Volume 38, No. 1

Spring 2005

The Spring 2005 issue begins with Jeremy Grimshaw looking at the connection between music and the development of Brigham Young's theology, comparing it to that of Joseph Smith and sharing contemporary criticism and insight into the teachings of Brigham Young. This is followed by "The Current Philosophy of Consciousness Landscape: Where Does LDS Thought Fit?" by Steven L. Peck, which explores advances and philosophical insights into the concept of consciousness as well as how LDS doctrine and theology fits in with this, and how it adds to the conversation. Finally, Ken Driggs takes a look at Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s, looking at the role polygamy played in a split between the two most notable Mormon Fundamentalism groups, as well as how the discontinuation of polygamy resulted in a rise in branch offs of Mormonism. Also included in this issue are several personal voices, a pair of fictional pieces, and a plethora of beautiful poems to choose from.

Articles/Essays

Music of a “More Exalted Sphere”: The Sonic Cosmology of La Monte Young

Jeremy Grimshaw

Seven and a half blocks east and five blocks south of the Salt Lake Temple, the 0,0 of the city’s cardinally aligned grid, an inconspicuous gate on the north side of the street opens onto a long path that leads to what was once the backyard of Thomas B. Child. A stonemason by trade and Mormon bishop by calling, Child spent many of his spare moments between 1945 and 1963 designing surreal and sacred sculptures and engraving poignant aphorisms into stone tablets, gradually creating one of the most unique (and, even to most Mormons, unknown) collections of folk art in the United States.

The Current Philosophy of Consciousness Landscape: Where Does LDS Thought Fit?

Steven L. Peck

Looking out of my window across my lawn, I see a red toy wheelbarrow tipped over, abandoned beside the sidewalk. Its redness is something I experience distinctly. Undeniably, I might be deceived, and there is no red wheelbarrow there. Maybe someone painted one on the window and I am confused, or maybe I am lying mad in a hospital bed and dreaming. Perhaps it is a hallucination. It could even be that I am the victim of a maniacal government experiment in which scientists are stimulating my brain in a way that makes me think I am seeing a red wheelbarrow. Nevertheless, whatever the cause, for me it is clear—I am seeing a red wheelbarrow.

Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: The History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s

Ken Driggs

The modern Fundamentalist Mormon community consists of a number of groups and many independent family clusters. The two largest are the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) centered in Colorado City, Arizona,…

Brown

Charmayne Gubler Warnock

I’m mostly brown. I have brown hair and, in summer, brown skin. It’s not a pretty golden brown like the models in the tanning lotion ads. It’s a kind of ashy, dirty brown. My eyes…

Thanksgiving

Angela Hallstrom

Beth: Listening “Take care,” says my Grandma Tess. She is the first one to leave after Thanksgiving dinner because she can’t drive at night. She’s got two hours’ driving to do, south to Salt Lake.…

Letters to the Editor

Leslie and Morgan Dubiel, Mormons and the Arts
Jeddy LeVar, Mormon Peacekeeping in Practice
Chris Conkling, Animadversions
Erratum

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

Lisa Madsen De Rubilar

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

Speaking in Tongues: A Gift of the Holy Spirit

Marylee Mitcham

Tongues of fire. All attentive persons within traditions that accept the New Testament are at least familiar with the phrase. Certainly I remember it from childhood when I celebrated the Feast of Pentecost as an Episcopalian, although I cannot recall any personal meaning it held for me. But later, as a Catholic, I realized through my own experience that this ancient spiritual gift is still bestowed. And now, as a Mormon, I can easily identify with pioneer accounts of its appearance among Saints who so richly received revelations and manifestations of the Spirit.

