Edwin B. Firmage

EDWIN B. FIRMAGE is Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, College of Law, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the author, with Collin Man- grum, of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (University of Illinois Press, 1988). "Reflections

Articles

Allegiance and Stewardship: Holy War, Just War, and the Mormon Tradition in the Nuclear Age

The present escalation in nuclear weapons technology between the United States and the Soviet Union has progressed beyond the point where any increase in such weaponry necessarily results in increased national security. It has become, in fact, the ultimate act of idolatry, a reliance upon technology, a false god which cannot save us but which will insure our destruction.

Hugh B. Brown: The Early Years

In 1969 Edwin B. Firmage taped oral history interviews with his grandfather, Hugh B. Brown. The following essay has been adapted from these memoirs, which will be published by Signature Books in 1988 as An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown.

Reconciliation

Introduction So we do not lose heart, though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Cor. 4:16) I come from a religious tradition that does not celebrate…

God: CEO or Master of the Dance?

My text is a poem and a scripture since as I age I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between beauty and truth.

Seeing the Stranger as Enemy: Coming Out

It’s not easy to motivate two thousand people, about evenly divided among high school students, young parents, and older citizens, to march a mile up a steep hill to listen to speakers on an unseasonably beautiful winter day. But Utah’s state legislators had been up to the task. With language so raw, so full of homophobic hatred, they had called these young citizens, our own children, bestial and subhuman.

Reflections on Mormon History: Zion and the Anti-Legal Tradition

Sir Henry Maine, our first great modern legal historian of the English language and law, in describing the paradigmatic shift from early feudal European society to a world of secular, territorial nation-states and market economy, observed that we had moved “from status to contract.” “Status” assumes an immutable condition not changeable by individual choice and action. “Contract” assumes that one can change existing conditions by choice and action. No statement describes with more insight the nineteenth-century Mormon concept of Zion.