Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

  • Why a Second Coming?

    Jim F.

    It might seem that there are few Hegelians in the world today.

  • Preserving the Veil from Survey Data

    Frank McIntyre

    Suppose I find that being Mormon raises income, makes your children nicer, and does all sorts of wonderful things. In fact, suppose God blessed every person who converted instantly and spectacularly with beautiful hair and perfect teeth.

  • Perfection

    P. Anderson

    In Comparative World Religions (REL 151) my freshman year I was taught that the word “Holy” is derived, or related to the word “Whole.” The basic idea being that part of being a perfect Divine being is the state of being complete, whole, or finished. I’ve wondered in the past just what perfect really means…

  • Tooth Bugs

    P. Anderson

    Recently my husband and I came across a set of rather old LDS song books. As my ward’s primary chorister my favorite was The Primary Song Book: Including Marches and Voluntaries. The edition is missing the title page and so I’m not sure when it was published (and am at a loss as to how…

  • From Russia With Love- Updated

    P. Anderson

    There is a certain sort of person that is just so self-absorbed and generally unaware that it just doesn’t feel wrong to gossip about them, they’d just enjoy the extra attention. In my childhood ward it was Brother L.- in that ward people traded gossip about Brother L. like baseball cards. In fact it feels…

  • Santa-god and the Second Naivete

    Jim F.

    I spent all of September and a good part of October finishing an essay on community for a journal on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and it nearly killed me.

  • Venus Robinson Rossiter: Learning to Serve

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Venus Rossiter, serving in Tahiti with her husband, Mission President Ernest C. Rossiter, wrote to the Relief Society General Board early in 1919 with her report for 1918.

  • Murder in the Metropolis: Part the Fourth (Conclusion)

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Hooper Young was arrested in Connecticut three days after the discovery of Mrs. Pulitzer’s body.

  • Murder in the Metropolis: Part the Second

    Ardis E. Parshall

    William Hooper Young, known as Hooper, was born in 1871 in Philadelphia, where his mother, Libbie Canfield, was visiting, while his father, John W. Young, was in Utah.

  • Murder in the Metropolis: Part the First

    Ardis E. Parshall

    As the ebbing tide of September 18, 1902, lowered the level of the barge canals near Jersey City, New Jersey, a passing trolley engineer spotted the nude and mutilated body of a woman lying in the mud.

  • The Opportunity Cost of Publishing

    Frank McIntyre

    In this excellent post, Rosalynde talks about the gender differences in subject material among Deseret Book writers. This renews the discussion brought up by Taryn Nelson-Seawright on the same difference existing in other Mormon outlets. Explanations abound for this phenomena, ranging from differing preferences to piggy discrimination, but most of them are sort of boring.…

  • Charlotte Owens Sackett: Teaching the Sisters to Sing

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Lottie Owens was born in 1877 in Willard, Box Elder County, Utah. Her mother’s family were early Church members in Nauvoo; her father had emigrated to Utah as a convert from Wales.

  • Sarah Day Hall: Southern Mother in Israel

    Ardis E. Parshall

    American Southerners have been joining the Church since the 1830s. The Southern States Mission became the most successful mission field in the Church in the last generation of the 1800s. During those years when southern LDS meeting halls were burned and elders and even members were murdered, many thousands of Southerners responded to the gospel.…

  • Our Crown Jewels: The Church Archives

    Ardis E. Parshall

    In the fall of 1983, Dialogue published Davis Bitton’s personal memoir of Leonard Arrington’s tenure as Church Historian, “Ten Years in Camelot.â€? That essay conveyed the excitement of discovering, writing, and publishing Mormon history on a scale never before known. The essay also records disappointment with changes then underway, betraying the uncertainty, even fearfulness, that…

  • Geertruida Lodder Zippro: The Extra Mile

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Much of the attention of the Relief Society Conference of October, 1945, was devoted to efforts to assist surviving members of the Church in the former war zones of Europe. Contact had been reestablished with some of the European branches, and reports of their experiences and especially of their needs were read to the sisters…

