Spring 1978
The Spring 1978 reflects on ten years of Dialogue and its role in fostering Mormon intellectual discourse. Mary L. Bradford reflects on her personal journey with the publication, while Robert A. Rees proposes ideas for a more spiritually unified dialogue. Douglas D. Alder and Paul M. Edwards discuss how shared origins led to differing beliefs within the community. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher explores the "Eliza Enigma," examining the complexities surrounding Eliza R. Snow’s life and legacy. Robert S. Michaelsen offers a retrospective on sociologist Thomas F. O'Dea's views of Mormonism, and Dixie Snow Huefner analyzes the Church's involvement in the International Women's Year Conference. The issue also includes Lewis B. Horne’s short story Zina's Version, and poetry by Marden Clark and Marilyn McMeen Miller Brown, capturing personal and religious reflections.
We looked a lot like the picture in the Dialogue logo, although, of course, we didn’t know it then. Gene and Charlotte England, Karl Keller and I were taking lunch on the lawn at the…
Communication is a matter of infinite hope. It is the emotion we feel when we send these fragile words however tentatively or forcefully out to others. Even those who write secret diaries, shrouded in cryptic codes, or who shout anonymous messages on subway walls, or who carefully hide parchment and golden plates in caves to come forth several millennia later all do so with the same expectation: that someone, somewhere will read and understand.
Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1979): 19–31
Within two years of his assasination, however, the Church was torn by succession struggles that led to dispersion. Almost a century and a half later, the whereabouts of many of these saints is still unknown.
I first encountered Thomas F. O’Dea through his book The Mormons which I read with considerable excitement. Here, it seemed to me, was a person professionally concerned with the development and enhancement of the scholarly…
Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 58–76
During the spring of 1977, Utah’s two major newspapers began their coverage of what was to become one of the hottest political controversies of the year: the Utah Women’s Conference authorized by the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year and scheduled for June 24-25
In 1971, all official church magazines were literally swept away and replaced by three colorful, professional, slick publications, each aimed at a different age group—the Ensign for adults, the New Era for young people and…
Many readers were surprised and delighted when Exponent II burst upon the scene. “You have lifted my thoughts from the mundane and sweetened my dreams of fulfillment,” wrote one. Another commented, “A newspaper for Mormon…
“Oh,” lamented Job, “that mine adversary had written a book.” Logic and syntax—even basic facts—which are unmistakably clear and irrefutable in manuscript form have a way of breaking down when committed to print. And when…
A magazine is supposed to be one of the easiest businesses to start. It requires no office, no equipment (printing and even mailing can be farmed out to local businesses), no staff as long as…
Jousting with windmills is a bit out of fashion nowadays, insanity even more so. But every now and then some glittering-eyed individual comes by with an idea most people do best to ignore.
Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/ Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).
How does an English graduate student who wants a visit to the East Coast, instruction in the American political system and an introduction into the Mormon publishing world satisfy these three ambitions in one two-month…
Zina thought: Ha, what now? She peered through her front door window at the old man crossing Lizzy’s backyard. He was skinny as a bunch of sticks, splotchy, and wrinkled as a raisin. His hair…
Were you cold?
I was cold and the wind was bitter
The canyon wide and deep and chill,
The cabin walls as thin as paper.
Hold my hand.
Yes, I will.
Little of the Mormon fiction published thus far has dealt significantly with the central issues of Latter-day Saint religious life. On the one hand there is the propagandistic fiction, found chiefly in the church magazines,…
Prospective Latter-day Saint readers of Donna Hill’s biography of Joseph Smith will want to know two things: Is there anything new, and is it sympathetic to the Prophet? The answer to both questions is definitely…
Seldom does the motivation for a book begin with a serendipitous finding. Such, however, was the case for this partial biography of Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism. The author, a specialist…
From Quaker to Latter-day Saint is an unfortunate title. Neither interesting nor particularly descriptive, it combines with the design and size of the volume to suggest one of those wearying biographies of a minor figure…
The publication of two biographies of major figures in Mormon history within a year is no small event. That both Donna Hill’s Joseph Smith (Doubleday, 1977) and Samuel W. Taylor’s Life of John Taylor have…
