Trying to get to the nursery proper and all of the blooming plants—bright colors, heady smells, early summer at its best—Mona almost walked past his table. It was one of those fold-up numbers with foldout…
When Dennis Cormier arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City, his first appointment was already waiting. The visitor was fleshy, jowls and hips, about Dennis’ age, and…
Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 1–18
Well, I was raised in a rather unscientific environment , a little farming community.
Dialogue 5.3 (Fall 1970): 11–25
Godfrey describes the steps leading to Wilford Woodruff issuing the First Manifesto.
Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 65–82
Evidence from Mormon women’s journals, diaries, and meeting
minutes tells us that from the 1840s until as recently as the 1930s,
LDS women served their families, each other, and the broader community, expanding their own spiritual gifts in the process.
You’re sure to hear a few such discordant notes as Brooks’s fingers glide up and down the scale, but to focus on such slips overlooks the book’s overall melody, the song of a Mormon girl whose nascent faith is challenged, lost, found, and refined by fire throughout. She’s the prodigal daughter telling only a little about years of riotous living, more about the faith of her youth and the re-visioned faith of her adulthood. Memoirs aren’t intended to tell a disconnected story of one’s life, but to invite readers into an intensely subjective world. The best memoirs aren’t written as how-to manuals (like the Marie Osmond brand beauty and fashion instructions Brooks read as an awkward, body-conscious young girl. You’re sure to laugh out loud as she spends a chapter pillorying such fluff). Instead, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, good memoirs awaken “a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, and they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”2 American publisher William Sloan says readers of such works are not so much saying to the author “Tell me about you,” but rather “Tell me about me; as I use your book and life as a mirror.”
Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 133–150
But Betsy was born. She was dangerously premature—especially so for those days. Everyone said that at birth she could have fit on a dinner plate (an image that haunted my young imagination). She wasn’t expected to survive. But she did. Perfect, whole, healthy.
Dialogue 11.4 (1977): 63-70
In the 1950s there was a book published call Fate of the Persecutors of Joseph Smith, which contains stories that have been part of folklore that have been passed down discussing what happened to the people who helped kill Joseph Smith.
Will Bagley is a historian who has written and edited more than a dozen books on Mormon (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) history and the American West. His best known work is…
Cross posted on The Exponent Blog
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. To honor this legendary Mormon publication, I’ve collected from various Exponent bloggers some thoughts about Dialogue‘s role in their lives and about Dialoguearticles that have particularly impacted them. MayDialogue continue on for another 50 years… and many, many more after that.
April Young Bennett:
While researching background information for a Relief Society lesson, I read Jessie L. Embry’s 1982 Dialogue article, “Grain Storage: The Balance of Power Between Priesthood Authority and Relief Society Autonomy“. It was such an eye-opener for me! The article presents compelling evidence that Emmeline Wells and her counselors did not choose to sell several decades of grain storage to the United States government, but rather had their grain storage program sold out from under them by priesthood leaders without their knowledge, something I had not read before in either church published or independent histories. Daughters in my Kingdom, for example, says “the Relief Society sold 200,000 bushels to the United States government.”