Winter 1979
The Winter 1979 Issue addresses a wide range of topics within Mormon thought, history, and personal experience. In an interview and essay, Hugh Nibley discusses the foundations of faith. James L. Clayton analyzes the Reynolds v. United States case and its impact on polygamy and moral law in 19th-century America, while Gene A. Sessions provides insights on the life of Jeddy Grant. James L. Farmer, William S. Bradshaw, and F. Brent Johnson explore the intersection of Mormon theology and emerging biological sciences, and L. Kay Gillespie examines quackery's historical impact on Mormonism. Lester E. Bush, Jr. compiles writings on Mormonism, homeopathy, and natural causes of death, while William Lee Stokes clarifies the Church’s official stance on these issues. Poems by Dennis Clark and Linda Sillitoe reflect on creation and personal musings, Lowell L. Bennion offers thoughts on Jesus and the prophets, and Herbert Harker and Marvin Rytting share personal reflections on family and resilience in the face of opposition.
This talk is supposed to have some reference to the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Restoration of the Church. One hundred and fifty years is not as long as you think—the Lord has not delayed his…
Dialogue 12.4 (Winter 1979): 46–61
Clayton discusses the history behind The Supreme Court Case Reynolds v. United States (1876), and shares his opinion about what was going on between members in Salt Lake and the federal government.
As the story goes, and as countless Mormon preachers and teachers have told it, embellished it and retold it for generations, it was a classic confrontation between a conspiracy of falsehood and the heroism of…
These three brief reprints provide interesting insights into early Mormon medicine. The first piece, from an essay entitled “Millerism” in The American Journal of Insanity (January 1845), although not directed at Mormons is relevant to…
Exegetes as willing and capable as Orson Pratt to combine empirical and theological insights have all but disappeared from the Mormon scene. His successors have retained the enthusiastic optimism of early Mormonism, but they have not replaced the empirical beliefs of the nineteenth century with the more correct information which is available to us now.
The following interview is with a man tried by the state of Utah as a “quack.”[1] His practice is based on massage, herbs, health foods and in reading the iris of the eyes. The trial…
Dialogue 12.4 (Winter 1979): 90–92
In postscript let me say that I have been accused of forging this letter and of taking unfair advantage of President Smith. Let the readers judge. I am personally grateful that the Church has not been caught in the position of taking a stand that might very well prove to be wrong in the future
It was indeed a historic moment when on Friday 9 June 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball announced, in a five-paragraph letter to all the leaders of the Church, that God “has heard our prayers, and…
One spring day when I was about three years old, I hunkered near where my father and the hired man were treating seed grain with formaldehyde. Father handed me the bottle to smell, but apparently…
In a recent issue of Dialogue, Clifton Jolley described the personal essay as a good way to confront the “beast.” I usually confront the beast in the shower. It is not that it lurks there…
for Harlow Soderborg Clark, surgically deaf
By sheer nerve you’ve gone Van Gogh one better:
cut your ear off from your brain, but
left it blooming in your hair.
You’d auditioned city living just so long—
Who made the world, my child?
Father made the rain
silver and forever.
Mother’s hand
drew riverbeds and hollowed seas,
drew riverbeds and hollowed seas
to bring the rain home.
Caricaturing the Mormon experience is hardly a new venture, but the cultural context of the present differs drastically from the past. For nearly the first century of Mormonism, cartoonists, including such powerful image makers as…
Ask any Mormon culture buff about Dialogue, Sunstone, BYU Studies or perhaps the Utah Historical Quarterly and you will get an informed response. But the Charles Redd Monographs in Western History? The odds are better…
In this era of the “Women’s Movement,” scholars are looking for documentation to rectify past neglects, and women in general are looking for “roots” and role models. There is a searching of materials by, for…
Perhaps the most significant thing to say about the importance of this published collection of papers read at Brigham Young University in March, 1978, is that it exists. To have eleven scholars renowned in various…
Beyond the sentience and the craft, under the sound and shape and color of the poem, one seeks the mystique that synthesizes and sets forth a poet’s real reality. Marilyn McMeen Miller Brown’s book of…
In his writings on the sociology of religion, Max Weber contrasts two types of religious leaders: emissary and exemplary prophets. The founders of the great religions of mankind fall into one of these two categories. …
