MORMON EXPERIENCE, SCHOLARSHIP, ISSUES, AND ART September 1992 Volume 16:3 Issue 89

2 Our Readers ...... READERS’ FORUM FEATURES 15 Scott Abbott ...... ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, TWO UNIVERSITIES: TENSIONS BETWEEN "RELIGION" AND "THOUGHT" AT BYU 24 Kristen Rogers ...... BIRTH OF THE BLUES 1990 Brookie and D. K. Brown Memorial Fiction Contest Winner 28 David P. Wright ...... HISTORICAL CRITICISM: A NECESSARY ELEMENT IN THE SEARCH FOR RELIGIOUS TRUTH

SUNSTONE (ISSN 0363-1370) is published by the Sunstone 39 Martha Sonntag Bradley ...... THE MORMON STEEPLE: Foundation, a non-profit corporation with no official A SYMBOL OF WHAT? connection to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Articles represent the attitudes of the writers only and not POETRY necessarily those of the editors or the LDS church. 14 Sean Brendan Brown ...... STROLLING FROM THE DELI, Submissions may be on computer diskettes, IBM-PC GROCERY LADEN compatible, and written in WordPerfect format, or on double-spaced typed, manuscripts. Submissions should not 38 Rosemary Klein ...... HEBREW IN SEASON: FALL exceed nine thousand words and must be accompanied by a 48 Sean Brendan Brown ...... signed cover letter giving permission for the manuscript to be JOB & OTHER SPECULATIONS filed in the Sunstone collection at the University of Utah 51 David Clark Knowlton ...... [WAITING... ] Marriott Library Archives (all literary rights are retained by the author). Unsolicited manuscripts will not be returned; authors 54 Laura Hamblin ...... A NIGHT IN SNOW CANYON will be notified concerning acceptance within sixty days. 57 Holly Welker ...... SLEEPING BEAUTY SUNS’tONE is interested in feature- and column-length articles relevant to from a variety of perspectives; news 59 B. J. Fogg ...... IMPLOSION stories about and the LDS church, and poetry, psalms, and limericks. Short stories are selected only through COLUMNS the annual Brookie and D. K. Brown Memorial Fiction Contest 9 Lisa Bolin Hawkins ...... FROM A TRUSTEE (submission deadline: 1 June 1993). All fiction submissions will Life is Too Full of Surprises be considered as contest entries. Letters for publication should be addressed to "Readers’ 11 Paul C. Pollei ...... TURNING THE TIME OVER TO... Forum." SUNSTO~E does not acknowledge receipt of letters to The Decline of Music in Mormon Culture the editor. Letters addressed to specific authors will be forwarded unopened to them. 49 Elouise M. Bell ...... LIGHTER MINDS Upon request, SUNSTONE will not provide a Don’t Laugh It Off: When Humor Hurts, subscriber’s address to mail solicitors. When Humor Heals Send all correspondence and manuscripts to: 52 Michael Hicks ...... THIS SIDE OF THE TRACTS SUNSTONE A Quorum Memoir 331 South Rio Grande Street, Suite 206 , UT 84101-1136 REVIEWS 801/355~5926 55 Arthur Bassett ...... TWO THUMBS UP AND FOUR STARS Fax: 801/355-4043 Mormons and the : The Place of the Latter- United States subscriptions to SUNSTONE are $27 for eight issues and $50 for 16 issues. Eight-issue day Saint in American Reliffton international subscriptions are $27 (U.S.) for Canada and by Philip L. Barlow Mexico and for surface mail to all other countries. Airmail subscriptions are $37 for Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, 57 Tim Behrend ...... PLUNDERING THE SCRIPTURES Australia, and the Pacific. Bona fide student and missionary Homecoming: Volume I, The Memory of the Earth subscriptions are $10 less than the above rates. by Orson Scott Card NEWS This magazine is printed on acid-free paper. 60 Sunstone Correspondents ...... UPDATE .AWARDS ¯ SUNSTONE Copyright © 1992 by the Sunstone Foundation. CALENDAR ¯ PECULIAR PEOPLE All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Cover John Snyder SUNSTONE READERS’ FORUM Founded in 1974 SCOTT KENNEY 1975-1978 DIVINE THERAPY ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES ALLEN D. ROBERTS 1978-1980 PEGGY FLETCHER 1978-1986 DANIEL H. RECTOR 1986-1991 SITTING IN THE hotel lobby between REGARDING Craig Tholson’s letter on Publisher Editor Sunstone West Symposium sessions, I lis- members being "spoon fed the official posi- LINDA JEAN STEPHENSON ELBERT EUGENE PECK tened to the conversational hubbub going tion on Adam:God" (SUNSTONE 16:1), as a Advertising Manager Associate Editors KIMBERLY KOLAN MARTI DICKEY ESPLIN on, and I was struck by the positive tone and life-long member I have never been taught KRISTOPHER MAGNUSSON Administrative Assistants by the amount of laughter mixed with it. This anything about the Adam-God theory/doc- DANIELLE SlaUGHTER Production Manager was no somber religious meeting of people trine. However, I have always been curious JOHN BARRACLOUGH MARGERY MULLIN Student Intern soberly pondering pious revelations, declara- about Adam and Eve and their creation. JASON ESPLIN tions, and deductions. These people were I have not yet received an answer to my Advisory Editorial Board enjoying themselves! prayers, but my inquiries have given me dif- PATRICK BAGLEY, BRIAN BEAN, T. E. BEHREND M. SHAYNE BELL, poetu; JAY S. BYBEE I noted that every face of those over forty ferent lines of thought to pursue, which DENNIS CLARK, poetry reviews; CONNIE DISNEY (at which point our attitudes begin to be MICHAEL HARWARD, DANIEL MARYON, fiction seems to be the way the Lord answers me. MARK D. THOMAS, LYNNE KANAVEL W’HITESIDES permanently etched on our faces) had, with- Possibility: Adam was cloned from God; Contributing Columnists out exception, a generous supply of "crow Eve was cloned from Adam’s rib; Jesus was ORSON SCOTT CARD, DORICE WILLIAMS ELLIOTT tracks" at the outer edges of the eyes~the MICHAEL HICKS, DAVID KNOWLTON, TOM LEFLER cloned from God; Mary was impregnated MARYBETH RAYNES, PETER SORENSEN result of much smiling and laughter. using a process similar to in-vitro fertiliza- Cartoonists I had given a paper implying that truly CALVIN GRONDAHL, PAT BAGLEY tion. That John 14:9-10 ("He that hath seen KIRK ANDERSON, MATT CHATTERLY, CHRIS CHECKETTS living the teachings of Jesus, as revealed me hath seen the Father . . . I am in the KENT CHRISTENSEN, DANNAJACQUES GEOFFJONES, STEVE KROPP, LEGUMI~, CARL McBRAYER ROBERT MURRAY, P S. through the Prophet and oth- Father and the Father in me") and other such MUELLER, BRAD VELEY ers, would enable one to have a longer, more scriptures are quite literal. (Genesis 1:16-17, RYAN S. WAYMENT productive, and happier life. Such a life re- Volunteers 5:1-3, Hebrews 1-3, D&C 35:2, Alma 11:44, BARBARA HAUGSOEN, ROBERT VERNON quired earnest and continual seeking for etc.) That Adam is God, and God is Adam in U.S. Correspondents "wisdom and understanding," as the prov- STAN CHRISTENSEN, Cambridge, Ma. the same way. NANCY HARWARD, Newark, De. erbs reiterate. When I seek to understand a principle or JACK & RENEE CARLSON, Potomac, Md. My hope is that when the young who ALICE ALLRED POTTMYER, Arlington, Va. doctrine I seldom receive definite answers, NEAL & REBECCA CHANDLER, Shaker Heights, Oh. attend the symposium reach "maturity," they but my mind is often flooded with endless JONATHAN & COLLEEN THOMAS, Chicago KARL SANDBERG, St. Paul; JOHN DURHAM PETERS, Iowa City too will have a lot of smile and laughter possibilities to a particular question. I am left RON PRIDDIS, Salt Lake City wrinkles. This life is no seventeenth-century JOHN COX, Auburn, Ca.; ERIN SILVA, San Diego to choose which idea leaves me the most JOHN & JANET TARJAN, Bakersfield, Ca. Protestant "veil of tears," grimly endured for comfortable, always secure in the knowledge IRENE BATES, Pacific Palisades; KAREN MOLONEY, Los Angeles the "pie in the sky," after-death reward; but it T. EUGENE SHOEMAKER, Sacramento that, while interesting, none of the answers International Correspondents is a time to progress and to obtain "joy" (and will lead to my exaltation. That still depends MARJORIE NEWTON, Australia; WILFRIED DECOO, Belgium have it "more abundantly" despite life’s inev- HARTMUT WEISSMANN, France on me and my charity for humankind. JAMES FIELD, WERNER HOCK, DIETRICH KEMPSKI, Germany itable vicissitudes). Part of that joy is in exer- KAREN MILLER SHUNICHI KUWAHATA, Japan; PAUL CARPENTER, Mexico cising agency with an inquiring mind, as we Milwaukee, OR 1AN BARBER, New Zealand; CHRIS SEXTON, United Kingdom do at Sunstone. I know the "Master THE SUNSTONE FOUNDATION Psychiatrist" would approve. Board of Trustees A BRIEF ENCOUNTER J. BONNER RITCHIE, chair LEW W. WALLACE KENT FROGLEY, vice chair MARIE CORNWALL, LISA BOLIN HAWKINS San Gabriel, CA I was pleased to learn from Mary ROBYN KNIBBE, GLEN LAMBERT, DANIEL H. RECTOR Bradford’s article (SUNSTONE 16:1) that Vir- L1NDA JEAN STEPHENSON, ELBERT EUGENE PECK ACCESSIBLE DRAMA Co-Executive Directors ginia Sorensen is finally coming into her own L1NDAJEAN STEPHENSON ELBERT EUGENE PECK and receiving recognition from BYU for her Development Board THANKS FOR PUBLISHING the com- JEROLD KINDRED, chair contribution to . RONALD L. MOLEN, vice chair plete script of another Mormon play. Those I was an officer in the English Club at the BLAINE CARLTON, ROBYN KN1BBE, DANIEL H. RECTOR who didn’t read the text truly missed a nice MARGARET REISER, J. BONNER RITCHIE, NICHOLAS SMITH Y in 1963 when Sorensen’s book, Where MARSHA S. STEWART, MARK J. VsqLLIAMS experience from Tim Slover’s and James Nothing Is Long Ago, was published. She was Symposium Chairs Arrington’s "Wilford Woodruff: God’s MOLLY BENNION, Seattle in the area visiting at the time, and we asked ALISON BETHKE GAYEK, Washington, D.C. Fisherman" (SUNSTONE 16:1). As I read the her to speak at one of our meetings which DON & LUCINDA GUSTAVSON, Boston REBECCA & KIRK LINFORD, Chicago words, I imagined an actor portraying the she agreed to do. About a week before the KIM MCCALL, San Fransisco young, zealous apostle. The piece engaged scheduled program, our advisor was in- National Advisory Board my heart, intellect, and imagination. As far as ALAN ACKROYD, MOLLY BENN1ON, formed that she would not be allowed to KATHERINE BOSWELL, BELLAMY BROWN I know, SUNSTONE is the only place that speak on campus because of the controver- TONY &ANN CANNON, COLE CAPENER, STEPHEN C. CLARK regularly publishes plays that otherwise DOUGLAS COND1E, D. JAMES CROFT, ROBERT FILLERUP sial nature of her work. Since we did not MARK GUSTAVSON, JEFFREY R. HARDYMAN, GREG KOFFORD would be unaccessible to most. want to miss the chance to hear her, one of FARRELL LINES, BRIAN C. McGAVIN, PATRICK McKENZIE GRANT OSBORN, RICHARD SHERLOCK, GEORGE D. SMITH JR. JON CAMPBELL the professors who lived near campus volun- RICHARD SOUTHWICK, LORIE WINDER STROMBERG NOLA ~,V WALLACE, DENNIS &: CARLAN YOUKSTETTER Atlanta, GA teered to have the meeting in his home. Virginia graciously accepted the change.

PAGE 2 SEPTEMBER 1992 While several students chose not to attend because of a question to be answered. "MARBLES" because she was not "approved," the handful When people believe that they are incapa- who did were amply rewarded with an inti- ble of figuring out the answers for them- AS A KID, one of the things that I was mate evening of stimulating discussion as we selves, they become obedient to the voice of greatest at was kickball. I could pitch, catch, gained insight into a remarkable woman and one man or one group of men--they literally kick, and run with the proficiency of a major her work. That brief encounter has contin- give away their free will. A people raised in leaguer. While other kids were always just ued to be a fond memory over the years. such an environment will always quote an- trying to boom that ball into the upper JUDITH BACHMAN CURTIS swers from a book that someone else wrote. atmosphere, I was looking for holes in the Phoenix, AZ They do not actually know inside themselves defense, topping the ball when they dropped what to believe, and without stock answers back, keeping it low and hard so they STUDY GROUP CALL they are completely lost. couldn’t catch me out. In the field, I was When questioning stops, so does revela- unparalleled. Instead of throwing at a guy I AM INTERESTED in starting a study tion and the flow of knowledge. Knowledge from thirty feet, I’d run him down for the group in the Vernal-Roosevelt area. Anyone is food for the soul, and boredom is a sign sure out. I was always looking for the double interested in joining may contact me by call- that the soul is not being fed. The preponder- play, and the threat of cuts or bruises would ing either 801/781-0743 or 801/789-9043. ance of boredom is why people sit passively never have denied this eight-year-old the LEE ANN PAGE in meetings, have to be prodded to "fit in glory of the diving catch. Vernal, UT with the program," and seek alternative sym- I loved the game. I was constantly honing posiums to be fed with new knowledge. my skills, looking for a new way to kick that DAMNED IF YOU DO Leaders who discourage questioning en- ball a little further, pitch the ball a bit better, courage the suppression of feeling, stifle per- run the bases a bit faster, and react to the ball IF THE GLORY of God is intelligence, sonal revelation and growth, and undermine a bit sooner. I was an eight-yea>old perfec- then bless the questioner. Questioning is the free will. The admonition "follow your lead- tionist. When recess came, I was on that catalyst for all revelation and is the means ers and you will be blessed," says that the diamond, captain or first picked. from which all new knowledge is discovered. rank and file do not have the ability to deter- Then came Mrs. Graap. She changed the It was questioning that led Joseph Smith mine truth. Truth is determined by the heart way we third graders thought and learned. and others in different times, places, and of each recipient; everyone has that ability. She introduced us to "right-brain" thinking. cultures to their revelatory experiences. All SCOTT MU LVAY We drew pictures upside-down. We wrote great advancements in thinking came Salt Lake City, UT poetry; we learned calligraphy. We even tried

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 3 meditating during nap time. When we put message that even I sometimes questioned. on The Wizard of Oz we each had to write our Like the eight-year-old giving up recess to own script. I still remember trying to figure understand algebra, I gave up my kingdom out how to glue the tinfoil to my Tin Man for the trappings of an ignorant pauper. costume. But Mrs. Graap’s greatest lesson for I don’t know if I ever figured out how me was the marble. many marbles Arthur, Bob, Chuck, Dave, "Arthur, Bob, Chuck, Dave, and Eddie and Eddie had, but a few years later I got an have 592 marbles. Arthur has 25 more mar- A in algebra and represented my region at the bles than Chuck, and 30 less than Dave. Bob state math competition. It wasn’t learning SUNSTONE has 60 more marbles than Eddie and five less algebra that was so important. Today, I’m not IS AVAILABLE AT THE than Arthur" and so on. Ourjob was to figure sure if I’ll ever figure out why I’m on my FOLLOWING LOCATIONS how many marbles each boy had. There were missionary experience. But when I consider DESERET BOOK STORES two ways to do it: we could use what Mrs. the notion of being back home on my throne, Cache Valley Mall Graap termed "deductive reasoning" (I call it it doesn’t seem quite as glorious as the strug- Community Shopping Center gle to find the answers. Cottonwood Mall guessing), or we could use algebra. Fashion Place Mall Finally, the class found the answer. All My son, peace be unto thy soul; Layton Hills Mall except me. I could get it by using deductive thine adversity and thine afflictions Ogden City Mall reasoning. I’d guess that Arthur had so many shall be but a small moment; And South Towne Mall marbles, see how close I was, and work from then, if thou endure it well, God University Mall Valley Fair Mall there. But algebra went over my head. I wres- shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt ZCMI Mall tled and tugged and sweated and labored, triumph over all thy foes. SEAGULL BOOK & TAPE and I lost. The more I squeezed, the more the ¯ .. know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experi- 1720 S, Redwood Road concept slipped through my fingers. Salt Lake City, UT I was willing to sacrifice anything to un- ence, and shall be for thy good. (D&C 121:7-8, 122:7.) 5730 S. Redwood Road derstand this algebra that so many of my Salt Lake City, UT peers had latched right on to. That was about Being that ruler and master of the kickball field just isn’t enough if you don’t have peace 1629 W. 90 S. when recess rolled around. I looked up, West Jordan, UT watching everyone shuffle by; in their eyes within your own soul. ELDER THAD BARKDULL 2144 Washington Blvd. were images of jungle gyms, jump ropes, Red Ogden, UT Rover, hopscotch, and my beloved kickball. Australia Brisbane Mission 2146 N. Main #528 But I stayed in the classroom through recess, Layton, UT trying to figure out how" a variable worked. It GOOD-NEWS NEWS hurt. It hurt because the others understood 2255 N. University Pkwy #2 THANKS for publishing Mario DePillis’s Provo, UT it, but they didn’t understand how I couldn’t. They didn’t understand how missing kick- absorbing article, "The Persistence of Mor- 110 Mesa Drive mon Community into the 1990s" (SUN- Mesa, AZ ball was worth knowing how to use algebra. STONE 15:4). It’s nice to know that, for all the 10714 Santa Monica Blvd. Now I’m on my mission, and in quiet Los Angeles, CA moments of reflection I’m reminded of my Church’s problems, there are positive things to say about it as well. The fact that DePillis 427 Preston Valley Center youth. Why did I stay in the classroom and Dallas, TX miss recess? Similarly, why am I on my mis- is a non-member and under no ecclesiastical constraint to say good things gives his com- SALT LAKE CITY sion? Back in my home town, I was ruler and master, just as I was on that kickball field. I ments all the more impact. I would like to see Benchmark Books more such articles. 331 S. Rio Grande, Ste.300 knew my hometown like the back of my hand. I had friends in every high school, Don’t mistake me. Opinions of many stal- Hayat’s Magazine & Gifts wart members to the contrary, any organiza- 236 S. Main every suburb. I was a leader among my peers and satisfied that I could achieve anything I tion--even the inspired Church of Jesus Weller’s Zion Bookstore desired. But I set aside the comforts of my Christ---can benefit from appropriately ex- 254 S. Main pressed constructive criticism. SUNSTONE, as LOGAN kingdom for a faraway land where no one knew me or cared for me, to bring them a the unofficially designated voice for "carping USU Bookstore ST. GEORGE Dixie College Bookstore Pontius’ Puddle PROVO BYU Bookstore THA~ A ~PI~ITOALL~ Valley Book Center HELP OOT 52 W. Center Walt West Books 1355 Riverside Dr. TEMPE, AZ. Books, Etc. 901 S. Mill Ave

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 4 critics" and "alternative voices," frequently I struggle with mixed emotions. After five me. I felt hopelessly unworthy at times. Was provides this valuable service for the king- years of study and dealing with disillusion- Elder Dunn really a kind and sane theolo- dom (and is often unappreciated, rand even ment upon discovering the double-face of gian? Or was he setting up youth for a huge castigated for it). Yet all of us must be careful the Church, it is a relief to connect with a fall? Who was hurt by Paul Dunn’s elaborate to look for balance, too. Concentrating all the thoughtful forum; it is also an upsetting lies? I was. time on the 10 percent of issues that deserve "foot-in-two-worlds" feeling. I have been iso- As a child, I wished I had a Paul Dunn as criticism can blind us to the 90 percent of the lated in my search for absolute truth, as a father. Today I have a lot more respect for Church that is helpful, or wise, or positive. much as it can be found in this world. No an honest drunk who readily admitted his Unfortunately, for all their public-relations one I knew in the mission field wanted to nature. savvy, the Ensign and LDS Church News focus hear anything about it. I quickly found out It is interesting that George Smith’s article too narrowly on "human interest" stories and that most people want comfort, not truth; preceded England’s. It was about William flaccid doctrinal exhortations, and are un- structure, not thought. People believe what Clayton’s journals documenting the private able to capture the richness of the gospel’s they want to believe. life of Joseph Smith ("William Clayton: Jo- consequences that cry out to be revealed. Eugene England’s "Healing and Making seph Smith’s ’Private Clerk’ and Eyewitness I suggest that SUNSTONE publish an issue Peace--In the World and the Church" (SUN- to Mormon Polygamy in Nauvoo," SUN- centering on positive things about the STONE 15:6) was about mercy. He said he STONE 15:6). Joseph lived a sneaky, double Church. I don’t mean the cloying, happy-face wished Paul Dunn could have been spared a life for years before he broke the "revelation" fluff that often gets mistaken for "good public roasting (see "The Paul Dunn Stories," to Emma, who was required to accept all the news," but solid articles like DePillis’s that SUNSTONE 15:3) because he was such a sane "wives" he had been "given" or be damned. If look past the Church’s warts to the sound theologian, and he has so much respect for a man can so lie to and humiliate his "elect structure beneath. him. I know how he feels; Elder Dunn was a lady," what other lies would he tell? It’s chill- PAUL H. SMITH hero of my youth. A child of an alcoholic ing to me. It’s also outrageous to believe that Salt Lake City, UT father with scars of broken trust, I remember the instigator of this libidinous double life going to firesides where Paul Dunn tapes was God through Jesus Christ. MODEST PROPOSALS were played. I tried to be righteous, but no Joseph Smith’s grand tradition of lying for bullets of life were deflected from piercing the Lord has flourished in the Church ever MORMONISM NOW AWAITS its own Gorbachev. What he or she must do is clear: 1. Deal honestly with the Mormon past. So- viet leadership did its best to maintain a society built upon lies, half-truths, camouflage, and denial. The Information Age did them in. 2. Eliminate authoritarianism, which dis- courages free and creative thought, en- shrines mediocrity, and encourages unrighteous dominion. Church members think and feel every bit as well as the leadership, even when dealing with sensi- tive human and spiritual problems. The whole point to the gospel is moral action in an independent sphere. 3. De-emphasi7e conservatism. When taken to the ridiculous extremes evident in the Church, conservatism is inimical to the generosity and openness of the gospel. It encourages disgraceful patriarchy and the attendant evils of sexism, racism, and spouse and child abuse. Conservatism in the Church has reached the status of a religion within the religion, and it is wrong. The Church will never achieve its tre- mendous potentials without fundamental re- form. It is time. PAUL D. MALLAMO Taos, NM MERCY, MERCY AS A RECENT subscriber to SUNSTONE, "What would you say is the moral of our story?"

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 5 since. We have mistaken charisma for honor, ing biases in the preface [to his ney, your struggle, your failings and suc- statistics for spiritual health, and structure autobiography, The Name Above the cesses, and your debts to others as it really for the kingdom of God. We want to be Title]: "At times I will telescope was so I can apply it to my own confusing called, chosen, and special--Pharisees in conversations--which strung out pilgrimage." For the life I live is not so ideal- our own way. over weeks and months--into one istically heroic, it is very human; its successes Heavenly Father sent us to school on this scene." Yet his account still has an and failings, its noble and aggrandizing mo- world and simply lets us cope with the bul- authenticity both in terms of facts ments, its cravings for praise and unassum- lies on our own, knowing we will eventually and judgments. ingness, its divine and carnal drives are so graduate and return home. We find at-one- I have just read Joseph McBride’s Frank intertwined that I can’t separate them. ment in the faith that we will have a home- Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, which Fortunately, while McBride honestly de- coming and are known and loved by the clearly documents that in Capra’s telling of bunks Capra’s contrivances, he also strives All-Seeing-One and not through a limited his own story he, like Paul Dunn, exagger- to understand Capra’s fears and the world earthbound hierarchy. While we are here, ated his contributions, slighted those of oth- view that propelled both his accomplish- though, it is hard to be "special" and humble ers, and created outright fabrications that he ments and failings. That attempt to put a life enough to accept that we’re just human be- told and retold for years. It was not authentic into an understanding perspective leads to ings off at boarding school with no WATS line in its facts or its judgments. How is Capra a charity, to an unwillingness to pronounce home, just the pay phone like everybody better example than Paul Dunn? It seems to judgment, and to a feeling of equality that else. me that the moral is that you can’t trust any comes from regarding others as ourselves. With all the man-handling by our male individual’s recollections when they are com- To progress as a society and as individuals, leaders, no wonder so many of us are search- mingled with their own ego. we all need honest critique within a nuturing, ing for our Mother in Heaven. We’ve taken GEOFFREY A. JONES accepting community. We also need vision- some severe fails on our schoolyard and, as Salt Lake City, UT ary myths to reinforce our ideals and goals. kids do, we are crying out, "Mama!" Mercy. But let’s keep the myths in the powerful DEBORAH AUSTIN STOLWORTHY Elbert Peck replies: forms of parables and fiction (like Capra’s Phoenix, AZ I am in the middle of McBride’s biogra- films); let’s have honest (auto)biography to phy and his relentless myth-busting regu- illuminate the flawed and human task of larly generates reflections on our common following our dreams from which we can IT’S AN UNBELIEVABLE humanness. Capra’s autobiography was a gain insight, consolation, and inspiration. LIFE crucial element in my undergraduate striv- 1860’S ALTERNATE VOICES IN HIS EDITORIAL on Paul Dunn’s war ings to become good and to work in the world to effect good. It called me to live an and baseball stories ("Casting out the Spell," activist Christian Life and gave me a believ- IN 1869, seven prominent Mormons SUNSTONE 15:3) Elbert Peck cited "the great able example. Now, as I read this critique of were excommunicated for being involved American moral storyteller" Frank Capra as his self-promoting story I want to yell at with publishing the Utah Magazine, which an example of how to honestly structure the Capra: "You didn’t have to remake your life criticized some of ’s policies. necessary theatrical telling of historical tales: into something you think it should’ve been! They were the Godbeites. Capra acknowledged his story-tell- I want to understand and celebrate yourj our- The Utah Magazine was essentially the SUNSTONE and Dialogue ,of that time. W. S. Godbe was a ’s president, Henry W. Lawrence was a bishop’s counselor, E. L. T. Harrison, Eli B. Kelsey, T. B. H. Stenhouse, and Edward W. Tullidge were prominent au- thors. All had impeccable personal lives. The Godbeites’ major heresy was their opposition to Brigham Young’s prohibition of all mining activity by Mormons. This, of course, handed the rich mineral resources of Deseret to the gentiles. An example is the fabulous copper mine at Bingham. Subsequently, President John Taylor en- couraged mining as an important activity. SAMUEL W. TAYLOR Redwood City, CA GOODBYE, MARK WE RECENTLY SAID goodbye to Mark. He died of AIDS-related cytomegalovi- rus, a virulent virus that attacks the brain. Mark was twenty-eight.

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 6 We adopted Mark when he was eight. It LIGHTHEADED about that time. Many of the first members of was obvious from the start that he was differ- the Church in Hungary had met the mission- ent, although the kDS Social Services coun- THERE STILL MUST be some intelli- aries while living abroad and then returned selor told us only that Mark had a difficult gence at because I to Hungary to help build the Church. These childhood and that his birth mother could received a letter from a department and its people share amazing conversion stories and no longer take care of him. letterhead had the university’s motto, "The are really the backbone of the Church there. Mark was a loner, frequently the victim of Glory of God is Intelligence," clearly at the However, there is another group of con- teasing by schoolmates and Church top although you reported that it had been verts. These people reflect the Hungarian "friends," and often misunderstood by his removed ("Enter to Earn," SUNSTONE 15:6). personality in all of its strengths and idiosyn- frustrated and perplexed parents and sib- Perhaps only certain departments were de- crasies. The branch president in Gyor is an lings. He was quite unhappy during his prived of the Light and had the motto de- articulate man with an independent spirit. growing-up years, although there were many leted. The branch leadership preferred to run the positive experiences, too. Eventually he de- SUSAN HARRIS branch without outside assistance; thus veloped a special bond with his two sisters. Chicago, IL things were a little unorthodox. Sunday Mark grew into a’ tall, handsome young Editor’s reply: School lessons were a strange combination of man. He reluctantly went on a mission. After Just before the issue reporting the change politics, religion, and science fiction. Like returning home he disappeared for a timel in BYU’s stationery was mailed, our BYU re- early members of the Church in other coun- He finally resurfaced in a distant city, living porter-at-large filed a report that the deletion tries, these Saints tend to bring in their own on the street. At this time the rest of the of the motto was a short-lived policy traditions from the past. They used secular family was forced to face his homosexuality. terms for spiritual principles--faith was te- In looking back, I can now see that for HUNGARIAN TELEPATHY lepathy and fasting was a great synergy. For a most of his life Mark had been trying to change, I was the lone voice pleading for a discover who he really was. He knew we and LAST JANUARY I accepted a teaching return to the basics. the Church were homophobic, and he tried position in Hungary. Having served a mis- Leadership is seen more as power than to hide his true identity We went along with sion in Austria a few years earlier, I expected service. The district president objected to the the charade because we couldn’t bring our- to encounter a similar culture. Instead I division of the district because then he would selves to believe he was gay If so, he certainly found a people with unique attitudes and only be president over half of Hunga~ would outgrow it, especially with all the culture. Outside the and priesthood, "boy" activities we scheduled for him. He I lived in the town of Gyor, located about few programs function. The missionaries met hated Scouting and all sports. He secretly halfway between Vienna and Budapest. The great frustration in the Gyor branch because played with dolls and dressed up as a girl. Church has been officially recognized in the branch president would not hold plan- After much soul-searching and not a little Hungary for about three years, and the ning meetings. prayer the family began to realize that Mark branch in Gyor has been functioning since Still, the openness and faith of these peo- was a victim and not the wicked degenerate the Church saw him to be. A good friend (stake president/social worker) counselled us to accept Mark as he was, let him live his own life, love him, and not abandon him. He also said that regardless of Claims to the contrary, he was unaware of any real sexual preference changes brought about by therapy Mark felt estranged from family and re- jected by the Church. Although there will probably always be some guilt, we reconciled with Mark. We had a family reunion for him, hugged him, had some fun together, prayed, and reassured him that we loved him and that he was part of the family Mark didn’t choose to be gay. His greatest fear was that he would die rejected and alone, as many LDS AIDS victims do. We made sure that didn’t happen. We were blessed to be with him at the end. We have chosen to think the best about Mark and leave the judging to God, who undoubtedly will be more compassionate and understanding than many members of the Church. We hope death is kinder to him than life. We love you, Mark. DON CALAWAY St. George, UT "There’s some debate whether he’s a lost sheep or a wolf in the flock."

