The Restoration movements have tended to elevate historical claims to the level of theological dogma. But in our defense of historical beliefs we have often denied the reality of historical process by asserting that ideas,…
Science is full of strange twists and unexpected developments—so many, in fact, that we are rarely surprised anymore by its most recent revelations. But one of the biggest scientific surprises of the twentieth century has…
Mormon history has always been a hot topic. From the earliest days of Church history over a century and a half ago, vastly divergent accounts of the origins and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been penned and published. In many cases, controversies about LDS historical topics have spilled over into the national press. In the last generation, for example, disputes about the accuracy of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Juanita Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre have been avidly covered in national newspapers and magazines.
Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 69–75
EVEN A CASUAL REFERENCE to studies treating the Book of Mormon reveals a range of divergent explanations of its origins. At one extreme are those who are skeptical of the book’s claims to antiquity who generally conclude that it is a pious fraud, written by Joseph Smith from information available in his immediate environment.
God sometimes seems to me quite unreasonable. I’ve thought so especially at times when it appears that the one gift he has clearly given me, the gift of dialogue, is also a source of pain…
For Jews, the Bible is an animate being. Understanding it means understanding everything we have experienced. The sum of meaning in the Bible is the sum of life’s meaning. Judaism is over 2,000 years of…
Near the beginning of my professional career at Brigham Young University, a community sage (who had observed a continuing struggle to merge the intellectual with the spiritual at the institution) asked me: “Harold, are you…
Headed west, Brother and Sister Gustavson pushed their handcart for many miles singing, “Some must push and some must pull” before their miracle happened. They inherited a wagon -— all in the moment a hand…
When Levi and I presented earlier versions of these papers at the 1986 Sunstone Symposium, the moment had already acquired an appropriately symptomatic quality by being given two titles: Levi’s too-brave or even brazen “In…
Despite my title, I do not intend to defend pornography, Mormon or otherwise. But I do intend to discuss Mormon attitudes toward erotica and suggest that a dearth of sexuality in Mormon literature may be…