In A Believing People, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert lament that the essay “has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected.” Early Mormons, they note, kept forceful diaries, wrote…
In October 1978, Dialogue interviewed Edward L. Kimball, youngest son of President Spencer W. Kimball and co-author of the popular biography Spencer W. Kimball. Dr. Kimball is a law professor at Brigham Young University. Dialogue:…
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…
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…
With the exception of a handful of standouts, such as Donna Hill’s work on Joseph Smith, biographies by Mormons of Mormons have been scarcely worth the title. Often reminiscent of mimeographed Christmas letters, these books…
We Mormons put a lot of stock in the Local Boy Makes Good syndrome: we’re proud of our Osmonds, our Marriotts, our Jack Andersons, and we’re anxious to let people out there know that we…
That last bastion of privacy—our personal diaries—has now been turned into a “program.” From the pulpit, we are admonished to keep diaries; we are treated to snatches of personal diaries in sacrament meeting, we are…
In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, so the old church fathers tell us, and so we realize every day as a baby dies in childbirth or a friend succumbs…
A few years back fifty LDS academics were asked to list the most eminent intellectuals in Mormon history. B. H. Roberts and Orson Pratt were most frequently nominated. James E. Talmage and John A. Widtsoe…
Between 1972 and 1982 I was part of the team of historians located in the Church Office Building under the direction of Leonard J. Arrington. It was a golden decade—a brief period of excitement and…