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 7 ple is refreshing. While missionaries in Aus- law, a spiritual law. I often wonder if history SMILES &: OPEN ARMS tria are lucky to baptize one good family is not repeating itself. Remember, the scrip- during their entire mission, it was not un- ture says that there are many truths yet to be JOSEPH WYSON’S letter rankled with usual in Gyor to have several families bap- revealed. Possibly one truth is that we for- particular bitterness. His holier-than-thou tized in a month. The challenge is whether sake the symbolic acts that show our faithful- attitude implied that letting people die and they can keep these new converts or whether ness and embrace the good works and the then doing baptisms for the dead is better they, like many members in the early days, desires in one’s heart. It took the Israelites than the saving of mortal lives! This is patent will go their own way. thousands of years before their law was ful- nonsense and ignores that "the greatest of SARA SCHIMMER filled. How many years will it be before there these is chanty" (1 Corinthians 13:13) and Bethesda, MD will be no need for laws, when all human- that God has said "all things unto me are kind will have Christ-like desires to do good? spiritual, and not at anytime have I given UPLIFTING & TOLERANT What Mother Teresa says is very simple: unto you a law which was temporal" (D~C Love is God; God is Love; we are all children 29:34-). THANK YOU for printing "Forgiving of God, and everyone deserves to be loved. This morning I went to a nearby large the Church and Loving the Saints" by Robert In India there are people who are called the Presbyterian church for a special service led Rees (SUNSTONE 16:1). I would like to see "Undesirables," who live in the streets. by the African Children’s Choir. These tiny more articles like this that are not just Mother Teresa looks beyond the color of skin boys and girls rocked with the energy of the thoughtful but also uplifting and tolerant. and religion and sees them as children of love of the Lord. They had been rescued from DAVID TROTTIER God who have no love, and she provides it disease and homelessness on the streets of Irvine, CA for them. To me she truly lives God’s greatest Kampala. Who rescued them? A group called commandment: Love God, and love others. Friends in the West from Vancouver who OPEN OUR HEARTS Joseph Smith saw a vision of the celestial reached fight over Salt Lake and the "prom- kingdom: "For I, the Lord, will judge all men ised land" and got to work saving lives! As I READ the letter by Joseph E Wysonaccording to their works, according to the Today these children are healthy and eager to called "A Narrow Gate" (SUNSTONE 16:1), desire of their hearts" (D&C 137:9). We all learn. They want to become leaders in their many thoughts went through my head. For have a long way to go. It is important to open country, and they have certainly felt the hand one thing Wyson does not know anything our hearts. I appreciate SUNSTONE’s efforts in of the Lord in their lives. about Sister Teresa or for what she stands. bringing different ideas to light. I might not Later on I went to fast-and-testimony Wyson sounded much like the Pharisees accept everything, but it allows me the op- meeting in my mostly white ward and heard and Sadducees during the time of Christ. portunity to think about things I might not the Mormon liturgy repeated over and over, They continually told Christ that he was have before. "I believe that this is the only true Church, I breaking the written la~vs. Christ continually BRAD VAN ROOSENDAAL believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.. ," had to explain that the old law had been Midland, TX and I marvelled at the rich variety of reli- fulfilled and that he was bringing a higher gious experiences. Robert Rees speaks of "forgiving the Church and loving the Saints." As a bishop, he tried to be consistently charitable instead of consistent, i.e., sticking to the letter of the manuals. I second Brother Rees’s ap- proach-invite people in for a warm bowl of soup, for an arm around the shoulder, for encouragement. Those of us who are trying to learn and live the gospel don’t need arro- gant, rule-quoting persons to make us feel like even greater failures. We need smiles and open arms. Back off from the celestial/terres- trial judgments, Brother Wyson! Let’s wait ’til the final trump and see who crosses the finish line. DONALD L. GIBBON Pittsburgh, PA

SUNSTONE ENCOURAGES CORRE- SPONDENCE. ADDRESS LETTERS FOR PUBLICATION TO "READERS’ FORUM." WE EDIT FOR CLARITY AND TONE AND WE’RE NOT LOSIN6 A SON., WE’RE 6AININ6 CUT FOR LENGTH AND SPACE. LETTERS ADDRESSED TO AUTHORS WILL BE FOR- FOUR HOT SHOWERS IN THE/V~ORNIN6,/ WARDED UNOPENED TO THEM. ~

PAGE 8 SEPTEMBER 1992 FROM A TRUSTEE desirable result. Having served in callings (e.g., the Primary presidency in a ward with sixty-six adults and more than 150 children) where keeping the organization staffed was LIFE IS TOO FULL OF SURPRISES sometimes more a matter of desperation than inspiration, I sympathize with leaders who wish to minimize the chances that a member will turn down a calling. I also sympathize with members who want time to think and pray about a possible calling, something that’s hard to do when the bishop or one of his counselors calls you in for a few minutes and assumes you’ll accept a calling on the By Lisa Bolin Hawkins spot. A friend of mine was attending a ward where her family was likely to buy a home and was called, with her husband, to a meet- MY FRIEND NEEDED to talk. "I got a vacy of those who are considered for a calling ing with five unfamiliar ward leaders. She really scary phone call this morning," she and then rejected, or declined the call them- thought it was a "get-acquainted" meeting, said. My mind leapt from heaW breathing to selves. Other kinds of secrecy surrounding but was asked to accept a calling in the obscenities to threats. "What?" I asked. callings and some Church meetings seem Young Women. Her family had just moved "Eider So-and-so’s office called," she said, unnecessary. For example, no child (or, far three thousand miles. She was looking for naming a neither of us had worse, spouse) should learn in work, her husband was about to begin a heard of, despite faithful attention to general meeting that a parent will be the new bishop demanding job, and her children would be conference and perusal of the Ensign. "They or Relief Society president. Nor should attending new schools. Closing on the new want us to come up tomorrow." members be subjected to the practice where, house was a month away, everything possi- We spent a few minutes discussing the on Tuesday evening, the ward or stake exec- ble was going wrong with the financing, and most likely callings for my friend or her utive secretary calls to set up an unexplained there was no guarantee that she would ever husband, who between them could serve in appointment on Sunday between a member be a member of the ward. The calling, which any Church capacity She did not doubt they and the bishop or stake president. The mem- would start immediately, involved a lot of would serve if called, but worried about the ber is left to wonder for almost a week scheduled meetings compared to the timing, the possible need to sell their home, whether he or she is "in trouble" (because the woman’s previous calling as gospel doctrine and so on. I left in suspense. She was cling- current practice is rather like being called to teacher. She had never worked with the ing to the ceiling. the principal’s office in school), what callings Young Women before. Well, it wasn’t anything important. No might be extended, from what callings he or After explaining all this, my friend asked calling, no difficult decisions, no sacrifices. she might be released, or whether some un- that she be allowed to "defer" the calling for What matters is that my friend spent an expected topic will be discussed. two weeks, when her circumstances would anxious day and night for nothing. Perhaps The current "keep ’em guessing" system be more certain and she would have had the solution is to reduce the anxiety level in creates anxiety, a perceived need to respond time to pray and consult her husband. At my circle of friends. But perhaps a better to the subject of the meeting without time for that time, she said, she thought she would be solution is to end the Church practice of prayer, consultation, or reflection, and a in a position to accept the calling. summoning people to meetings without tell- sense of anticlimax when one discovers once That was Tuesday. The bishopric asked ing them why. again, after a week of rich imagination, that her to contact a counselor on Thursday. This time-honored tradition may have Church membership usually requires small- When she did, and repeated her concerns, healthy roots. After all, it’s wise to keep con- but-steady service, not heroic quests. the counselor said the bishopric wanted to fidential the names of those considered and Leaders undoubtedly find some benefits staff the position as soon as possible and so then rejected for a calling. The name of a to the current system. If, during the prelimi- they couldn’t wait. Since then, she has member to whom a call has been extended is naries, a leader discovers some impediment moved into that ward and has seen many similarly private. Those who’ve been called to a planned call, he can simply refrain from reasons why it would have been a good idea to and accepted Church positions would be extending the call and explain that concern to serve in the calling extended to her, work- wise to limit the number of people who for the member’s welfare prompted the meet- know about it until they are sustained. And ing with the Young Women. She is sorry the ing. Unfortunately, this approach may result bishopric was unwilling to wait the two a member who is considering a new calling in a decision not to extend a call when the should consult only a few discreet advisors. weeks she feels she and her family needed impediment was more perceived than real or and, although she has served in other wards However, the confidentiality surrounding when the member would have overcome the these situations is meant to protect the pri- in every calling available to her, feels difficulty, given the chance. In all cases it "branded" as someone less-than-valiant results in a one-sided decision, rather than because she did not accept the calling imme- LISA BOLIN HAWKINS is a writer and teacher an adult discussion of the needs of the mem- of legal writing, as well as a member of the diately. ber, the organization, and the balance be- The problems of "anonymous meetings" Sunstone Foundation board of trustees. She lives tween the two. in Orem, Utah. can be seen on a group level, too. It was Another possible benefit to leaders is a announced in our sacrament meeting one

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 9 Sunday that the Young Adults aged eighteen calling is more than they can handle and the analogy to a university. A professor might to thirty were invited to attend a meeting that remain physically, emotionally, and spiri- ask that a student come to her office at a evening at the stake center. It was one of tually healthy. certain time without explaining why (al- several announcements and no other infor- 3. Assume that members will take time to con- though most of us would consider that mation was given. The next Sunday, it was sider a calling. Once, I knew through inspi- rude). However, almost never would a pro- announced that a new Young Adult ward had ration even before meeting with the fessor make an appointment with a colleague been formed at the meeting. I wondered how bishop that I would be called to a certain without giving him some idea of what the many people had attended; after three hours position (one I didn’t want, but accepted). proposed conference is about. Similarly, in a of Church starting at 8:30 in morning, I am Other times, a calling has been obviously family, children are expected to come when unlikely to go to an evening meeting unless right and I have accepted immediately. But their parents call them without a lot of ex- I know why I’m going. The Young Adults other times, I have accepted in the "heat of plaining or justifying. Husbands and wives, who didn’t attend may feel left out or less the moment" and later wished I had taken however, usually call to each other with committed to their new ward. It would have time to pray and consult my husband. some form of explanation, even if it’s just, done no harm to have invited the Young Those are the callings I’ve struggled with "Honey, can you come look at this? I’m in the Adults to attend the meeting "where a new and regretted. basement," or "We need to talk about a vaca- Young Adult ward will be formed for our Church leaders should make "think- tion." stake." ing time" a part of the schedule. Members In the Church, although some of us have Which leads to the first of several sugges- should be called to a position and then stewardship over others, the adults are more tions: asked to pray about it, with a time set like colleagues, or better still, adult brothers 1. Tell people why they are being asked to attend several days later for the member to re- and sisters, than we are like teachers and a meeting. The person who makes the ap- turn with a decision. Members should be young students or parents and children. The pointment need not be absolutely specific, discouraged from accepting callings at practice of summoning other adults to meet- although he could. Statements like "the the time they are extended, especially ings with no explanation and expecting that bishop wants to discuss a calling in the callings that are particularly time-con- they will agree to whatever is proposed with- Sunday School"; "the bishop wants to get suming or demanding in other ways. out consideration perpetuates a false idea of better acquainted with you"; or "a com- Most of these suggestions can be summed how one exercises priesthood power. Anon- mittee is being formed for the fall social"; up in the principle that Church leaders ymous meetings and surprise callings jolt or even "the bishop hopes to lay some should treat adult members as adults: adults one’s spirit--they are neither long-suffering, rumors to rest" are better than nothing. who know their own circumstances better nor meek, nor kind, nor loving. This is one These more-specific statements may al- than the leader does, who are dedicated to tradition that could, and should, go the way leviate anxiety, or at least provide it a the work of the Lord, but who also have of other false traditions. ~ focus. The adage that whatever one imag- other responsibilities and needs. Consider ines is likely to be worse than the truth often applies to meetings with Church leaders. 2. Allow members to explain their circumstances when they are offered a calling. Many Church leaders, as well as Church tradi- tion, teach that it is inappropriate to turn down a calling because the leader issuing the calling has received inspiration and confirmation from the Lord. Anyone who has been a part of the process of issuing callings knows that the Lord lets us make mistakes and the ideal, inspired scenario often is not the case. A Traces the history of the Utah Paiutes from member may not be in a position to ac- prehistory to the late 1980s, presenting the full cept a calling--perhaps for reasons he or story of their battle for self-sufficiency. she would rather not discuss, although they have nothing to do with worthiness. Cloth: 0-8263-1383-3 $29.95 My idea of a wise bishop is one who asks members what callings they enjoy or think they would enjoy most. Although members’ preferences won’t always coin- cide with the ward’s needs or with inspi- ration, when they do, there is no reason not to give people callings they can ap- UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS proach with enthusiasm. And, despite the current stigma, there should be no reason ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO 87131-1591 for members not to ask to be released if At bookstores, or call (505) 277-4810 FAX 1-800-622-8667 their circumstances change or they find a

PAGE 10 SEPTEMBER 1992 TURNING THE TIME OVER TO... class, a small recital each year for a gradua- tion procedure. All of us, with our differing gifts and interests, had our talents fostered by this lovely lady and her desire to help us Paul C. Pollei grow. The enjoyment we knew in the name of music and art was indeed heaven for young hearts. THE DECLINE OF MUSIC IN From all of this, my rich private musical training was supported and augmented by MORMON CULTURE invaluable "on-the-job" experience, of ser- vice to music in and for the Church. In addition to my calling as ward organist, my bishop gave me five dollars toward the costs of attending the Church-sponsored music workshops that provided weekly les- sons from members of the Tabernacle organ personnel--Alexander Schreiner, Frank Asper, and Roy Darley. This training, and my own lessons from a fine private piano teacher, occasionally overseen by my great uncle, former Tabernacle organist Tracy Y. Cannon, put me in the hands of a supportive coterie of excellent musicians who promoted good music in the Church and assisted many developing musicians. I remember sitting at the console of a well-worn organ until midnight hours as a teenager, with lights completely dimmed in the chapel except for my small reading lamp, thinking I was the greatest musician in the world as strains of my grandiose improvisa- tions poured from the instrument. How was I to know that this art of improvisation, mod- ulation, and transposition was taught in a most organized fashion for all respectable organists in any music conservatory, and that The Church has, effectively, lost its interest in serious music. this was what is expected of all good church Both amateur and professional music students who excel musicians in the Western world? are not given a place of importance in the Church. MY mission in France and Belgium SOME TIME BETWEEN my twelfth provided opportunities to share musical ex- Latter-day Saint included not only the usual and thirteenth birthdays, I was called as the periences with members and non-members Sunday meetings, but also quarterly stake alike, both secular and sacred. I returned ward organist. This red-letter day was the conference (with two general sessions and an first in a series of stepping-stones provided with a feeling of success. Like a priest or evening youth session), various kinds of monk or trained musician of earlier times, I by the Church that led me to my life’s work. Scout meetings, stake and ward choir and It was not always convenient for a grow- had, in effect, been taught and nurtured by chorus practices, festivals, dances, parties, the needs and programs of the Church for my ing teenager to rise to every Church occasion, firesides, and roadshows. When these meet- but the steadfastness of my parents coupled professional career. I knew that I had to share ings were accompanied by hymn singing or music with the world. with my commitment to my calling pro- keyboard music of any kind, I was called duced a kind of record for church atten- Training in keyboard music was not all I upon. The ’s and Young Women’s owed the Church and its programs. Activities dance. Mutual Improvement Associations (MIA) First of all, I performed regularly at the were themselves devoted to helping our per- in theatre, dancing, choral music as well as organ console for three meetings each Sun- sonal development in music, dance, drama, many evenings of sports supplemented the regular weekly activities. I shall never forget day--priesthood meeting, Sunday School, and sports, as well as giving us religious and sacrament meeting. But in those days, such magnificent youth experiences as sing- training. Regular participation in the mid- ing in the for general the "regular meeting schedule" for an active week MIA meeting was obligatory. But even earlier, and on a smaller scale, I conference under seemingly stern directors PAUL C. POLLEI is a professor of music at who made us memorize our music and called remember my Primary teacher insisting that us to task if we showed signs of weariness or Brigham Young University. I perform, along with other members of my lackluster; or the thrill of dancing in the MIA

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE i i dance festival at the University of Utah sta- uplift when the performance finally rang worship and development programs. Joseph dium with 5,000 other young people to the through. I have been part of choirs from the Smith must have had similar thoughts when scintillating rhythms of rhumbas, tangos, most humble Primary gathering to the most he inaugurated a singing school in the Kirt- fox-trots, and folk dances from various na- auspicious collection of Saints in ded- land Temple. And I remember Elder Boyd K. tions. Even school activities, loaded with ication services, choirs of all shapes, sizes, Packer’s response to a young, inexperienced, music productions, were flavored with the and tastes, conducted by superior musicians, newly sustained bishop’s counselor posing influence of the Church. Seminary activities and also innocently led by willing amateurs the question in a regional leadership training were dovetailed with secular musical activi- who did their very" best. session about how to organize a good sacra- ties. My young life in Salt Lake City was an Over the years it became apparent that the ment meeting: "Get some good music, and intertwined whole, combining the finest as- more training one receives in the technical everything else will fall into place." pects of a middle-class family background aspects of music making, the more deter- The provision of heartfelt music to ac- enhanced by endless activities and numerous mined one becomes to help elevate the levels company, bolster, sustain, and enhance spir- acquaintances, provided largely by the itual quests and sacred events has been Church. known to humankind from the begin- After my mission, I moved my dream ning. (Christ’s birth itself was heralded by of becoming a professional musician into a choir of angels.) I know that my short the reality of high productivity. Because of One of the first things life with its variety of musical experiences my Church experience, I did not doubt is only a small taste of what music is, even the possibility of realizing my dream to be to this world. "the world’s greatest composer." to strike the missionary is Through undergraduate studies and HOWEVER, a change in Church graduate school, the Church was always the awesome importance tha.re for support and sustenance, and as music has gradually arrived. It began with an avenue for expression, new experi- a dramatic alteration in the workings of ence, and experimentation. It always of music. Unfortunately, the Church. seemed that a musician’s life in the sur- In 1980 the Church announced the roundings of the Mormon faith was sensi- many mission presidents consolidated meeting schedule. Gone was ble and workable. There were the opening service of Sunday School with eve>expanding opportunities for using its hymn practice. Gone were the mid- arts in the Church. Never did I feel the tell the missionaries that week MIA, Primary, and Relief Society conflicts I often heard other musicians meetings. All at once it seemed as if the discuss, the struggles, the great difficulty all music is forbidden. varied activities of the Church had van- in coping with the lifestyle of the per- ished in favor of one long Sabbath meet- forming or practicing artist. I rarely felt ing. As this adjustment was being made Church-wide, it soon became statistically any conflict between art, its "muse," and apparent that fewer and fewer young LDS my ordinary, comfortable Mormon life- style. I just assumed that you did in life what people were participating in the arts. of expectation and performance practices. Whereas the festivals, roadshows, and other seemed most appropriate to your God-given musical productions had once been the "ar- talents, your experience, and your expertise. The comfortable relationship of volunteer- With graduate study finished and the ism in the Church and the ability to conscript tistic staple" of the Church, it was no longer possible, expedient, or of interest to pursue world to conquer, I was left to my personal members to serve in a variety of assignments allowed for a development of musical pro- these ambitious projects. devices to provide for my family and future. Gone were the dances, choirfests, choral Teaching was my favorite challenge, and per- grams based on the needs of the Church as directed by leaders. Because of the temporary festivals for amateur musicians, and weekly formances were the enhancement and by- activities promoting the development of the product of my own music making. Always, nature of rotating assignments in the lay-di- rected Church, it was not uncommon for me musical arts. The general Church Music the Church and its programs were part of this Committee was disbanded, and local priest- package. Teaching in the Church seemed to to alternate between serving as a musician and a variety of other assignments, including hood leadership was no longer charged with go hand-in-glove with teaching in a school or developing and creating musical excellence a conservatory. It was all part of the same bishop. The joy of participation, along with the thrill of seeing others benefit from at- in the Church. The handbooks continued to thing, because, to me, music represented the recommend’a ward choir, but gone was the language of angels, and whether one made tempted musical excellence, has accompa- nied me throughout my life. possibility of assembling the Saints for an music in a studio, a concert hall, a cathedral, adequate practice time, and gone were the or a Mormon chapel, it all seemed natural, One doesn’t easily forget musical experi- ences, simple or grand, when the artistry instructions necessary to facilitate the devel- appropriate, sacred. opment of such practices. Gone were the I never avoided performing music in the displayed went heavenward and touched a congregation or reached a troubled heart. training sessions for musicians. No longer Church because it wasn’t "professional." were young keyboard talents developed for Making music was part of my heritage. If a One doesn’t easily forget an awakening of a troubled soul to the magic of life developed the purpose of continuing performance on choir was called for, all you needed was a the sacred instrument--the organ, which conductor, an accompanist, some good through musical contacts. The magical uni- versal language touched by the hand of God would be the only link to a time-honored music, and willing singers. A little bit of "sound of worship" in Church service. Now, musical taste was helpful and provided the was meant to illuminate the Saints in their

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 12 entire services passed without a smallest mi- of his term to be the installment of pipe "more important" aspects of the Sunday ser- nority participating in the hymn singing of organs in every chapel in his stake; he now vices. In spite of this, it is still true that the day. Teenagers were never exposed to finds himself with beautiful instruments encouragement to do music on a wide scale musical excellence, and the Primary children without musicians to play them or programs does not presently exist in the Church. were relegated to singing easily taught ditties to train new ones. It takes no great powers of observation to of inconsequential flavor. The Church was Perhaps the next significant contribution notice the decline in hymn singing through- now left essentially destitute of music, and to the current state of music in the Church out the Church. One needs only attend a most of an entire generation has grown up was the introduction of the "purple book," regular sacrament service and look around without a firm, stable introduction to music, sanctioned and copyrighted by Church lead- during the singing. And no hymn singing is be it sacred or secular. ers as appropriate music for Church activi- well flavored without the support of a strong Of course, the Church is not alone to ties. This was produced at the same time the organist who can enliven the rhythm and blame. The much-discussed wounds to suggestion was made to use only hymns in accentuation of musical structure by excel- healthy society--breakdown of family, lent performance. This process will con- drugs, television addiction-~do not help. tinue to create a slow, sad death for music Throughout society in general, the change in the Church. Music is rarely successfully from an active agrarian society to a passive taught to adults, but, by those who know consumer society has had its influence. how, it can always be successfully taught The once great American tradition of buy- to the very young. But there are no pro- ing a piano as a first major family pur- grams in the LDS church encouraging the chase has suffered from inflation and very young to musical excellence. Singing other economic problems, but even more "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" from the availability of television and three times per month does not enliven or other "passive" alternatives. Young people excite potential training in youth. can now buy a Walkman and put a wide The trends in Church music are easily variety of tunes in their ears with the push identified. They are manifest by such sen- of a button instead of making music by timents and statements as the following: painstaking training. Stereos, computers, up emotions, but "We will sing the first verse only"; "We will and electronic machines now replace the forego hymn practice today because the time-honored piano. Ironically, these ma- sacrament service was too long"; "Could chines that can make music all by them- you accompany me tomorrow morning in selves have now reached such a level of Church?"; "We will discontinue choir complexity that many people who buy practice for the summer"; "I just want him them don’t know what to do with them. to be able to play the hymns when he goes But before the modern music syn- on his mission"; "That’s all right, we’ll just thesizer, there was another musical in- sing the hymns without the piano"; "It strument of great power and varied doesn’t matter; it’s just for Church"; possibility. So large, complex, and expensive "Twenty minutes is enough for choir as to be unavailable for general home use, worship services. Since nearly everyone practice"; "We can’t have those kinds of in- this instrument has for hundreds of years sensed a need for more music in a service struments in the church." found its place at the center of uplifting con- than the singing of hymns, and since the gregational worship. For me, the demise of music from the "purple book," though not organ playing is the most tragic aspect in the recommended for Sunday worship service, THESE trends should not surprise any- decline of Church music. Given the travails was available and sanctioned, the sound of one. When Mormon children turn twelve, of the carting instruments this music and like compositions became they graduate from Primary having sung from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City, one wonders familiar and began to be performed almost many lovely "little" tunes for nine years. Now if the Salt Lake City Tabernacle organ would universally in the services and in general they move on to priesthood and young have been built if the project had been initi- Church meetings. women’s programs. Shy, capricious, adven- ated in the late twentieth century. No longer It is ironic that even though hymns were turesome, reluctant, troubled by peer pres- does organ music play any part in the wor- the first recommendations for worship ser- sures, nagged by parents, disturbed by their ship plan of the typical Mormon service. First vice, the opportunity even to teach hymns to ever-growing bodies and spirits, presenting of all, there are almost no amateur organists the members did not now exist. This was themselves as music makers is far from their skilled enough to perform even for simple important, not only because the Church is thoughts. Or is it? It is a rare teenager in the Mormon hymn singing, let alone with the continually adding new members unfamiliar modern world who does not own a headset skill required for the fine music written for with our hymns, but also because the publi- the organ itself. Hymns themselves, once the that connects to a tape or compact disc cation of the new hymnbook in 1985 pre- player, which he uses to sequester himself musical language of all Saints, now require sented us with a considerable number of into the realm of private music listening for simplification to the point of non-recogni- hymns unfamiliar even to life-long Church hours every day. Most of the music these tion for any satisfactory keyboard perfor- members. The recent re-introduction of Sun- young people hear represents the popular mance. I think of the stake president who day School hymn practice is a step back in before the "consolidation" considered the forms of the leading singers and instrumen- the right direction, but in many cases it is a talists of the day, mostly advertised through singular most outstanding accon’tplishment half-hearted one, easily pushed aside for top-forty radio stations, television commer-

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 13 cials, music videos, and dances. dragging a once non-liturgically oriented making, it would seem that Saints and priest- After several years of this kind of musical church, trying to rise from unsophisticated hood leaders would welcome specific guide- experience, the young Mo~rmon reaches "pioneerisms," into musical oblivion. Instead lines to assist them in promotion of this adulthood and is suddenly .called ~a turn of striking anthems by well-rehearsed choirs, sacred art. BYU sponsors an annual workshop from worldly pursuits to enter a spiritual accompanied by excellent organists or in- for Church musicians, continually fostering plane never before known. One of the first strumentalists, most musical presentations in the ideas and excellent new techniques things to strike the missionary is the awe- today’s worship services are a mediocre vari- which would contribute to the development some importance of music in his or her life, ety of syrupy popular melodies accompany- of Church music. However, the workshop perhaps created by its sudden absence. Un- ing unimaginative words which "relate to has never been empowered to administer the fortunately, many mission presidents tell the gospel principles." In the worst sentimental materials presented or analyze the long- missionaries that all music is forbidden, ex- tradition, these tunes and lyrics may stir up reaching goals or values of these presenta- cept that sung by the , little emotions in the susceptible, but they cannot tions. Hence, the information available realizing that this period in a young person’s stir and uplift the soul. They point not to remains dormant and of little use to the life, with new spirituality and maturity, God, but to the world and its values, musical Church worldwide. In general, both amateur would be the optimum time for introduction and emotional. It seems that President Spen- and professional music students who excel to beauty. Instead, immediately cut off from cer Kimball’s hopes for Beethovens and are not given a place of importance in the something that was so important, private, Michaelangelos in the future of the Church Church in any particular musical calling, set- and individual, the only outlet for the young have been stalled. ting, or function. missionaries is to sing. This they do with The Tabernacle Choir, of course, contin- As all things cycle, we can hope that the great fervor in all meetings and missionary ues to render the lovely anthems and popular thoughts of the prophets regarding music gatherings. Again, this would be a wonderful music of the day, sprinkled with the master- and the worship service will again permeate time for discovery and expression of great pieces of choral literature. But even their the general Church. For the sake of true beauty. However, the only "appropriate" repertoire has become more catholic (that is worship and beauty in our lives and en- tunes these missionaries can sing are the ones to say, universal), appealing to a wider variety hancement of spirituality, I hope that music they stopped singing seven or eight years of tastes, and including music from movie will sometime take a renewed place of honor before. These are the songs they last sang in scores and Broadway productions. Given the in the hearts and practice of the Saints. There church with any enthusiasm. They have lost easy access via television and ’video produc- is nothing like the beauty of an angelic choir, seven years of great possibility. There was no tions to the Tabernacle Choir or general accompanied by a magnificent organ, to nur- instruction and no outlet. Their church has Church meetings, it has become a sort of ture thoughts of heavenly presence. ~ forsaken them in the area of musical educa- dictum that if"it" is sung in a general meeting tion and excellence. of the Church, "it" must be okay. If "it" is sung But for all the breakdown in musical by the Tabernacle Choir, we must be able to training and activity in the Church, a great sing "it" in church services. Other organiza- many trained musicians continue their hopes tions sponsored by the Church, such as the and quests for excellence. Trained musicians, Mormon Youth Symphony and Choruses, however, often seem to pose a threat to also render concerts of mostly quasi-popular Church leaders and members. Often, their music, giving still more support to the notion expertise is resented or seen as elitist or arro- that if "it" is performed in the Tabernacle STROLLING FROM THE DELI, gant, and some difficulties can be created by venue, "it" is appropriate for any Church GROCERY-LADEN a professional musician’s willingness, or un- event. Hence, popular music, Broadway willingness, to participate voluntarily in show tunes are all stirred into the melange of There is this new generation Church music activities. Still, there are many that which is new ,~,~nsidered "sacred." There rising among us trained musicians in the Church who are is little discrimination among the producers without the will to live: willing and able to serve. of sacred music from the secular. Notwith- psychologists argue the pattern Unfortunately, it is not only the limita- standing, mature Saints are quick to distin- of life’s incapable intellectualizations, tions of Church music programs, the token guish that which is heaven-sent from that educators argue lack of moral courage; mention of music by any priesthood author- which is not. By instinct and sensitive per- I have walked among the garden idols, ity, the reluctance on the part of leadership at sonal feelings, hearers recognize the beauty seen my leaders tricked into the marriage all levels to deal with music, the lack of and excellence of sacred music. Compared of admitted deviancy and failed nerve. encouragement for the development of side by side with a rousing anthem of the Still, the plaster statue-sellers cry, music by the very young, the lack of practical same message, a quasi-popular tune accom- "what is wrong, what is wrong?" training of pianists, organists, conductors, or panying semi-serious lyrics will never be as our youth continue to die, daily. vocalists, and the lack of outlet for fine mu- mistaken for sacred. There are parties to attend: sical performances in the Church that dis- So, the Church has, effectively, lost its we blame them their dying courages trained LDS musicians. They are interest in serious music. Fewer and fewer as we stroll home arm and arm full also dismayed by what has rushed in to fill Saints are being assisted in their spiritual excited over the boiling of lobster, the void, so to speak---a new, pervasive style development by the music provided by their the sweet interior of cracked claws, of "religious pop" music, a style once rele- church. There are few statements as to whom the spicy artichoke leaves, gated to nightclubs, discoteques, movies, the music program of the Church should be the musky scent of Chianti and teenage dance parties. This has now addressed and of what it should consist. freshening across the maple lowboy completely infiltrated our Church services, Based on past traditions and the joy of music --SEAN BRENDAN BROWN

PAGE 14 SEPTEMBER 1992 S U N S T 0 N E

Life and religion are one and the same. We don’t need two universities at BYU.

ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, TWO UNIVERSITIES: TENSIONS BETWEEN "RELIGION" AND "THOUGHT" AT BYU

By Scott Abbott

AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN I LEFT THE OLD-BOOM summer and have had a semester of paid research leave. I have town of Farmington, New Mexico, and headed north for my traveled to numerous conferences at my department’s expense. first year at BYU. The lush campus at the foot of the mountainsBYU’s library is good and, at a time when state universities are seemed like paradise; and at the center of that paradise was the cutting library budgets, we have an aggressive acquisitions honors program, its challenges and stimulations assuring thatpolicy. The academic climate at BYU is even more stimulating paradise was more than a country club. Informing the entirethan when I was a student. Faculty colleagues across the experience was a complex web of religious theory and practice. university are dedicated, morally committed scholars with A philosophy professor taught my class anddiverse opinions; I have participated in faculty seminars on was my ward bishop; a psychology professor was my stake feminist thought and on the French philosopher Emmanuel president. The education I got from these and other religiouslyLevinas. Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton, Alan Bloom, and Mar- committed professors, trained in good programs around the tha Nussbaum have led lively and controversial seminars. country, qualified me for graduate work at Princeton andFurther, BYU has more women faculty members and more insured that I did well there; it also prepared me to teach anblack students than when I was a student, and it looks as if we LDS institute class for Princeton undergraduates. After gradu-will get more. Our Women’s Research Institute and an active ating from Princeton I taught for seven years at Vanderbiltgroup of women students have gained national attention with University in Nashville, Tennessee. Those were good years: Itheir innovative and forceful work on women’s issues. Women wrote articles and published my first book; I taught good students now receive half of the university’s most exclusive students and associated with good colleagues; I again taughtscholarships--offered, in my day, only to males. Sexist lan- an institute class; and I scrambled for tenure at an exclusiveguage is officially discouraged at BYU, and university policy on university. I was granted tenure in March of 1988, and by Aprilhiring women is one of affirmative action. This year when my I had decided to move to BYU. Answering questions of an department wanted to hire a bright non-Mormon woman who incredulous dean and various colleagues I described my de- also had an offer from UCLA, the university administration and sires to work at the university that had shaped me and that the board of trustees decisively waived normal deadlines and would shape my fellow Mormons in years to come. Some of hired her. After four years I am grateful to be at BYU and am them understood. Others did not. To further explain myself insure I made a good choice. my subsequent correspondence with Vanderbilt friends, I have Though the university is a better place than the paradise I recounted the following positive experiences at BYU. experienced in my student years, it is not yet what it could be. At BYU I moved into a wan’a, supportive, and competent Let me give a few examples. I bring them up here because I department. My teaching load is the same as it was at am immensely proud of the university fellow Mormons have Vanderbih. I have received generous research grants every built up over the last century, and I want to be part of the continuing productive process. SCOTT ABBOTT is an associate professor of German at Brigham Ironically, the most pressing issue on the BYU campus is Young University. An earlier version of this article was presented at Mormon scholarship. With few exceptions, Mormon and non- the 1992 Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City. Mormon faculty are free to pursue their research wherever it

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 15 S U N S T O N E

takes them. I can write freely about Freemasonry and the three are BYU graduates and five are from other programs. Of German novel, and a friend writes uninhibitedly about Dantethe most recently hired faculty, the assistant professors, five are and the Latin sexual vocabulary. As long as the work is unre-from BYU and only two from elsewhere. The percentage of lated to Mormonism, and as long as it is real scholarship, BYUfaculty with BYU credentials thus progresses from 25 percent will permit it--and it may be well funded. But when professorsto 37.5 percent to 71 percent in the department of Ancient write about sexuality among Mormon adolescents, or queryScriptures. In the department of Church History and Doctrine working Mormon women about their opinion of Presidentthe numbers are even more skewed toward BYU, and the trend Ezra Taft Benson’s advice that they stay at home, or speak aboutis similar. Of full professors, seven are from BYU and four have Mormon women from a feminist perspective, or ask whydegrees from other schools. Among associate professors nine Mormon chapels are bombed in South America (these are four have degrees from BYU and only one from elsewhere. And of recent, actual cases), immediate pressure is applied. The pat- the assistant professors, all six have their degrees from BYU. tern is that a single genera], authority will contact a universityThe percentage of home-grown faculty here progresses from administrator, who then contacts the faculty member’s dean64 percent to 90 percent to 100 percent. Another way to put and department chair. BYU administrators are forced to defend this is that only six of twenty-three faculty hired from 198at faculty at meetings with the board of trustees, especially afterthrough 1991 have degrees from schools other than BYU. sensationalized reports in tlhe press. More often than we know, Faculty hired for 1992 change this picture only slightly.~ university officials shield faculty members from pressure from This kind of analysis doesn’t tell you which of the BYU above. And there are surely many instances when board mem- graduates in education or history have been excellent scholars bers bite their tongues when thoroughly provoked. But whenand teachers and which of the graduates of Duke and usc have board members don’t, and when our administration doesn’t actnot been assets to the program. What it does tell you is that as a buffer, a pattern of arb!itrary micromanagement arises thatReligious Education has experienced the kind of inbreeding inhibits research on Mormon topics. We scorn efforts at the that weakens any academic department--they have hired University of Utah to declare Mormonism an uninteresting andteachers rather than teacher-scholars, and they have chosen, to unfruitful research topic, but we produce our own climate inuse their phrase, the "tried and true" former seminary and which faculty know they are safer pursuing topics unrelated toinstitute teachers rather than the products of good graduate what may be most dear to them. And Mormon research at a schools. While other departments increasingly hire qualified Mormon university becomes controversial. faculty, and while students become increasingly brighter, this Although the new "Statement On Academic Freedom at kind of religious inbreeding will lead inevitably to second-rate BYU" argues that acadernic freedom must include thestatus. individual’s freedom "to ask hard questions," it also says that Members of the Religious Education faculty argue that it is faculty behavior or expression must not "seriously and ad-nearly impossible to find candidates with degrees from other versely affect the University mission or the Church." Whatschools who teach well and who fit their standards of ortho- behavior or expression might "seriously and adversely affectdoxy. Perhaps their standards are too timid. I know of one BYU’s mission or the Church"? Who knows? We have enough faithful LDS candidate with extraordinary credentials in both shocking examples of arbitrary judgments during the Wilkin-teaching and scholarship whom they chose not to hire because son years to cause unease. Historically, the efforts to preventhe did not fit the unctuous seminary teacher mold. The normal deviations from supposed political and doctrinal purity haveprocedure for any academic department, designed to make adversely affected BYU and the Church more than might have creative risk-taking possible, is to bring a young the original "problems." Spy scandals and secret committeesscholar/teacher to campus for two three-year trial periods. On that keep files on members "contradict fundamental Churchthe basis of that trial they are then given tenure or asked to doctrines" more radically than does, for example, a private leave. Religious Education faculty tell me that they could not belief that the Book of Mormon is the word of God but perhaps bear to let someone with a family go and so they must be not an archeological record:, or than do suggestions that we talk absolutely certain when the person is first hired. Those are more openly about out Mother in Heaven. Enforced difficult decisions for any department, of course, and the better "goodness" is infinitely more destructive than unorthodoxy--the initial hire, the less pain later; but good departments are it is personally destructive and also inhibits scholars who givebuilt only with hard decisions. CES employees are a comfort- form to our history and illuminate our present circumstances.able fit in one way, for already they have their proven loyalty Like the problem of doing research on Mormon topics, the to the Church. They have not, however, shown that they are gulf opening between teachers of religion and the rest of thescholars or that they are suited to a university academic depart- faculty is crucial to our idea of a Mormon university. I’ll focusment. on one example. The pattern of hiring in Religious Education One solution to the pressure exerted on a relatively small indicates an increasing preference for candidates with 13YU religion faculty by the thousands of students required to take Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s and Church Education System (CES) fac- 1 religion classes is to borrow faculty from other departments to ulty. In the department of ancient scriptures, only three fullteach religion classes. This arrangement has been used professors have their final degree from BYU, while nine havefruitfully for as long as I can remember; but it has been recently degrees from other universities. Of the associate professors,curtailed somewhat by Religious Education policy. Hal Miller,

PAGE 16 SEPTEMBER 1992 S U N S T O N E dean of Honors and General Education, professor and professor, and that we be recommends reversal of this policy in a careful with distinctions between LDS and recent memo, reasoning as follows: non-LDS faculty. But some excitable faculty By involving those outside Religious member with access to this general au- Education, students can be alerted thority board member reported that we to the fact that the Gospel is what is were all going to hell in a handbasket and most important here, that we are the board member, already disposed to (nearly) all about the business of believe the worst, all-too-easily fit this into pursuing it, of plumbing its depths, his picture of a university spinning out of of savoring its inexhaustible rich- control. ness, of encountering its rnatchless BYU administrators’ biggest headache, spirituality. Most important is the one administrator says, are ill-informed, message that we are in this together, biased end runs to members of the board so we teach and learn the Gospel of trustees. I suspect that the board of with one another. There is no corner trustees sees itself as enormously patient. of purchase on that effort. Moreover, But when complaints by members of the it may alert students to the diversity John Birch Society to a trustee about a of methods by which the gospel may faculty member’s lecture on the need for a be effectually apprehended and the Spirit invited. new ecological world order can produce a request by a board For BYU to be a healthy, Mormon ,university, Religious Edu-member for a faculty member to be reprimanded, as recently cation faculty and other faculty must be united in hiring andhappened, something is amiss. retaining only teachers and scholars of the academic, spiritual, Apparent distrust among some trustees has led to attempts and moral first rank (for those three are intimately related). Asto further control Church employees. The statement on sym- a friend of mine is fond of quoting: "First-rate faculty hireposia is one such action. And this spring, when BYU faculty first-rate faculty. Second-rate faculty hire third-rate faculty." received their 1992-93 contracts, they contained a new para- graph: I.T has been almost a year since the First Presidency’s Brigham Young University is a private university. It statement suggesting that Church members not take part in has unique goals and aspirations that arise from the symposia like Sunstone’s. Many of us on campus saw this as an mission of its sponsoring institution, The Church of order to mind our own academic business in chemistry and Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By accepting a con- law and humanities and to quit thinking and talking about tract of employment here, faculty members choose to Mormon topics. Faculty in the sociology department drafted a accept, support and participate in the University’s letter to Rex Lee protesting the statement and asking for religiously oriented educational mission, to observe clarification.3 At about the same time an assistant professor and support the behavior standards of the University, who had read a paper at the last symposium was called in by including the Honor Code and Dress and Grooming his ecclesiastic leaders in what seemed an attempt to intimidate Standards, and to further the University’s objectives him. Several departments sent letters or delegations to Rex Lee by being role models for a life that combines the quest in support of the sociology departmentg positions and argued for intellectual rigor with the quest for spiritual values against arbitrary limitations of academic freedom. A persistent and personal character. Faculty who are members of rumor was heard and often denied that the administration had BYU’s sponsoring Church also accept the spiritual and been given a hit list of six faculty members whose employment temporal expectations of wholehearted Church mem- was to be terminated. A faculty member named as co-editor of bership. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought received abusive anon- There is nothing particularly obnoxious in the paragraph (ex- ymous phone calls and was attacked in the press. When BYU’s cept, perhaps, for the morally misleading dress and grooming academic vice president resigned rumors flew. Members of thestandards), for most of us came to BYU precisely to "further the board of trustees told faculty members privately that tensionUniversity’s objectives." But the sudden, unannounced, and between the board and BYU faculty had never been as high. unexplained change in our contracts indicates that someone One specific example in its absurdity shows just how baddoesn’t trust us and finds it necessary to remind us of the letter things are. Recently, a member of the board of trustees mistak- of the law. In the context of such newly exerted control, the enly and in private expressed contempt for a faculty whosedocument on academic freedom and competency reads like a elected advisory committee had recommended that we no legal document making it easier to fire unruly faculty. In all longer call one another brother and sister at BYU. There was no fairness, it may simply be that the current tensions and para- such recommendation; the faculty committee wrote a draft, noias on campus cause it to be read this way, for there is much subsequently tabled, that recommended that we should not language in the document defending faculty rights to free refer to male faculty as professor and women faculty as sister,expression. that we should instead refer to them as brother and sister or

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SO much for my litany of complaint. Every university hashas been established to the end that all pure knowledge must its problems. I’m grateful ours don’t include racially segregatedbe gained by our people, handed down to our posterity, and and alcoholic fraternities or a provost whose vision of a univer-given to all men. We charge our teachers to give constant sity doesn’t include a library--two of Vanderbilt’s most press-stimulation to budding young scientists and scholars in all ing problems when I left there. But BYU’S problems concern mefields and to urge them to push further and further into the deeply. I am also aware that I can’t see all sides of any of these realms of the unknown.’’5 issues. Caveat lector. This was the experience I had as a student at BYU. I felt I was Many unsavory things at BYU (sexist hiring practices, at- "urged to push further and further" into science and philoso- tempts to disallow certain non-traditional viewpoints, harass-phy of every kind, fearlessly, certain that I would never face an ment and backstabbing in the name of orthodoxy) involveunbridgeable dilemma. That happened because my mentors individuals and departments within the university who inflictwere simultaneously scholars and faithful Mormons. Today’s wounds on themselves and others despite concerted actions students have similar experiences, I think, with a new genera- and policies of the administration and board of trustees. I saytion of faithful scholars. despite, and I have mentio~q.ed just how good Church support But after quoting Harold B. Lee the chapter continues with of BYU is, but I also want to say because of. Our collectivewhat I see as its main topic: "Unfortunately, some of the stupidities aren’t happening in a vacuum. While supportingpractitioners of study and reason are contemptuous of or education with economic gusto, some of our leaders say and hostile toward religion and revelation.’’~ Although the chapter do things that make education nearly impossible. There is areturns several times to the argument that "the view of religion virulent strain of anti-intellectualism in the Church. This ¯..is includes the methods of reason and the truths determined nothing new. Joseph Fielding Smith, for example, wrote in hisby them’’r and although there is a section on how revelation journal in late December 1938: "The more I see of educated needs reason, the chapter emphasizes the negative. It warns men, I mean those who are trained in the doctrines andthat while there may be "nothing wrong" with reasoning about philosophies of men now taught in the world, the less regardthe principles of the gospel in joumals and symposia, there is I have for them. Modem theories which are so popular today nothing especially right about that either. It argues that while just do not harmonize wi:th the gospel as revealed to thereligion does not reject reason, "spiritual verities can be proven prophets. ,4 only by spiritual means . . . we comprehend secular truths In my view, the basic and most destructive mode of thispredominantly by study and reason and spiritual truths finally anti-intellectualism is to distinguish between faith and reason,only by revelation.’’~ This text is an attempt to produce a setting the one against the other and the one above the other. balanced discussion of reason and revelation; but splitting the And its purveyors are, among others, members of BYU’s board two so drastically, and asserting the primacy of one over the of trustees. I don’t think they mean to be anti-intellectual; oftenother while spending almost half the chapter warning against in their writings and talks they indicate they not only supportreason and professors and universities, has the net effect of thought and education, but they link them integrally to faith.fostering anti-intellectualism. These are, in fact, our spiritual leaders; and as an academic Along with the people in my ward who pick up on this kind vulnerable to the pride they warn against I am thankful forof negative portrayal and justify their own lack of intellectual their reminders that, in the end, I am not as smart as I think Icuriosity, some professors at BYU find it comforting to assert "us am. The anti-intellectualism I am talking about, however, is(spiritual giants) v. them (academic pygmies)." Neil Flinders, the message heard and used by people at BYU and elsewhere for example, uses Elder Neal Maxwell’s division between the who disdain the intellect and suppose they can live by what"tongue" of secular language and the "mother tongue of faith" they think is faith. to lament that "academic practice at BYU is clearly dominated I will give examples of tlqLis anti-intellectualism from severalby contemporary academic norms’’9 and to ask why we don’t recent statements by current members of our board of trustees. "see the secular domain as foreign to the spiritual domain."~° These are men I admire immensely, each of whom has movedBYU Provost Bruce Hafen’s distinction between the passports me spiritually sometime in :my life; I would not now be at BYUMormon academics have earned to Athens and their citizen- or in the Church if I had not. felt the spirit in their words. Whatship that must remain in Jerusalem~ unwittingly feeds the follows will be seen by some as "contradicting or opposing,same unproductive fires.~2 And when Elder Maxwell asserted rather than analyzing or discussing, fundamental Church doc-at the 1992 BYU Education Week that a few modern individu- trine or policy" or "deliberately attacking or deriding theals seem to favor a life of the mind over a life of devotion, that Church or its general leaders"--to quote the document on "exciting exploration is preferred by them to plodding imple- academic freedom. I wish that the readers who see it that way mentation," anti-intellectual dogmatists nodded knowingly.~3 would recognize the damage to our leaders, damage to the Two influential talks in the last decade by Elder Boyd Church, and damage to our own souls caused by assumptions Packer, another board member, have likewise served to divide of infallibility and by quashing attempts at discussion. the spirit and the mind and to denigrate reason while praising Elder Dallin Oaks quotes President Harold B. Lee at the it. One talk mentions blending, wedding, and mixing the spirit beginning of his discussion of religion and academia in hisand mind: "The fusion of reason and revelation will produce book, The Lord’s Way: "The educational system of the Churchmen and woman of imperishable worth..... The combining of

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reason and revelation is the test of mortal this way: ’The mantle is far, far greater than life!’’14 Elder Packer describes here some of the intellect.’" my most meaningful experiences. But the The audience was to conclude from this speech leaves these thoughts behind and that professors don’t understand things of identifies the following as its crux: "Now the spirit, that academics are forced to pro- listen carefully! It is crucial that you under- duce spiritually sterile work, and that truly stand what I tell you now. There is danger! wise men and women will retreat from aca- Church-sponsored universities are an en- demia. The example was so foreign to my dangered species--nearly extinct now." The experience that I went looking for the dis- talk quotes a passage from the recent debate sertation mentioned in the talk. It turned on the secularization of church-sponsored out to be typical of so many dissertations colleges that asserts that "the schools that written for weak departments. "The purpose lost, or are losing, their sense of religious of this study," the author wrote, "is to mea- purpose, sincerely sought nothing more sure the counseling attitudes of bishops and than a greater measure of ’excellence.’ . . . seminary instructors of The Church of Jesus The language of academic excellence is pow- Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to compare erfully seductive." 15 The talk further asserts their counseling attitudes with various mea- that BYU can only be kept "in faith with the sures of activity in their wards and class founders" if the rooms." The startling conclusions were that "There is a rela- prerogatives of this unique board of trustees are nei- tionship between counseling attitudes of bishops and their ther diluted nor ignored .... Theirs, and theirs alone, effectiveness as bishops .... Also the amount of training re- is the right to establish policies and set standards ceived in counseling is positively related to counseling under which administrators, faculties, and students attitudes.’’is are to function--standards of both conduct and of This example is bogus. The dissertation is clearly a weak excellence .... History confirms that the university piece of work done for a weak department. To use it as the key environment always favors reason, and the workings example in a talk pitting academia against spirituality is unfair. of the spirit are made to feel uncomfortable. I know of Contrast the anti-intellectual spirit of that example with this no examples to the contrary. passage from Joseph Smith’s letter to Isaac Galland, 22 March Why the defensiveness? Why the distrust? Why the need to 1839: "the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion assert exclusive control? Why the absolute division betweenis, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every the faithful board of trustees and the unfaithful university--theitem of truth, without limitation or without being circum- very university that is and can be an "example to thescribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of contrary"?]6 men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is I find a clue in attitudes expressed in an earlier talk by Elderclearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest Packer. "It is an easy thing," he states, "for a man with extensivedegree of evidence of the same.’’19 academic training to measure the Church using the principles Academia, at its worst, is indeed sterile, mind-numbing, he has been taught in his professional training as his standard.and spiritually destructive. So is religion at its worst. We don’t In my mind it ought to be the other way around. A member ofchoose to be academics or practitioners of a faith because of the Church ought always, particularly if he is pursuing exten- how bad they can be, but rather because of the power they give sive academic studies, to judge the professions of man against "lr us to live good and productive lives. the revealed word of the Lord. And why shouldn’t academics My recurring question is why, with our extraordinary theo- "measure the Church using academic principles"? Because, thelogical background in which all truth is meant to be circum- talk asserts, academics will vitiate religion and true religiousscribed into one great whole, we insist on fearfully dividing scholarship whenever possible. The talk gives as an example ainstead of fearlessly circumscribing? Why the weak anecdotes friend, a CES employee who went East to do a doctorate in about academic misfits instead of the academic and spiritual counseling and guidance. He chose as his dissertation topic,triumphs like Steven Epperson’s Mormon History Association "The Ward Bishop as Counselor." He was forced by his profes- prize-winning book on Mormons and Jews in the nineteenth sors to delete references to power of discernment and revela- century?2° Epperson wrote his dissertation at Temple Univer- tion. If he would do so, he was promised, he would become sity in Philadelphia. His non-Mormon dissertation committee "an authority in the field, his dissertation would be publishedwas thrilled by the project and supported him while learning and his reputation established." In the end he both compro- from his religious commitment. Or why not the example of mised and didn’t compromise, and the dissertation becameSusan Taber’s oral history of her Delaware ward, a study neither the inspired document it might have nor the academicacademic readers of the University of Illinois Press found success promised by his professors. The writer, the talk re- stimulating and academically challenging?21 Why not choose, ports, returned to the modest income and to the relative as an example of scholarship growing out of faith, Richard obscurity of the CE System. "He summed up his experienceBushman’s fine history of Joseph Smith’s early years that helped

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 19 S U N S T O N E him move into a distinguished chair at Columbia University?22Joseph bought a book in which to record his thoughts. On the Or Hugh Nibley’s massive set of writings on Church-relatedflyleaf he wrote his name and then the phrase: "Record Book subjects?23 Or Paul Cox’s brilliant work in Pacific rain forests?24Baught for to note all the minute circumstances that comes Or Lamond Tullis’s Latin-America studies?25 Or Royal under my observation.’’~ These are the misspelled and in- Skousen’s work on Book of Mormon manuscripts?> Or Fred tensely meant words of a man of great capacity hungry for Geddicks’s book on religion and law?2r Or Alan Bergin’s psy-knowledge. The following years, between 1832 and 1836, chology?~8 Or Wilford Griggs’s Egyptian archeology?> Or Lau-were a time of intense "getting wisdom" of the broadest kind. rel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Pri7e work in women’s history?3°Attending class daily in the "Elders School" with its lectures on In these "Mormon scholars’ " work and lives there is nomedicine, grammar, Egyptian artifacts, and finally Hebrew, whining supposition that it’s us vs. them, that if the so-calledJoseph filled his diary with entries like the one on 3 November secular academic world were just spiritually minded they1835 in which he links study and the temple : "I would award us all Guggenheim fellowships and Nobel prizes.then went to assist in organizing the Elders School called to (Note that although Ulrich’s women, Cox’s rain forests, andorder and I made some remarks upon the object of this School, some of the other subjects; are not Mormon, the work and and the great necessity there is of our rightly improving our conclusions fit squarely into Joseph Smith’s anti-sectarian vi-time and reigning up our minds to a sense of the great object sion of the truths we seek.) that lies before us, viz, that glorious endowment that God has But the trustees whose texts I have described give primarilyin store for the faithful.’,> A few months later Joseph made the negative examples and warn mainly of the seductive power offollowing entry: reason over faith. Again I ask, why do they and so many others Wednesday the 17th [February 1836] attend[ed] the defend faith over reason in what our theology teaches is a false school and read and translated with my class as usual, dichotomy? Let me give several examples to argue that there and my soul delights in reading the word of the Lord should be no split between the two. in the original, and I am determined to pursue the Hugh Nibley, in his now classic "Zeal Without Knowledge," study of languages untill I shall become master of quotes Joseph Smith: " ’The: things of God are of deep import; them, if I am permitted to live long enough, at any and time and experience, and careful and ponderous and rate so long as I do live I am determined to make this solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if my object, and with the blessing of God I shall succed thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the to my sattisfaction,--this evening Elder Coe called to utmost heavens.’ " Nibley~ interpretation: "No shortcuts or make some arangements about the Egyptian records easy lessons here! Note well that the Prophet makes no distinc- and the mummies)5 tion between things of the spirit and things of the intellect.’’3~ One month later (27 March)Joseph dedicated the Kirtland Many "Mormon scholars" will tell you that the process ofTemple. His dedicatory prayer is full of his enthusiasm for study and inspiration is the same whether the subject is phys-learning, and he quotes from the aforementioned revelation ics, art history, a talk for ward conference, psychology, or that will become section 88. The temple will be a place where choosing counselors for a Relief Society presidency. BYU pro- "the Son of Man might have a place to manifest himself to his fessor A. LeGrand Richards, for instance, writes that "In mypeople." And what will allow that to happen?--"Seek learning; own life, I can’t draw a specific line between those experienceseven by stud>> and also by faith, Organize yourselves; prepare which have been ’religious’ and those which have beenevery needful thing, and establish a house, even a house of ’secular’. ,,32 prayer, a house [of] fasting, a house of faith, a house of When we distinguish between religious experience andlearning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God."~ intellectual experience (or religious experience and mechani-The extraordinary outpourings of knowledge through the en- cal experience, for that mau.er), we disregard the verses in thedowment are only possible in minds prepared through intense that describe the light of Christ: "Andstudy and prayer. the light which shineth, which giveth you light, is through himThe temple, as we use it today, is no longer a place where who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light thatwe can receive instruction in Hebrew grammar or the latest quickeneth your understandings; Which light proceedethmedical discoveries--although it has often been the locus forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space--where a scholar’s mind is set free to make discoveries, like John The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things,Widtsoe’s in organic chemistry or my bishop’s in civil engineer- which is the law by which all things are governed, even theing. But the temple’s shift in function need not lessen the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the marriage of religion and thought. With this shift, Church bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things" universities become, in the best and broadest sense, houses of 88:11-13). All experience of life and light, as I interpret this, islearning. The fact that meetings of student wards are held in experience of God. science lecture halls and English classrooms connects religion The following episodes from The Personal Writings of Joseph and thought physically and symbolically in ways our students Smith, made accessible by Dean Jessee’s meticulous scholarlycannot misunderstand. work, have had a profound effect on how I view faith and Finally, President Joseph E Smith says it as well as anyone reason. Just one month before receiving the above revelationhas: "With God all things are spiritual. There is nothing tern-

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poral with him at all, and there ought to Methodist church, financed initially by be no distinction with us in regard to Cornelius Vanderbilt. A Methodist these matters. Our earthly or temporal bishop, Holland McTyeire, led the univer- existence is merely a continuance of that sity until 1889. During the next twenty- which is spiritual."3r five years Vanderbilt moved away from the Methodist church, becoming fully in- MY reuniting of reason and faith is dependent in 1914. Burtchael identifies not simply a theological game. Separating several related causes for the break. Here the two has grave consequences. are the ones that strike me as most rele- In the pages of the journal First Things vant to our situation: there has been a recent flurry of articles 1. "There was a period of great intellectual about the secularization of American uni- turbulence, when fresh findings and versities. Our university administration, methods and disciplines raised fearful the authors of the new document on aca- philosophical challenges to theology. demic freedom, and members of our Spokesmen for the church’s concerns, by board of trustees have quoted from these a compound of incapacity and animosity, at some length. One supposition of sev- exacerbated the apparent hostility be- eral of the articles is that "the real danger tween the church and rigorous scholar- comes from a much larger group of per- ship." I have described moments in our sons who believe that [church universi- own recent BYU history when these con- ties] can strive for ever-higher standards ditions were met precisely of academic excellence--and use the 2. "There was a transfer of loyalty same criteria of excellence by" which the from the church to the ’academic guild,’ best secular universities in the land are judged to be excel- especially on the part of the faculty." Why? Burtchael asks. lent.’’3s This makes no sense to me. What is wrong with Because the "angry General Conference... had narrowed "secular" standards of academic excellence? Where are the its view of what it meant to be Methodist to things like a conflicts between academic excellence and the Mormon theol- religious test for all faculty and disciplinary control over ogy I have just outlined? The author of the article supposes that students. Absent any larger vision of Christian education, there is a fundamental difference and thus admits the rea- this program was unrelievedly negative, and assured the son!faith distinction that is at the root of all this evil. Imagine educational reformers that the church had no stomach for Joseph Smith saying that "If there is anything virtuous, lovely, ambitious scholarship." I have been trying to show that or of good report or praiseworthy (as long as academics don’t while not unrelievedly so, much of our current vision of think it is excellent) we seek after these things." what it means to be Mormon at a Mormon university is Many American colleges founded by religious groups have negative and that we fear ambitious scholarship. become secular, and our board and administration are worried "There was a progressive devolution of church-identifiers: that we might follow a similar path. Alan Keele, former associ- . first from Methodist to generically Christian, then to gener- ate dean of General Education and Honors, argues that the ically religious, then to flatly secular." Why? Burtchaelg analogy is wrong-headed: answer is because "an effective bond to the Methodist Joseph Smith and Brigham Young would, I fear, roll Church instinctively evoked references to bigotry, exclu- over in their respective graves at the very suggestion sion, narrowness, sectarianism, and selfishness." There is no that the founding of a school in Zion might be com- acknowledgment of "any intrinsic benefit for the mind in parable in any way to the founding of what they Methodism . . . and no exploration of the [more general would have called ’sectarian’ colleges. The ~_t)s theo- Christian] faith which would suggest that it was illumina- logical imperative for learning.., with its grand vi- tive of the mind." sion of the compatibility of all truth, is so unlike the We are similarly at risk here--the word "Mormon" can typical ’sectarian’ view that it has in fact become a and does evoke bigotry, exclusion, narrowness, and sectar- focal point of anti-Mormon rhetoric down to our own 39 ianism. In John Gardner’s 1982 novel Mickelsson’s Ghosts, time. for example, Mormons are described as a "sea of drab faces, Fears that 13YW will become secular should be balanced by fears dutiful, bent-backed, hurrying obediently, meekly across an that it will become sectarian like Liberty Baptist or Bob Jones endless murky plain . . . timidly smiling beasts, im- University--and the document on academic freedom should aginationless . . . family people, unusually successful in include this in its language. business and agriculture, non-drinkers, non-smokers . . . One First Things article on the subject is especially helpful no real fault but dullness.’’< Or in Tony Kushner’s 1992 to us in our situation. In "The Decline and Fall of the Christian ’’4° play, Angels in America, a Mormon woman describes Salt College, James Burtchael first reviews the history of Lake City as a hard place, "baked dry. Abundant energy; not Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt was founded in 1875 by the much intelligence. That’s a combination that can wear a

