Summer 1984
The Summer 1984 Issue presents a range of scholarly and creative works on Mormon theology, history, and literature. D. Michael Quinn examines the evolution of sacred authority in the LDS Church, while Lawrence Foster discusses the critical work of Jerald and Sandra Tanner. Blake T. Ostler explores the Mormon concept of God, and George D. Smith analyzes B. H. Roberts’ studies on the complexities of the Book of Mormon. Dennis Rowley highlights James Talmage’s decision to pursue science as a career, revealing internal conflicts in his faith journey. Marcellus S. Snow discusses challenges in translating LDS scriptures for German audiences. Fiction by J. Laurence Day and poetry by Robert A. Rees and Ruth Bowen Thornton offer personal and reflective insights. A selected bibliography by Stephen W. Stathis rounds out the issue with recent literature on Mormonism.
In more than 150 years, Mormonism has experienced a series of interrelated and crucial transitions, even transformations. This study de scribes five of these linked transitions as individualism to corporate dynasticism, authoritarian democracy to authoritarian…
For more than two decades, Jerald and Sandra Tanner have devoted I their lives to exposing and trying to destroy Mormonism. They have succeeded in upsetting Mormons of various persuasions, largely because of their abrasive…
The conflict between the God of religious worship and the god of philosophical inquiry has plagued Judeo-Christian theology since the union of Greek philosophy with Hebrew religion in the first centuries of the Christian era.…
Dialogue 17.2 (Summer 1984): 96–105
In 1979 and 1981, members of the Roberts family gave copies of these works to the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Roberts’s two studies, with descriptive correspondence, will be published this year by the University of Illinois Press.4
James E. Talmage was born to be a scientist. When he arrived in Utah lin 1876 at the age of fourteen, he was attending Brigham Young Academy within a few weeks. During the next eight…
The 1980 publication of revised German language editions of the LDS Standard Works represents an important legacy for German-speaking Mormons. The story of how and why the new translations arose and how they differ from…
Even now, sometimes, he looks up from what he is doing and stares, unseeing, because some sound, some word, sometimes nothing at all, has brought her back. Her name whispers through his mind, and there…
Scholarly as well as popular interest in Mormonism continues at an almost unprecedented rate. The Saints remain, as they always have, a peculiar people. Their history, as Winfred E. Garrison aptly observed, “bristles” with controversial…
In the last days of summer
we walk through tall grass
to the river
long before the sun spills
With solemn tenderness
You apportioned our times and seasons
(While Eden embroidered itself with emeralds),
And marble campanile chimed a day
Into a thousand years.