Flying in a Confined Space

Patricia Gunter Karamesines

In my dream, people mill at a fair, trying things they’ve never before done. There’s horseback riding on flashy steeds and archery with brightly fletched arrows. At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the…

The Hands of Cowboy Red

Penny Armstrong

When my father sucked in and released his last hyphenated breath, I was holding his weightless hands, trying to make them warm. He was old. He had cirrhosis of the liver, an abdominal aortal aneurysm…

Prayer for a Grandchild

Marilyn Bushman-Carlton

Let bells come
from porches and throats
of brown cows,

#1071: The Banality of Evil

Arthur Henry King

Had I been a German in those Thirties,
I should have joined the Party:
I should have gone with the rest.
I should have condoned the persecution of the Jews.

#939: Ambulance Unit

Arthur Henry King

‘Say goodbye to all
this bluddled nonsense on earth:
simple rot inside
a coffin’s a better life.
I’m now more trouble than I’m

Reading into Dusk

Dixie Lee Partridge

On the wood porch I awake
to no sound, but a sense of some change:
light falls across an arm and
I pull back into darkness.

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

Dixie Lee Partridge

Near a rock slope of hill pasture,
grass grows up through a few old bones.
Again, what’s moved past recall
is not past pain. White as the noon-day

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

Dixie Lee Partridge

Winter already edging down
from mountain passes, I walk past
our first town cemetery, filled with upright
markers and gold-red trees.
It’s had no vacancies for years.

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

Dixie Lee Partridge

A lined calendar of empty trees
turns the cold
consolable. Even light this dim
is an invitation.

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

Carol Clark Ottesen

Soft summer wind lifts girls’ sheer dresses into wings,
Pinks, reds, and golds winking and rippling through the air
Like babies cooing far away.
They pose round-faced and porcelain

November 2001

Robin Russell

You notice the smells first, more spring, or
even summer, than late fall, the stale-clean
scent of wet sunlit streets after last night’s
heavy rain, the musk of soaked dead leaves,

A Maturing View of the Book of Mormon | Grant H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins

David P. Wright

This book is something of a watershed in the study of Mormon history and Mormon scripture. It is the first significant popularization of evidence by a writer within the Church indicating that Joseph Smith’s ancient…

Singing the Differences to Sleep | Heidi Hart, Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice

Phyllis Barber

A grace note is a musical term for a miniature note placed before a prominent note in a musical phrase. If music is the direct line to human emotion, as Heidi Hart claims in her…

Relations and Principles: The Mormon Dialectic | Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism

Matthew Thomas Nagel

Douglas J. Davies offers novel thematic interpretations of LDS theology that are provocative in both academic and devotional contexts. He identifies two theological commitments present throughout the historical development of LDS cosmology, ritual, scripture and…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

Robert R. King

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

Good News for Fiction Readers | Jack Harrell, Vernal Promises, and Douglas Thayer, The Conversion of Jeff Williams

Todd Robert Petersen

In 2003, Signature Books hit 100 percent from the free-throw line when both of the novels it published that year won manuscript awards from the Association for Mormon Letters. Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises and Douglas…

About the Artist

Issue Art

Marylee Mitcham was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1943. She received a B.A. in English literature in 1967 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She and Carl, her husband of forty years, currently reside in…

Volume 38, No. 1

Contents

Articles/Essays

Music of a “More Exalted Sphere”: The Sonic Cosmology of La Monte Young

The Current Philosophy of Consciousness Landscape: Where Does LDS Thought Fit?

Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: The History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s

Fiction

Brown

Thanksgiving

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

Notes

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

Personal Voices

Speaking in Tongues: A Gift of the Holy Spirit

Flying in a Confined Space

The Hands of Cowboy Red

Poetry

Prayer for a Grandchild

#1071: The Banality of Evil

#939: Ambulance Unit

Reading into Dusk

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

November 2001

Reviews

A Maturing View of the Book of Mormon | Grant H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins

Singing the Differences to Sleep | Heidi Hart, Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice

Relations and Principles: The Mormon Dialectic | Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

Good News for Fiction Readers | Jack Harrell, Vernal Promises, and Douglas Thayer, The Conversion of Jeff Williams

Volume Art

About the Artist