Samuel M. Brown

Letters to the Editor

What Shall We See?

I’m still haunted by a woman who died in our intensive care unit a decade ago. She was eighteen weeks pregnant and had a kidney infection serious enough that her lungs failed. She quickly ended up on maximal life support, barely surviving from day to day.

Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists

My mission was a complicated time for me. I was a Harvard undergradu ate, newly theist but uncertainly Mormon, and I was living in southern Louisiana. I’d been a strident atheist for years before a conversion at age eighteen, and I’d managed to keep myself separated from much of folk Mormon belief, even as my family and I had been supported by wonderful Mormon folk in 1980s Davis County, Utah. I was finding my way to faith in the miserable, wet poverty of southern Louisiana, but it was a faith inflected by my lifelong skepticism and general readerliness.

Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Levirate Widow

Polygamy is, for many Americans, Mormonism’s defining feature. Even now, over a century after the main church abandoned the practice, images of Latter-day Saint polygamy persist in the popular and scholarly imagination. Most accounts of Mormon polygamy have either emphasized sexual experimentation and marital reform on the one hand or biblical primitivism on the other.While these accounts are at least partly true—Joseph Smith did believe that he was replacing a failed system of marriage, and he and his colleagues frequently invoked Bible patriarchs to explain their behaviors and doctrines—polygamy was also a solution to a specific set of contemporary cultural problems—remarriage after bereavement—refracted through biblical interpretation.

Tending the Desert | Alan K. Parish, John A. Widtsoe: A Biography

We have waited five decades for a biography of one of our most prominent apostles, and I am grateful to Alan Parish for bringing the volume into existence. He is to be congratulated for returning…

The Prophet Elias Puzzle

Early Mormonism is notable for a proliferation of angels, scriptural luminaries who visited the Prophet Joseph Smith and his close associates. These visitations not only established prophetic authority generally but were also often associated with specific innovations, rites, and doctrines. Thus, Moroni delivered the Book of Mormon, John the Baptist bestowed the lesser priesthood, and a triumvirate of Christian apostles granted the higher priesthood. Perhaps most important in this august pantheon is Elijah, the biblical patriarch who ascended living to heaven (was translated) as a reward for exemplary faithfulness. For early Mormons, Elijah shouldered a burdensome mission: to oversee LDS temple rites and integrate the human family into an organic whole, sealing up personal relationships against death. 

Choices, Consequences, and Grace | Richard Dutcher, dir., God’s Army 2: States of Grace

Richard Dutcher, the founding father of Mormon cinema, has much to be proud of in his third film, God’s Army 2: States of Grace. His first effort, God’s Army, was a missionary bildungsroman with a…

Domlik

Winter was Domlik’s best season. The New Year rains were the earth’s sweat; and when the soil perspired, the dirt softened into mud so thick it postponed all organized demining activity. Even the bravest deminer—by…

Brattle Street Elegy: Always Sacred

I first arrived in late August 1990. Two weeks earlier, I had undergone a conversion experience that had jolted me from world weary agnosticism to a fervent belief in God and the Restoration. Simultaneously I…

Hurt or Make Afraid

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, In His house full of light, Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; There the saints will shine bright.  William Clayton, 1846  I’m cold. We’ve been walking…

The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging

On March 10, 1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith preached a sermon after the burial of his friend King Follett, killed by accidental rock-fall while building a well. To an assembled crowd of his followers, Smith proclaimed, “If you have power to seal on earth & in heaven then we should be crafty. . . . Go & seal on earth your sons & daughters unto yourself & yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory . . . use a little Craftiness & seal all you can & when you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walk through the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me & my Council.” 

Canon: Open, Closed, Evolving | David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

Sacred Borders represents a rigorous and compelling consideration of various traditions about the state of the biblical canon in American religion. For bookish Latter-day Saints, this volume will provide much-needed context for early Mormon beliefs about their open canon as well as a subtle and sympathetic view of both sides of the debate over the closed canon.