By John Hatch Art by Chad Danger Lindsay Shivering and disoriented, I stared blankly into my car windows. Piles of snow blackened by car exhaust surrounded the parking lot, and the air was stale with smog. I was terrified. My wife and I had been married just under eighteen months. We were still trying …
Category: History
“I Could Love Them All”: Nauvoo Polygamy in the Marriage of Willard and Jennetta Richards
By Devery S. Anderson In August 1842, while Willard Richards was fulfilling some church assignments in New York, he penned a letter to someone “I esteem the dearest on earth, & whose absence I continually feel, but be assured that neither time nor distance, can obliterate those emotions of Love, of friendship, of attachment, …
Sunstone and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Through his words, through his ethics, and even through a 2003 keynote symposium lecture from his eldest living son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has left a beautiful legacy behind him in the Sunstone community. In a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Sunstone has created this online …
Lessons in Mormon Modernism: Or, How I Learned to Love the Provo and Ogden Temples
By Alan Barnett Or, right-click here to download the audio file: Lessons in Mormon Modernism: Or, How I Learned to Love the Ogden and Provo Temples In 1892, the long task of completing the exterior of the Salt Lake Temple culminated as workmen placed the round capstone on the central east tower …
Rediscovering the Legacy of Mormon Midwives
By Jenne Erigero Alderks Midwifery possesses a special role in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The significance of the work can be seen in the description of midwives as “high priestesses in the chamber of birth” in a 1915 article in the Relief Society Magazine on the heritage and …
Elder Poelman’s Famous Speech
(The following is excerpted from Joe Geisner’s upcoming article ” ‘Very Careless in His Utterances’: Editing, Correcting, and Censoring Conference Addresses,” to be published in the December 2011 issue of Sunstone. Click here to subscribe.) On 16 November 1984, the Salt Lake Tribune broke a story about changes in first quorum of seventy member Ronald …
The Monitoring of BYU Faculty Tithing Payments: 1957–1963–Part I
By Gary James Bergera Art by Jeanette Atwood Or, right-click here to download the audio file: The Monitoring of BYU Faculty Tithing Payments: 1957–1963 Gary James Bergera is the managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation. From 1985 to 2000, he was Director of Publishing at Signature Books; from 1992 to 1998, he …
Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates: A Guide for the Overwhelmed–Part II
Continued from Part I III. Mapping the Positions Thus far this article has summarized the historicity question as if it were a two-party debate: arguments for versus arguments against. But in fact, writers have adopted a wide array of positions around this issue. William Hamblin (1994) organizes views on historicity into five categories: evangelical, …
Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates: A Guide for the Overwhelmed–Part I
By John-Charles Duffy Art by Jeanette Atwood Book of Mormon “historicity” refers to the claim that the Book of Mormon is an authentic translation of an ancient volume of scripture. Whether or not one believes the Book of Mormon to be historical in this sense is maybe the most fundamental question affecting one’s relationship to …
Written by the Finger of God?: Claims and Controversies of Book of Mormon Translation
By Don Bradley The accuracy of the Book of Mormon’s rendering into English was so important for Mormonism’s founding claims that—like the divine Sonship of Jesus in the biblical narratives of the Baptism and the Transfiguration—it needed to be declared from heaven (Matthew 3:13–17; 17:1–5; D&C 5:11–13).1 In June 1829, the Three Witnesses to the …