Richard Van Wagoner

Joseph Smith: “The Gift of Seeing”

Dialogue 15.2 (Summer 1982): 48–68
Van Wagoner and Walker focus on the seer stones that Joseph Smith used in the Book of Mormon translation process.

Saints You Can Sink Your Teeth Into | William G. Hartley, Kindred Saints: The Mormon Immigrant Heritage of Alvin and Kathryn Christensen

With us, someone else’s genealogy ranks right up there with reading the tele phone directory or watching someone else’s home movies. Most Mormon family histories are about as much fun as funerals. Thus, it was…

Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 67–83
Van Wagoner defines polyandry as having two or more husbands at the same time. He identifies women who ended up marrying members of the Twelve or Joseph Smith while they were were already married to their own husband

Sarah M. Pratt: The Shaping of an Apostate

I am the wife of Orson Pratt .. . I was formerly a member of the Mormon church. . . . I have not been a believer in the Mormon doctrines for thirty years, and am now…

The “Lectures on Faith”: A Case Study in Decanonization

The “Lectures on Faith,” seven 1834-35 lessons on theology and doctrine prepared for the “School of the Elders” in Kirtland, Ohio, were canonized in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants by official vote…

Orson Pratt, Jr.: Gifted Son of an Apostle and an Apostate

The distinction of being the firstborn of Apostle Orson Pratt’s forty five children belonged to his namesake, Orson Pratt, Jr. Unlike Joseph Smith III, Brigham Young, Jr., Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, John Henry…

The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young

The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young