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Volume 45, No. 1

Spring 2012

The Spring 2012 issue begins with a detailed look at the traditional theological and philosophical debate of virtues and vices, specifically which traits fall into which category. Shawn R. Tucker looks at this issue, and questions the relative silence of the church leadership on the topics, as well as what the mormon community would agree upon regarding what constitutes virtues and vices. This is followed by an article by John Bennion exploring the role of manifest destiny both in American culture and the culture of the Mormon church, explaining how we can incorporate this spirit through a modern context in a respectful way. Finally, Gary James Bergera explores the relationship between politics and religion in the Cold War era at Brigham Young University and in the broader context of the church.

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  • mothers day, chiekookazaki

Contents

Articles

Home and Adventure: An LDS Contribution to the Virtues and Vices Tradition



Recent years have seen renewed scholarly interest in the tradition of the virtues and vices.This tradition has roots in both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman ethics, and reached the height of its Western cultural importance during the medieval period. Since that time, many artists and thinkers have continued and further developed the virtues and vices tradition. Edmund Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene (1590-96) and Benjamin Franklin‘s Autobiography (1791) both expand this tradition, with Spenser’s lively stories about the power of virtue and the danger of vice and with Franklin’s description of his aborted attempt at a handbook on “The Art of Virtue.” In addition, Oscar Rejlander’s landmark photograph Two Ways of Life (1857) is an allegory of the contrasting paths of virtue and vice. Other artists have focused particularly on the seven deadly sins, notably Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in their The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) and the series by American artist Paul Cadmus titled The Seven Deadly Sins (1945–49). 



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Mapping Manifest Destiny: Lucile Cannon Bennion (1891–1966)



I don’t remember ever seeing my grandfather and grandmother together. I seem to remember a picture, him standing a foot taller than her, his face weathered. She wears her wide-brimmed gardening hat. But if it exists, I can’t find that picture. During my memory they lived apart. When I was very young she lived in her white, wood-framed house at Greenjacket, near Vernon, Utah, and he lived in his small box of a cabin at Riverbed, fifty miles westward in the desert. Was it her asthma that kept them separate or her desire to support the family with money she earned from selling her paintings? When asked, older relatives mention both reasons, but neither seems sufficient. 



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The Richard D. Poll and J. Kenneth Davies Cases: Politics and Religion at BYU during the Wilkinson Years



During the cold war years after World War II, Mormons, including some Church leaders, increasingly infused national concerns about Communism with strong moral and religious overtones. J. Reuben Clark Jr.(1871–1961), first counselor in the First Presidency, asserted in 1949: “Our real enemies are communism and its running mate, socialism.”Almost four years later, Church President David O. McKay (1873–1970) urged: “Every child in America [should be] taught the superiority of our way of life, of our Constitution and the sacredness of the freedom of the individual.”Communism, he stressed, “has as its ultimate achievement and victory the destruction of capitalism” and the “undermin[ing] of the Restored Gospel.” “It is as much a part of the religion of American Latter-day Saints,” the LDS Church News asserted, “to accept the Constitution of the United States, and defend it, as it is to believe in baptism or the resurrection.” 



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Classic Articles

“There Is Always a Struggle”: An Interview with Chieko N. Okazaki



Chieko Okazaki: In my meetings with the young women or with the Relief Society women, I’m often really surprised that they do not feel that they can function as women in the Church—not all of them, of course, but many of those who come to me and talk to me. I just keep wondering, “How did they get to that point of feeling like they were not worth anything in the Church?” 

Greg Prince: Did you feel that way when you were younger?



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Fiction

Requiem in L Minor



Today the L’s. In the old address book, the L pages are impossible—phone numbers lined out, zip codes scratched in, whole entries x’d or margined with a question mark. Even the H’s are more decipherable.…



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Interview

“There Is Always a Struggle”: An Interview with Chieko N. Okazaki



Chieko Okazaki: In my meetings with the young women or with the Relief Society women, I’m often really surprised that they do not feel that they can function as women in the Church—not all of them, of course, but many of those who come to me and talk to me. I just keep wondering, “How did they get to that point of feeling like they were not worth anything in the Church?” 

Greg Prince: Did you feel that way when you were younger?



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Personal Voices

Give Me My Myths



I am a lover of legends, a spinner of tales. Pepper your preaching with anecdotes if you want my attention. Punctuate your sermons with parables, your homilies with flesh and blood, your lessons with people who breathe. Do this for veracity’s sake, for as Neal Chandler once so astutely reminded us in Dialogue, “Story truths are mostly truer than the truths of exhortation.”But great stories are also subjective, ambiguous, multi-faceted, and complex, not conducive to ten-minute talks or Gospel Essentials lessons, and they seem to be fading in importance, even as the need for thoughtful faith increases in this complicated world.



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Poetry

Reviews

The Truth Will Set You Free | Errol Morris, Tabloid



Tabloids, it seems, make good headlines. When Errol Morris’s new film Tabloid began its limited release on July 15, 2011, British papers were themselves dominating the news, with the News of the World closing its doors on July 10 and Rupert Murdoch appearing before Parliament less than two weeks later. The timing was weirdly appropriate: Morris’s film examines an episode from 1977 when the British papers were awash with the story of Joyce McKinney, an American girl alleged to have abducted a Mormon missionary and briefly made him her sex slave. In looking at the tactics of tabloid reporters in 1977, it seems that not much has changed. Surely the reporters then would have hacked McKinney’s mobile phone had they been able. 



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Truly Significant | Edward Leo Lyman, Candid Insights of a Mormon Apostle: The Diaries of Abraham H. Cannon, 1889–1895



Abraham H. Cannon was Mormon aristocracy. The son of long-time First Presidency member George Q. Cannon, he accepted a call as an apostle at age thirty. During the latter portion of his life, the period covered in Candid Insights, he was also deeply involved in some of the most prominent business concerns of Utah Territory—banks, securities, printing, mines, and more. He served in these areas during the tumultuous period of the first Manifesto and the economic depression of the 1890s leading up to statehood. Also from the age of nineteen until the time he died at thirty-seven, he kept a diary. 



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Sermon

The Great Vigil of Easter



My parents, in a nice haphazard sort of a way exposed me early on to the basic classical literature and ideas that they thought I needed to know. The raciness of some of the Greco-Roman myths was not lost on them, but they thought that perhaps the myths were not much more risque than the stories that I was likely to encounter in the scriptures (which is true) and besides, surely it was better to learn about the birds and bees from the Greeks and Romans than from the gossip and innuendo of schoolchildren or the pages of a magazine.



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A Community of Abundance



I have never spoken on Mother’s Day in church before, nor have I wanted to. One cannot talk in church on Mother’s Day without venturing into territory like women’s role in the Church and its relation to motherhood. Antique maps mark such territories with warnings like “There Be Dragons”; in that territory, there is no safe ground for man. 



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