Publishers wanted to get into the pocketbooks of Sunstone readers as well. Soon we started receiving ads from Bookcraft who hit our audience exactly with books by Eugene England and Truman Madsen. But then someone must have exercised unrighteous dominion and lost his priesthood because their next offering tried to get us on the Boyd …
Part VIII of the Sunstone Classics Series Wayne C. Booth was a distinguished literary critic, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, and a professor of English and literature at the University of Chicago. This excerpt is from a Sunstone article published in 1998. It starts on page 25 of issue 109. Where am I …
Then something happened. Thirty years after the Sunstone readers rejected the “First Temptation of Christ” comic, and 20 years after Ed Snow wrote his “10 Commandments of Mormon Humor,” which explicitly forbade Sunstone from using deity in humor, Sunstone published a short story called “Jesus Christ (Almost) Visits the Mormons.” Now, this wasn’t a cartoon, …
Do you not feel guilty enough? Does the terror of hell not hang over you every hour? Do you not obsessively search your memory for past sins that could keep you out of heaven? Fear not! Spencer Kimball has a book for you. Yes, my friends. Sunstone advertised the Miracle of Forgiveness. (Can you spot …
Part VII of the Sunstone Classics series. Dorothy Black was a member of the staff of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought during the 1980s. This is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in 1984, starting on page 30 of issue 43. You don’t grow up a Mormon without feeling guilt. Like right now, I …
As I asked in the previous post, can we make an argument that there should be such a thing as “solid ground” in a culture—unjustified, but immovable points? Interestingly, I think there is. For two reasons. One is cultural, and one is humorous. First, from a cultural standpoint, the reason that a culture is coherent …
Sunstone’s first ad appeared in its first issue. And, of course, it was about Sunstone, advertising our second Mormon history calendar. A mere five dollars! We have an original shrink-wrapped copy preserved behind bullet-proof glass in the Sunstone office. Issue two was ad-free. But issue three really got going with four ads. The first one …
Part VI of the Sunstone Classics series. Neal Chandler is a former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and former director of the Creative Writing Program at Cleveland State University. This article is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in 2004. It starts on page 42 of issue 135. As a new missionary, …
So, with that, let’s get back to our original question: what can be the subject of humor and what can’t? It seems to me that a good term to use for that which cannot be the subject of humor is “solid ground.” But when I say solid ground, I don’t mean “the parts of a …
Back in the dark ages when there was no such thing as online advertising, Sunstone had to advertise its event on real paper. Sooo clunky. But really pretty. For example, this one for the 1981 symposium. And I was amazed to find out the high caliber of authors Sunstone was able to bring in even …
