I am particularly grateful for the invitation to edit this special edition of Dialogue, largely because it allows me to address readers in a relatively informal and conversational way on certain academic issues which often…
[…] in Seattle, I helped my husband through a Ph.D. program, I also bore six children, and helped design and build three homes—all this before I decided to get serious about my own education. I […]
[…] Orson Pratt’s Remarkable Visions. Elder Dykes had also published his Chronologic Table which summarized 6000 years of human history. This chronology, Dykes wrote, “showed the coming of our Savior is near.” In March 1852, […]
Much has been written about the heroines in Virginia Sorensen’s adult fiction, their real-life counterparts, and inspirations. By contrast, relatively little attention has been given to her male characters and the family figures on whom many were based. As a self-proclaimed family chronicler, Sorensen found in her male forbears, indeed all members of the Eggertsen family, a significant source of information and ideas for her fiction.
[…] Gene had an abiding curiosity about things both temporal and eternal, and an awe of creation, both human and divine. He loved fly-fishing as much as he loved poetry. His enthusiasm, whether for tennis […]
[…] that made him an extraordinary prophet and at the same time a flawed and fascinating and opaque human being who almost seemed to have a death wish. I began spending more time reading Shakespeare […]
[…] by revealing the beauty of what Ed wards called “Being in General.” He hypothesized a deeply aesthetic human nature that could not resist beauty and a God so aesthetic that he communicated with humanity […]
Over the course of some thirteen years I was involved in an intense “affair” with a woman other than my wife. My long-term affair with Fawn McKay Brodie, literary in nature, involved the research and…
This paper will examine the vision or purported vision of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith on the night of 21-22 September 1823, announcing the location of the gold plates containing the Book of Mormon. The 1839 history of Joseph Smith contains by far the most detailed description of the vision, but there are details in this account which could not have occurred prior to 1834. The process used here (as in New Testament “form criticism”) will be to distinguish the original historic core of the visionary narrative and experience from later anachronistic redactions. Finally, if Joseph Smith did see what he claimed to see on that night, what does that represent—a dream, a representation of a being actually in his room, an altered state of sight, etc.?
[…] their origins. Of course, David feels that I am throwing out the baby with the bathwater. “ Human experience is larger than the physical sciences,” he argues. But replacing everything religious with laws of […]