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,…
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.
These were the words of Brigham Young to his Mormon followers at the first Sunday services held at Winter Quarters on a wind-swept rise of land on the west side of the city’s proposed Main Street. Daniel H. Wells and William Cutler had brought the sobering news into camp just two days before that Nauvoo had been overrun in the skirmish known as the Nauvoo Battle. The subsequent sufferings of the dispossessed and starving citizens of Nauvoo spurred Brigham and his fellow apostles into even greater relief action than that already underway. “Let the fire of the covenant which you made in the House of the Lord, burn in your hearts, like flame unquenchable,” he re minded the Saints, “till you, by yourselves or delegates . . . [can] rise up with his team and go straightway and bring a load of the poor from Nauvoo . . . [for] this is a day of action and not of argument” (Journal History, 28 Sept. 1846).
When Sarah Roundy Sylvester was fighting death in the fall of 1938 she must have felt her life was unsuccessful. The promises of a good education, the status of a significant and unusual Church assignment,…
During the spring of 1984, the editors of DIALOGUE sent a short questionnaire to all of its then-2,300 subscribers plus 600 who had let their subscriptions lapse in the previous year. At that point, the journal had been edited in Salt Lake City for exactly two years.
When it comes to explaining economic matters, Americans have difficulty resisting conspiracy theories and are even more fascinated with their second cousin, the expose. Small wonder, then, that in a single week last July Fortune…
One of the popular bumper stickers of the fifties and sixties told us, “I’d rather be dead than red.” An even more succinct version declared, “Better dead than red.” I remember these slogans because they…
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…
Even now, nearly eleven years later, I can still see his face—shocked, fearful, and deeply pained. I’d been working for almost four months at the newly constructed, multi-million dollar Language Training Mission, as the Missionary…
An unwavering testimony of the unique and utter truthfulness of the Church is a prized possession among Mormons. I often hear members declare in testimony meetings that they have “always known the Church is true.”…