Volume 05, No. 2

Mormons are usually startled by the appearance of new theological movements in Catholic or Protestant circles. Without probing into their content, analyzing their presuppositions, or seeking to understand their origins, they often dismiss these movements…

If viewed in terms of quantitative measurements, economic progress dictates not only the physical image of a landscape but, more potentially, the cycles and processes inherent in that landscape as well. There is, of course,…

In the spring of 1968 a Mormon fellow-student, Bob Lemkau, and I attended sessions on nonviolence and revolution taught by radical students at U.C., Berkeley. Through four years of classes at Berkeley, and culminating in…

Twelve-year-old Missy watched as her younger sister Becky walked exuberantly down the steps into the baptismal font. She saw the shiver of excitement that possessed her at the first touch of the water. She listened…

Let me begin by admitting that my title, and perhaps my entire paper, begs a major philosophical question. I am well aware of the age-old debate over the reality of free will. I am aware of…

“Thank goodness I don’t have to live there! How do they stand it?” The revolting, depressing drabness and ugliness of the little Mormon towns we were driving through made my artist’s soul shiver. Never had I…

Late in October 1830, four tired Mormon missionaries reached the village of Mentor, Ohio. Their leader, Parley P. Pratt, had persuaded them to walk two hundred miles out of. their way to bring the message…

A short time ago, in Brigham Young University Studies, I published an article about Japanese and English poetry; I ended it with the statement that poetry in both languages carries the hallmark “Made on Earth…

Many people have observed something unusual about my relationship with my wife and people in general. Often, I have been asked by individuals wondering what my secret is, “Kennedy, do you know what you’re doing?”…

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a schizophrenic church. Its ultimate concern is with things beyond—life after death, justice-in-judgment, salvation, exaltation—and with their earthly preparation—baptism, repentance, endowment. But at the same time…

In his writing lifetime, David L. Wright, a brilliant young author from southern Idaho, did come to know some measure of fame after the publica tion of his short story “A Summer in the Country,”…

His eyes milky, intensely blue, 
Fasten totally upon the life that was living 
From 1884 to nineteen hundred and twelve; 
Not seeing the life that has been his dying since, 
Though he has braked the crawl toward surcease 
More courageously successful than we (even I, the Valley’s Poet)
In our existing. 

Adlai Stevenson died in Palermo. 
In the airport. His face was pasted 
On the newsstand, bobbing in and out among 
Jabbering Sicilians, their sweaty hands 
Sticky with orange soda pop, 

So Stevenson be glad—
Whatever your life was, your dreams were,
I do not know and you cannot care,
Fallen like a stone on that hot street.

Corn grows in my father’s backyard garden 
in ten green files, each row a week taller, 
the tallest now past two months, nearly ripe. 
The years he’s planted gardens range beyond
the year that I was born in early spring, 
but memory recalls three different plots 

Readers of Dialogue who have been searching for a sympathetic, read able, and reasonably accurate introduction to Mormonism to present to their non-Mormon friends may well consider Carl Carmer’s The Farm Boy and the Angel.…

Dudley Dean is a forty-year-old befuddled jack-Mormon professor of English. Wife Hannah has left him and married one of his teaching colleagues—a maudlin, oversexed boor named Ashton—and his devout Mormon mother has just died. Dudley…

Not many years after Voltaire delivered himself of his much maligned observation that history is a pack of tricks we play on the dead, historians began to attempt to prove him wrong by telling us…