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body out.’’42 Edward Abbey sees us similarly in Desertleaders should not let a few differences between them and BYU Solitaire,‘43 as does John Le Carte in The Russia House2‘4 faculty get in the way of a century-long effort to build a Burtchael’s point is that when a church begins to harp onMormon university. We have in our recent history many exam- the faith!reason distinctiLon, denigrating its supposed aca-ples of the kind of vision that will make us whole. Hugh B. demic enemy, those who know the value of reason willBrown’s 1969 talk at BYU, for example, developed a kind of abandon ship. Although our theology radically affirms in-aggressive pro-intellectualism: "Preserve, then, the freedom of telligence as the glory of God, our actual practice makes usyour mind in education and in religion, and be unafraid to imaginationless and intellectually dull. Non-Mormon writ-express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine ers see this, and so do increasing numbers of faithfulevery proposition. We are not so much concerned with Church members. whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are 4. Most of Vanderbih’s second-generation faculty were loyal tothat you shall have thoughts."‘4s the church as well as being academics, Burtchael writes, yet Elder Marlin Jensen has quoted the following inspiring this was the group that laid the groundwork for the later, passage from a letter by J. Golden Kimball, a statement that complete secularization of the university. This is, I think,sums up my view of BYU: "Elder Maeser visited Bear Lake Stake the present situation at ~YU. Most of the faculty are loyal toin the interest of the Brigham Young Academy, and filled an the Church as well as being academics. There are some, of appointment at Meadowville, Rich County, Utah, in 1881. The course, who aren’t loyal to the Church and there are some meeting was held in a log school house. Language cannot who aren’t academics. But if we and our board of trusteesexplain the impression made. The spirit and personality of the continue to proceed from a foundation of fear, we too willman burned into my soul and awakened me to a realizing create either a sectarian or a secular university. sense of what life and religion mean--I drank in his words, as I was an hungered. I repented in sack cloth and ashes--no IF we aggressively asserted the connections between rea- power could prevent me from attending Brigham Young Acad- son and faith on Joseph Smith’s (and Brigham Young’s and Johnemy. My brother, Elias, and I together with our mother went Taylor’s and Joseph E Smith’s) model, sectarianism and secu-to Provo at great cost and sacrifice, and all who know us can larization would be rendered impotent. In 1972 as president look back to 1881 and ascertain just ’what Dr. Maeser did for of BYU, Dallin Oaks argued similarly in a discussion of BYU’sme. , ,,’49 connection with Jim Jensen’s work with dinosaurs: "Jensen In addition to the testimony of the powerful effects of an points out.., that the bones are there and cannot really be educator and an education, two things stand out in this pas- ignored by a major university that is almost literally sitting onsage: the fact that Karl Maeser is referred to both as Elder and top of them." Oaks suggested that the board "give controlledDr., and Kimball’s phrase combining life and religion--"he but expanding support to research in Rocky Mountain paleon- awakened me to a reali7ing sense of what life and religion tology and pursue the private funding of a museum to exhibitmean." Life and religion are one and the same. We don’t need findings, fin so doing] ... we demonstrate that the church hastwo universities at BYU. nothing to fear from any legitimate research; in fact, the church university fosters it.’’‘45 ADDENDUM What keeps us from fulfilling this vision? Distrust, I think, IN what may prove to be a landmark BYU devotional and fear. Again I quote then President Oaks: "While church authorities know we have testimonies, they question our judg-address, President Gordon B. Hinckley spoke to faculty and ment and sensitivity.... We must not have anything done atstudents on 13 October 1992 about his expansive vision of the l~gu or said publicly by BYU teachers and administrators thatuniversity. Statements like the following take the edge off some can be misinterpreted ..... It doesn’t matter that it couldn’tof the tensions described above: reasonably be so used, or that it was distorted. We must not I am confident that never in the history of this give Occasion for retaliation or give ammunition to our ene- institution has there been a faculty better qualified mies.’’~ Bruce Hafen reiterated this advice to walk carefully in professionally nor one more loyal and dedicated to his most recent address to B~u faculty and staff: "Ira few among the standards of its sponoring institution. us create enough reason for doubt about the rest of us, that can This institution.., is a continuing experiment on erode our support among Church members and Church lead- a great premise, that a large and complex university ers enough to mortally wound our ability to pursue freely the can be first-class academically while nurturing an dream of a great university in Zion." As I read these state- environment of faith in God. ments, both of these university leaders imply that some pow- "Trust is what makes an army work, and trust erful members of our board of trustees do not understand how comes from the top down." (Gene Smith, published generally faithful the BYU faculty is, nor do they share our in condensed form by Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, "dream of a great university in Zion."~r Vol. IV, page 299.) This is not a climate in which faithful scholarship will May God bless you my beloved associates, both flourish. Realistically, pragmatically, President Oaks and Pro- young and old, in this great undertaking of teaching vost Hafen are surely right. But idealistically, divinely inspired and learning, of trust and accountability.

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Press, 1993). I am honored and grateful to be called President Hinckley’s 22. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Begnnnings of Mormonism (Urbana and associate; he inspires me to help build this university for the Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984). greater glory of God. ~ 23. Hugh Nibley, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986 24. Paul Cox, Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduction to Polynesian Ethnobotany NOTES (Portland, OR.: Dioscorides Press, 1991). 25. Lamond Tullis, Handbook of Research on the Illicit Drug Traffic: Socioeconomic and Po- 1. Information from the uY~ General Catalogue, 1992-1993. litical Consequences (New York: Greenwood, 1991). 2. No other department on campus even approaches these percentages of hiring fac- 26. Royal Skousen, a professor of English at BYU, is working on a critical edition of the ulty with ~w degrees. 3. "Church Issues Statement on ’Symposia,’ " SUNSSONE 15 (September 1991): 58-5; Book of Mormon. 27. Frederick Mark Gedicks and Roger Hendrix, Choosing the Dream: The Future of Reli- "B~ Memo Highlights Academic Freedom Issue," SUNSTONE 16 (February 1992): 62-66. 4. Joseph Fielding Smith, quoted in Gary James Bergera and Ronald Priddis, Brigham gion in American Public Life (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). Young University (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1985), 62. 28. Alan Bergin, Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change (New York: Wiley, 5. Dallin Oaks, The Lord’s Way (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1991), 45-46. 1986). 6. Oaks, 46. 29. Wilford C. Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity (Leiden; New York: E. J. Brfll, 1990). 7. Oaks, 49. 30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale:The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her 8. Oaks, 64. Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 9. Neff Flinders, "Our Celestial Agenda," in Laying the Foundations: A Symposium Initi- 31. Hugh Nibley, "Zeal Without Knowledge," Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless ated by the Moral Character and Agency Education Research Group and Sponsored by the College (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978), 261-78. of Education (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University), 5. 32. A. LeGrand Richards,"God or Mammon: Not Both/And, But Either/Or" in Laying the 10. Flinders, 8. Foundations, 95. 11. Bruce Hafen, talk given at BW, reported in Y News, 13 September 1991. 33 Smith, Personal Writings, 15. 12. Bruce Hafen, "The Dream is Ours to Fulfill" (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 34. Smith, Personal Writings, 72. 1992), 15-22. Hafen’s talk to faculty at the beginning of the 1992 school year deftly and 35. Smith, Personal Writings, 161. meaningfully wed reason and faith, and yet still insisted on a hierarchy. 36. Smith, Personal Writings, 176. 13. Neal A. Maxwell. (Not in print that I know of.) This statement was repeated in 37. Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1966), 70. Elder Maxwell’s 1992 October general conference talk. 38. David W. Lutz, "Can Notre Dame Be Saved?" First Things (January 1992): 35. 14. Boyd K. Packer. "I Say Unto You, Be One," B~ 1990-1991 Devotional and Fireside 39. Alan Keele, personal memo. Speeches (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1992), 90. 40. James Burtchael, "The Decline and Fall of the Christian College," First Things (April 15. Packer, "Be One," 88. 1991): 16-38. 16. Packer, "Be One," 88-89. 41. John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1982), 225 ft. 17. Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect," Address to the 42. Tony Kushner, Angels in America (London: Nick Hein, 1992). Fifth Annual cEs Religious Educators’ Symposium, 1981, also in Let Not Your Heart Be Trou- 43. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 235 ft. bled (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1991), 101-22. 44. John le Carte, The Russia House (New York: Knopf, 1989), 176. 18. "Counseling Attitudes of Bishops and Seminary Instructors of the Church of Jesus 45. Bergera and Priddis, 163. Christ of Latter-day Saints," (Boston: Boston University School of Education, 1961.) 46. Bergera and Priddis, 223. 19. Joseph Smith. The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee (Salt Lake 47. Hafen, "The Dream," 22. City: Deseret Book, 1984), 415. 48. Bergera and Priddis, 71. 20. Steven C. Epperson, Mormons and Jews (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993). 49. J. Golden Kimball, quoted by Elder Marlin Jensen in an unpublished talk as hon- 21. Susan Taber, Mormon Lives: A Year in the Elkton Ward (Urbana: University of Illinois ored alumnus of the College of Humanities, October 1991.

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SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 23 S U N S T O N E

First Place, 1990 Brookie & D.K. Brown Memorial Fiction Contest BIRTH OF THE BLUES

By Kristen Rogers

WHE FIRST AFTERNOON, right after the registration tions and snickers. I am wondering why everything has to and introductory meetings, they have a trip planned to Grace- grow senile. Why decent things die. land. It’s sort of an ice-breaker. Something to show the sales Back at the ticket office we meander through endless reps that Memphis is good for something. souvenir shops. We ride out there on a bus. It’s an hour’s drive. August has I’m handling the Elvis mugs one by one when August calls the window, so I read my paperback. out, "Hey, Nora!" I look over. He holds up a pair of slippers "Get your nose out of that book, Nora," he says. "Don’t you with Elvis’s head on the toes. I try to smile, but when he want to see what Tennessee looks like?" I can’t think of a reasondecides to buy them for Callie, I’m not amused. why I should. "She doesn’t want a stupid thing like that," I say. I glance out the window. Tennessee, from what I can tell, is "She does too. She wants them more than anything in the whitehot and shabby. I return to my book. The heroine has just world." discovered that she loves the man she despises. They are about That night the sales reps go dancing and barhopping. I don’t to fall into each other’s arms for the first time, about to fulfilldance and I don’t drink. August goes along for the fun of it. I the passion that has been relentlessly building for the last 213myself have a low tolerance for fun, so I stay in the hotel room pages. I try not to listen to the snuffling of August’s nose, whichand watch Dirty Harry on the pay channel. is stuffed up with hay fever. He comes back in a great mood and tries to wake me up, At the ticket office they put us into a shuttle van and dropbut I pretend I’m asleep. After he rolls over I lie awake and us off at the front door. We step into a room that is a livingthink about how hard it is to love a man who hums in his sleep. monument to the worst of the sixties and seventies. The guide Today August has meetings in the morning and most of the pretends to tell us the deepest secrets of the Presley lives. I lookafternoon. He thinks I should get out and explore Memphis, around. but I’m afraid to go out in the heat. I call up August’s mother "Sick," I mutter under my breath. "Totally sick." so I can talk to Callie. "What?" says August. "She’s fine. Don’t you worry, she’s just fine," Mother Bennett "This place looks like vomit," I say. says. This trip was her idea. She insisted on paying my fare. "It He looks at me like I’m demented. "That’s the whole point," will be lovely," she says. "It will be so good for both of you to he says. get away." She worries a lot about the state of our marriage. We are herded through the rooms. August is enjoying "But Callie misses me, doesn’t she?" I say. himself. His mother named ihim Augustus. He was the ninth of "Well, no, she’s fine really. We’ve been having a wonderful ten children; I give her the benefit of the doubt--she was time." undoubtedly a bit wacko by the time he came along. Everyone She puts Callie on the phone, and I tell her Mommy misses but me calls him Gus; the name August was a private jokeher and is sending her a big kiss over the telephone wires. She between us, once. In the jungle room, he nudges me and sayssounds happy, too happy. he thinks we should decorate our bedroom just like this. He "Don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy will be home very soon," sounds hopeful, like maybe I’ll think he’s funny. There’s a littleI tell her, slowly, so she’ll understand. museum in the basement, where they’ve saved the sequined In the afternoon I doze off, but in the middle of a dream and fringed costumes. I have seen film clips of the time whenabout a man who wears leather pants and rattlesnake boots I Elvis needed no costume. hear the lock click and August comes in, blowing his nose. I remember that Lisa Marie has had Elvis’s grandchild and. "Come on," he says loudly. "We’re getting out of here." that people are still seeing him at K-Marts and demolition "Go away," I mumble. "It’s hot out there. We’ll get mugged. derbies. But the guide says tlhat Elvis died on the toilet, and inThere’s a lot of racial tension these days. Besides, I’ve had a the backyard is the family cemetery. August reads the inscrip-headache ever since I got up." He sits on the bed and looks at me strangely. "What is it with you? You’re as much fun as a sack of potatoes." KRISTEN ROGER5 is a freelance writer living in Park City, Utah. I sit up very fast. "Potatoes?" I yell. "Look who’s talking!"

PAGE 24 SEPTEMBER 1992 5 U N 5 T O N E

"’Dear God, let me live ’til I see my baby girl grown up.’ You make that prayer and God’s gonna do It! God’s gonna let you live."

And then I can’t think of anything else to say to the man who "Why is everything so tacky?" I say, talking to the heavens, took the rattlesnake cowboy out of my life. I suppose. "What is this, the capital of schlock?" August wipes He is taking off his shoes. He hurls them one at a timethe sweat from his forehead. against the wall. "Okay. Fine. We’ll stay in the room till we rot." The few blocks we have walked seem like a mile. "Look," He lies back on the bed with his hands behind his head. says August. "Beale Street." I look at the street sign. I feel a surge of energy. "No," I say. "You’ll stay in the room "So what?" I say. until you rot. I’m sick up to here with this place." I try to "It’s famous," he says. "The blues were born here. The believe I’m angry. I take a few swipes at my hair with the brushbrochure said so." and slash some lipstick onto my mouth. I’m fully aware that "Swell," I say. So we walk down Beale Street and come to I’m being irrational, but rationality doesn’t seem particularlywhere W. C. Handy stands holding his horn, staring across the important. street with his round bronze face. The blacks sprawling across He doesn’t catch up with me until I’m leaving the lobby. the benches in the park pay him no mind. They don’t look up "Come on, Nora." It sounds a little like begging, a little likewhen August walks all around him, peering at the inscriptions. whining. "Let’s have a good time. We’re on vacation, for crying "Good news. His house is just down the street," he says, out loud." I don’t answer, but I let him follow me. We stepcoming back to me. outside and my clothes are suddenly soaked with sweat. I head "I’m going to melt, it’s so hot," I say. We walk on, stopping for the shady side of the street. I have never seen so many in front of a bar and grill plastered with posters of events that blacks in one place before, and I feel pale in an unhealthy sortwere and events that will be. Down low is a photo of the owner of way, but I don’t say any of this to August. We are weavingshaking hands with Lyndon B. Johnson. The smell of barbecu- down this miserable little street, looking disinterestedly in theing fills the air. I’m getting hungry. The next store has a store windows. windowful of stuff from the Fifties: outdated dresses, old boxes

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 25 S U N S T O N E

of laundry soap, lard buckets, a Hoover. Rooster waves his hand. "This my second time alive, you We look these items over carefully, as though we are plann- see. You don’t understand that. God brought me back to life. I ing a purchase. While we are looking the door opens and an didn’t have a thing to do with it." Rooster’s pants sag around old man steps out. his waist. Blue-striped suspenders hold them up. He lays his "How y’all doin today?" he says, tipping his straw hat so thathand on August’s shoulder and leaves it there. we can see his grizzled hair. The cheer in his voice puts a sour August grins at Rooster. "You mean to say God raised you taste in my mouth. "How y’all like Beale Street?" from the dead?" His voice sounds full of reverence, but I know I glance over at August, who is caught off guard. "We like itbetter. fine," I say. The heat is wearing down my reflexes. "Yes, sir, He surely did." "Y’all look like nice folksy" he says and sticks out his hand. "When did that happen, Rooster?" It feels like well-worn leather. "Proud to meet y’all. I’m Rooster, The bartender sets cool glasses in front of us. He stands and and this the second time I been alive. I was dead, now I’m alivelooks at us for a minute. August drains most of his im- the second time." mediately. I smile politely and look at August to see if he’s smiling. He’s "Told you," says Rooster. "Time don’t mean a thing. Could smiling. He introduces us. of been last year, could of been three hundred years ago. Same "You seen the sights?" says the old man. thing." "We were just going over to see W C. Handy’s house," says He works his tongue over his teeth. August looks back at August. me with that look in his eyes. ’Tll show you Handy’s house. I knew Handy personally. "God raised me," Rooster says. "My folks all dead. He taught Heard him play, right here on Beale Street." Sweat is falling inme to read and write. Taught me to read the Holy Bible." my eyes, but I blink it away. The old man takes my elbow and The bartender looks over and winks. "Rooster telling you all guides me across the street. "Ain’t nobody can tell me nothing,"kinds of stories?" he says. "I seen the seen, heard the heard, done the done, and "Is he in here a lot?" I ask. been the been. Don’t you tell me anything!" "Every morning, every noon, every night," says the boy. He stops suddenly and waves his hand. "Here’s the place." "Ain’t you, Rooster?" It’s a blue house, small, nondescript, uprooted from its true "Rooster’s some character," August says. habitat and plunked down here on Beale Street. August is "Let me see that," the old man says, reaching for August’s grinning. The old man rates right up there with Graceland. napkin, which is stained with a brown ring. "I’m gonna show I don’t like his grin. "I’ve got to get out of this heat," I say toyou what God gonna do for you." He looks over at me and lifts August. his eyebrows. "Come with me," says Rooster, and he takes my arm again "Y’all got children at home?" he asks. and then we are at the bar in the Blues Riff Saloon. It’s dark and "One," I say. "A little girl." cool and nobody at all is sitting at the little round tables. We The bartender comes over and wipes up where I spilled sit on the padded barstools. The bartender, a round-faced boy some Coke. "Y’all from somewhere out West?" with a bit of a mustache, sets napkins in front of us. "Like "Utah," August says. something to drink?" His Southern voice is as cool and slow as "Urn hm," says the bartender. I lean my head on my hand the fan overhead. and watch Rooster. "Coke please," I say. August orders the same. "What about August suddenly yawns and grabs my arm. "Sorry, Pop. We you?" I ask Rooster, but he shakes his head and waves his gotta get going now," he says. I pull my arm away. kidskin hand. Rooster lifts a hand. "Just set still a minute," he says. "I tell "Naw," he says. you what God gonna do for you." He tips back his straw hat August is grinning like a weasel. "How long have you livedand takes out a pen from his pocket and writes in shaky letters here, Rooster?" he asks. on the napkin: R-I-G-H-T. He pushes it over in front of me. Rooster scrunches up his face indignantly. "Why you ask a"Can you read that?" he says. "It says RIGHT. And God’s gonna thing like that? What difference do time make? I ask you onedo you right." thing. It cheaper to live, or to die?" He pokes an old finger at August’s shirt. "You, sir. You gonna "I don’t know. Dying’s not cheap," August says, squintingtake your little baby and burn her up?" like he was doing some serious figuring. "My uncle that died "Course not." last year had about a five thousand dollar funeral." I look "Well then!" Roosterg voice grows triumphant. "No more is around at the walls. They are papered with pictures of celebri- God gonna throw his children in hell to burn!" ties and demi-celebrities. In a glass case are somebody’s bright He stops, starts to say something else, and begins to cough. green high-heeled shoes. "Course, you don’t have to get one ofAugust glances my way and gestures with his eyes toward the those fancy caskets," August goes on. "They have cheap ones door. He’s had enough fun. I shrug noncommitally. I’m won- you can slip inside an expensive-looking case so it will lookdering who taught Rooster to write. nice for the funeral."A girl slides the chairs out to sweep under "Another thing." Heg talking to me. "You want to live, or the tables. die?"

PAGE 26 SEPTEMBER 1992 5 U N 5 T O N E

I consider. I’m watching the pinkness of his mouth. When I see the fire station, an immense relief washes over "You pray to God," he says. "Pray and say, ’Dear God, let me me. I almost run inside, yanking the glass door open. Three live til I see my baby girl grown up.’" He’S staring at me withblue-shirred men, hunched over a card game, look up in those old eyes. "You make th~at prayer and God is gonna do it! surprise. God’s gonna let you live." I try a wide smile. "Hi," I say. And then I feel a little foolish. August grabs my arm hard and pulls me to my feet. "Let’sThey wait. I tell them I’m a tourist. I say that I was just go, hone>" He calls me honey only when he’s bored. He offerswondering--is it safe to be walking around here? some bills to the bartender. "Mr. Rooster, sir, it’s been a pleas- "Y’all want a soda?" asks one of them, getting up and ure.,, walking to the refrigerator. He is thin and nervous-looking, The bartender shakes his head. "Naw. Y’all kept him outtawith slick greased hair. "Oh," I say. Thanks." He twists the lid trouble awhile." off and hands it over, and I give him a smile. The soda is red Rooster’s voice grows mist,,/. "I love y’all," he says. "And you,and sweet and cold. I wonder if August saw me come in here. ma’am, I be praying that God gonna give you your wish." "Safe?" says another. He cocks his head. "You alone?" I nod. There’s an odd fluttering at the base of my throat and I tell them my husband is outside. I can’t say anything. August hands the money to Rooster. I glare "That’s good. I wouldn’t keep going this away. I believe I’d at August, but he doesn’t no~:ice. Rooster looks at the money turn around here." for moment, then he sticks o!_tt his worn hand. The thin fireman says, "Hey, y’all seen where they shot "I never asked for it," says; Rooster. He stuffs the bills into Martin Luther King?" his pocket. "No," I say. August comes in then. He is scowling. I look at August is steering me toward the door. The brightness him gratefully. beyond the windows blinds my eyes. "I’11 pray for you, too," I "Y’all ought to see it," the thin fireman says. "Right in back call out over my shoulder, only because I can’t think of any-of here." thing else to say. Then we are gasping in the heat once more. I "Who was it shot him?" says the third fireman. "I forget." throw a poisonous look at August and head off. He’S fat, with beads of sweat on his forehead. "What’s the matter?" he cries, trotting after me. "Lee Harvey Oswald," says the other one, shuffling cards. "Did you have to give him money?" I say through clenched "Naw," says the fat one. "That’s the guy that got JFK." teeth. "Right in back of here," says the thin one. "The very motel." "What’s wrong with that?" he says. "Seems like it was some guy with the same first and last "Everything. It’s demeaning." name," says the fat one. August rolls his eyes upward. "Demeaning? Geez, Nora. I try "Nuts to you," says the other one. "Fellow’s name was to help an old guy out ..." Hinckley or Manson or something. I know it. It’s on the tip of But I’m mad now. I’m steaming along the street. Augustmy tongue." ! bite my lip to keep from laughing. shouts that I’m going the wrong direction, but I don’t care. He "I could take you there," says the thin one. "Just right back said I should see Memphis, so I’ll see Memphis. He followshere." behind, yelling. I look at August to see if he’s smiling. He’s staring at the "Come on, Nora," he yells. "Give me a break. Why do you firemen with glazed eyes. He has lost his sense of humor. take everything so serious?" "It’s right in back, you say?" I ask. The thin fireman points I walk faster. The street is; like a yellow glare, like a hotthe direction. funnel sucking me down. Maybe I take everything so serious "We’ll find it," I say. "Come on, honey," I say, grabbing because this is serious business. August is falling behind meAugust’s arm. "Let’s go see it. now. I realize that nobody much is on the street; in fact, I \Ve walk out of the building and across some grass and then haven’t seen a soul for a while. Too hot for anybody to bewe see it. It looks exactly like the motel I saw on T.V. back then, hanging around. the motel I was too young to remember: but I remember this, I glance back. August is about a block back, walking alongall right. I remember the whitehot bullet that ripped into flesh half-heartedly. I myself feel a little dizzy. Tight little thoughtsand bone. I remember the explosion of pain, the pale hot city pound in my head. What if somebody jumps me? I hold mygoing ha7y and red-rimmed, then dark. purse a little closer. August is probably following along so that I remember how innocent things grow senile. I think about he can protect me. But what ira gang jumps us both? What ifdying on the toilet, dying on a motel balcony, dying in a they slit our throats and drag our bodies into a side alley? I lookbedroom. at the blank buildings. I wonder if Rooster has forgotten about "Dear God," I say under my breath, "Let me live to see my promising to pray. I see a man in one of the doorways, watch- baby grown." ing me. "What?" says August. He’S looking pale and snuffling, star- I realize suddenly that a per~on could die here, in Memphis. ing glumly at the motel. He’S burning up out here. I walk a little faster. A person could disappear into a back street He looks so forlorn that I laugh a little and give him the rest never to be found. I think maybe it’s time to turn around. Iof the soda. "Come on," I say, taking his hand. "We’ve got to think maybe someone malicio,as is stalking me. get you out of this heat."

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 27 S U N S T 0 N E

The apologe{ic we should be pursuing is not a defense of tradition against the reasonableness of criticism, but the formulation of post-critical religous perspectives that allow our God-gven abilities to think to flourish and a mature faith to grow. HISTORICAL CRITICISM: A NECESSARY ELEMENT IN THE SEARCH FOR RELIGIOUS TRUTH

By David P. Wright

THERE ARE TWO CONTRASTING MODES OF sense to surface in texts and events which were only partially studying scripture’s basic historical aspectsmits date and au-elucidated in the traditionalist perspective. Above all it has thorship, the historical veracity of events described in it, andbeen a spiritual journey and experience of the highest order, the existence of ideas and practices in the periods in whichone that I would not choose to undo. they are claimed to have existed. These are the traditionalist In this essay I wish to describe the evidential essence of my and historical critical modes. They have different ideological pilgrimage to criticism as I experienced it during my under- proclivities and tend to generate different conclusions and aregraduate and graduate educations. I will first summarize the thus components of discrete research paradigms if not of largercharacteristics of the traditionalist and critical modes. I will world views. As a consequence of this, movement from one then describe some areas of evidence and some of the critical mode to the other is not a simple choice of research strategy.considerations that convinced me of the legitimacy of the Transition can only really come from a "conversion experience"critical orientation. In this discussion I will also describe re- in which an individual, upon perceiving the deficiencies of onesponses and perspectives that I developed--i.e., "post-critical framework and the overwhelming strengths of the other, isapologetics," so to speak--that gave me continuing apprecia- catapulted into the perceived stronger mode of thinking. tion of my religious tradition. I had such a "conversion experience." I grew up a traditional Mormon and decided to pursue a career in Near Eastern THE TRADITIONALIST AND CRITICAL MODES studies so as to contribute to the "defense of the faith" along BEFORE I actually describe the two modes, I need to traditionalist lines. But during my university preparation I found that many of the traditional historical assumptions thatmake it dear that I am not talking about methods of study, but I held did not make sense against the evidence that I was rather intellectual attitudes and orientations toward texts. The encountering. The process of transformation was slow, but by closest I come to speaking about method, below, is in describ- the end of my graduate education I had come to own the ing what textual evidence is most important in making conclu- critical framework. Adopting this mode has brought somesions about basic historical issues about the text. Still, even in tactical woes,1 but its benefits in providing an understandingthis, I am speaking about something more abstract or at a and appreciation of scripture and history have made thesegreater "distance" from the data studied than specific methods. difficulties negligible. Criticism has allowed meaning andMoreover, while particular methods may be associated with one or the other mode, the modes are not to be equated with "these methods. I should also note that in the descriptions that DAVID P. WRIGHT is an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, follow I am not distinguishing between the two modes from Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in Near Eastern Studies the point of view of inherent or basic rationality. It is true that at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. He has taught at those with one orientation may call the other illogical; but each Brigham Young University and Middlebury College. This paper was mode attempts to satisfy the demands of reason within its own delivered at the B. H. Roberts Society panel discussion, "Do What research paradigm. This is one of the reasons why people do not readily flock from one mode to the other. is Right, Let the Consequence Follow: Telling the Truth about Our The traditionalist mode looks at scripture’s historical as- Scriptures," on 6 February 1992 in Salt Lake City.

