Dialogue 3.2 (Summer 1968): 41–55
Zucker describes the efforts that Joseph Smith went through to study Hebrew. Joseph Smith’s personal behavior was apparently not changed, but in other aspects in later years there is evidence that Joseph Smith was using Hebrew language structure
Are Mormons Christians? The official name of the Church includes the words “Jesus Christ” within it, and we consider Him our Savior. Our scriptures include the Bible, and, as Anthony Hoekema suggests, “Many people have the impression that the Mormon teachings are not basically different from those of historic Christianity.” Yet Dr. Hoekema has decided that “The Christ of Mormonism is not the Christ of Scripture.” The good doctor came to this conclusion by asking—and himself answering—the following ten questions: …
In 1930, when B. H. Roberts published his six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned journals were silent. But he himself, with pardonable pride, had described his work as “monumental.” One Mormon, answering Bernard De Voto’s contemptuous description of Utah as an intellectual desert, hailed Roberts as “another Gibbon.” Although hyperbolic, the favorable judgment was in general well deserved….
In the west door for kings alone swung wide,
the leather-padded wicket, left behind me
stifling a gasp, expired.
No more fresh air:
I had entered the dim, mouldy, hollow hush
of a dead church—the silence of the ‘grave
and reverend’ sirs ghosting it in their gowns—
Czechoslovakia is much colder and darker now than it was last year. Not that the meteorological phenomena have been all that different: Prague has consistently registered temperatures as warm as or warmer than those of…
“Thank goodness I don’t have to live there! How do they stand it?” The revolting, depressing drabness and ugliness of the little Mormon towns we were driving through made my artist’s soul shiver. Never had I…
The year was 1856. Times were bad, economically, in Europe and particularly in England. In Utah, as in most developing economies, the need for human resources was high. Emigration committees were formed and funds collected…
Thus Clinton Larson in an interview published in Dialogue for Autumn 1969. Dr. Larson, whom Karl Keller has described as the first “Mormon poet,” also affirmed a hope that “If . . . literary artists . . . take their work as seriously as they should, and by ‘seriously’ I mean that they become professionally responsible, then a significant and coherent literary movement can begin.” Whether a “literary movement” in the church is possible, or even desirable, I wish to leave aside. Good poems, however, should be possible and certainly are desirable; they are, as Larson suggests, “part of the spiritual record” of this people. The recent books of three young writers, who might be thought of as second-generation L.D.S. poets, exhibit the grounds for both the hope and the negation in Larson’s remarks.
Dialogue 6.1 (Spring 1971): 31–36
Brian Walton, the BYU student body president in 1969-70 wrote this article to adress race issues head on. During BYU’s 1969-70 academic year, because of the church’s policy of denying blacks the priesthood and temple blessings, there were numerous protests at sporting events. In addition, several schools severed ties with BYU for a time.One of the ways that he was able to accomplish that was to bring in a fact finding mission from the Univeristy of Arizona to identify potential racism at BYU by interviewing students.
I grew up in Snowflake, which lies in desert country in Arizona, altitude 5600 feet. Alof Larson and May Hunt, my parents, were among the early arrivals to this pioneer settlement, named for Erastus Snow…