Karen Lynn

KAREN LYNN, formerly associate professor of English at Brigham Young University, is a member of the General Music Committee of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This paper was originally presented at the Association for Mormon Letters, Salt Lake City, January 1983. Since then, a new LDS edition of hymns has been tentatively scheduled for release in April 1984.

Our LDS Hymn Texts: A Look at the Past, Some Thoughts for the Future

Articles/Essays – Volume 10, No. 1

Our LDS hymn texts are a fascinating key to the history of the Church and the changing attitudes and concerns of the saints. Since the publication of the vest pocket hymnal of 1835, each new…

A Feminist Look at Polygamy | Sara Davidson, Real Property

Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 1

In an earlier best-seller, Loose Change, Sara Davidson documented the impact of the Sixties on her fictionalized self and two other intelligent females. Real Property moves on into the Seventies, but not in novel form.…

Sensational Virtue: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Fiction and American Popular Taste

Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 3

Before 1900, novels about Mormons ranged from the amateurish to the slick, from the scurrilous to the rather even-handed, from the realistic to the wildly imaginary. Their one common thread was that almost all of…

The 1981 RLDS Hymnal: Songs More Brightly Sung

Articles/Essays – Volume 16, No. 4

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 33–42
About ten years ago the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints decided that its 1956 hymnal was already becoming out of date. An RLDS Hymnal Committee was commissioned to begin work on a new volume, and the result, Hymns of the Saints, was published in 1981. Hymns of the Saints is more than just a revision or reediting of the 1956 hymnal; out of 501 hymns and responses, more than a third are new to this collection.