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 28 S U N S T 0 N E

pectsmits composi- a larger conserving tion, date, accuracy of and community-sup- events, and chrono- porting context (my logical placement of so-called "post-critical ideas and practicesm apologetics" that I ad- in terms of what a duce below will sug- particular religious gest something of tradition has deter- this). mined or come to be- The main objection lieve to be the case of traditionalists to the about these matters. critical mode is that it The scriptural text is requires denying su- read uncritically: what pernatural elements the work claims on and discounting the the surface with re- evidential value of spect to historical aspects is accepted for the most part as the mystical and emotive-spiritual experience. Theoretically, the historical reality. Moreover, in this mode there is little review critical mode does not require such a humanistic coloring. All of what qualifies for evidence in historical study. Sometimes it requires is a willingness to subject to critical review all when traditionalist study is undertaken systematically or in historical questions as well as presuppositions about what depth, certain peripheral traditional views and assumptions counts for evidence and how evidence is construed. But it is are modified to harmonize with or support central tenets.2 true that the critical mode as used, for example, by biblical Nevertheless, conclusions in many respects are predeter- scholars has resulted in conclusions with a rather humanistic mined. All this indicates that the ideology of the traditionalist coloring. The question here is whether this is the fault of the approach is conservative. It preserves preexisting ideas and mode or whether is it indicative of the truth behind the practices. (I do not mean to imply here that conservatism is a evidence. I would suggest the latter. This certainly does not negative feature.) mean that there is no divine element, but it may be that it In contrast to the traditionalist mode, the historical critical operates differently than what we have come to expect tradi- mode ("critical" having to do with proper discernment, not tionally.4 unfair or purposefully negative judgment) determines the his- The main theoretical recommendation for the critical mode torical aspects of scripture through evaluation of the contextual is that it is consistent: it treats all media of human discourse-- evidence exhibited by a text rather than through surface or secular and holy~in the same way. Scripture, whatever might extemal claims. While it acknowledges that these claims may be said about its inspiration, is a vehicle for human under- be helpful in formulating hypotheses about the basic historical standing~it speaks to us in our own language--and thus it aspects of the text, it realizes that what a text claims or what seems fallacious to exempt it from critical analysis. The tradi- extemal parties claim about a text is not necessarily correct. tionalist mode is less than consistent in its tendency to immu- This leads to a second defining element of the critical mode: a nize scripture or claims about historical aspects of scripture willingness on the part of the researcher to acknowledge the from critical study.5 It is for these reasons that James Barr, a possibility that historical matters may be different from what is noted biblical scholar, has argued that historical study is by claimed by a text and the tradition surrounding it. While nature critical; any operation that does not have the critical research cannot be carried out without some guiding hypoth- element is not historical.6 eses, presuppositions, and enabling prejudices, a critical scholar is prepared in the back of her or his mind to modify, THE SHIFT FROM TRADITIONALISM even radically, conclusions and hypotheses about basic histor- TO CRITICISM ical matters. Thus the critical framework, and here is the third defining feature of the orientation, is a mode of open-ended THOUGH the critical mode may be more attractive the- inquiry. No conclusion is immune from revision. Revision oretically, this attractiveness will not by itself move a tradition- comes by continual review of one’s own conclusions and the alist to accept this mode of study, especially with its threat of a review of others’ differing conclusions which the framework turn in a humanistic direction and its nonconservative ideo- encourages and tolerates. Review is also required for assump- logical cast. The critical mode has to force itself on a tradition- tions about what counts for evidence and how evidence is to alist by showing that it makes better sense of evidence than the be understood. The requirement of review is related to the traditionalist approach in several key matters. I want to review notion, mentioned above, that extemal claims~be they here three areas of critical observations that I made during my scholarly or nonscholarly--about a text are questionable. In years of university training which compelled me to acknowl- contrast to the conservatism of the traditionalist mode, the edge the validity of the critical approach. I will add some critical mode has a liberal or at times even a radical or anarchic 3 constructive afterthoughts in each case to show that ultimately ideological tendency. But the critical mode can operate within the critical approach can enrich the religious tradition. What I

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 29 S U N S T 0 N E say here is only a sam- meal. Wine was also piing of the evidence offered in libation, the responsible for my The evidence led me to conclude that beverage portion of transformation. Fur- the service (cf. Num- thermore, though I baptism was probably not practiced in ancient Israel. bers 15:1-16). Fur- discuss these matters ther evidence for this separately, the different This is an example of where Mormon and Christian was also found in ideas were all develop- Psalm 50 which im- ing at the same time practice, not just ideas, differed from plicitly recognized the and mutually influ- fact that sacrifice was enced each other. our religious ancestors. If there could be an a meal by rejecting (and rightly so in the THE "GOSPEL biblical context) a lit- THROUGH evolution of ideas and practices eral understanding of THE AGES" the rite as such.9 This over a few decades in Mormonism, rationale of sacrifice One of the views was confirmed in part that I was drawn to ac- there could bemeven must be--changes by the significance of cept was that the sacrifice among "gospel" was not the and developments over the centu~es Israel’s neighbors, same in all the ages. I much of which chro- discovered that Israe- of Israelite, Christian, and Mormon traditions. nologically predates lite and Christian reli- the phenomenon in gious traditions as ancient Israel and sug- found in the Old and gested, by the way, New Testaments were that Israel came by its phenomenologically--in fundamental belief and practice--practice through its Near Eastern ancestors and neighbors. In different from one another and different from our religiousthe non-Israelite context, offerings were also meal gifts to tradition today True, each subsequent manifestation of theappease or induce the action of the gods.l° In sum, the ancient tradition grew out of the earlier traditions and, therefore, theIsraelites had a different view of the meaning of sacrifice than subsequent manifestations shared many formal and ideationalwe did. The view that it represented Jesus’ death seemed to be traits with earlier ones. But the passage of time and the differ-an imposition on the text. Thus ideas about the meaning of ent circumstances in which later adherents lived led to ansacrifice were not the same in all the ages. evolution and change in religious ideas and practices. A similar question arose in connection with another aspect One place where this notion of religious difference andof my cultic study, that of ritual purification. When I system- development became clear to me was in my study of the atically studied practices of purification in the Old Testament, biblical cult, i.e., matters pertaining to temple and templeit became clear that baptism, which Mormon tradition and worship in ancient Israel] I found that the traditional explana-scripture said existed in pre-Christian antiquity, was no where tion that Israelite sacrifice typologically represented the deathto be found in that ancient text.11 There were ablutions for of Jesus did not make sense in view of the complexity of theremoving ritual impurity arising from certain conditions per- sacrificial system of the Hebrew Bible and the general purposetaining to death, sexual matters, and disease. And the idea of of sacrifice indicated by that text. The evidence, found mainlywashing and sprinkling of sinners, based for the most part on in the priestly legislation of the Pentateuch (Leviticus and partsthe purification of persons from ritual impurity, occurred as a of Exodus and Numbers), showed that there were several types metaphor. But there was no actual sin-removing ablution of sacrifices each with divergent goals: some for praise, somewhich functioned as a means of entry into the covenant com- for thanksgiving, some for rectification of the noxious effectsmunity Now to say that baptism was not practiced because it of one’s impurity or sin on the sanctuary, and some for thewas not attested was certainly an argument from silence. But rectification of damage done to what is holy The theory orthe silence took on significance in view of the fact that the Bible perspective that held these diverse sacrifices together was thatspoke frequently about--even prescribed in detail--other they were gifts, specifically food gifts, to the deity to respond to sorts of ablutions. The silence was also significant in that or induce his blessing or to appease his wrath. It was not the baptism would have had been a major initiatory rite de passage, slaughter or death of the animal, but the presentation of fat andmuch like circumcision. But whereas the Old Testament was meat pieces to the deity on the altar as a type of meal that waspeppered with clear references to circumcision, it had none the focus of the rites.8 This view was corroborated by the factregarding baptism. This evidence led me to the conclusion that that cereal offerings accompanied (and sometimes substitutedbaptism, for the purposes we supposed, was probably not for) the animal offeringsmthis was the bread portion of thepracticed in ancient Israel. This then provided an example of

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where Mormon and tween ancient and Christian practice, not modemtraditions. just ideas, differed from those of our PROPHECY more remote religious saw prophetic :xpressions,, not as ancestors. 12 AT the same Confirmation of statements cc ,ncerning events time that I was re- the notion that reli- , thinking the matter of gious ideas and prac- far in the future, [ statements that the sameness imag- tices evolved came ined to be found in re- through study of Mor- concerned their [ ediate contexts ligious phenomena mon history itself and ideas, I was re- which evidenced a which could be reappl ied by later communities. thinking traditional clear evolution of ,, ’ assumptions about ideas and practices the phenomenon and within its short one nature of prophecy in hundred and fifty the Bible and other (now sixty) year his- Mormon scripture. tory. It seemed that if there could be an evolution of ideas and The traditional view was that prophets are able to see far into practices over a few decades, such as in the identity and nature the future and do so with clarity. This did not seem to be 13 14 of God, the organization of the Church, the practice of sustainable upon critical study. baptism,15 in the priesthood and related practices,16 and in A good example of what I discovered is found in the 17 temple work and doctrine, so there could be--even must prophetic works pertaining to the sixth century B.C.: the books be--changes and developments over the centuries of Israelite, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Haggai, and Zechariah (chapters 1-8). At Christian, and Mormon traditions. the beginning of this century the Babylonians were threatening I developed a post-critical apologetic response to this con- the kingdom of Judah with destruction. This destruction fi- clusion so as to be able to observe some sort of continuity and nally came in 586 B.C. when the temple was destroyed and identity between the biblical and Mormon traditions despite many Judeans were exiled to Mesopotamia. The Babylonian their phenomenological differences. My argument was that realm did not endure. The Persians soon came to power in though these religious traditions did not always manifest iden- Mesopotamia and the conquering King Cyrus allowed the tity of practices and ideas in form and content, varying and captive Judeans to return to their land around 538, rebuild different practices and ideas in these traditions did manifest destroyed cities and towns, and even rebuild the temple. The some identity in function. In comparing practices or ideas and prophetic expressions in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, looking for similarity therein, one was to search for and com- Haggai, and Zechariah pertain to these historical events and pare the common goals in the religious traditions and how the indicated that prophecy had a rather imminent orientation and traditions achieved these goals rather than to search for exact that its view of the future was not a clear one. similarity in practices and beliefs. Thus in the case of Mormon The collective evidence for this view can be summarized as baptism, I compared to it the practice of circumcision in the follows. These prophetic books share the common expectation Hebrew Bible that, like baptism, was a sign of membership in of an imminent return to the land of Israel and consequent the covenantal community; I compared purgation and repara- abundant and even enduring blessing after Babylonian captiv- tion sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible that, like baptism, rectify ity2° The preexilic or early exilic portions of Jeremiah and personal evil in some way; and I compared Old Testament Ezekiel say that the captivity will not last for long: the book of ablutions for removing ritual impurities that, like baptism, Jeremiah says seventy years;21 the book of Ezekiel, much of reflect an interest in purifying moral impurity. 18 To the matter which was probably composed in the Exile, says that their of Israelite sacrifice I compared the practice of prayer in glorious return is "near at hand" (Hebrew: ki qeirevu lavo’).22 Mormon tradition, which has similar goals. Just as in the case Zechariah, who lived shortly after the exile, noted that he and of prayer, biblical sacrifice was offered to praise and thank God his people were living at the end of the seventy-year period.23 for blessings, to request further blessings, and to effect repen- These prophets collectively say that after the people’s punish- tance. 19 Sacrifice was thus a form of concretized prayer.. In sum, ment in the foreign land the people--and this often includes for me, the continuity of the biblical and Mormon traditions other Israelites who had suffered dispersion in earlier political came to lie not in common practices and beliefs but in com- catastrophes--would be forgiven and renewed (e.g., given a mon goals amid diverse practices and beliefs. Scriptural and new heart) and come back to their land.24 Ezekiel goes as far religious history began to make much more sense from this as to say that the to the land would be total; God perspective. I could deal with the evidence without having to wfis going to "gather [the people] back into their land and leave resort lamely to notions of scribal conspiracy or knowledge none of them behind" (Ezekiel 39:25, 28). The four prophetic withholding sin to harmonize the disparity that existed be- works contain the expectation that the restoration to the land

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 31 S U N S T 0 N E would begin a period hopes of the forego- of regeneration when ing beatific restora- the people would no The Book of Mormon became tion are localized in longer be troubled by the sixth century their enemies and a window to the religious soul of Joseph Smith. B.C.), and (b) the vi- would have agricul- sion of even the im- tural and economic It manifested his own religious questions, minent future is not prosperity.25 Jerusalem clearly predicted or would be rebuilt and known (note that sev- become glorious.26 eral of the aforemen- The temple in Jerusa- and his attempts to answer these difficulties. tioned expectations lem, which was de- did not occur: the propensities of the stroyed by the His example gave me continued Babylonians, would people to sin re- also be rebuilt, and its mained the same; priesthood and sacrifi- only some, not all, of cial worship would be the Israelites returned reestablished.27 The to the land; the Jude- last nine chapters of ans remained domi- Ezekiel contain the and spiritual insight. nated by foreign na- ideal plan and context tions; the rebuilt tem- for such a temple ple and Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40-48). That were not as glorious this is a temple for as expected; Ezekiel’s Ezekiel’s own time is seen in the facts that he is the one whoideal temple was not built; the Davidic dynasty was not re- was to inaugurate the temple’s sacrificial worship, thus func-stored, and Zerubbabel in particular did not become king; this tioning something like a second Moses,28 and that the Judeansunclear vision of the future is also marked by an apparent in Babylonian exile were to be shown the design of the templeignorance of the vicissitudes of Christian and Jewish history in so that after repentance they could execute the plan and fulfill the years far into the future). its cultic prescriptions.29 Haggai, a contemporary of Zechariah,This perception about the nature of prophecy was verified spoke of the ideal glory of the restoration temple when he saidby the sometimes guarded but nonetheless openly expressed that the building would be adorned with precious thingsexpectations in the New Testament that Jesus would return in "shaken" out of the surrounding nations.3° With the templethe time of the first Christians. Paul, for example, said to the and Jerusalem rebuilt, God would come and again make hisThessalonians: "... we [Paul and the living Thessalonians] abode in the temple (or the city))1 For Ezekiel specifically, who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will God’s return to the post-Babylonian captivity temple wouldby no means precede those who have died .... we [i.e., Paul rectify his leaving it just before the destruction)2 All the fourand the Thessalonians] who are alive.., will be caught up in the clouds together with [those who have died among the first prophets indicate that the Davidic kingdom would be reestab- ’’39 lished in this age of restoration.~ Jeremiah terms the new kingChristians] to meet the Lord in the air. This perspective a "righteous branch" (Jeremiah 23:5; 33:15). Ezekiel calls himabout prophecy was also verified in the expectations of Joseph a "prince" (nasi’) and subordinates him to the priesthood)Smith.4 When the Saints were driven from Jackson County in 1833, for example, his revelations expressed hopes of immi- The posterity of this king would continue to rule after him 4° according to Jeremiah and Ezekiel)5 Thus the picture is not of nent reclamation of the land. Mormon tradition has come to a single king but of a continuing dynasty. For Haggai, the kingread these unfulfilled hopes, like the unfulfilled biblical proph- reinaugurating this dynasty was to be his contemporaryecies of gathering, as matters for the future. This should not Zerubbabel (who was of Davidic descent) who would take his obscure the fact, however, that their formulation has an immi- ~6 nent orientation revealing that the prophet had an unclear place as the thrones of other nations are destroyed. Zechariah 41 also appears to single Zerubbabel out for royal position, appar- perception about the denouement of future events. (The ently calling him the "branch" and thus tying him into theBook of Mormon did not enter into the evidence for the nature Jeremianic expectation of a Davidic king or dynasty.~7 Thisof prophecy since the book was beginning to show itself as a Davidic king or dynasty according to Jeremiah and Ezekielnineteenth-century composition, as I note later.) would rule over the two houses of Israel that had split apart The theological reconstruction that I pursued in conse- after the death of Solomon.~8 quence of these critical conclusions was to see prophetic ex- This picture suggested to me that prophecy has the follow-pressions, not as statements concerning communities and ing characteristics: (a) it does not concern itself generally withevents far in the future, but as statements that concerned their events far in the future--it has an imminent orientation (theimmediate contexts which could be picked up by later corn-

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munities and reapplied just before the initial secondarily to their return from Babylon- situation as occasion ian captivity, just be- demanded. This was fore 538 B.C. The date not simply a theologi- of Third Isaiah is more cal principle,, but one disputed, but a dating based on historical around the end of the fact. The apocalyptic sixth century seems chapters of the book reasonable. The main of Daniel, for exam- reason for seeing these ple, which were cer- chapters as sixth cen- tainly written in the tury productions, par- first half of the second ticularly 40-55 to century B.C. and not which I will limit my- in the sixth-century, self here, was that understood Jeremiah’s their content fits per- seventy years to mean fectly into the expec- seventy weeks of years. Thus the hopes of Jeremiah (and of tations of return from captivity and blessing toward the end of other prophets of the time) were reinterpreted to apply to the the exile in that century. Specifically, the temporal perspective of situation in the second century B.C.42 My response saw thethe chapters can only be satisfactorily explained by assuming prophecies of old not as announcements of what was certainlythe work was written around the timeqp erhaps just before-- to be in the future but as sources of inspiration for creatingCyrus conquered Babylon. The following basic picture ap- prophetic vision in a later religious community But the ques-peared from my study of these chapters: (a) the people have tion was, Who was to "re-vision" these prophecies of old for recently suffered (past tense) destruction;46 (b) Mesopotamia the present community, particularly our community? I arguedis the place of captivity, and the Babylonians are the enemy that it was to be those who had the same relationship to the quickly fading from the picture (present tense);47 (c) the tem- community now as those who first spoke the messages had to ple and cities, including Jerusalem, have been destroyed (past their communities, i.e., the communityg current prophetictense) and need rebuilding (future orientation);48 (d) release leaders. This reapplication of unfulfilled prophetic hopesfrom Babylonian captivity is imminent (present-future orien- would itself be an act of prophecy, something only prophetstation);49 (e) Cyrus the Persian king is the political leader who could do.43 My apologetic had one unfortunate corollary: since will effect the release (present tense);5° (f) the chapters look only prophets could reactualize and reapply this prophecy, forward to bounteous blessing upon the return from Babylon fireside speakers and popular writers who were used to tallying(future orientation).51 the numbers in Daniel and conflating predictions to tell us The temporal situation in these described events formed a what was going to appear in next week’s newspapers would"hairpart," so to speak, marking the historical standpoint of the have to find new acts. writer. Destruction has already occurred, the people are already in Babylonian captivity; Cyrus is the agent effecting release; TEXTUAL COMPOSITION AND DATING rebuilding .and blessing will occur in the future. The writer, MY views also changed about the composition and date then, was writing from the temporal standpoint of one living approximately 539 B.C. when Cyrus took control of or was of much of scripture. Over time I came to see that some about to take control of Babylon. generally accepted critical views about the composition of the Another logical consideration also constrained me to be- Bible were valid and that the "ancient" scriptures produced by lieve that these chapters were composed about this date. If Joseph Smith were not really ancient but his own composi- eighth-century Isaiah is speaking here, why does his ability to tionsmwhat applied to prophetic foresight also applied to envision matters with specificity extend to only this sixth prophetic hindsight. I will limit myself here to the subjects of century date? He gives us relatively precise historical details to the date of Isaiah 40-55 and the authorship of the Book of this point: Jerusalem is destroyed, the people are in captivity Mormon. in Babylon, and Cyrus is the one who will release them from One of the more challenging critical views about the Bible captivity But after this period specifics are wholly lacking; we that I encountered and came to accept was that the last half of only have a general prophecy of blessing. Why does the writer Isaiah, chapters 40-66, did not belong to the eighth-century not give us the detail of events in centuries to come? This figure Isaiah who was the author of a significant part of the logical difficulty and the temporal perspective led me to con- material in chapters 1-39.44 1 came to agree with the view that clude that the chapters must have been written in the main these last chapters were to be divided into at least two subsec- around 539 B.C. tions: chapters 40-55, called Second-or Deutero Isaiah, and 45 My critical view about the last half of Isaiah did not come 56-66, called Third or Trito Isaiah. Second Isaiah is dated to easily because it meant that the Book of Mormon exhibited

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 33 S U N S T O N E anachronism in its cit- peace; (e) they men- ing of five full chapters tion something about of Second Isaiah and Scripture defines and constructs Melchizedek’s father; portions of others.52 and (f) they note that Lehi and his family much of the way members of society perceive Melchizedek was could not have "great." The last three brought these chapters and interact with other people and the world elements are not in to the New World Genesis 14 and are since the chapters around them. Because of this there is an thus part of the unique were composed ac- argument Hebrews cording to the critical ethical obligation to critically examine develops. This indi- view some sixty years cates the Alma 13 pas- after the family came sage is dependent to the new world. In- the historical nature of scripture to be sure upon Hebrews. An- deed, four full chap- other sign that Alma ters of Second Isaiah that the attitudes and perceptions it generates depends on Hebrews are cited in First and is in the former’s lack which are legitimately grounded. of certain problematic are traditionally dated formulations found in before 544 B.C. Hebrews. For exam- Because in my early ple, in Hebrews, university studies I could not accept the conclusion that theMelchizedek is said to be "without father, without mother, Book of Mormon was not ancient, I was very reserved at first without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of about accepting the conclusion that chapters 40-55 were writ- life" (7:3). This illogical statement does not appear in Alma. ten after Lehi’s supposed departure from Jerusalem. But otherRather, Melchizedek has a father there and the statement about lines of evidence led me to the conclusion that the Book oflacking beginning of days and end of life is attributed to the Mormon was a workma scriptural work to be suremcom- priesthood and to Jesus (Alma 13:18 and vv. 7-9). This seems posed in the nineteenth century by Joseph Smith. Some of theto indicate that Alma 12-13 has solved problems inherent in evidence pertained to matters listed in other sections above:Hebrews, which means is it dependent upon it. Much more the book portrayed a relative homogeneity of religious ideasevidence could be brought pertaining to these Book of Mor- and practices which contradicted the critical perception of themon chapters, but it is rather clear from this little evidence that evolution of religious phenomena. And the character of proph-they are dependent upon Hebrews. Hence they and the Book ecy in it did not accord with that studied in scriptural worksof Mormon a~. large, to make a generalization supported by and expressions whose date was relatively certain. But the other evidence, are not ancient compositions. decisive evidence for me was textual anachronism. I will give The post-critical response that I developed to these conclu- one other brief piece of evidence. sions came through observing that the critical approach em- One of Alma’s famous speeches (or speech-discussions), ployed by many non-Mormon biblical scholars in studying the Alma 12-13, upon close analysis depends upon the New Bible did not lead them to reject the Bible as a religiously Testament epistle to the Hebrews.53 The anachronism consistsvaluable document. These scholars were able to distinguish in the fact that Alma 12-13 are dated traditionally to 82 B.C. between judgments about historical matters and judgments while the book of Hebrews is dated somewhere between about spiritual worth. The conclusions that the Pentateuch came from a period much later than the time of Moses and that 60-100 A.D. These Book of Mormon chapters reflect phraseol- 54 ogy and ideas from at least five different chapters of Hebrews. it did not reflect true history or that the gospels of the New The thickness and exactness of parallels alone suggested thatTestament were written a generation or more after the time of these chapters of Alma were dependent on Hebrews. A study Jesus and that they contained unhistorical elaborations on the 55 of the parallels confirmed this direction of dependence. Forlife of Jesus did not require the rejection of the text as example, Alma 13:17-19 and Hebrews 7:1-4 speak about the scripture. These scholars argued, in fact, that the critical method opened up the meaning of scripture and made it more priest-king Melchizedek. Hebrews begins by paraphrasing 56 Genesis 14:18-20, which speaks of Melchizedek, and then relevant. constructs an argument about his greatness. What shows the This sort of argument I applied not only to the Bible but to dependence of the Alma passage on Hebrews is that it has the the Book of Mormon and other so-called "ancient" Mormon same elements in the same order as the Hebrews passage and in scripture, which upon critical inspection turned out to be this reflects the particular argument of Hebrews: (a) bothnineteenth-century compositions. Though the date of these passages refer demonstratively to "this Melchizedek"; (b) theyworks changed, and certain perspectives about the nature of say he was king over the land of Salem; (c) they say he was athe information conveyed by them changed, they still served priest; (d) they explain his title of king of Salem and king ofme as scriptural works. The Book of Mormon became a win-

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 34 S U N S T O N E dow to the religious soul of Joseph Smith. It manifested hisceived their skin coloring as the result of a sin of their ances- own religious questions, his struggle with ideas around him,tors.59 The book also offers descriptions--negative descrip- and his attempts to answer these difficulties. As a place oftions-about the personality and character of supposed Na- asking questions and giving answers it constituted thetive American ancestors.6° A critical study of the Book of apprentice’s workshop in which he became a prophet. Reading Mormon, as I have indicated, shows that Joseph Smith was its it critically unfolded another dimension of Joseph’s creativeauthor, which carries with it the implication that these per- life. His example gave me continued encouragement in myspectives about Native Americans were his own speculations. religious searchings. It alloxved me to appreciate his intellec-We have the ethical responsibility of examining the validity of tual ability and spiritual insight. this critical perspective seriously and carefully lest we hold unfounded notions that create attitudes that are injurious to CONCLUSION Native Americans. Finally, scripture and tradition teach that the present order I HAVE spoken largely in a past-tense mode to describe of things is soon to pass away. Critical study of the nature of how I came to accept the critical approach to studying scrip- prophecy, however, indicates that the future is not clearly ture. But clearly the implication of all this is a recommendationknown. Moreover, many in the past--Israelites, early Chris- that we in Mormon tradition consider the validity of thistians, and even early Mormons--had imminent expectations orientation and these general conclusions. The critical per-that were not realized. We have the ethical obligation of spectives about religious evolution, the nature of prophecy,examining the validity of this critical perspective seriously and and the composition of the Bible and Book of Mormon are not carefully lest we make a mistake of taking a short-sighted view eccentric, but represent ideas and conclusions shared by criti- about the future and, by ignoring environmental problems and cal scholars at large. The apologetic we should be pursuing isby the build-up of destructive weaponry, leave to our children not a defense of tradition against the reasonableness of criti-and the many generations after them the desolating product of cism, but the formulation of post-critically re-visioned reli-our blindness.61 gious perspectives that allow our God-given abilities to think Our community has a mission, but it cannot be fully real- to flourish and a mature faith to grow. To require putting aside ized without the use of all our faculties. The spirit will generate these legitimate questions, the c.ritical method, and the clear conclu- in us commitment to our community, a sense of the relevance sions and evidence generated thereby is to require setting aside our of our developing religious tradition, and a perception of the search for and claims about being interested in historical and even divine in our own and our spiritual ancestors’ history. But religious truth.57 reasoned critical study must be allowed to guide us in our There is another consideration in addition to a search for search for historical understanding and matters related truth that recommends serious attention to the historical crit-thereto. 62 g~, ical approach and its results. I add this despite the risk of being charged with "political correctness." Scripture defines and NOTES constructs much of the way members of society perceive and interact with other people and the world around them. 1. On my employment at BYU see the article and my statement in SUN- Because of this there is an eti~ical obligation to critically exam-STONE 12 (May 1988): 4-3-44. See also Philip Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University ine the historical nature of scripture to be sure that thePress, 1991), 141-q2. attitudes and perceptions it generates are legitimately 2. See James Barr, Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 40- grounded. 55, on how a fundamentalist approach to scripture is not to be defined or For example, Mormon scripture and tradition teaches that viewed as strictly literalistic. The fundamentalist view allows modification of lit- eral understandings to support the larger perception of biblical "inerrancy." the religion of the ancient Israelites (from the time of Moses) 3. A "liberal" tendency refers to the situation where a conclusion or conclu- was inferior to Christianity. The Israelites were given this formsions perpetuate former ways of thinking but with some revision; "radical" refers of religion, the tradition says, because of rebellion.58 Criticalto the situation where a conclusion or conclusions differ completely from previ- study indicates that this understanding of Israelite religion isous ways of thinking; and "anarchic" refers to the situation where each individ- ual differs in his/her conclusions. These terms are used to indicate simply and wrong. Christianity was rather a development out of Israelite abstractly the relationship of conclusions to formerly held views. They are not to religion, not the restoration or establishment of a religionbe construed as referring to larger political alliances and orientations. which could have been the Israelites’ "if they had been righ- at. One issue that I can only briefly address in this paper, related to the mat- teous." The traditional interpretation grew out of an attempt toters just raised, is the evidential value of spiritual experience for historical study. (Note: by "spiritual experience" I include all that a traditional framework would explain the differences between Israelite and Christian beliefsinclude under this rubric. I have mainly in mind, however, "testimony-inducing" and practices. We have the ethical responsibility of examiningspiritual experience. On another matter, I realize that the term "spiritual the validity of this critical perspective seriously and carefullyexperience" may reflect "overbelieff in regard to the phenomenon. My concern is lest we hold unfounded notions that create attitudes that arenot to examine the complex etiology of such experience [for something on this, see the end of this note]. I share with my readers the given of "spiritual injurious to the Jewish people whose religious foundation isexperience" and discuss how this might be understood.) the Hebrew Bible, the product of ancient Israelite religious I say up front that spiritual experience is one of several avenues of under- experience. standing (including "scientific" study, historical criticism, aesthetic experience, intuition, tradition; others could be named). These various avenues do generate The Book of Mormon teaches that Native Americans re- knowledge and truth. But it seems to me that these different avenues do not

