Volume 07, No. 2

This poignant observation by Dale L. Morgan was written even before World War II, and the erstwhile Utah sons and daughters spoken of are themselves now grandparents. Moreover, it is doubtful that anyone any longer has any hopes of closing the “wounds” through which they departed. Indeed, the “wounds” have long since come to be regarded instead as gateways to worldly opportunity. With worldly opportunity has come worldly achievement, which has in turn brought worldly respectability; and respectability is always a problem for a “peculiar people.” 

I remember the warm Indian summer nights of 1959.1 drove with both windows of my Volkswagon wide open so I could smell the burning leaves and autumn fields as I passed through Sandy and Draper…

It was in the year 1930, after an unusual “calling” from the Church, that I made a momentous personal decision: to enter the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and work toward the Ph.D. degree in Biblical Studies. I had been teaching seminary for four years, but now, impressed with the need for greater understanding of the background of the Scriptures and convinced that I could make my best contribution to the Church only after studying under the finest Biblical scholars in the country, I became one of several Church educators who decided to take what, for a Mormon, would be a most unusual step. What follows are my personal reminiscences concerning why we went to the Chicago Divinity School, what we did there and the ultimate value of this experience. 

KSL Radio reaches east barely twenty miles past Rock Springs, Wyoming. That’s where we were first able to make out the words of Elder Spencer W. Kimball at 11:30 Friday morning, October 6. His voice…

Particularly since he had been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, loss of church membership was shattering to my father’s professional, social and business affairs. One day John W. Taylor was revered as…

Since previously exposing myself in a sometimes quite personal way in this column I have had the heady and maybe trying experience of having some readers wishing to engage in a dialogue with me via…

“I love to go home” said a recent speaker. We in the audience agreed that home should be a place that when you go there you are glad to be there, a place for renewing…

In an open forum discussion on religion, a college student asked the panel: “Can an atheist be moral?” (He was using the word in its broad meaning to include all behavior deemed good or bad).…

at his execution, 
Mountain Meadows, Utah, March 23, 1877 

I want to say I used what strength I had 
to save those people. It went on. I could not

With vivid cunning 
she draws rounded 
petals of smoke 
within her mouth, 

When so many biographies of early Mormons are made immaculate (and superficial) by filial piety, it borders on the tragic when an historian seeking to write an objective life of Sidney Rigdon fails in many…

In a recent New Era article (August 1972) Arthur Henry King made an incisive comment about Mormon literature: Mormon artists, he said, “need not write especially for Mormons, and they need not write especially on…

Both of these books are composed of a number of short autobiographical accounts of L.D.S. Church members who have achieved success in important personal quests. Win If You Will, like a series of good Priest’s…

Let us begin by accentuating the positive, even if it proves impossible to eliminate the negative in discussing William Roper’s and Leonard Arrington’s biographical study of William Spry, Utah’s Governor during the period from 1909…

In the final chapter of this book appear the words:  Someone has said that writing a man’s life is like sending a bucket into a deep well and drawing it out full, then dipping a…

To pass public judgment upon a work after a relatively cursory perusal seems, at best, a bit unfair, for each work, to the author, is more than the final product; and perhaps the reader can…