Winter 1998
The Wintter 1998 Issue examines historical, psychological, and theological perspectives within Mormon thought, particularly on themes of sexuality, identity, and institutional changes. Eric G. Swedin offers a historical overview of Latter-day Saint approaches to sexuality and psychology, exploring how these views have evolved over time. Margaret Merrill Toscano addresses complex questions of personal identity and spirituality. Edwin B. Firmage reflects on Mormon history and critiques aspects of the anti-legal tradition within the faith, offering insights into the broader implications of this stance. Lawrence Foster compares Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, with John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, focusing on the role of sexuality and prophetic authority in their respective movements. Bryan Waterman discusses significant transformations in Brigham Young University’s Honor Code during 1965-71 under Ernest Wilkinson’s leadership
The issue of sexuality, its expression or non-expression, even questions about its very nature, torments American culture. Various philosophies and systems of morality abound which advocate chastity, promiscuity, sex solely for procreation, sex for recreation,…
Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.
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.
The extraordinarily yet often highly conflicted connection between religious and sexual impulses and expression has long been noted by scholars.[1] Dynamically expansive new religious movements, in particular, often experience sharp polarities between efforts to control,…
For the first fourteen years of his tenure as president of BYU (1951-65), Ernest Wilkinson was largely occupied with expanding the school’s size and its academic reputation. His goal of creating the world’s most important…
The human mind seems irresistibly compelled by (at least) two incompatible intuitions: first, that as morally responsible beings we are able to do other than what we do; second, that what happens now could not…
What a difference a word makes. Consider, for example, these two words: apostle, a biblical word from the Greek apostalds, meaning “one sent forth.” For Mormons, an apostle is a man called of God as…
Rudger Judd Clawson, born 12 March 1857 in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a polygamist and the first Mormon convicted and imprisoned (1884-87) for violating federal law (Edmunds Act of 1882) regarding unlawful co habitation.[1]…
Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1999):190–199
It is noteworthy because, instead of laying out the original historical meaning of Isaiah, it reapplies the text to the time of Joseph Smith and to the course of Jewish and Christian history up to his time.
Last winter, after half a century of faithful church service and during a temple session, I abandoned my position at the temple veil, removed my robes, and demanded to be released. By nightfall, I had…
Just another day in paradise in the Garden Park Ward. It was a spring morning that felt more like summer, and Sister Conway, our Sunday school instructor, was gracious enough to leave the door open,…
Steven whistled Neil Young songs to himself as the pickup sped north towards Saltillo. From the truck’s open bed, he commanded an obstructionless and enviable view of this Mexican wilderness’s enormous sterility. For some, it…
The alpha and omega sat at meat.
The woman could not speak. She only knelt
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet
Flowed like river waters to the Delta.
I raise you my just born daughter
to the Father of All Lights.
He has set a flame in you;
this fire connects you to the trees
the earth and creeping things.
Family sentinels, we watch flames grab scrub oak
roughly on the shoulder of our dysphoric mountain,
shiver as three firs’ tired arms collapse in slow motion
silence.
The week they turn off your phone,
I wait in your car while you give quarters
to a pay phone mounted on red brick
at a convenience store.
In those days
we all wanted a man
to cover our shame, the nakedness
of being a woman alone.
A degree yes unless
The Knight came
My father comes to me
his hand scrapes on the door
that he opens to this bedroom where I am still,
not sleeping but waiting for his hair oil scent to reach me.
I want to know why water has the right of way
where God dwells near zenith or nadir
why you see stars better peripherally
why some people have a fear of trees
My job was once threatened if I published a poem.
I lived in another place
but in America and knew my rights.
I let the poem wait. Oh, I read it aloud once
Since easterners first invested the West, the landscape and inhabitants have generally been viewed through the lens of a movie, television, or tourist camera. Everybody from eco-terrorists to wise-use ranchers, from politicians to military officers,…
These two volumes aim to describe the development of the hierarchical leadership and organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) as well as certain related issues. They begin with…
To most people, Utah’s apostle-senator, Reed Smoot, seems one-dimensional. Most Latter-day Saints re member him as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and as a senator from Utah. Some have heard of the…