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speak with equal force about the same questions. Historical criticism is not going that is used to show the revelation was an "aftermath reaction to the August to inform me much about the artful sense of a chapter in the Bible or how I 1844 succession of the Quorum of the Twelve" (see 222-23). Such critical ap- might use its message to better my lif~. Thus I need some of these other avenues proaches must be applied to the Bible and to Joseph Smith’s scriptures in Mor- to derive answers to these questions. On the other hand, nonhistorical avenues mon tradition. (including spiritual experience) are not going to tell me much about the basic Critical work on the Book of Mormon text has been pursued (cf. Stan Lar- historical issues surrounding a scriptural text. For this I need historical criticism. son, "Textual Variants in the Book of Mormon Manuscripts," Dialogue: A Journal The problem with the spiritual mode as an avenue of historical understand- of Mormon Thought 10 [Winter, 1977]: 8-30; "Conjectural Emendation and the ing is that while tradition represents information obtained by it as unerring and Text of the Book of Mormon," Brigham Young University Studies 18 [1978]: 563- unified, the fact of the matter is that there is great diversity in what people come 69; Foundation for Ancient Research and , Book of Mormon Crit- to know by this route. Witness, for example, the revelations of Hiram Page (D&C ical Text: A Tool for Scholarly Reference [Provo: Foundation for Ancient Research 28) and David Whitmer (An Address to All Believers in Christ [Richmond, MO: and Mormon Studies, 1984-1987]). Textual criticism "is only a small part of the David Whitmer, 1887] passim but especially p. 27), which contradict the revela- larger historical critical endeavor. tions and understandings of Joseph Smith and of other members of the Church. 6. On this point, see James Barr, The Scope and Authority of the Bible (Phila- Note also that it is not just Mormons who have these experiences--experiences delphia: Westminster, 1980), 30-31. Thus from Barr’s point of view (and mine) which often contradict each other and Mormon expectations. See, for example, there can be no such thing as traditional (or faithful) history if "traditional" (or Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (2nd ed.; London: Oxford University Press, "faithful") means uncritically holding to preconceptions about the historical na- 1950); William James, The Varieties of Reli~ous Experience (New York: Macmil- ture of documents and their contents: "traditional" (or "faithful") and "history" lan, 1961); Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, [1930]); and are a contradiction in terms. especially Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences (Los An- 7. My dissertation as well as many of my published works have focused on geles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1961). To define as valid only those spiritual experi- this area. See David P. Wright, The Disposal of Impurity: Elimination Rites in the ences which conform to orthodoxy or a particular person’s spiritual experiences Bible and Hittite and Mesopotamian Literature (Society of Biblical Literature Disser- does not solve any of these problems, but instead creates an evidentiary tation Series 101; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987). uroboros. Because of these difficulties with spiritual experience, the historical 8. The placement of blood on the altar is also a focal point in the rite. This critical mode appears to be the most viable approach to investigating historical has various purposes. Sprinkling blood from "sin" (purgation) offerings and matters. placing it on the horns of altars served to purify the locales and sancta in or on After saying this, I should note, however, that spiritual experience is not to which it was used (cf. Leviticus 16:14-19). Dashing blood against the sides of be written off. It is a mode of understanding, as I have said--but more pre- the altar in other sacrifices apparently served to ransom the offerer from blood- cisely, a mode of self-understanding. It leads an individual to recognize the rele- guilt incurred through slaughtering an animal (cf. Leviticus 17:3-4, 11), though vance and meaning of the tradition and community to her or his life. It helps this may also have some purificatory and expiatory effect similar to the blood rite bind the individual to that tradition and community. It helps develop in an indi- of the "sin" (purgation) offering. See Wright, Disposal, 147-59. vidual a positive response to the traditions and community. In this way this type of 9. The sacrificed animals were not substitutes for the people who brought experience helps cultivate, among other things, a common or community sense of them, vicariously suffering for them, but were presents given to God (see my arti- morality (in the broadest sense of that term) and a common or community sense of cle, "The Gesture of Hand Placement in the Hebrew Bible and in Hittite Litera- purpose. This "subjective-relational" sense of spiritual experience rather than the ture," Jou.rnal of the American Oriental Society 106 [1986]: 433-46). This is "objective-probative" sense (which is the traditional understanding of most spiri- comparable to more obvious acts of appeasement where Aaron stops God’s tual experience; i.e., spiritual experiences prove an external objectivity) has the plague with an incense offering (Numbers 17:8-15; English 16:43-50) or David virtue of allowing both good scholarship and the religious community to flour- stops God’s plague with sacrifice (2 Samuel 24:18-25). Isaiah 53:10, in a meta- ish. phor, is the only place that speaks of substitution. Careful scholarly study of spiritual experience in Mormon tradition is long 10. See A. L. Oppenheim, with E. Reiner, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a overdue. This study must be done from phenomenological, historical, herme- Dead Civilization, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1977), 183-98; O. R. neutical, psycho-physiological, and theological perspectives. For study of the Gurney, Some Aspects of Hittite Religion (Oxford: Oxford University for the British phenomenon in Mormonism, particularly emotive "testimony-generating" spiri- Academy, 1977), 25-63; and Wright, Disposal, 31-45. tual experience, one can begin with Laski’s book, mentioned above, which 11. See David P. Wright, "Unclean and Clean (OT)," Anchor Bible Dictionary shows that many people have "ecstatic" experiences (in religious and secular (ed. D. N. Freedman; 6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992) 6:729-41. contexts) that are similar to those claimed by Mormons. For historical study of 12. The claim that these inconsistencies can be explained by the removal of emotive-spiritual experience in Mormonism, one can begin with R. Hofstadter, data from the Bible does not hold in view of the actual history of the biblical Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1963), canon or in view of the inability to determine any convincing explanation why 55-116. These pages hint that Mormonism’s notions about spiritual experience such practices or beliefs would be removed in the pre-Christian period. Why have their immediate matrix in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American would the messianic view of atoning sacrifice be removed when the Hebrew evangelical and revivalist thought according to which individuals could have ac- Bible quite openly speaks of a messianic figure? Why would baptism per se be re- cess to divine knowledge through emotive spiritual experience without the aid of moved when the Bible recognizes a host of other purificatory ablutions? ministerial or academic training. For hermeneutical study, one can begin with 13. Van Hale, "The Doctrinal Impact of the King Follett Discourse," Brigham the work of philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 2d Young University Studies 18 (1978): 209-25; Boyd Kirkland, "Jehovah as the Fa- ed. [New York: Crossroad, 1989]) who allows for and describes the manifold ther," SUNSTONE 9 (Autumn 1984): 36-44 and "Elohim and Jehovah in Mor- ways human beings gain knowledge and understanding. For a beginning to un- monism and the Bible," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19 (Spring 1986): derstanding the psychological and physiological factors involved, see Laski and 79-93; Thomas G. Alexander, "The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From James (above), and well as Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and Richard Gorsuch, Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology," SUNSTONE 5 (July-August 1980): 24-33; The Psychology of Reli~on: An Empirical Approach (Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice- David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Hall, 1985), 153-256 (and see the bibliography here). For theological under- Thought 15 (Spring 1982): 14-58. standings, see the last four works in note 57, by Ostler, Hutchinson, Dulles, and 14. See Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty in Mormon History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1967); D. Gnuse. 5. Critical study of other Mormon documents has been undertaken. For Michael Quinn, "The Council of Fifty and Its Members," Brigham Young Univer- works on Joseph Smith’s history, see Dean C. Jessee, "The Writing of Joseph sity Studies 20 (1980): 163-97 and "The Evolution of the Presiding Quorums of Smith’s History," Brigham Young University Studies 11 (1971): 439-73; "The Reli- the LDS Church," Journal of Mormon History 1 (1975): 21-38; Andrew F. Ehat, ability of Joseph Smith’s History," Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976): 23-46; cf. " ’It Seems Like Heaven Began on Earth’: Joseph Smith and the Constitution of Stan Larson, "The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text," Brigham the Kingdom of God," Brigham Young University Studies 20 (1980): 253-79; D. Young University Studies 18 (1978): 195-208. For a critical analysis of a revela- Michael Quinn, "From Sacred Grove to Sacral Power Structure," Dialogue: A tion claimed to date from 1841 used by Sidney Rigdon to support his claim to Journal of Mormon Thought 17 (Summer 1984): 9-34. succession in the Church presidency, see Andrew Ehat, "Joseph Smith’s Intro- 15. See D. Michael Quinn, "The Practice of Rebaptism at Nauvoo," Brigham duction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question" (MA Young University Studies 18 (1978): 226-32. 16. See "Official Declaration--2" in the Doctrine and Covenants; Lester E. Bush Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1981), 220-24. Anachronism is the criterion

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Jr., "Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview," Dialogue: A Journal ordination of the "prince" is seen in the fact that the priests have access to the of Mormon Thought 8 (Spring 19713): 11-68; Mark L. Grover, "The Mormon inner temple court (44:15-19, 27; cf. 40:44-46; 42:13-14; 46:19-20) while the Priesthood Revelation and the S~o Paulo, Brazil Temple," Dialogue: A Journal of "prince" does not (46:1-3, 8, 12). Mormon Thought 23 (Spring 1990): 39-53; Linda King Newell, "A Gift Given, A 35. Jeremiah 33:17, 19-22, 23-26; Ezekiel 46:16. The books of Jeremiah and Gift Taken: Washing, Anointing, and Blessing the Sick among Mormon Women: Ezekiel are partly concerned with ensuring the righteousness of the new royal Changes from Joseph’s Time to the Present," SUNSTONE 6 (July-August 1981): line. Jeremiah calls the branch more specifically the "righteous branch" (tsemakh 16-25 (with responses by D. Michael Quinn and Irene M. Bates, 26-28); and tsadiq) or "branch of righteousness" (tsemakh tsedaqah) and says that he will do "The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood," Dialogue: A justice and righteousness in the land (Jeremiah 23:5; 33:15; English: vv. 25-27). Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Fall 1985): 21-32; Melodie Moench Charles, "LDS Ezekiel sees some of the former kings or "princes" as evil (21:30-32). He estab- Women and Priesthood," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Fall 1985): lishes rules for the prince so that this ruler and his posterity will not act 15-20. wickedly, especially in regard to the acquisition of land (cf. 45:8-9; 48:21). The 17. Gordon Irving, "The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of prince also has sacrificial contributions he must make for himself and for the the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1.830-1900," Brigham Young University Studies people (cf. 45:13-25; 46:4-7). Part of the way Ezekiel limits the king’s evil-doing 14 (1974): 291-313; David John Buerger, " ’The Fullness of the Priesthood’: The is by subordinating him to the priests (see the previous note). Second Anointing in Latter-day Saint Theology and Practice," Dialogue: A Journal 36. See Haggai 2:20-23 and compare with Jeremiah 22:24-30 for the context of Mormon Thought 16 (Spring 1983): 10-44; "The Development of the Mormon of royalty; cf. also Haggai 2:3-5; see Sirach 49:11 for a later reflection on this. Temple Endowment Ceremony," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20 37. This identification is made by comparing Zechariah 6:12, which says the (Winter 1987): 33-76. Note also the recent changes in the temple ceremony, see branch will to build the temple, with 4:9 (cf. vv. 6-14), which says that SUNSTONE 14 (June 1990): 59-61. One could add here the changes in the prac- Zerubbabel has founded the temple and will complete it. Cf. also Zechariah 3:8 tice of plural marriage (see "Official Declaration--1" in the Doctrine and Cove- which connects the branch to the time of Joshua the high priest, a contemporary nants; see D. Michael Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, of Zerubbabel (so also 6:11-13; and cf. 4:11-14) 1890-1904," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 [Spring 1985]: 9-105; E. 38. Jeremiah 3:18; 23:5-6; Ezekiel 34:23; 37:15-27; cf. Jeremiah 30:3; 31:1, Leo Lyman, "The Political Background of the Woodruff Manifesto," Dialogue: A 27-28; 50:19. Journal of Mormon Thought 24 [Fall 1991]: 20-39). For a brief assessment of de- 39.1 Thessalonians 4:15, 17 (and note the caution in 5:1-11); for expression velopments overall, see Mario S. DePillis, "Viewing Mormonism as Mainline," of the imminent coming of Jesus, see Matthew 10:23; 16:28; 24:33-34; Mark Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 24 (Winter 1991): 59-68. 14:62; Acts 1:6-7; 1 Corinthians 1:7-8; 7:29-31; 15:51-53; 16:22; Phflippians 18. See David P. Wright, "The Spectrum of Priestly Impurity" in Priesthood 1:6, 10; 4:5; 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10; 5:1-7, 23; 2 Thessalonians 2:1; 1 Timothy and Cult in Ancient Israel, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Saul M. Olyan (Journal for 6:14; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 10:25; James 5:8-9; 2 Peter 3:3-4, 9-10; 1 John 2:18- the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 125; Sheffield, England: JSOT 19; Revelations 1:1, 3, 7; 2:25; 3:3, 11; 22:7, 10, 12, 20. By the way, the under- Press, 1991), 150-81. standing that various New Testament passages refer to a general apostasy 19. In fact, even in ancient Israel there was a connection between prayer and requires modification in view of these expressions of Jesus’ imminent return. sacrifice: if one could not afford to offer a sacrifice, one could offer a prayer. Cf. 40. Cf. D&C 101 and 103. Menahem Haran, "Temple and Community in Ancient Israel," in Temple in Soci- 41. On other prophetic expectations in Mormonism, cf. Grant Underwood, ety, ed. Michael V. Fox (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1988), 23-24. "Millenarism and the Early Mormon Mind," Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982): 20. Differences and details regarding textual composition complicate this 41-51, and "Seminal versus Sesquicentennial Saints: A Look at Mormon Millen- picture. This layout allows us to get a fair impression of the basic chronological nialism," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14 (Spring 1981): 32-44; Mar- orientation of the hopes. vin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Fight from American Pluralism (Salt 21. Jeremiah 25:11-12; 29:10; cf. the time period in Jeremiah 27:7; on sev- Lake City: Signature, 1989), and "Quest for Refuge: An Hypothesis as to the So- enty years as a standard period of punishment, cf. Isaiah 23:15, 17. cial Origins and Nature of the Mormon Political Kingdom," Journal of Mormon 22. Ezekiel 36:8. History 2 (1975): 3-20; Keith E. Norman, "How Long, O Lord? The Delay of the 23. Zechariah 1:12; 7:5. Parousia in Mormonism," SUNSTONE 8 (January-April 1983): 48-58; Anthony 24. Jeremiah 16:14-15; 23:3, 8; 24:5-7; 29:4-14; 30:3; 31:7-11, 15-22, 31- A. Hutchinson, "Prophetic Foreknowledge: Hope and Fulfillment in an Inspired 37; 32:36-41; 33:7-9; 50:8; Ezekiel 6:8-10; 11:17-21; 14:10-11; 16:59-63; Community," SUNSTONE 11 (July 1987): 13-20 (this discusses Joseph Smith’s 18:29-32; 20:39-44; 24:13; 28:25.-26; 34:12-13; 36:22-28; 37:1-14, 21-23; "Civil War" prophecy). 39:25-29; Zechariah 2:11-13 (English: vv. 7-9); 3:9; 8:7; cf. Ezekiel 13:9; 16:53- 42. Daniel 9:24; that this refers to Jeremiah’s seventy years is made clear in 58. Daniel 9:2. See Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 25. Cf. Jeremiah 3:16; 12:14-17; 23:6; 29:11-12; 30:11, 16; 31:5, 12-13; Anchor Bible 23 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1978) 244, 246-50. 33:12-13, 16; Ezekiel 28:26; 34:13-15, 25-29; 36:1-12, 29-38; 47:1-12; Haggai 43. I imagined that since this was a reapplication of prophetic hopes, not 2:21-22; Zechariah 1:17; 2:1-4 (English: 1:18-21); 3:10; 8:10-17; cf. Zechariah every old prophetic hope would need to be taken up--only those that fit the 8:20-23; also the prophecies against the foreign nations in Jeremiah 46-51 and needs of the later religious community. I also imagined that there would be no Ezekiel 25-32. need for literally holding to the hopes of the older prophets. 26. Jeremiah 30:18-21; 31:38-40; Zechariah 2:5-9, 16 (English: vv. 3-5, 12); 44. Critical scholarship also recognizes that sizeable portions of chapters 1- 8:3-8; cf. Jeremiah 17:25 39 do not come from Isaiah. On the critical issues in general, see the commen- 27. Jeremiah 27:19-22; 31:14; 313:11, 18, 22; Ezekiel 37:26-28; Haggai (pas- taries: Otto Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (Old Testament Library; Philadelphia: sim); Zechariah 1:16; 3:1-10; 4:11-14; 6:9-14; 8:9; cf. Jeremiah 3:16-17. Westminster Press, 1972) and Isaiah 13-39, Old Testament Library (Philadel- 28. Note the second person singular directions in Ezekiel 43:19-25. Ezekiel phia: Westminster Press, 1974); Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40-66, Old Testa- functions as a second Moses (see W. Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2 [Philadelphia: Fortress, ment Library (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969); Christopher R. North, 1983], 432-34; see also pp. 430-31 on the textual problems regarding person). The Second Isaiah (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Edward Kissane, The Book of Ezekiel can well perform these functions because he is a priest (Ezekiel 1:3). Cf. Isaiah, 2 vols. (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, Ltd., 1960, 1943); John L. McKenzie, the second person singular reference in 45:18, 20; 46:13-14 Second Isaiah, Anchor Bible 20 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1968). 29. Ezekiel 43:10-12; cf. 40:4; see also 20:39-44 for the restoration of tem- For the argument of dating Second Isaiah, see in particular North, 1-4, and Kiss- ple practice after restoration from Babylonian captivity. ane, vol. 2, xi-xxvii. 30. Haggai 2:6-9 45. "Isaiah" in these expressions refers not to a prophet named Isaiah but to 31. Jeremiah 3:16-18; Zechariah 2:16-17 (English: vv. 12-13); 3:2; 8:2-3 sections of the book of Isaiah. 32. For God’s leaving the temple, see Ezekiel 8-11 (specifically 8:6; 10:1, 3- 46. Isaiah 40:1-2; 42:22-25; 43:26-28; 47:6-15; 48:3-4; 49:14-21; 51:19; 5, 18-21; 11:22-23); note that sins drive God from the temple and he goes east 54:7-8. into exile. On the return of God to tke temple, see Ezekiel 43:1-4; note that God 47. Isaiah 43:14; 47:1-15; 48:14, 20. comes back from the east (i.e., to the east gate of the temple); 43:3 specifically 48. Isaiah 40:1-2, 9-11; 41:27(?); 44:26-28; 45:13; 49:8, 14-21; 51:3, 17- connects this return with the vision in chapters 8-11. 23; 52:1-10; 54 passim. 33. Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24-27; cf. Jeremiah 17:25; 22:4. 49. Isaiah 43:5-8; 45:13; 48:20; 49:9-12, 22-26. 34. Ezekiel 34:24; 37:25; cf. Ezekiel 21:30-32 [English: vv. 25-27]. The sub- 50. Isaiah 44:28; 45:1-13; implied in 41:2, 25; 46:11; 48:14.

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51. Isaiah 44:1-5; 48:17-19; 49:20-23; 54:1-5 (and passim). See particularly City/Provo: Deseret Book and Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon 54:9-10, 14 for the enduring character of blessing. Studies, 1985].) Sorenson’s theory is a partially critical attempt to make sense of 52. Isaiah 48 (parallels) 1 Nephi 20; Isaiah 49 (parallels) 1 Nephi 21; Isaiah the Book of Mormon’s lack of concord with general ethnological, linguistic, and 50 (parallels) 2 Nephi 7; Isaiah 51 (parallels) 2 Nephi 8; Isaiah 53 (parallels) other cultural evidence from ancient America. See also critiques in several of the Mosiah 14. Partial citations or parallels include: Isaiah 40:3 (parallels) 1 Nephi essays in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon. 10:8; Isaiah 55:1-2 (parallels) 2 Nephi 9:50-51. These portions, by the Book of 60. Cf. 2 Nephi 5:24; Enos 1:20; Alma 3:5; 22:28; 43:20; 44:18; Mormon’s own story, would have had to been available at the end of the seventh 61. Recent relaxation in international tensions should not lull us into think- century B.C. Other citations of Second Isaiah include those by Jesus: Isaiah 52:1- ing that all henceforth will be well in Zion or in the world. 3 (parallels) 3 Nephi 20:32-45; Isaiah 54 (parallels) 3 Nephi 22. 62. I need to add here at the end that in my view the conclusions given in 53. For a full discussion, see David P. Wright, " ’In Plain Terms That We this paper cannot serve as a reason to move to some other religious tradition, es- May Understand’: Joseph Smith’s Transformation of Hebrews in Alma 12-13," pecially conservative Christianity, since other traditions and especially conserva- forthcoming in New Approaches to the Booh of Mormon: Explorations in Critical tive Christianity have similar historical problems (see Barr in note 2 and Barr and Methodology, ed. Brent Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, forthcoming). Brown in note 56). 54. See, for example, A. Malamat, "The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method.," in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. C. Meyers and M. O’Connor (Philadelphia and Winona Lake: American Schools of Oriental Research and Eisenbrauns, 1983), 303-13; R N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 53 (Sheffield, England: Journal_for the Study of the Old Testament, 1987); J. Max- well Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadel- phia: Westminster Press, 1986), 25-119. | 55. See the recent book by John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the His- torical Jesus: Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, Anchor Bible Reference Library (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1991). HEBREW IN SEASON: FALL 56. See, for example, James Barr, Scope and Authority and Holy 5c~ipture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983); Lawrence Boa&, Exasperating language! Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction (New York: Paulist Press, 1984); Ray- Encrypted right to left without vowels, mond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning qf the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981); Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadel- the code writing of a hunted tribe phia: Fortress Press, 1979). whose tracks might give them away. 57. The only way for individuals to decide if the historical critical mode and And the consonants! Spidering over the page its conclusions have validity is to study the critical literature for themselves. For critical work on the Bible, see the new Anchor Bible Dictionary (6 vols.; D. N. like refugees bearing invisible burdens Freedman et al. eds. [New York: Doubleday,1992]), the older Interpreter’s Dictio- or stand-up comics nary of the Bible (4 vols. plus supplement; G.A. Buttrick et.al., eds. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1962 & 19761) and the commentaries in the Anchor Bible (Double- hiding their pain in camouflage; day) and the Old Testament Library (Westminster Press). For a good and fairly even the name of God gone underground, recent introduction to the Old Testament for nonscholars reflecting the work of critical scholarship over the last generation, see Berhnard W. Anderson, Under- safe from prying eyes in this, standing the Old Testament (4th ed.; [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 19861). one of H-s native languages. This has a good bibliography with the majority of books listed having been pro- duced ’oy critical scholars. This introduction might be the best place to jump in Which is why I’m taking the course: for those unacquainted with critical scholarship. Also see the works in notes 2, 28, 42, 44, 54, 56. For some critical work on Mormon scripture, see Edward As- thinking we might communicate better hment, "The Facsimiles of the : A Reappraisal," SUNSTONE 4 in the Original. But then, (December 1979): 33-46; Anthony A. Hutchinson, "The Joseph Smith Revision and Synoptic Problem: An Alternate View," John Whitmer Historical Association when I sat there in a front seat Journal 5 (1985): 47-53 and "A Mormon Midrash? LDS Creation Narratives Re- holding the alphabet upside down considered," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21 (Winter 1988): 11-74. And see the papers forthcoming in Brent Metcalfe’s New Approaches to the Book of to make it read from left to right, Mormon. Cf. also Anthony Hutchinson, "LDS Approaches to the Holy Bible," Dia- the stuttering began. logue: ,’\Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Spring 1982): 99-124. Blake T. Ostler’s article, "The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source" (Di- A friend who’s more advanced alogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20 [Spring 1987]: 66-123) argues that the Book of Mormon has an ancient core which has been augmented with man}, warns me there will be more bad days, nineteenth-century additions and is one direction the critical approach could like when we learn there’s one verb take. For me, however, his conclusions about the Book of Mormon text pose se- for marriage and rape. vere theoretical and theological inconsistencies. Nonetheless, his "Preliminau Theology of Revelation," (108-15), contains important considerations for those One thinks of the lower animals trying to make theological sense of historical critical conclusions. For similar in rutting season, considerations, see Hutchinson, "Prophetic Foreknowledge" (in note 41). On models of revelation that take h~storical critical views into consideration, see caught in a permanent Eden. Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983); Robert Gnuse, The Authority of the Bible: Theories of Inspiration, Revelation and the Canon Bless the Fall. of Scripture (New York: Paulist, 1985). Bless us all. 58. Cf. JSR Exodus 34:1-2; D&C 84:23-28. 59. See 2 Nephi 5:21-23; Jacob 3:5, 8, 9; Alma 3:6-9; 3 Nephi 2:15. The at- Blessed be the name tempt to reduce the geography of the Book of Mormon peoples which might be of You Know Who. thought to alleviate much of this ethical problem cannot be accepted. (See John ----ROSEMARY KLEIN Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake

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The Churc.h buildings may not tell us all we want to know about God, but they reveal much about the people who built them.

THE MORMON STEEPLE: A SYMBOL OF WHAT?

By Martha Sonntag Bradley

TEN YEARS AGO I PUBLISHED Moreover, in the view of art my first paper: "’The Cloning of critic Panofsky in Meaning in the Mormon Architecture.< I was sure Visual Arts, content is "that which a it would influence the Church’s work betrays but does not parade." building policy. It did not. In fact, It is "the basic attitude of a nation, the Churchg approach to building a period, a class, a religious persua- is today even further removed from sion-all this qualified by one per- aesthetics and more deeply en- sonality and condensed into one trenched in bureaucracy. Neverthe- work. ,3 less, this paper, a decade later, is Forms that express the "basic based on a naive hope that Mormon attitude" of an age arise in many architecture will once again be en- ways. For example, a reverence for dowed with symbolic potency. the earth’s power is reflected in an arc of lightning, the undulation of THE SYMBOLIC IMPACT ocean waves, rolling hills or craggy OF FORM mountain peaks, or simply in the IN architecture there is no such quiet horizontality of the land- scape. They reflect the elemental phenomenon as accidental form. It order of the universe. In similar is the art most closely connected to ways we invent our own symbols to function. Here, ideas are made help us interpret the meaning of more accessible, given permanence, our existence. endurability. Architecture is the em- All artistic forms arise from this bodiment of idea and belief. interplay between idea and mate- Modern artist and social critic Ben Shann commented on the crit- rial, from a compulsion to embody ical connection between form and ideas in physical and tangible form. 1. The St. George Tabernacle We better understand something if belief. According to Shann, form is we can see it, or touch it, or hold it. the visible shape of all mang Perhaps ideas or beliefs will endure growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most if they have concrete form. Shann continues: primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated For form is not just the intention of content; it is state. Form is the many faces of the legend--bardic, epic, the embodiment of content. Form is based, first, upon sculptural, musical, pictorial, architectural; it is the infi- a supposition, a theme. Form is second, a marshaling nite images of religion; it is the expression and the 2 of materials, the inert matter in which the theme is to remnant of self. Form is the very shape of content. be cast. Form is third, a setting of boundaries, of limits, the whole extent of idea, but no more, an outer shape of idea. Form is next, the relating of inner MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY is an assistant professor of history shapes to the outer limits, the initial establishing of at Brigham Young University. She is also the new co-editor of harmonies. Form is further, the abolishing of excess- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. ive content, of content that falls outside the true limits

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2. The Tower of Babel 3. Greenwich, Utah 4. Meadow, Utah

of the theme. It is the abolishing of excessive materi- of these functions and, over time, have expressed the hierarchy als, whatever material is extraneous to inner harmony, of these functions. to the order of shapes now established. Form is thus The notion of a church as a gathering place of the faithful a discipline, an ordering, according to the needs of and the literal house of God has its roots in Old Testament content.4 theology. The Old Testament story of Jacob’s dream typified the As human beings, we are compelled to interpret the mean- process through which humankind moved from literal to ing of our existence through symbols. Our propensity forsymbolic understanding of God’s presence in the holy place. symbol-making unconsciously transforms objects or forms And Jacob... went toward Haran. And he lighted into images therein endowing them with heightened meaning. upon a certain place, and tamed there all night, Throughout time, religious art and architecture have been because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of shaped by this tension between form/content and symbol. The that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down voluptuous fertility figure or the paintings on the wails in in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a prehistoric caves reveal how our ancestors understood their ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to lives and the symbols they used to appease their gods. As was heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and true in prehistoric times, the interplay between religion and art descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above continues. Therefore, LDS meetinghouses and in particular it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, Mormon steeples are legitimate symbolic expressions of the and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; psychological condition of the modern-day Church. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, THE CHURCH AS THE HOUSE OF GOD Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And ¢ he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! ’A-- HOUSE of God" is metaphorically used by Mor- this is none other but the house of God, and this is the mons to describe their churches and temples. This is a gross gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morn- simplification, for these buildings are actually multi-use cen- ing and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, ters: chapels are houses of worship, administrative centers, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top community centers of social life, as well as houses of God. The of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel. steeples of these buildings serve as the symbolic embodiment (Genesis 28:10-13, 16-19.)

