Spring 1987
The Spring 1987 Issue of Dialogue marks the journal’s maturation, with reflections on its history, influence, and readership. Eugene England shares personal experiences with Dialogue, while a survey analyzed by Armand L. Mauss and others offers insights into its readership. Blake T. Ostler presents a view of the Book of Mormon as a modern adaptation of ancient sources. Articles explore themes of loyalty, obedience, and literary expression, including the life of Henry Bigler post-Gold Rush and Juanita Brooks’s memoir Quicksand and Cactus. Personal essays and poetry delve into themes of transformation, spirituality, and family bonds. And more!
DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT begins both its twentieth volume and its twenty-first year with the publication of this issue. Launched in 1966 as a daring and earnest effort to transform the serious conversation of…
God sometimes seems to me quite unreasonable. I’ve thought so especially at times when it appears that the one gift he has clearly given me, the gift of dialogue, is also a source of pain…
During the spring of 1984, the editors of DIALOGUE sent a short questionnaire to all of its then-2,300 subscribers plus 600 who had let their subscriptions lapse in the previous year. At that point, the journal had been edited in Salt Lake City for exactly two years.
Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 69–75
EVEN A CASUAL REFERENCE to studies treating the Book of Mormon reveals a range of divergent explanations of its origins. At one extreme are those who are skeptical of the book’s claims to antiquity who generally conclude that it is a pious fraud, written by Joseph Smith from information available in his immediate environment.
Henry William Bigler marched west with the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War (1846-47) and by January 1848 was an employee of Johann Sutter, constructing a saw mill on the American River northeast of Sacra…
It strikes me that Mormon intellectuals, possibly excluding those occasions when Orson Pratt may have had lunch with B. H. Roberts, now constitute a genuine subculture within the larger host culture of Mormonism. We have…
Juanita Brooks holds an undisputed place among Mormon historians. Her landmark and still definitive history of the Mountain Meadows massacre was first published by Stanford University Press in 1950 and reprinted by the University of…
In July 1984, I attended testimony meeting in my home ward in Salt Lake City. As the previous month’s crop of infants were blessed, I thought that after the sacrament I would go home. It was a Fourth of July weekend and I was sunburned, sleepy, and not much in the mood for testimonies about the star-spangled banner. Besides that, I was hungry. But when the sacrament was over, I stayed. I thought my motivation was guilt, but now I know it was grace.
Since my conversion to the Church almost fourteen years ago, I have struggled on various levels to come to terms with the atonement of Jesus Christ. At times, while young deacons passed gleaming trays among…
Our family had just finished the pre-service reception, and Brother Holbrook, the funeral director, had just closed the doors to the Relief Society room. As Mother’s surviving sisters and their families filed past the coffin…
The shop smelled of wood’s death-scent
released, by the carpenter’s skill,
in the spring breeze: nature
spread across the afternoon
What kind of God has made this sapphire tide
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan,
outrageously extravagant, a place
fit for the baptism of God or kings
Come, my child, hark to the tale
The poets weave for our world:
Hear the prophets sing the song
Of earth rolling on her wings—
It would be difficult to say too much in praise of John Phillip Walker’s new contribution to Mormon historiography, a field that is bursting with recent major studies. Walker’s book deserves a place on the…
Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, The Price
Hoyt W. Brewster, Jr., Moments That Matter
Nancy D. McCormick and John S. McCormick, Saltair
Allan Kent Powell, The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah’s Coal Fields, 1900–1933
The Western Writers of America, Pioneer Trails
Leonard J. Arrington and Heidi S. Swinton, The Hotel: Salt Lake’s Classy Lady. The Hotel Utah, 1911–1986
