Edwin B. Firmage
EDWIN B. FIRMAGE is Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, College of Law, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the author, with Collin Man- grum, of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (University of Illinois Press, 1988). "Reflections
Allegiance and Stewardship: Holy War, Just War, and the Mormon Tradition in the Nuclear Age
Articles/Essays – Volume 16, No. 1
The present escalation in nuclear weapons technology between the United States and the Soviet Union has progressed beyond the point where any increase in such weaponry necessarily results in increased national security. It has become, in fact, the ultimate act of idolatry, a reliance upon technology, a false god which cannot save us but which will insure our destruction.
Read moreHugh B. Brown: The Early Years
Articles/Essays – Volume 21, No. 2
In 1969 Edwin B. Firmage taped oral history interviews with his grandfather, Hugh B. Brown. The following essay has been adapted from these memoirs, which will be published by Signature Books in 1988 as An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown.
Read moreReconciliation
Articles/Essays – Volume 22, No. 3
Introduction So we do not lose heart, though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Cor. 4:16) I come from a religious tradition that does not celebrate…
Read moreGod: CEO or Master of the Dance?
Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 4
My text is a poem and a scripture since as I age I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between beauty and truth.
Read moreSeeing the Stranger as Enemy: Coming Out
Articles/Essays – Volume 30, No. 4
It’s not easy to motivate two thousand people, about evenly divided among high school students, young parents, and older citizens, to march a mile up a steep hill to listen to speakers on an unseasonably beautiful winter day. But Utah’s state legislators had been up to the task. With language so raw, so full of homophobic hatred, they had called these young citizens, our own children, bestial and subhuman.
Read moreReflections on Mormon History: Zion and the Anti-Legal Tradition
Articles/Essays – Volume 31, No. 4
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.
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