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5. Bountiful Tabernacle, Utah 6. Logan 6th Ward, Utah, 1906 7. Salt Lake 21st Ward, 1907

This scripture, so rich in metaphorical imagery, describes thethe example of the Gothic serves best to illustrate this point. holy place as a literal residence or dwelling place of God. TheThe verticality of the Gothic symbolized the tendency to reach ladder or vertical element in its construction as the bridgeinto the spiritual sphere, into the heavens. Gothic architecture between the physical and metaphysical worlds is typical ofwas truly God-centered. religious architecture that is God-centered. Rodin, the French impressionist sculptor, poetically charac- For some religions the building itself is a symbol of divineterized the verticality of the Gothic cathedral by saying: "The reality, for others the shrine or altar is the place for communioncathedral is the scaffolding of heaven. It gathers itself for flight; with God. For some religious groups, the location is significantit rises, then stops the first time to rest on the balustrade of the in terms of a divine visitation or miraculous event in the livesfirst tier; then the construction resumes its skyward flight. It of the people. A sacred building may exist as a stage for ritualstops at the limit of human powers.’’r or it might be a house of prayer. The hopes of the beyond found expression in the increasing Regardless, ideally the church is a place where humanheight of the Gothic cathedral, which seems to set the laws of beings can feel the spirit of God. In the house of God we gravity at defiance. pursue what philosopher William James called a "sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there. "5 TOWERS, SPIRES, AND STEEPLES The location or delineation of sacred spaces in buildings THE most obvious vertical element in ecclesiastical ar- reveals what is sacred for a people and where they believe the metaphysical and spiritual power lies. It is here, then, that wechitecture has always been the tower. Originally towers housed must look for what artist Marcel Duchamp describes as the bells to call people to worship and spread news both joyful and ’’6 sad. In times of war, medieval men used towers for defense, as "starting point of the concrete. Whatever the functionsrefuge of in times of danger. Towers stood as marking posts for these buildings, they are testimonies to the sense of awe thattravellers, occasionally served as apartments for priests who people can feel. The buildings may not tell us all we want tocould conveniently say night offices without descending to the know about God, but they reveal much about the people who church below. built them. Architecturally, the tower was the culmination of English Because we are most familiar with Western architecture,Gothic achievement. The revolution in church design which and because it is so clearly reflected in Mormon architecture, marked the closing years of the seventeenth century, was due

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8. Indianola, Utah, 1916 9. Society Hill, South Carolina, 1907

10. Nebo Stake Tabernacle, Utah 11. Parowan, Utah

mainly to the work of Christopher Wren, whose London tradition as transported to New England during the eighteenth churches rising from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666 created century and repeated ad nauseam in revival architecture of the a new spatial and decorative concept in the High Renaissancenineteenth century. Nineteenth-century LDS steeples are the style designed for Protestant worship and preaching. Fifty-tworeminder of what Rodin called this "gathering for flight"; it is churches were rebuilt under his direction. These churches arethe last, however, diffused remnant of the flight upward, of the particularly interesting because of their variety of interioryearning to reach the heavens, even as the winding staircase of plans. Collectively, their towers and spires soared over thethe Tower of Babel, the symbol of a bridge between heaven and crowded streets of London, and varied in shape: rectangular, earth (#2). round, square, or octagonal. An effect of stability was obtained There are four basic types of LDS meetinghouses: (1) no by the width of the tower receding to the top, by battering,steeple; (2) a fully integrated (substantial)steeple; (3) separate through stepped upper stories, or by buttresses projecting less (but often not equal); (4) the afterthought steeple which comes in two types: (a) a diminutive steeple placed on top designed stage by stage. without any thought of a steeple form, or (b) the steeple as THE MORMON STEEPLE logo. There has always been a tradition in LDS architecture of THE earliest Mormon steeples such as that of the Nauvoo building churches with no steeples at all. The small vernacular structures of the colonization period could easily be mistaken and Kirtland Temples or the St. George Tabernacle (illustration #1) were the indirect descendants of the Wren tower/spire as school houses or public buildings. There is nothing in terms

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12. Parowan, Utah 13. Tempe, Arizona

14. La Canada, California, 1954 15. Wilshire Ward, California

of form or symbol that distinguishes their religious function. vernacular structure is complimented by the white wood trim These small, primarily one-room structures were, like of the roof cornice and window moldings which are headed by homes in the isolated areas of Mormon territory, usually built brick arches. of locally produced adobe brick, log, or rough-hewn frame A passage from The Whisper of the River by Ferrol Sams studding. The choice of material depended entirely on the illustrates this sense of place so important for a gathering of availability of materials, the climate (that varied so dramati- Saints: cally from north to south), technology, and the ethnicity of the The building stood in a grove of red oak and particular group. "The development of Mormon architecture is hickory nut trees, and the yard around it was hoed as much a story of change in church philosophy and expansion free of weeds and then swept clean with dogwood of church organization as it is a story of the adoption of ’’8 brooms. Its windows, tall and narrow, were filled with technological or stylistic improvements (#8, Indianola, Utah, squares of handmade glass. The irregularity of each ]916). clear pane gave a slight prism to reflected light and Church buildings erected during the first wave of settle- produced a mirrored mosaic that was mismatched ment were simple, plain in form and ornamentation, and and undulating. The steeple had no ornamental frills reflected a determined community effort to create a place of but was proportioned well to the size of the building, congregation in the truest sense. The earliest churches were and it housed an ancient iron bell that compensated houses of worship, but also the scenes of virtually all public in clanging volume for its lack of timbre and tone. It gatherings (#3, Greenwich, Utah). The warm red brick of this was a one-room building, but should anyone think it

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16. Paris Tabernacle, Idaho, 1883-89 17. Salt Lake 19th Ward 18. Sugarhouse Ward, Utah

crude or spartan, let it be quickly known that this was straints of the Church in the mission field. The steeple was the House of the Living God. added to the original structure several years after its original There were some people who thought themselves construction (#9). indifferent to that church, but they all wanted it there. It gave a feeling of security and it guaranteed succes- FULLY INTEGRATED TOWER FORM 1880s- 1920s sion. Even the most outspoken cynic would have THE four decades between 1880-1920 marked the high been uncomfortable and filled with foreboding had it vanished. It was needed right there, where it was .... point of Mormon steeple design, a time when steeples became The church was hope and assurance; it was challenge; more fully integrated with building design. Impossible to it was£judgment. It was also comfort and benediction. understand these forms separate from the structures they The area would have been desolate indeed without it.9 adorn, they emerge naturally from the mass itself and together As communities stabilized, became more stratified and di- with other architectural elements produced churches. versified in terms of population, services, and resources, the Although the Bountiful Tabernacle, built in 1857-63, is Saints built new church buildings bedecked with steeples or basically a Classical Revival building, the steeple itself ex- added steeples to previously existing structures. Where earlier plodes with creative energy and blatantly disregards the for- buildings most likely had crude roofs, sawmills provided lum- mality and orderly spirit of the style. Its complex series of ber to create a more finished look. stages do not diminish in size as they ascend toward the sky, Like the Greenwich wardhouse, the Meadow, Utah, ward but stay basically the same. Each stage is complicated by building conforms to the classical style. The round headed moldings and woodwork more reminiscent of Victorian than windows and cornice lines stretch to a more formal and careful classical detailing. The multi-spired upper level sits on a plat- rendering of what is still basically a vernacular structure. The form like a fancy wedding cake presented on a tray (#5, octagonal wooden tower has louvered, round-headed win- Bountiful Tabernacle, Utah, 1857-63). dows and an octagonal steeple that rises sharply to a peak (#4). Perhaps the most curious early Mormon church steeple is The Society Hill ward building was the first LDS church the Logan 6th Ward’s tower, a replica of the Salt Lake Temple. building constructed in South Carolina, a building built in The building itself combined elements of Gothic Revival and 1907 for a branch first organized in 1898. Its rectangular plan New England church architecture, most notably its symmetry and plain facade and wall surfaces reflect the financial con- and the dentils and other careful details of the cornice lines

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19. Mar Vista, California 20. St. George, Utah, 1970s 21. Is that a Mormon Steeple on the Planned Parenthood Building?

(#6). ship were established that would dictate ward building design The steeple of the Salt Lake 21st Ward building, 1907, is for the next fifty years. The most important change was that again fully integrated into the design of the building. The main future church buildings integrated all functions in one ward entrance to the building is located on the lower level. Round- building. Before this, separate tabernacles were constructed for headed windows on the second story and an interesting round larger meetings and separate gymnasiums were built for recre- window with star molding on the second-and-one-half story ational activities. Churches designed by Don Carlos Young, the appear on the brick portion of the tower. The upper one-third "Colonel’s Twins," embodied this concept of integrated design, is constructed of wood and is topped by pointed arched Gothic emphasizing function. Steeples were once again a conspicu- windows and a spiked steeple (#7). ously absent element in what were otherwise basically conser- The Paris Tabernacle’s tower is also fully integrated into the vative designs (#12, Parowan, Utah). building design, but here it is alive with action and energy. In the 1940s and 1950s repetitive plans were produced by Divided into seven different levels (not necessarily identifying private architects for use by the Church. Ted Pope designed an stories of the building) this tower is totally eclectic (#16). The estimated 250-300 buildings between 1949-1955, more than twin towers of the Nebo Stake Tabernacle (#10) flank a curvi- any other single architect working for the Church. His designs, linear parapet facade of this Mission Revival style building. The particularly his pseudo-Colonial churches, like the Sugar- flaring tower roofs are covered with red tile (#17, Salt Lake house Ward, were popular, functional, and inexpensive. 19th Ward). Steeples were a popular ornamentation on Pope-designed During the 1920s the Church built numerous, really quite church buildings. Because these buildings were large multi-use wonderful, Wrightian buildings reminiscent of Frank Lloyd structures, the steeples were less fully integrated into the Wrightg Unity Temple (1909) in Oak Park, Illinois, character- overall design and have a more decorative quality (#18). ized by massiveness, boldness, a sculptural look, and subtle While the stucco and Spanish Colonial ornamentation of basic proportions. Nevertheless, many Mormons felt uncom- these buildings is clearly indigenous to Southern California fortable with what they perceived as unchurchlike, awkward and Arizona, the use of the tower continued during the 1940s forms foreign to LDS architectural tradition, perhaps because and 1950s. The tower/steeple in both the Tempe Ward, 1930s- of the noticeable lack of steeples (#11, Parowan, Utah). 1940s, and the Mar Vista ward, 1928, was less important to the By the 1930s the essential functional patterns of LDS wor- overall design of the building as function became more impor-

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22. Narragansett Ward, Rhode Island 23. Sage plan chapel with three-tiered lightpole steeple

24. St. George, Utah, 1990 25. Granite, Utah, 1990

rant than symbol (#13; #19). Not all buildings constructed function to overall design; what needs the building could during this period were modern versions of the Spanish Colo- satisfy became more important than its religious symbol. nial. The La Canada Ward, designed by architect Louis Thomas Many architects were alarmed by the implications of this in 1954, has tudor decorative elements but again a steeple program, particularly its insensitivity to local cultures and totally out of scale with the rest of the building (#14). styles. The new aesthetic, uniformity of design and concept, reflected the intent to unify different cultures and peoples. For CHURCH BUILDING COMMITTEES Saints in the international Church, the wardhouse was a sym- bol, a trademark; the steeple was a symbol that the Church had CHURCH membership doubled between 1940 and arrived. The immediate results of the consolidated building 1960, and this growth is reflected in a corresponding rapid program were reflected in steeple design. The Church’s use, proliferation of building projects. The institutional response to misuse, and disuse of steeples in the last few decades indicate this growth came in 1954 with the creation of the Church a more pervasive attitude toward ecclesiastical building in Building Committee, consolidating all artistic and financial general (#15, Wilshire Ward, California). decisions in a single governing agency and creating the first SEPARATE STEEPLES index of plans. In 1964, the building program was further revamped allowing for greater consolidation of programs, a DURING the late 1970s and 1980s an increasing num- move that had a profound impact on chapel design. The tower/steeple form became increasingly less important than ber of LDS standard-plan meetinghouses had detached steeples

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26. Matthews Ward, California, 1930s 27. La Mesa, California, 1950

28. Suggested logo/symbol of the new wardhouses 29. Duente Ward, California, Sage plan with tower

placed somewhere nearby the main structures. Many archi- Often this design was a financial consideration. When a tects who worked with these plans attempted to design a stake was trying to adhere to budget in planning their new steeple form that corresponded to the style, material, or shape building, the steeple, when measured against a higher grade of of the main structure. Some were successful; others were not. carpet in the chapel or a larger kitchen, often lost out. The But increasingly the steeple was not considered in the original three-tier, light pole steeple form, popular in the 1980s, was design of the building and had no relationship to it in terms of the best example of this accommodation to economic con- scale, form, or scope of design. The result is that many of these straints on design. This became the simplest, most under- steeples/towers seem to be afterthoughts, elements added to stated, abbreviated expression of "steeple" to date. For less signal that this building is a church, a sort of logo, but utterly than $3,000 it signaled "church" (#23, Sage plan chapel with devoid of symbolic or aesthetic potency. Furthermore, many three-tiered lightpole steeple, Granite, Utah, 1988). freestanding steeples--the separate but not equal group-- could be eliminated altogether and not affect the design or mood of the original structure. In this way the steeple was THE AFTERTHOUGHT STEEPLE divorced from aesthetic considerations and became a symbol DURING the late 1980s the Church Building Depart- devoid of ideological impact. Instead, we have steeples that are ment constructed a number of churches, most notably the Sage whimsical, dramatic, ridiculous, and often look like the con- meetinghouse plan, with no steeples at all. There was nothing tact point for a space station (#22, Narragansett Ward, Rhode in the form of the Sage, or usually the materials with which it Island; #20, St. George, Utah, 1970s). was built, that suggested church. A number of stakes opted, at

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 47 $ u N S T O N E later dates, to place steeples next to the existing structures. the horizontal sweep of the Sage roof or other contemporary Others, in perhaps a worse-case scenario, put steeples, usually standard plan buildings have been so emasculated as to have small, and totally out of scale, on top of the building itself, asno symbolic impact at all (#29, Duente Ward, California, Sage an afterthought (#24, St. George, Utah, 1990; #25 Granite, plan with tower). Utah, 1990). There were earlier instances of this type of stee- Secularizing the functions of the LDS church building is ple. Harold Button’s Matthews Ward, built in the 1930s, has a reflected externally in the desymbolization of the steeple. This tiny lantern like steeple with no relationship in terms of style,diffuses and deemphasizes its symbolic impact which reveals dimension, or design to the rest of this boxy, unattractivemuch, perhaps too much, of how far we have come and how building (#26). The steeple of the La Mesa ward building ismuch we have lost. ~ quite lovely, but again completely out of proportion with the Classical Revival building itself (#27). NOTES Other Sage chapels were built with small steeples included in the original building. Nevertheless, these diminutive 1. Martha S. Bradley, "The Cloning of Mormon Architecture" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14 (Spring 1981): 20. steeples have the same feeling of being afterthoughts rather 2. Ben Shann, The Shape of Content (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, than integrated parts of the design (#21). 1957), 53. 3. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday An- CONCLUSION chor Books, 1957), 14. 4. Shann, 70. 5. William James, The Writings of William James (New York: The Modem Li- THE change in steeple form on churches is due to morebrary, 1968), 725. than simply changes in style. The change is an expression of 6. Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Paragraphic Books, what the German artist Franz Marc, who died during World 1959), 78. 7. Rodin, The Cathedrals of France (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1921). War I, called the "profoundest center of gravity of their own 8. Ebbie L. Davis, "Form Function Relationships in the Development of LDS age.’’~° What then is the center of gravity in the LDS church asArchitecture," M.A. Thesis, BYU, 1970, 170. reflected in modern day Mormon chapel architecture and, in 9. Ferrol Sams, The Whisper of the River (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 1-2. particular, in the steeple? 10. Franz Marc quoted in Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: First, the relationship between content and form has been Dell, 1964), 286. obscured by the preoccupation with function, which expresses the content of the modern day church (the spirit of the age, if you will). In the 1980s Mormon ecclesiastical structures be- came the stage for the movement of large numbers of Saints through programs--not meditations on the spirit, but the JOB & OTHER SPECULATIONS satisfaction of programmatic requirements rather than com- munion with God. His name in languages was Iyy0bh, Hiob: Second, is the steeple of the LDS meetinghouse a symbol of I wonder when he stretched out a house of God? Is it the s)qnbol of a God-centered place of at end of day, the boil-scars tattooing worship? Our wardhouses are more literally houses of commu- his arms and chest nity, social, and administrative life. They are occasionally courthouses, sports arenas, dance hails, and craft centers; in and the bitter wife settled alongside him terms of space, materials of construction, and the general level if the length, texture, shine of respect with which they are treated, they are not even in a of her hair pleased him as before, metaphorical sense houses of God. Our architecture reflects an if the size of the new herds, flocks, yokes, embrace of the earth rather than a preoccupation with the house and servants compensated heavens. It has become human-centered. It is spatially the for the old familiars. scene for the interaction of the community of Saints rather than the interaction between human beings and God. How often did he dream of his children’s The new three-tiered lightpole "steeple" form does not round warm faces, dark eyes, symbolize the function of the Mormon meetinghouse. It does bright laughter? not in any sense have symbolic potency as an identifier of a Nights, when the narcotic of deep house of God. The new logo/symbol of the wardhouse might sleep--r.e.m, sleep--detached more appropriately be the sign welcoming visitors and telling his nous from fear, the name of the ward, the group who uses the building (#28). The spreading roof of the Sage standard plan, like a huge did he ever question the contest, tent, provides a striking contrast to the vertical lines of the the terrible pride of the Yahweh god Gothic cathedral that stretch heavenward. The form of the Sage who wagered his safety, his life, his fortunes is more reminiscent of a huge warehouse, a warehouse for to the jealous lash of a devil’s mockery? worship, warehousing the Saints. The steeples placed next to --SEAN BRENDAN BROWN

PAGE 48 SEPTEMBER 1992 we all know. So let’s look at its negative LIGHTER MINDS side-effects.

WHEN HUMOR HURTS DON’T LAUGH IT OFF WHEN does humor hurt? For one, humor hurts when it is malignant teasing. WHEN HUMOR HURTS, What is malignant teasing? It’s deliberately painful mockery that hides its coward’s face WHEN HUMOR HEALS behind the mask of the Joker. In the Anglo-American culture, almost any vice is excusable--stinginess, alcoholism, promis- By Elouise M. Bell cuity-if it’s played as a joke. Think how much mileage, how many laughs, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and Dean Martin, among others, got out of the aforementioned vices. The one fault we don’t excuse is lack of a sense of humor. So one can be cruel to an- other, mocking and teasing, if it’s done in the name of joking, kidding. And if the victim should speak up and object, voila--our old friend, The Guilt of the Victim: "What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke?" Countless children have been made miserable, day after day, by such brainless and cruel "teasing" by siblings and by adults who should know better. I once intervened when my father was teasing my nephew. My father growled, "He’s got to learn to take a joke!" The child was four years old. I tried to explain to my father that the ability to take a joke requires a little more than four years to develop. In some people, that ability to take a joke is minimal at best. There’s a wonderful book and film called Bang the Drum Slowly. The setting is a national baseball team, and the main characters are the pitcher and the catcher. The pitcher is bright, the catcher is dull-normal, as I believe the counseling pro- Humor heals because it reminds us always to look around and see that fession calls it. Maybe just dull. The catcher we’re not the only ones here. It provides us with release from our tensed is the butt of every joke the baseball players postures and pleasure at the unexpected distortions of our lives. can think of. The team calls this kind of hard teasing "ragging." And they rag the catcher mercilessly--until they learn he has a termi- WE’VE HEARD QUITE a lot in recent nal disease. Then their natural decency re- There are many definitions of humor. Ar- emerges, and they show him kindness years about the healing properties of humor istotle says that "humor is the pleasurable from Norman Cousins and his literary cous- instead of cruelty. At book’s end, the pitcher distortion of what is expected." By torquing visits his friend’s grave, and as he walks away, ins. Like all powerful medicines, humor can your body as one does in stretching exer- have negative side-effects. Counselors need he reflects, with what I consider one of the cises, you decompress the spine. By distort- great closing lines in bookdom: "From here to be alert to these side-effects. So we’ll talk ing your body from its expected and about when humor hurts, when it heals, and on out, I rag nobody." He had learned about customary posture, you release accumulated the dangers of malignant humor, for those how we might avail ourselves and others of tension and help yourself feel better. Humor its curative properties. who dish it out as well as for those forced to works a bit like that. Humor could be enor- swallow it. mously healing in the Mormon culture if we Okay, what about this? You have an office would, first, admit how much tension accu- ELOUISE M. BELL is a professor of English at mate who has told you repeatedly what a mulates, and second, allow ourselves to dis- poor sense of direction she has. She is, as Brigham Young University. This address was de- tort expectations once in a while. livered to the annual conference of The Helen Cannon calls herself, "a geographical We want to discover more about humor, dyslexic." She regales you with funny stories Association of Mormon Counselors and Psycho- to nail down the statistics. When it heals. therapists, 4 April 1991, in Salt Lake City. of getting lost in her own neighborhood. And when it hurts. Because it does hurt, as One day, she is late for an appointment, and

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 49 when she arrives, you quip, "What’s the mat- HOW HUMOR HEALS our customary expectations and posture to- ter: couldn’t you find the freeway exit?" And ward authority--and that is mightily restor- WE all realize that humor heals. But ative and healing. she blows up! Is she neurotic? ’Maybe then, who ain’t? If you want the point clarified, just how does it work? Let’s think about that On another occasion, one member of the Quorum of the Twelve encountered the aged read Cyrano de Bergerac, now also in a fine question a bit. film production. Cyrano makes forty jokes Freud says that "jokes are the aggressive J. Golden on the streets of Salt Lake Cit> about his own nose, but floors the cadet who release of pent-up frustrations." Frustration "Good morning, Elder Kimball," the mentions the word to him: "For I say these is of epidemic proportions in our culture. If apostle said. "How is your health today?" things lightly enough about myself, but woe we were to give each other greater permis- "Wal, not too bad for an old man," J. unto him who says them of me." Now some- sion to acknowledge that fact, and then add to Golden shrilled. "Truth of the matter is--I time psychologists ought to figure out the that permission to release those frustrations can’t pee. But that’s all right: the president of psychology of that attitude, which we all through humor, our mental and emotional the Church can’t pee either!" have to a greater or lesser degree. Just why health might improve dramatically and That story is healing because it releases us, do we object to others making fun of the counselors wouldn’t be working sixty- and verbally and briefly, from two expectations. It same flaws we do? We know the facts--that seventy-hour weeks. gives us permission to say, or at least hear, the we have a big nose or a poor sense of direc- One of the rare Mormons treasured for his mildly taboo word, pee, and to acknowledge tion. So why should we take offense when humor was J. Golden Kimball. Everyone that the president of the Church actually another says what we have said ourselves, knows and cherishes some J. Golden story. pees--o r has trouble peeing. and joked about, so often? I think it has to Like this one: Now if those stories offend you, I’m sorry. do with the principle of invasion. For me to Preaching at the funeral of Rudger Dixon I’m sorry in the same way a colleague of mine show you part of myself is one thing; for you in Idaho, J. Golden waxed eloquent about was sorry when a student she had had in to notice and comment uninvited is another. what a stalwart the deceased was, how Zion class .just folded up and dropped out of ev- I may wave to you out of my living room would never be the same without Brother erything, including the university. When the window as you pass by, but if you peer in my Dixon, how even as they were gathered, the dean informed her that this young man had window uninvited and later tell me what deceased was being welcomed into the com- withdrawn, my friend said, "Oh, I’m sorry!~ you saw, I am apt to feel that my privacy has pany of the departed saints in the celestial The dean replied, "That’s all right; it wasn’t been invaded and my inner sanctum dese- kingdom. your fault." My friend explained that she crated. "Brothers and Sisters," he croaked, hadn’t assumed it was; she was just sad that My brother discovered this truth the hard "Brother Dixon is even now in the presence the boy had left school. So in that sense, I’m way. In the middle of one hot night in their of Brother Brigham and Brother Joseph 2 sorry if you’re offended, but I would cite two home in Washington, D.C., he and his wife Then he looked into the audience and higher authorities on the issue. To some were awakened from a sound sleep by a great saw the gnnning face of Rudger Dixon. long-faced followers who were offended clap of thunder. A heavy storm was beating J. Golden glared over at the bishop on the when he was joking and teasing with some down. "You close the windows." he yelled to stand and rasped, "Bishop, just who the hell young men, Joseph Smith explained that a his wife; "I’ll bring in the lawn furniture." is dead here, anyway?" hunter’s bow must not stay tightly strung all And he dashed to the back yard, not really Now, in the spirit of research, let’s look at the time, or else it wouldn’t be in shape when thinking about the fact that he: had gone to that story. It’s not especially funny, you know. it was needed. bed in the buff. Outside, he ran around haul- But it’s told and retold in Mormon Country, My second authority is Levi Edgar Young, ing in the furniture, but as he tried to get the generation after generation. Why? For at a member of the Twelve some time back. He giant lawn umbrella furled, the wind least three reasons that could be of interest to declared that the eleventh commandment whipped around and practically had him a Mormon psychotherapist or counselor. had been revealed to him. airborne. He struggled around in the back First, death is fearful to most of us. We Some skeptic queried him, saying, "Elder yard for some minutes, naked as a newborn, view death with awe, mystery, dread. We Young, I understand that you have pro- in the middle of thunder and lightning, but have, despite ourselves, a powerful in- claimed an eleventh commandment, and at last got the umbrella down and everything stinctual drive tensed always to resist death. that it says, ’Thou shalt not take thyself too secured. He had just dropped back into bed Joking about death momentarily releases that seriously.’ Is that correct?" when the phone rang. It was his neighbor coiled resistance and eases the tension. "Nossir!" replied Elder Young. "That is not and golf buddy. "Just wanted, to let Mary Second, the key word in this story is hell. correct. The correct wording is: ’~Thou shalt Poppins know we loved the show!" Watching our language, for a good many of not take thyself too damn seriously!" As therapists, you are invited into our us, produces a certain tension. J. Golden’s use Some Saints fear that if we give permis- lives. In fact, you’re invited further in than of that taboo word, hell, in that reverent sion to tell irreverent stories, we will endan- just about anyone else. But you’re treading setting releases a few degrees of tension in us, ger the testimonies of the faithful, or the on tender, if not sacred, ground. Take your and thereby heals us a tad. unfaithful, or someone, surely someone. But shoes off. Be respectful. And be very careful Third, maintainin’g a reverent, respectful I suggest that when the time comes that we about laughing. The client who can laugh posture toward the leaders of the Church-- give permission in our culture for more heartily at his own foibles can be deeply, toward anyone or any object, for that mat- humor directed at ourselves, at that day we primally wounded--in your jargon, his Lit- ter--produces a certain emotional and will have stronger testimonies in every quar- tie Boy can be wounded--if you laugh at spiritual compression, just as standing erect ter. The principle is that the tree which does those same foibles. produces a spinal compression. When J. not bend shall break. The tension which is So humor can hurt when itg malignant, Golden comes out with that taboo word, hell, not released can eventually snap the spine, and humor can hurt when it’s invasive. he gives us all a chance to pleasurably distort the spirit, and perhaps the soul.

PAGE 50 SEPTEMBER 1992 SPEAKING THE WORD is cathartic, therapeutic. Try it sometime. my idol, Anna Russell. One can even have a Raphael Sabatini begins his great adven- firm conviction that one’s church is the only YOU understand the pnnciple of the ture book, Sca~’amouche, with this wonderful divinely ordained church on earth--a nd still ~vo~d. It is the power of the word that tri- opening line: "He was born with the gift of have perspective enough to realize that most umphs in dysfunctional families, triumphs laughter, and a sense that the world was of the world does not share that conviction, over the denial, the lies, the secrets, and the mad." (My father quoted that line to me and that there is some considerable irony in silence. The first speaking of the word can be frequently when I was a child. It may be his such a conviction. One could value the story painful, it’s true: "Dad’s an alcoholic"; "Bud is best legacy to me.) The line expresses a very of the good deaconess Jones, who after an gay"; "Mom’s is a shop-lifter"; "Sister had an therapeutic philosophy. The world’s madness easy and blessed death, was being shown abortion." (Not all in the same year, we causes us great misery and pain. Awareness around heaven by St. Peter. They passed a hope.) Saying those things is incredibly pain- of the insanity and the ability to laugh at the lovely meadow with a stream running ful at first. And also enormously healing. insanity combine to make one of the few through, and saw many folks who were sing- Such is the power of the word. effective balms. Another word for that balm ing and shouting praises, baptizing in the I have a friend who recently began to is perspective. As I page through the oft- stream, and enjoying a great picnic lunch. retrieve memories of incredible: incestuous quoted DSM-III (Diagnostical Statistical Man- "The Baptist saims," explained St. Peter, and abuse during her childhood. I won’t belabor ual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition), it seems j<’I~llt~m/~ nodded. Later they passed a great the horrors she is going through as she faces to me that most disorders, at least those that (,,,thtc cathedral, and inside were a congre- the emergence of these memories. Her expe- are not biochemical in origin, are malfunc- gation listening to a beautiful Gregorian rience in that respect is a classic textbook tions of perspective. The client lacks the per- chant sung by robed choir boys. The incense case. What is not typical is her way of dealing spective to understand that a defense smelled sweet, and the stained glass win- with the pain. She has written twelve or mechanism which may have been useful at dows were marvelous to behold. "The Cath- fifteen limericks, each of them incredibly age four is counter-productive at age fort> olic saints," indicated St. Peter. Jemimah graphic, some of them remarkably bawd> all The narcissistically disturbed have perspec- nodded in recognition. "Now we’re going to of them very good verse, all of them humor- tive problems, the hysterics have perspective have to be very quiet as we pass this next ous--blackly humorous, to be sure, fiercely problems, the phobic, the pedophilic, the place," said St. Peter. And on tiptoe, he led satiric in the style of Jonathan Swift--and as perpetually panicked. Well, pardon me for her past a valley were industrious folks were a group, these limericks are enormously ther- playing doctor here. My point is that per- plowing and planting, painting fences and apeutic, enormously healing, both to the au- spective is a symptom of good health, and pacifying babies, piecing quilts and taking thor and to other incest survivors with whom that humor helps us keep things in perspec- turns giving talks to one another. "The Mor- she has shared them. tive. mons," St. Peter whispered after they had Here’s the principle: expressing our pain Sometimes, humor works in rather dra- passed. "But why do we have to be so quiet?" in language is healing. And the witty expres- matic ways. A therapist of my acquaintance Jemimah asked. "Because they think they’re sion of pain is additionally therapeutic. The once, as a young student in training, was the only ones here English poet Robert Graves has a poem enti- assigned to work in a state hospital with a Humor heals because it reminds us al- tled "The Traveler’s Curse after Misdirection." chronic patient. You know the kind they ways to look around and see that we’re not The traveler in this poem has been given assign the apprentices--they’re not going to the only ones here. It provides us with that wrong directions all day. His rage and frustra- get better; they’re not going to get worse, so great lens, perspective. It provides us with tion are, by the end of the daB huge, toxic, what harm can the beginner do? Well, my release from our tensed postures, and plea- possibly pathological. Perhaps you have friend was working with this man who had sure at the unexpected distortions of our been in his uncomfortable shoes. If so, you been institutionalized for years. She had had lives. May we all keep a constant supply of will understand his feelings as he pro- several lucid conversations with the man, humor in our individual medicine bags and nounces a curse on all those who gave him when he suddenly went into a series of grot- apply generously as needed. bungled directions: esque and bi7arre facial tics and incoherent May they wander stage by stage vocal sounds. My friend looked at him and Of the same vain pilgrimage:, laughed in his face. The patient stopped Stumbling on, age after age, short. No one had ever laughed at his gig Night and day, mile after mile, before. He pulled himself together and never At each and every step, a stile; again went into the routine as long as my waiting At each and every stile withal, friend worked with him. Her spontaneous May they catch their feet and fall; laugh had provided him with some perspec- in a restless breeze At each and every fall they take, tive, which, in this case at least, proved ben- as squirrels spar May a bone within them break; eficial. marking across the park And may the bones that break within Humor heals, then, by reminding us of their springtime space Not be, for variation’s sake, perspective. And perspective need not be a waiting Now rib, now thigh, now arm, now passionless detachment. One can have pas- shin, sion and perspective. One can, for example, in melancholy sunlight But always, without fail, sincerely believe that the best things in life as mallards fly by THE NECK. are chocolate and have perspective enough to searching for rushes Clearly, the emotions of rage and frustration see the humor in that belief. One can be in which to nest that prompted that poem have been mightily passionate about music, and also see its purged with its creation. Even ~eading it aloud waiting funny side, in the manner of P D. Q. Bach or --DAVID CLARK KNOWLTON

