Spring 1989
I have recently finished writing a biography of Juanita Brooks. The fame of this Mormon housewife and teacher from Utah’s Dixie resides in the definitive books she authored about the Mountain Meadows massacre and its…
In the center of Salt Lake City, two important traditional Mormon symbols confront each other across Main Street: the angel on the temple spire and the beehive atop the now-closed Hotel Utah.[1] While the beehive…
Everything means something. When I write a list of food names on a long, narrow sheet of paper, not only the words themselves but the form in which they are written indicate this is a…
Christian doctrine, from Paul’s injunction, “Mortify the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13), to King Benjamin’s declarative, “The natural man is an enemy to God” (Mosiah 3:19), teaches the death of the natural man, the…
Growing old in the last part of the twentieth century is unlike anything that has gone before. The population of older people in the United States has increased dramatically, rising from 18 million in 1965 to more than 29 million in 1987 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1988, 15). By the year 2020, those over sixty-five will comprise 20 percent of the population (Holden 1987, 272). Those over eighty make up the fastest growing group, and the number of 100-year-olds will triple by the turn of the century (Maxwell 1987, 710).
Aunt Ella used to say that a man who doesn’t live his principles is a poor specimen. This observation, like her other nuggets of conventional wisdom, was ostensibly directed at me, but she always cast…
Dialogue 22.1 (Spring 1989): 69–75
This essay focuses on the efforts of both groups to establish congregations in Canada’s far west and explores why the growth of the Latter-day Saint and Reorganized Latter Day Saint churches in British Columbia became so lopsided after World War II.
Four carved bishops keep vigil above the threshold to Canterbury Cathedral. The filigree of sculpture surrounding them is as airy as lace, though crafted of stone. It looks as if it could rise upon wind…
I often muse what I would do if I were God: Would I first stop wars, eliminate hunger and disease, make people loving and caring? I think not. Though the prospect is appealing, I know…
If I were Satan, I’d keep a scrapbook, a book of remembrance, if you will, of the hidden face of evil. It would contain such eternal verities as this by English philosopher and mathematician William…
This morning I went to the funeral of a friend who was killed in a motorcycle accident. I slipped into the only vacant pew in the very back of the chapel and listened to the…
cop and father, he cautioned us of more
than boogeymen and fire, in case of snakes,
freeze where you are, same for skunks and por-
cupines, brave enough to tromp on cracks,
Spring sneaked into town while court convened.
One noon, I walk from my office to my
old neighborhood and find it well-kept.
The ditch I’d hurtle galloping home
from school has been curbed and guttered.
The hush that sheathes the road is sure and slow.
My lights suspend a galaxy of flakes:
The silence is as haunted as the snow.
Dean L. May has tackled a difficult problem in this brief survey of Utah’s history. First of all, his book came after the successful media presentation of the same material instead of vice versa, as…
Early in my academic career I determined to study neither Mormon history nor women’s history, so I was at first somewhat hesitant to review this book which obviously dealt with both. As a historian I…
That such a volume as this could be written at all is happy testimony to the development of a Mormon historiographical tradition. Its appearance at this late date, however—over a century and a half after…
Outside the San Francisco theater where we saw The Last Temptation of Christ, Christians paraded with guitars, bullhorns, sandwich boards, and placards (some in Cantonese) protesting the blasphemous portrayal of their Lord and Savior. Anti-semitic…