  • Christina Olsen Rockwell: Visiting Teacher

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Christina Olsen was a Norwegian convert to the Church who emigrated to Zion before the arrival of the railroad. She was in her early 30s when she married the legendary Orrin Porter Rockwell, a man more than 20 years older than she was. Christina began her short married life by dividing her time between an…

  • Secrets from the Research Library

    Ardis E. Parshall

    My Utah history columns for the Salt Lake Tribune have a limit of 650 words; the Relief Society articles need to fit a single page. The brevity of these accounts may mask the complexity of the work behind them, so put on your deerstalker caps and I’ll recreate the process, using Frances Swan Clark as…

  • Frances Swan Clark: A Kindness Remembered

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Many of Utah’s early pioneers did not remain long in the Valley. In defiance of counsel, some rushed to the California gold fields. A few went to California as missionaries, and the two apostles who founded a ranching colony in San Bernardino found no shortage of volunteers to accompany them there.

  • Catherine Garber Laine: The Role of Her Lifetime

    Ardis E. Parshall

    This story and the other women’s stories to follow were written for my ward’s Relief Society newsletter, as a formal calling for which I was set apart. The assignment was to write about a faith-promoting incident involving a woman; I added the detail “… whom no one has ever heard about.”

  • On the Road to Mountain Meadows

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Two years ago I wrote an article entitled “‘Pursue, Retake & Punish’: The 1857 Santa Clara Ambush.� You can read it here if this essay triggers your interest; the short version is this:

  • Joseph and Moses

    Frank McIntyre

    Most are acquainted with the passage in D&C 130 where God gives a fascinating response to Joseph’s query about the Second Coming:

  • Mormon Feminists: A Divided Allegiance?

    S. Snyder

    I originally began this post as a primer on feminism–a post on feminist ideological inconsistences and boundaries, and what the term “feminism” means–but the discussion following my previous T&S post on feminism and the comments on this post on FMH have got me thinking about the issue of allegiances and how that seems to be…

  • Healing the Breach between Feminists and Non-Feminists

    S. Snyder

    One of the hardest things for me to deal with when it comes to feminism and the church is not directly related to any of the hot button feminist issues (i.e. not having the Priesthood, worrying about polygamy, etc). Instead, I have a tendency to get upset about the tension-filled relationship between feminists and non-feminists*…

  • Mormon in the Congo

    Julie M. Smith

    Moroni 8:14 never used to sit well with me:

  • We Did It

    Russell Arben Fox

    We’ve finally read the entire Book of Mormon as a family, all of us (those that can read, anyway) taking turns verse by verse. It only took us four and a half years, and we’re ready to do it again.

  • Natural Succession or the Prophetic Death Card?

    Michael McBride

    Does God control who is Church President by ending life (using the “death card”)? Or does he control who is President by controlling the order in which Apostles are called? Of course, both can be true (or neither depending on your theological persuasion), but let’s examine these questions systematically.

  • Could the Restoration have Happened Elsewhere and Elsewhen?

    Michael McBride

    The common answer heard today in the Church is no. A variety of reasons are usually given:

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part II: The Edited Volume Retrospective

    Michael McBride

    The Mormon Social Science Association, under the direction of editors John Hoffman, Cardell Jacobsen, and Tim Heaton of BYU’s Department of Sociology, is currently putting together a volume of essays that retrospectively assess O’Dea’s 1957 classic The Mormons.

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part I: Strain and Conflict in the Church

    Michael McBride

    Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (1957) is a classic text in Mormon studies. So much that the Mormon Social Science Association is currently putting together an edited volume

  • Scriptures as Seer Stones

    Michael McBride

    To me, the most interesting thing about the seer stone that Joseph used when translating the BoM is not that he used it but that it is really just a rock. From what I understand, if you or I were to pick it up, we couldn’t tell it apart from any other smooth rock of…