Fall 2004
The Fall 2004 Issue delves into various aspects of Mormon culture, theology, and history, offering insights into the community's evolution and challenges. Klaus J. Hansen reflects on Jan Shipps’ long engagement with Mormonism, highlighting her influential role in shaping public understanding of the faith. David H. Bailey discusses the potential pitfalls of theological speculation among Mormons, particularly regarding the interpretation of doctrines and beliefs. R. Dennis Potter explores the complexities of divine providence, prophecy, and the nature of prayer, raising thought-provoking questions about how God interacts with human affairs. Tina Hatch examines the changes within the Relief Society from 1960 to the present, noting how societal shifts have influenced its mission and activities. Jean Anne Waterstra details the "Golden Years" of the Relief Society magazine, emphasizing its significance as a platform for discussion and community building among women in the church. And more!
This essay had its origins in a projected review of Jan Shipps’s Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). I have expanded it into an assessment…
Engaging in doctrinal speculation, and then later adopting these speculations as religious dogmas, is as old as recorded history. One example is the adoption of the traditional geocentric, flat-earth cosmology of antiquity into the doctrinal…
The doctrine of divine providence states that God is the supreme governor of the world—past, present, and future. Different versions of the doctrine depend on different interpretations of governance. The strongest version of this doctrine comes from the Calvinists who assert that each and every event in the history of the world is planned by God and happens only because God wills it, including anything that humans do.
The 1960s marked for Latter-day Saints the commencement of a new era of consolidation and growth that have led to multiple changes in the Relief Society. The organization experienced the automatic enrollment of women in…
My mother was an enthusiastic, devoted member of the Relief Society—the old Relief Society, the pre-block-meeting-schedule, pre-Correlation Relief Society. She belonged to a Relief Society that LDS women chose to join by paying a small…
Elder Jeff Lee Johnson came home on January 24 at 2:14 in the afternoon. The plane had made its way north all that day, stopping in Miami, then Atlanta before finally arriving six minutes ahead…
When I jumped that westbound train climbing north out of Fra ser, Colorado, I wasn’t intending to come back. Not for her. Not for anybody. The soggy June fields between Tabernash and the pulp mills…
It’s a boggy acre, surely. Is there any greater conundrum than human sexuality? Is there any aspect of our lives about which it is more difficult to generalize? Is there anything in our experience so…
9/11. For seeming forever, a call for help. Since 2001 a blast of grief swallowed like debris from the heap of rubble and human remains on the streets of Manhattan, of the New York until…
Each spring the Christian world celebrates the most important week in history—Passion Week or Holy Week, the time between Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his atonement, death, and resurrection. Throughout the world the majority…
The death of a loved one may evoke anguish, regret, confusion, anger, shock, bitterness, despair, relief, gratitude, nostalgia, even joy. But the death of my friend Bonnie evoked in me, both on that Friday morning…
What if the Resurrection were not pent
for the vast reendowment of all flesh
but occurred as if by chance, like birth
(that miraculous appointment), and just
as unnoticed. What if these were the terms?:
At the Japanese American National Museum
a pile of small stones, most
no bigger than my thumb, each
with a single kanji,
Bernard DeVoto gave an impromptu lecture about the process of writing nonfiction at the 1955 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Conference Director Theodore Morrison described the lecture as “an exacting intellectual test for his audience. .…
