Let’s take a quick break to make sure everyone reading this is living up to BYU standards. Please compare yourself to the righteous people pictured in this informational poster. I’m very disappointed in all of you. Where’s your sports jacket, Mister? And I don’t see enough Aquanet in that hair, Sister! Another thing I found …
Some of the things I found in Sunstone’s various closets were these short-lived Mormon publications. Including the infamous Seventh Street Press (started by future Sunstone and Signature Books leaders), which made nothing but trouble on BYU campus in the early 80s. (And, yes, it was THAT Packer speech this issue is reporting on. You …
Sunstone has been collecting weird Mormon stuff for a long time. For example, how many of you saw these in your grandmother’s house? These resin grapes were a popular homemaking meeting project back in the 1970s. And I guess one of them found a home here. After many stops at Deseret Industries, I’m sure. And …
In honor of Sunstone’s 50th anniversary, I decided to put together a collection of the physical and cultural detritus that has collected in Sunstone’s office over the past few decades. But, to do so, I had to descend into the office’s bowels. You remember that creepy basement from Heretic—that horror movie about Hugh Grant luring …
The LDS Church’s mammoth audiovisual infrastructure stems largely from the early efforts of one man. James E. Talmage. Ninety years after his death, Elder James E. Talmage of the Quorum of the Twelve is primarily remembered as an intellectual defender of his faith and the author of several lengthy theological books like The Articles of …
One of the darkest episodes in Utah history, an 1873 lynching and subsequent coverup in the Mormon settlement of Logan, has resurfaced with the unearthing of bones in a remote corner of the Logan city cemetery. It’s interesting that this stark case of frontier justice would come back to light right now when our nation is …
Frankly, it’s amazing that the Kirtland Temple was even around to be sold to the LDS Church a few weeks ago. In 1838, just a few days after Joseph Smith left Kirtland, Lyman Sherman burned down a print shop that had gone over into Mormon dissenters’ hands and the temple was apparently scorched in the …
During the Spanish-American War, Mormons made up almost an entire company of the famous Rough Riders. But they never made an appearance with Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba. Why was that? When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, Mormons were still villainized as a cloistered, theocratic, patriarchal sect—anti-democratic and opposed to the fundamental …
The communist government of East Germany had really grown to like the Mormons in 1982. Which was strange considering apostle Ezra Taft Benson’s relentless condemnation of communism or anything he thought was connected to it (like the Civil Rights movement). But, as the November 1982 issue of the Sunstone Review reported, “Our preaching of good …
The filming of General Conference began humbly, with one man sitting in a hole he’d carved out beneath the Tabernacle floor. Frank Wise was a young British convert to the Church who grew up wandering the film studios around London. When he emigrated to Utah and joined the Church in 1939, he was immediately hired …
