Acccording to republican purists of the Revolutionary generation, the values of commerce, which “fostered a love of gain, ostentatious living, and a desire for luxuries,” could be contrasted with those of agriculture, which encouraged […]
In April 1993, President Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, international dignitaries, and Holocaust survivors celebrated the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the monument is one […]
The study of churches and religious movements is especially prone to the issues of bias and selective presentation due to researcher position and organizational politics. Like many other religions, Mormonism as an object […]
We could say that Joseph Smith Junior went to the woods for the same reason Henry David Thoreau went: He wished to live deliberately. Or maybe we should say that Thoreau went for the […]
[…] of continual evolution in the present, and are intertwined in dialectical relationships with other ideas and the world in which they are immanent. Even ideas considered revelatory, having issued from a source beyond the […]
[…] explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide […]
[…] were assassinated by an angry mob in June 1844, Parley P. Pratt published a proclamation addressed to the Church’s large and dispersed membership to assure them that all was well. In doing so, he […]
[…] and moved to New York where I began a graduate program in ethnomusicology. I became disillusioned with the state of classical composition as I knew it at the time and felt that, although I […]
[…] a single seed. Some are mirrors, with each element corresponding to a specific parallel in our own world for the purposes of allegory. Some are photocopies, carefully repeating standard tropes, while others are stadiums, […]
[…] she said. He looked up, his face one of confusion and terror. There is more in this world than I ever understood. But I believe him. By hell, I believe him. I had to […]