When I picked up William V. Smith’s The King Follett Sermon: A Biography, I was expecting to find a history of the text of the famous sermon from April 1844. I found that it was…
The life of Maurine Whipple, lauded Mormon author of the 1941 novel The Giant Joshua, is one of the saddest stories in LDS literature. She loved her people, the tough and hardscrabble settlers of St.…
When the Dialogue office moved from Stanford to Los Angeles, it found a home in the University Religious Conference, which was kitty-corner from the UCLA School of Dentistry, where I was a student. Occasionally, I…
When I received a copy of Dialogue volume 8 in the spring of 1973, my mind was immersed in Watergate, Vietnam, and civil rights. Lester Bush’s article on the evolution of a policy relative to…
Those of you who have paid attention along the way know quite a bit about Lester’s 1973 article, particularly because of the follow-up article he published in the Journal of Mormon History in 1999 that…
On this the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lester E. Bush’s landmark Dialogue article “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” I, along with other knowledgeable students of Mormon studies, gratefully acknowledge the crucial role…
Typical of far too many youths of my generation, I grew up in a racist home, a racist community, and in racist Latter-day Saint congregations. As a young man, I harbored deep racist sentiments and…
Last night, I sat on the ballroom’s hardwood floor and laced up my practice shoes. Their black canvas fabric hugged the contours of my feet as I flexed, pointed, and rolled them out before a…
Sometimes in the morning, I wake earlier than the others. I slip out of my room and sit down on that well-worn spot on the couch that over time has become mine—the one the boys…
In his 2022 Dialogue article “The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo,” Jeremy Christiansen adds to a fuller understanding of LDS reception history of the Lukan account of “Gethsemane,” namely Jesus’ agony and sweat/blood…