Winter 1974
The Winter 1974 Issue opens with a conversation about Mormonism, exploring various perspectives on the faith. Lawrence Foster presents a little-known defense of polygamy from the Mormon press in 1842. The roundtable on Mormon literature features essays by Eugene England, Bruce W. Jorgensen, and Karl Keller, discussing the intersection of great literature and true religion, the foundations of Mormon literature, and the influence of author Flannery O'Connor. And much more!
Dialogue 9.4 (Winter 1974): 21–34
Foster points out that in 1842 an unpublished pamphlet was written called “The Peace Maker” that expressed its support for polygamy. It is the first-known defense of polygamy before 1852.
Dialogue 9.4 (Winter 1974): 74–75
Review of An Egyptian Endowment by Hugh Nibley, which discusses the papyri that Joseph Smith allegedly used to help translate the Book of Abraham. Hugh Nibley decided to state his case, but allow readers to form their own conclusions after reading it.
Progress implies change and for this writer the call to explore new opportunities has become more insistent in recent years. It will soon be ten years since this column appeared in the first issue of Dialogue. Ten years seems sufficient to insure a sound beginning. If there are any among our readers who wish to take up the challenge of editing this column now is the time to step forward.
The following is a transcript of a discussion held in Los Angeles in March, 1975. The discussion was organized by Jerry Kaufmann, an investigator of Mormonism from New York. In addition to Kaufmann, participants include…
Car window turned to shale from sun
burst, the car parked some summer
Sunday there before the church
house. Voices sing: “Spirit
Dialogue 9.4 (Winter 1974): 74–75
Review of An Egyptian Endowment by Hugh Nibley, which discusses the papyri that Joseph Smith allegedly used to help translate the Book of Abraham. Hugh Nibley decided to state his case, but allow readers to form their own conclusions after reading it.
Family Kingdom was written primarily for a non-Mormon audience, written, as the author says in his Preface, to satisfy the “insatiable curiosity” and correct the “amazing amount of misconception regarding the institution of plural marriage…
The fiddles are tuning in Mormon historiography. Not only is there a great deal of activity as new histories are written and old classics revived; there is, more importantly, a new professionalism. Mormon scholars have…
It’s nice to know there was something to talk about in Manti last winter. I’m refer ring to Joyce Eliason’s Fresh Meat/Warm Weather, a confessional autobiography disguised as a first novel, which has a lot…
Religious Movements in Contemporary America is a collection of 27 papers, mainly based on field work, on “marginal religious movements in the United States”—such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pentecostals, Spiritualists, Satanists, Hare Krishna, Scientology, and…
As an epigraph to their anthology A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert quote Orson F. Whitney’s 1888 Contributor essay, “Home Literature”:
We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not yet exhausted. His highest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundation may now be low on earth.
