In 1831 Joseph Smith announced the Law of Consecration and Stewardship. This law was revealed, according to the Prophet, to establish the social and economic basis of the Restoration on the same scriptural foundations as…
Typhoon rains were pounding the house for the fifth consecutive night. I was preparing for bed with a candle and a bowl of water when I heard urgent feet on the stairs. Belen Rivera, our…
Late in the summer of 1833 one Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, recently excommunicated from the Mormon church for “unchristianlike” conduct toward some of the sisters,[1] learned of a manuscript written some twenty years before by the late Reverend Solomon Spalding which was similar to the Book of Mormon. His interest piqued, he set out to investigate this story, principally through interviews with former residents of Conneaut, Ohio, where Spalding once had lived.
“Oh,” lamented Job, “that mine adversary had written a book.” Logic and syntax—even basic facts—which are unmistakably clear and irrefutable in manuscript form have a way of breaking down when committed to print. And when…
Zina thought: Ha, what now? She peered through her front door window at the old man crossing Lizzy’s backyard. He was skinny as a bunch of sticks, splotchy, and wrinkled as a raisin. His hair…
“Of making of books there is no end.” These words from Ecclesiastes could as well be applied to the more than thirty thousand doctoral dissertations and an even larger number of master’s theses completed in…
Some have suggested that the most successful writing about the Mormon experience in the nineteenth-century comes from the frail and fading pages of the personal accounts recorded by first generation Mormons. From the first it…
When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…
My earliest memory of Retty Mott is of hurrying past her house as I walked home from Primary. I hurried past because my cousins had told me that she chased people. Once she had leaped out from behind a tree in her front yard and hit Max Peterson with a fire shovel. She had chased him clear to the end of the block, hitting him all the way with the fire shovel . . .
The Mountain Meadow Massacre was one of the most tragic criminal events in the history of the United States, and William Wise’s book concerning the massacre is similarly tragic in its lack of scholarship and…