Spring 1992
The Spring 1992 Issue explores Mormonism's evolving role and theological foundations, with reflections on historical, philosophical, and personal themes. James B. Allen discusses Mormonism's journey toward becoming a universal church, while Sterling M. McMurrin examines Christianity’s theological roots. Romei W. Mackelprang addresses the intersection of sexuality and contemporary Mormon beliefs, and Erin R. Silva explores the ecclesiastical significance of grace. Karl F. Best reviews changes in early Mormon revelations between 1833 and 1835. In "Personal Voices," Edward L. Hart shares reflections on loss, Nellie Brown writes about the meaning of home, and Garth N. Jones recounts a poignant train ride experience.
Dialogue 25.1 (Spring 1992): 13–36
A historical analysis of the globalization of the Church. Under President David O McKay, the Church was able to reach out to more people beyond North America and Europe, which led to an increase in membership, temples and missionaries.
Historical Christianity is a remarkable composite of diverse religious cultures, a mixture that even today, after two millennia, is still mixing, blending things that often will not blend and fusing the unfusible. Sometimes severe, chaste,…
Several years ago, I presented a series of guest lectures on sexuality to undergraduate nursing classes at Brigham Young University’s Salt Lake Center. My presentations were aimed at preparing students for their work with patients…
While living in Philadelphia several years ago, I served for three years as liaison from the Philadelphia Stake High Council to the Philadelphia Spanish Branch located in the Puerto Rican and black barrios of North…
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accept as scripture the book of Doctrine and Covenants, a compilation of revelations received by the Prophet Joseph Smith. These revelations cover a variety of…
Pancha Robinson was doing dishes at her mother’s sink and watching her husband Rick, who was out in the backyard with the children. Gloria, Pancha’s sister, was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with a…
My wife, Eleanor Coleman Hart, died on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1990, after an unfailingly resolute two-year struggle with systemic lupus. The forty-sixth anniversary of our wedding passed only a few days before her death.…
It had been the perfect day. We had learned how to write cursive L’s and mine were the best, so Miss Handy hung my paper on the board for the rest of the class to…
Luke had a dream. When I first married his daughter Marie, she warned me that he believed dreams were a form of personal revelation. But it was not until the summer of 1952 that I…
We leave the town at noon
For a beach of white pebbles
And small, clean bones. The wind
Whips our sensible skirts, and sun glints
The light was too harsh
in the South. All day
I sat beneath that tree
growing darker and darker
until I was all shade.
The absence of a signal
is itself information,
a zero giving meaning to binary ones.
The call that doesn’t ring,
Grandma teased us
for the time it took
to kill one jackrabbit
on our backyard picnic table.
Why do I strain for a freedom found outside,
Where worlds in time and space lie wide and full?
My room is closed and airless while the tide
Slaps up the pier and churns me in its pull.
And yet old times of weary venturing pall.
The egg insists on its own reality,
So I go along, easy, not one
To counter what I don’t know.
A friend of mine told me —
so I know it’s true —
she saw someone in the road
behind her house
Sometimes boys would stand
on the high school stairs
and throw nickels at girls
in low-cut blouses, hoping
Reviewers expect to apply somewhat different criteria to an edited diary than to a monograph, interpretive book, or col lection of essays. Instead of asking questions about the scope of the research, the felicity of…
The William Clayton journals elevate Signature Book’s series of nineteenth century Mormon diaries to a high level of primary documentation. Although excel lent biographies of Clayton have already been published, George D. Smith has brought…
Since 1844 numerous books have been published in Italy containing the observations of travelers who have visited Nauvoo or Salt Lake City. While some of these travel accounts have been remark ably objective, most have been…
As Leatrice Lifshitz explains in her introduction, this unusual collection of verse represents “an attempt to return old women to the circle, to the continuum of women and of life” (p. viii), and its rich…
The Memory of Earth begins the five volume story of the Oversoul, the master computer of the planet Harmony. For forty million years, the Oversoul has preserved peace among humans exiled into space by a…
