” defending principles of “liberty,” showing “liberality” in one’s interactions with others, etc.—is a contested concept in America. It’s both an adjective and a noun.…