Fall 1992
The Fall 1992 Issue explores various aspects of contemporary Mormon identity and experience. Linda Sillitoe reflects on the community's origins and characteristics, while Tim B. Heaton provides demographic insights into modern Mormon families. John Tarjan discusses how organizational metaphors can shape and sometimes limit religious experiences, comparing these ideas to Jewish and Mormon paradigms in Seymour Cain's analysis of supersession. Steven J. Sainsbury addresses the stigma surrounding AIDS, likening it to a modern-day leprosy, and Fayone B. Willes highlights the challenges involved in documenting local histories. Susan B. Taber shares her experiences in the Elkton Branch from 1976 to 1981, offering a personal perspective on what it means to be Mormon. And much more!
Telling the truth about history is most essentially, I think, knowing who we are and where we come from. When Mormon historians began to shed additional light on the beginnings of Joseph Smith and the…
Certain characteristics of Mormon families are consistent with the social and theological emphasis the LDS Church places on family life. For example, in 1987 I wrote about the four C’s of the Mormon family: Chastity…
Many Latter-day Saints worry that as the Mormon Church has become more corporate in nature, it has not retained its strictly religious focus. Some have argued that its extensive financial holdings have made the Church…
For some time now, especially since World War II and the shock and guilt evoked in the Western world by the virtual extermination of the European Jews, traditional Christian views of the role of the…
Typically, when an individual contracts a disease, friends and relatives rally to provide needed support. Even terminal illnesses, though reminders of our own mortality, elicit comfort and sympathy. Friends and family form support groups, dispense…
The sweep of wide-angle Mormon history is impressive, offering a comprehensive panorama of the Church’s worldwide workings, progress, and achievements. But to see Mormon history only through this wide-angle lens is to miss the rich…
On the second Sunday of December 1976, Cloyd Mullins and his two sons, Lynne Whitney and her four children, Bill and Ellen Lilley and their two small children, a pair of missionaries, and Karl Tippets…
When Aunt Iona died in August, I was glad I didn’t have to visit the nursing home anymore. Iona was my great-aunt, my long-dead Grandma’s sister. I loved her, of course, but when I heard…
“I saw Cory yesterday,” Mom tells me when I meet her downtown for lunch. She used to play her harmonica outside Crossroads Mall, before she moved to the ZCMI Center. She doesn’t play her harmonica…
The first three weeks of my mission in Koshigaya, a small city outside of Tokyo, Japan, breezed by. Despite two months at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, I still couldn’t understand the gibberish that…
Last summer I was asked to respond to a paper on the LDS garment, given by Colleen McDannell at the Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium. Her paper, to appear as a chapter in her forthcoming…
I thought again today of how I used to sit at forums and devotionals so that I could watch the signer for the deaf club. I knew the manual alphabet and recognized a sign or two, but mostly I watched without understanding, the signer’s hands, eloquent and expressive, echoing the words of the speaker. I’d see “thank you,” a hand to the lips and then out; I’d identify the rapid-fire finger spelling of a name—much too fast for me to read. And at the end of the prayers, that beautiful sign “the Lord, Jesus Christ,” the letter “L” moving diagonally from the left shoulder to the right hip, and then a finger in the palm of each hand. I was always crying long before the prayer.
For many years, I have read with increasing interest the abundance of articles and essays dealing with the way men and women should behave—both within the Church and in the world at large. At varying…
The flashing red lights, which transposed the familiar objects of our yard into illusionary images, seemed no stranger than the events of the evening. Three hours earlier we’d been a happily pregnant couple. Now we…
in a perfect diamond of flight
slip between me and the sky, circle
toward rest and cover for the night.
The lake is a polished absurdity
Hunched over and rocking a little,
he answered the president in stutters,
and I wrote it all down in the ledger—
the girl’s name, how many times, my pen touching
She performs the persistent ritual of cleansing,
the splashing of water
upon her scarlet apple flesh
sullied with blood
In five short years Judith Freeman has established herself as a serious contender in the arena of American fiction. Her first major work was a collection of short stories, Family Attractions, published by Viking Penguin…
Religious conflict, dissent, and schism rarely have been examined in a critical, balanced, and systematic fashion. Social order, harmony, cooperation, and conformity commonly are considered normal, desirable, and good; while social change, conflict, competition, and…
Annette Hampshire’s Mormonism in Conflict: The Nauvoo Years is simultaneously refreshing and exasperating. To her credit, Hampshire strives for a degree of methodological and theoretical rigor that has been sadly absent in most Mormon historiography.…
Thomas G. Alexander, professor of history at Brigham Young University and prominent scholar of Mormon studies, has completed his long-awaited biography of Wilford Woodruff. An important nineteenth-century Mormon leader, Woodruff served as fourth president of the Church of…
Dialogue 25.3 (Fall 1992): 197–198
RLDS Church Archivist Ronald E Romig expected The Founding Prophet: An Administrative Biography of Joseph Smith, Jr. to be exclusively about Joseph Smith. Instead Maurice L. Draper who was both a member of the RLDS Quroum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency, focused more on different adminstrative situations in the RLDS church.
Readers of L. Kay Gillespie’s exposition about Utah’s unforgiven should find it thought-provoking—at times, disturbingly so. The picture he paints here is of Utah’s darkest side: the deliberate brutishness and ugliness on both sides of…
