Winter 1966
As Dialogue completes its first year of publication, there is much cause for optimism. Featured in this issue is Karl Keller's edition of "The Life and Testimony of Sidney Rigdon" by John Wickliffe Rigdon. In a review of two new books on the Mormons, Robert Mullen's The Latter-day Saints and Wallace Turner's The Mormon Establishment, Leonard Arlington reminds us of the two most neglected aspects of the Mormon historical experience - the modern and the international. Two writers in this issue help repair this neglect - Elder G. Benson Whittle with his note on the problems and achievements of missionaries from North America in Brazil and Rao Lindsay with his history of the frustrated dream of a colony for Mormon converts in the Near East. The issue includes a review essay on Wallace Stegner's writings about the Mormons, a roundtable on the fate of art and religion in a society based on "marketplace" values, and a rather optimistic analysis of the condition of both free agency and freedom in a time of the New Morality and the Welfare State. All lively reading. And for this season, the issue contains a special Christmas sermon by Lowell Bennion on the grace of Jesus Christ.
Dialogue 1.4 (Spring 1966): 15–42
Not very long after the death of Sidney Rigdon, the influential preacher and compatriate to Joseph Smith in the first years of the Church, his son, John Wickliffe Rigdon, wrote an apology for his father.
Free agency is a fundamental theological principle of the Mormon religion. Freedom is a basic goal of the American political system. But they are not the same thing, and Mormons damage both principles through a…
For almost 130 years, Mormon missionaries have been going to foreign lands. Most of this activity has been in Western European countries where the culture and the political and social institutions were quite similar to…
Dear Sirs: . . . . I borrowed the first two issues and have read each one with a great sense of gratitude. I knew it — I knew you were there somewhere, you people…
Utah and her cultural environs of southern Idaho and northern Arizona have produced three significant literary historians: Bernard DeVoto, Vardis Fisher, and Wallace Stegner. DeVoto, perhaps best remembered as a crusader for public causes rather…
The history of Mormonism and of early Utah as the two merge after 1847 has customarily featured ecclesiastical and political leaders, leaving others who played significant roles on the fighting front of westward expansion to…
The emergence of Michigan’s Governor George Romney as a strong contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968, the popular Mormon exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, and the spread of Mormon buildings and…
Professor Stewart has given us a well-written biography of Joseph Smith. The book is divided into sixteen chapters, many of which draw their titles from key statements in Mormon literature that concern the events treated…
This little book is about George Romney’s introduction into public life and politics in Michigan. The partisanship of the author, an aide in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, is meticulously restrained, but never out of sight.…
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent. Archibald MacLeish A decade ago one might have been hard pressed to compile a sizable bibliography of…
Art and religion share a common end and a common enemy. The common end is the enrichment of the life of the spirit; the common enemy is the market place. That the end, or at…
It is easy to sympathize with Dr. Marden Clark’s essay, “Art, Religion, and the Market Place” — too easy. We are all, I suppose, concerned about the relationship of religion and art, and on the…
Professor Clark’s “Art, Religion, and the Market Place” takes us into a very interesting world in which Art and Religion (the good guys) are engaged in a deathly struggle with the Market Place (the bad…
My first reaction to Mr. Christmas and Mr. Driggs was to hurry back to my essay to see if I had really said those things. I seemed to be hearing myself through a kind of…
Years ago, when I was a Mormon missionary, I became anxious when a Protestant minister quoted these words of Paul: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is…
Art and religion share a common end and a common enemy. The common end is the enrichment of the life of the spirit; the common enemy is the market place. That the end, or at…