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 51 for the summer. No one seemed to mind; the THIS SIDE OF THE TRACTS little flock seemed happy to go un- shepherded. All I heard about the president was that he had a beard and that he majored in Latin American literature. ! envisioned a A QUORUM MEMOIR kind of Che Guevara in a three-piece, with a priesthood manual folded into his copy of The Socialist Worker. The real man, it turned By Michael Hicks out, was lean and blond, wore glasses, and talked less like a revolutionary than a man- agement training seminar teacher. The first week he was back I went head to head with him during our quorum class, arguing over whether or not Joseph’s teachings should be considered scripture (I took the affirmative). Though I was belligerent, he remained airy--he had no time for public clashes. Later, after many long discussions with him, in which we agreed about most everything, I found out that despite his major he didn’t especially like Latin American literature, though he was proud when Marquez won the Nobel Prize. Our meeting room at the Institute build- ing was rather spare and, well, institutional, with grey metal chairs and a persistent hum of fluorescent lights. (I never was able to persuade anyone to turn off the lights and open the drapes.) There was no piano, and since meetings began at 9 A.M., we growled hymns a cappella while our wives, two rooms away, sang sunnily with a piano chim- ing behind them. From the nursery, records of "Old McDonald" and "My Grandfather’s Clock" seeped through the walls. Our black- boards slid on runners, and could cover one another, which made them ideal for Gospel Jeopardy. But we never played that game A quorum is not just assignments, socials, shared labor, lessons, again after the first week. or even controversies. It is a cast of characters. We didn’t because, when that fall came, the old quorum president was retired to the high council and our new president called WHEN A PIONEER woman broke a two new teachers. The first, Dave, was fast on thing I wanted it to be that it never could: his feet and could improvise a tolerable dis- piece of china, I am told, she threw the half Utopian classroom, half Parnassian cussion, which he often had to do because fragments down into her well so that the game. the second, Chuck, rarely showed up for his pieces might filter the spring. I feel the same The first priesthood meeting I attended at appointed lessons. On one typical Sunday, about the memories of my old quorum: don’t my university ward in the Midwest literally Dave got up and began airing his beefs with toss them casually into the hot sun of scru- was a game--"Gospel Jeopardy," they called Ken Woodward’s latest Newsweek article, a tiny, but put them down in some small place it. We had to guess the questions to answer tough piece on the LDS missionary system. where they can do some good. So I hesitate cards stuck on the blackboard. It was our half That started a big fight over just how right or to have this slight memoir read by so many of the room against the other half and our wrong Woodward was or wasn’t. Some of us, who don’t know me or who don’t care. But if side won, despite my grand faux pas--I sympathetic to the article, felt Dave was mis- it helps some future elders quorum presi- chose "LDS Periodicals" for 100 points, but to representing the article and finally one dent, it will have done its job. an answer I no longer recall I provided the brother got up, pulled the article off of the Here is the gist of it: my elders quorum question, "What was the Frontier Guardian?" Institute bulletin board and made Dave read was like a dream that never came true, some- instead of the correct question, "What was it to the class. None of this was in the man- the Western Standard?" I learned then this ual. would not be an easy quorum. That’s the way classes were in those days. MICHAEL HICKS is an associate professor of I also learned that first Sunday in August They were either straight out of the man- music at Brigham Young University. that our quorum president was on vacation ual--when Chuck showed up---or straight

PAGE 52 SEPTEMBER 1992 out of left field. So we went from Sunday to bishop who was bent on overturning his old in anyone’s memory, set foot into our meeting Sunday, from boredom to exhiilaration and order. (We knew we were in trouble when he room. He came pretty much all the time after back again, never knowing what to expect, began referring to the quorum as one of the that. except that we never expected Gospel Jeop- "auxiliaries.") Since I am basically shy, I tend to shun ardy-it was just too much trouble for any- We clashed with the new bishop over two socials. Only once while I was quorum pres- one to plan. matters. First, he wanted 100 percent home ident did I plan one--a mock-Polysophical The new president, whose wide, childlike teaching at almost any cost and so instituted Society meeting, complete with dim floor eyes peered from a beefy, Brigl~Lam-bearded a program of private intimidation of negli- lamps, Mozart horn solos, readings in Greek face, was philosophical about all this. He was gent home teachers. Second, he tried to re- and Hebrew, and a strange lecture by an less concerned about the weeMy meetings move quorum funds from our account and economics student on "Why the United than about keeping the home teaching afloat put them into the ward account. The details Order is Economically Unsound." The rest of at about 75% or so. He was even more con- of these controversies have slid out of my the socials that we had--an inside bratwurst cerned about having first-rate socials. I recall mind. But I recall vividly the fierceness with dinner and an outside barbecue (with some one delightful dinner where he barbecued which my counselors protested to me of disastrously fermented punch) are the two chicken halves in his backyard in the rain. these and other, smaller matters, and how that come to mind--the counselors had to Almost no chicken was eaten, and the left- diplomatically I tried to sound these com- plan. To their credit they and the quorum overs were given to ward members on wel- plaints to stake ears. I felt glad when one secretary never complained (to me) about the fare (which included us). But the dinner stake leader confided to me that the stake loads of work I left at their doorsteps, which ended with a bright discussion in his base- presidency wanted me in this position pre- included not only the socials, but the sports ment library, with lots of talk about raising cisely to counterbalance the iron hand of the and the sacrament. But none of those formal- children, behaviorism, and Ken Woodward’s new bishop. But by then I had already de- ities mattered so much as furniture moving, articles. cided that was why the Lord had called me. male quartets for stake meetings, board Our president always cared that everyone If that sounds like sour grapes, I should games, shared sack lunches, and gratis tele- in the quorum feel just like he did: free, add that the bishop and I got along pretty vision, bike, and engine repairs. That was comfortable, unpressured, at home and at well considering our sometimes different ap- fellowship to us. ease more than at attention. To our bishop proaches to Church government. A power- For anyone who doesn’t know it: secretar- that was a bitter pill. A formal, anxiety-rid- fully built former football coach, he had a big ies are heroes. Our first quorum secretary did den, yet extraordinarily likeable man, the heart and could give about the best counsel all the regular recording of attendance, min- bishop was just about to take a position as a of any bishop I ever knew. And unlike many utes, and so on, not to mention representing department chairman at another university. bishops, ours was slow to interfere in the the single member’s point of view in our Dismayed by our president’s easygoing ap- quorum instruction, which was crucial to presidency meetings. When he was suddenly proach, the bishop urged the stake president our new order. excommunicated, we all became much to call a new quorum president before he left We studied far-flung topics from Church closer to him than before--such are the iro- for his new position. By inspiraLion, he rec- history, the arts and the Church, and practi- nies of religious fellowship. We requested ommended me as the replacement. cal matters like basic accounting and how to and got a second secretary, but he was Every newly appointed priesthood leader buy meat. Some of the brethren who arrived quickly released to become the ward single approaches his task with a zeal to overthrow at school in August 1981 found that their adult representative. One of our high the old order. It is not that he dislikes the old first priesthood lesson in our ward--given by councilman’s sons, a wiry long-distance run- order so much as that he feels that he has to a veterinary student--was on selecting and ner, was the third and last. His work became have something to do. And he has to vent his caring for pets. I insisted that we have no the thread that held our presidency together, nerves, which have been overheated by the teacher, but rather call specialists for each since we met at best twice a month, and admonitions that came with his call. So I lesson. When people defaulted on their les- never remembered very well what had been began to dismantle what our quorum had sons-unavoidable sometimes, since lessons assigned and reported from meeting to meet- been and erect something new, or perhaps were assigned three to six months ahead--I ing. He wrote everything down and some- something very old: swimming in my head usually took the helm, which I loved. At one times that’s the best thing that one can do. were blurry visions of the Sci~ool of the point we actually forbid quorum members to But one quickly learns that a quorum is Prophets and Nauvoo’s golden days, all pre- bring manuals to meeting, because, as their not just assignments, socials, shared labor, sided over by the beneficent countenances of covers said, they were only "personal study lessons, or even controversies. It is a cast of my heroes B. H. Roberts, Orson Pratt, and guides"--not group crutches, I said. With characters. And so, it is the players of this (only occasionally) Brigham Young this and other tactics I made a fetish of quo- troupe and the roles they played that lodge I got pretty definite about what should rum instruction. This fetish came from my most firmly in my thoughts. I think of Kent, happen in the quorum: a formal curriculum belief that meetings are the most immediate whose voice often rose from the back of the for meetings, with lessons, outlines, and experience of a priesthood quorum, the quorum to debunk some miracle tale in the handouts planned months ahead; diligent things that most color the way we look at the Church; of Roger, the psychology major who home teaching and personal priesthood in- notion of the quorum itself. If we could get taught me self-hypnosis on his fat black re- terviews (for aesthetic reasons I always re- these right--make them dignified, informa- cliner chair, trying to get me through a horri- fused to call them "PPI’S"); and the continued tive, strenuous, dramatic--we would be a and expanded independence of the quorum ble depression; of Chuan, a semi-mystical long way toward getting the quorum right. Asian, who plucked his index finger with a from the ward. This last ideal seemed treach- We knew we were getting something right erous in a one-quorum student ward. But it rose thorn right after his baptism to when one brother ended the hallway vigil he demonstrate the duality of beauty and pain, was a good response to a dommeenng new had kept for two years and, for the first time and who, when asked to give a priesthood

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 53 lesson, delivered a forty-five minute lecture on Buddhism; of frail Pat, with his perenni- ally mussed hair and sleepy eyes, who some- how always made you feel that you had just saved his life; and of the two Scotts. One was an athletic, fashionably long-haired land- A NIGHT IN SNOW CANYON scape architect with a great comic knack. At quorum socials, leaning against one of the This is the place of inverted Institute building closets, he would break us Valleys, where black magma all up by improvising phony "Quincy" scnpts And red sandstone meet. in a mock-Jack Klugman voice. The other Lie in the dry river bed. Scott was a cocky libertarian in a dull green Wait for sleep. Listen sport coat, who liked to talk about revolu- To footsteps of motionless pilgrims. tion, pulling guns on police, and bankrupt- ing the Church. People tended to avoid the Here is your parent, and your child-- second Scott. Murmuring of things that were; The cast was great, but not everyone liked Speechless with things that will be. the repertory: the way I ran things seemed to Bats with familiar faces fly rankle some people. Unlike Paul, I had no Through the night, guided knack for being all things to all people, Only by echoes of themselves. though I tried like crazy. My spiritual clien- tele, however, did not really include the more Wind moves over your body orthodox (their view) or the less creative and Like the airy fingers of a lost lover: tolerant (my view). I realized that some A warm pressure, here--then not here. brethren were not getting what they bar- gained for in this quorum. And that made me Stars spin in their space-worn orbits feel guilty. I knew I could not adapt beyond Forever defining north, as if eternity a certain point; meanwhile, the old guard of Had anything to do with time. the quorum was leaving and more reaction- --I_AURA HAMBLIN ary families moving in. Add my guilt to long- standing bouts with depression and the bishop and you will understand why, after a year and a half, I asked the stake president to be released. He complied and I said goodbye to Utopia and Parnassus. I became the ward librarian and the old librarian became the MOTHt P, WOVE THE MOP, NING new president. In a couple of months, after our first quo- A powerful dramatization of sixteen women rum president (the Latin American literature major) got a teaching job in another state, I throughout history in search of God the was called to fill the vacancy left in the high Mother, written and performed by ,, council--but that’s another stoW in itself. Carol Lynn Pearson Meanwhile, the new elders quorum presi- dent, as I expected, changed everything. NOW AVAILABLE -- In time the boundaries were redrawn and ON VIDEO & IN PRINT! ,g: the university ward gave up the ghost. Every- one was released, scattered. The bishop I ÷ " . . an amazing experience... I wish everyone could loved and fought with died suddenly. Some see it and be inspired by it." Riane Eider, author of T/~e C/~ahce ana/t/~e Bga/~ of the rest of us send Christmas cards to each ÷ Performed to sold-out audiences over 200 times in the U.S.A. and abroad "I" Featured at International Minoan Celebration of Partnership on Crete other. Who knows where everyone else ÷ Includes specially composed music and a theme song, available in cassette and sheet music ended up. Maybe some of them will read this and smile. SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY MAlL ORDER PRICES: Now, as I send my fragmentary memories VIDEO: $34.95 (retail list price $39.95) of the quorum on their slow journey back to MOTHER WOVE THE MORNING BOOK: $8.95 the mouth of the well, I can’t decide if I was SPECIAL: VIDEO PLUS BOOK $39.95 ($48.90 retail value) a hero, a miserable failure, or, as is often the Order 24 hours a day with Visa or Mastercard by calling 510-906-8835. Or send check payable to case, both. I only know I miss the old quo- Carol Lynn Pearson to: Motl~er Wove t]~ Morning, 1384 Cornwall Ct., Walnut Creek, CA 94596. rum. I still think of it all the time, remember- (Add 10% shipping charges, California residences add 81/2% sales tax.) ing those days when it stood whole and complete, like a great, gleaming china set locked up in its cabinet in the Midwest. ~

PAGE 54 SEPTEMBER 1992 REVIEWS Mormon and non-Mormon) toward the Bible, specifically the King James Version. In his own words: Certainly I am not pretending to TWO THUMBS UP AND FOUR STARS rewrite Mormon history along se- verely new lines. But I am propos- ing that nothing--not the early MORMONS AND THE BIBLE: THE PLACE OF THE LATTER-DAY pioneer experience of the Saints, SAINTS IN AMERICAN RELIGION not the geography of Mormon By Philip L. Barlow headquarters, not Mormon politi- cal behavior, not the famous at- New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, $34.95,251 pages tempts to establish a polygynous or theocratic or communal society, not Mormon millennialism or Mor- mon social make-up, not the al- leged contemporary corporate wealth, not former charges of rac- ism or still-current accusations of sexism, not the quasi-religious in- terest of some early Mormons in folk magic; in sum, none of the more dramatic aspects of the Mor- Reviewed by Art Bassett mon experience often spotlighted MORMONS AND THE BIBLE: The Place by observers--captures the evolv- ciate and every careful writer should emu- ing but enduring religious quintes- of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion late. Not only is it extremely well written, it sence of Mormonism and its may well prove to be one of the real sleepers has also maintained a good balance between relationship to the balance of in the crowded bed of contemporary Mor- Barlow’s own Mormon biases and a concern American religion better than a mon publications. That it comes from a non- for objectivity in the larger world of scholar- firm, comparative grasp of the Mormon press (this is one volume in ship. Two aspects of the book that I think Bible’s place among the Latter-day Oxford’s multi-volume Reli~on in America se- make it worth at least one reading caught my Saints. This assertion applies even ries) and has an inflated price tag may keep attention immediately: to Mormon theology and revela- it out of the hands of many of the Mormon 1. This volume represents a new approach to tion, which, as we shall see, is inex- faithful. It is, for example, currently grouped Mormonism, examining its history tricably enmeshed with and with the gentile literature at the BYU Book- through the lens of one aspect of its doc- dependent on prior and often un- store rather than with Barlow’s other Mor- trine-focusing on its views regarding conscious biblical perspective. (x- mon books. the Bible. This in itself seemed a flash of xi.) In my opinion, Mormons and the Bible is genius to me, but Barlow has also gone After an introductory chapter on attitudes one of the most stimulating books to come further to interweave both Mormon his- toward the Bible in antebellum America, Bar- on the Mormon market for years--s timulat- tory and Mormon thought with American low initially focuses on Joseph Smith’s view ing because it presents a fresh, delightful new history and religious thought of the same of the Bible in two chapters that signal the path through the rut-worn field of Mormon eras. On first blush, that format might format for the remainder of the volume: history and doctrine. Disarmingly simple in sound terribly dense and cumbersome, chapter 1 deals with Joseph’s views regarding its major thesis, yet profound in its insights but part of the brilliance of this volume is the Bible before the Restoration, and chapter and scholarly to the core, it is effortlessly that Barlow keeps the material basic and 2 with the Prophet’s attitude toward the Bible readable--unlike anything one would imag- cogent, and readily understandable even ine originating with a doctoral dissertation (and toward scripture in general) from the for a casual reader. time of the Restoration until his assassination from the Divinity School at Harvard (which 2. The volume draws upon and assembles a it was: Barlow’s 1988 doctoral thesis). in Carthage. great deal of current Mormon scholarship Using the King James Version as a focus One of the major pluses of this volume is that up to now has appeared only in its crystal-clear organization. Each chapter is for these chapters (obviously for purposes he rather inaccessible monographs or arti- will return to later in the text), Barlow deals prefaced with an extended synopsis, making cles in scholarly periodicals, materials too it effortless for readers to make their way with the issue of the Book of Mormon and commonly known only to the most in- the relationship of its contents and style to through each segment of the book, present- formed of Mormon scholars. ing as it does a clear road map pointing not the Bible with which Joseph was familiar. only to where Barlow is headed, but also From this, a discussion evolves regarding indicating what to watch for on the wayma A NEW LOOK AT MORMON modem revelation delivered in the idiom of blessing that every casual reader will appre- RELIGIOUS THOUGHT King James English. Included in this discus- WHAT Barlow does do is take his sion is material regarding the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, material that Barlow ART BASSETT is a professor of humanities at readers on a journey through Mormon his- Brigham Young University. divides into a six-pronged catalogue clearly tory, focusing on changing attitudes (both illuminating the types of changes made. The

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 55 principle of typology also receives brief at- Further committing the rapidly helped reorient late-twentieth-cen- tention, not only as a way of doing Biblical growing Church to a seventeenth- tury Mormonism. (182-83) exegesis, but also as a device for bonding the century English text carried deeper In many respects, Barlow’s summarizing history of Mormonism to that of Israel in the implications than most Saints were chapter, "The Ambiguities of a New Religious Bible in a manner unique in important ways aware of. An understanding of the Tradition," is his best (this despite the fact to the Mormon experience. process through which this step that like the proverbial wine at the wedding As noted above, in addition to being a came to seem natural to officials by of Cana, one typically does not find the best treatise on Joseph Smith’s attitude regarding the late twentieth century sheds at the last in any doctoral treatise). In this the Bible, the views of Joseph’s contemporar- light on Mormon biblical percep- chapter, and indeed throughout the text, Bar- ies regarding the kame issues are insightfully tions. low continues to remind his reading audi- interwoven into the text, clearly and com- To understand the decision, one ence that his is only one way of looking at fortably illuminating similarities and differ- must distinguish between the sin- these issues, and that his sampling, as reveal- ences between the Mormon experience and cere explanations offered by lead- ing as it is, is still only a small sampling that that of the Protestants and Catholics. Not ers and teachers in recent decades, will perhaps lead the way to further thinking only does one get a clearer view of Mormon and the several historical factors on this issue. One statement, "The majority attitudes toward the Bible, but in the reading that, between 1867 and 1979, of Mormons remain in a hermeneutical one also acquires the added benefit of an transformed the KJV from the com- Eden, innocent of a conscious philosophy of abbreviated course in American religious mon into the official Mormon interpretation" (226), will not be as true for thought--as a backdrop against which to Bible .... readers who complete a reading of this work. view Mormon attitudes. While examining these influ- In chapter 3, "Diversity and Develop- ences, I give special notice to J. MODERN LDS SCHOLARSHIP ment: The Bible Moves West," Barlow begins Reuben Clark, long-term member a comparative analysis--the c~ritical method of the Church’s First Presidency. By SECOND, the book is a gold mine of he employs throughout the remainder of the 1956 President Clark had appro- sorts in its allusions to other scholarship pro- book--o f various Mormon leaders’ attitudes priated most Protestant arguments duced by Mormon (and non-Mormon) regarding the Bible. He juxtaposes Brigham for the KJV, linked them to scholars. Just one personal reference should Young’s views of the Bible lq,Ot only with uniquely Mormon concerns, and in serve my purpose here. I have long sus- Joseph’s, but also with those of Orson Pratt, the process made subsequent LDS pected, based on a gut-level assumption one of the foremost students of the Bible in spokesmen dependent on his logic. stemming from a rather cursory reading of pioneer Utah. Although some Saints felt Clark’s the sources, that the typological relationship This is followed by a chapter entitled influential reasoning was unper- often noted between pioneer Mormon Utah "The Mormon Response to Higher Criti- suasive, his logic nevertheless hints and ancient Israel led territorial Utah to an cism." In this, the comparison becomes at deeper, irreducibly religious mo- interest in the Old Testament that stimulated three-pronged, with a right v

PAGE 56 SEPTEMBER 1992 masters and doctoral theses; references to articles in Mormon-oriented journals such as PLUNDERING THE SCRIPTURES 5UNSWONE, Journal of Mormon History, and Dialogue are included along with some from Ensign, BYU Studies, and symposia from the HOMECOMING: VOLUME 1, THE MEMORY OF EARTH College of Religion at BYU; scholarly religious By Orson Scott Card journals that reach out to a non-Mormon as Tom Doherty Associates, 1992 $21.95, xx + 294 pages well as a Mormon audience, such as Christi- anity Today and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, appear on the list in company with several non-Mormon texts. All of this testifies to the breadth of Barlow!s research. All things considered, Barlow’s book is a must on the bookshelves (and in the hands) of anyone wishing to understand the Mor- mon experience: member and non-member Reviewed by Tim Behrend alike. The price alone is the major obstacle. ACCORDING TO THE dust jacket, ture and thereby a voice to speak meaning- best selling science fictionist Orson Scott fully to contemporary society; to expand and Card’s most recent novel, The Memory of develop the often minimalist characters of Earth, "is the first of a new five-book series Semitic mythology, emphasizing change and that will carry its readers from the road to ambivalence over homilitic certitudes; and Basilica back to Lost Earth." Non-Mormon generally to explore the intellectual and spir- fans will undoubtedly be frustrated by the itual complexity of the human issues raised five to ten years that may well lapse before in scriptural narrative. Card can finish the last volume and bring it Card chooses instead to work more in the SLEEPING BEAUTY ~o market. Mormon readers, on the other romantic, larger-than-life tradition of Arnold Before I heard you reciting poetry hand, can scope ahead to find out where this Friberg: Nephi comes through the thrills and I did not know there was anything quinquepartite "epic" is heading simply by spills of early prophethood with muscles rip- better than alarm clocks. Warm rereading 1 Nephi, substituting hoked-up piing. Despite some ambivalence and moral bread, sliced thick and smelling science wherever divine intervention is re- hesitation, there is nothing wimpish or of childhood, touched my nose corded in the original. hobbit-like about him. but never my mind and furious This is possible because The Memory of But this focusing on Card’s unattributed friends claimed it made me Earth is an unattributed reworking of 1 source may be unfair, for he has not in fact snore. They told me sunrises Nephi 1-5. It takes place against a grand, named his characters Nephi, Lehi, and were pink and orange rips Asir~’tovian-style galactic background, but is Zoram (they are Nafai, Volemak the Wetchik, in the sky and if I saw rife ’with sociological dressing and thematic and Zdorab), and it is unlikely that his pur- one I should believe in chords that seem to be inspired by post- pose is to develop and understand the Book immortality the rest of Nibleyan historical exegesis of Mormon of Mormon story. Instead, his real intent the day. "Stars," and scnpture. Unfortunately, lovers of serious lit- might be, as he argued in a typically vituper- they’d shake a finger, erature, and those awaiting the prophesied ative essay about popular literature and its "keep moving while you Shakespeares and Miltons among us may be critique in the late 5unstone Review (2 [4] :25- sleep." But nights and disappointed at what Card has done, or 28), simply to tell a story with the power to days were homogenized failed to do, with his borrowed material. involve his readers in the compelling experi- still. One day I saw The reworking of scriptural stories or ence of it, to create a vivid, vicarious memory. you smile while sun other traditions is, of course, an old and To do this he has plundered 1 Nephi, taking shone in your eyes worthy literary enterprise. From Sophocles from it a ready-made plot outline to be jazzed and that night I to Nikos Kazantzakis, writers have repeat- up and sold in the lucrative adolescent and dreamed we lay in edly mined the rich lodes of myth and leg- sci-fi markets. This is how the new version soft, tall grass end, often to spectacular results. In The goes. beneath a naked, Memory of Earth, however, Card, does not Forty million years ago Earth was nearly motionless sky, attempt to do for Nephi and his brothers destroyed in a series of apocalyptic wars that laughing, chewing what Mann, for example, did for Joseph and left it largely a cinder. Most of the survivors bitter stems of his: to give them deep psychological struc- set off to colonize other planets. grass. Now my Harmony, a planet in a system about 100 eyes open to TIM BEHREND is a scholar of Japanese light-years from Earth, is one of the successes thought of literature currently managing a series of cultural of this thrust into space. Though largely ag- you, and I preservation projects for the Ford Foundation in ricultural and non-mechanized, Harmonian never Jakarta, Indonesia. He .follows developments in society is in some ways scientifically ad- oversleep. Mormon literature as best he can at a 12,000 vanced: sophisticated computer technology --HOLLY WELKER mile remove. is everywhere evident, as are laser projection

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 57 and small scale localized anti-gravity devices. a kind of hot-wired cross between a Liahona Oversoul with an empirically established cer- Further, though the memory of ig is lost, and the Urim and Thummim. tainty that it is in fact the vocal interface genetic changes long ago engineered in the Along the way Card has put much energy between Harmonians and the planetary Mas- human populace of the planet have affected and imagination into creating the history, ter Computer--the reader is more likely to the electronic architecture of the brain in politics, technology, and society of planet ask Card for a break and skim ahead. such a way that the supercomputers de- Harmony and the city Basilica. Indeed, as in Equally irksome is Card’s heavy-handed signed to run the world can communicate most fiction that markets itself on the sci-fi use of the "stupor of thought" idea: if a char- directly with humans in a kind of cybernetic and fantasy shelves, so much creative energy acter feels stupid or empty or blank about telepathy. At the same time, however, all is drained in the process of conjuring the some proposed idea or plan, she can be sure forms of technology with military applica- setting of the book that little is left over for it is not the correct one. At its worst this idea tions are hidden from Harmonians by the characters and ideas. Card should have an is reduced to an absurd sort of blind man’s Master Computer of the world. The advantage, working as he is with the prefab- bluff when Nafai seeks his way through the computer’s telepathic powers are such that it ricated cast, plot, and concerns of 1 Nephi, city by planting his foot in a certain direction can prevent even the thought of such things but he fails (or declines) to do anything with then waiting for a feeling of stupidity to tell as powered flight or simple wheeled convey- them but fiddle and embellish: making Sam him it’s the wrong way. Card should have ance from being entertained. (Issya), for example, a cripple supported by been attuned to the stupidness of this idea Harmony’s founders anticipated that over magnetic floaters and an outspokenly when he wrote the book and revised accord- a period of 15-20 million years society independent and highly respected figure in ingly. would naturally evolve away from the vio- the matriarchal life of Basilica and its mantic Card has sometimes been cited as an in- lent, power-oriented proclivit:ies of the old women’s religion. He never aspires to tran- telligent writer who weaves complex ideas humans and into a new, peace loving race scend Friberg in his characters, though, rooted in religion and philosophy into his that could then return and repopulate the whether in the direction of Rockwell or science fiction stories. Michael R. Collings, home planet Earth. The Darwinian wheels Mapplethorpe. He is satisfied doodling with for example, has stated that Card’s novels prove to turn much more slowly than ex- the intricacies of Harmonian life and thereby "succeed equally as SF adventure and as ana- pected, though, and after 40 million years fails to give us characters with any more life logical explorations of humanity, morality, humans are still humans. But the Master than Clutch Cargo or Johnny Quest. salvation, and redemption. LDS readers will Computer’s warranty ran out 20 million In adapting the 1 Nephi story Card on find much that is thought provoking, stimu- years ago, and it’s beginning to have prob- occasion translates whole dialogic and theo- lating, and spiritually moving in both novels" lems carrying out its mission. logical passages into the voice of his narrator (Dialogue 20 [Fall 1987]: 174-75). This claim In something of a panic the computer or a given character. The result of this almost seems unwarranted to me. While questions decides it must get in touch with Earth to get plagiaristic devotion to his literary exemplar of causation, sacrifice, salvation, and free will some new programming. To this end it often rings flat to a Mormon ear. Take for are certainly at the heart of much of Card’s searches out a group of people: still sensitive instance Nafai’s speech after his father has wnting, they tend to be answered simplisti- to its weakened telepathic w)ice with the asked him to return to Basilica with his cally in the deeds of his romantic-individual- intention of sending them Earthward. brothers to try to recover the Palwashantu ist heroes. Against this imaginative historical back- Index. This, finally, is what prevents The Memory ground we are introduced to Nafai, a strap- "Father," Nafai said, "I’ll go and of Earth, and Card’s writing generally, from ping young scholar, youngest of four sons in do whatever the Oversoul has speaking deeply: it is simplistic. More pre- the aristocratic family of Volemak the asked us to do. Because I know that cisely, Card posits worlds of great imagina- Wetchik. He is a skeptic at the outset who the Oversoul wouldn’t ask us to do tion and color that spin on axes of easy considers a vision purportedly received by it without preparing some way for rationalism and reductionist moralism. It Wetchik, and his father’s subsequent jeremi- it to be accomplished." never takes Card’s protagonists long to dis- ads against the people of Basilica city, to be This is a slight readjustment of 1 Nephi cover within themselves a rare and marvel- marks of insanity. Soon, though, Nafai him- 3:7, which reads: ous gift for interpreting the either/or self is receiving visions and even direct com- And it came to pass that I, mechanics of his universes; after that it is munications from the Oversoul, as the Nephi, said unto my father: I will merely a matter of what plot tricks and wily Master Computer’s voice is now deistically go and do the things which the characters will complicate and postpone the known. Lord hath commanded, for I know inevitable victory of the team that Card is From here the plot follows 1 Nephi that the Lord giveth no command- playing on. Although larding of un- through the problems with the two oldest ments unto the children of men, anticipated consequences, personal suffer- brothers, the first return to Jerusalem (Basil- save he shall prepare a way for ing, alienation, and even faintly existentialist ica) and so on, concluding with the murder them that they may accomplish the whiffs of qualified happiness are always pres- of Laban and the stealing of the brass plates thing which he conlmandeth them. ent, we are never in doubt as to who in Card’s by subterfuge, here portrayed as Nafai (dis- We typically read the Book of Mormon in novels will come out on top. guised with the assistance of anL old-technol- search of just such bites of scriptural wis- In fairness to the author, Card has made it ogy body mask "holocostume") beheading dom; when Nephi makes his speech we ac- clear in essays, letters, and critiques pub- Gaballufix with a charged-wire blade in cept it as true, perhaps marking it with lished in alternative Mormon forums over order to procure the Palwashantu Index. This highlighter or a red pencil for future refer- Index is a globe-shaped piece of computer the years that he is an author of the masses ence. But when Nafai tells his father the who finds the elitist tastes of Mormon hardware that connects Nafai and his party Wetchik the same thing--and this just a few directly to the master files of the Oversoul-- "literateurs" ignorant, biased, dishonest, con- days after replacing a cavalier disbelief in the temptuous, absurd, wrongheaded, and, most

PAGE 58 SEPTEMBER 1992 cruelly, inimical to Mormonism. As the Lou Nafai’s father .... [Also,] the names Perhaps it is Card’s appropriation of the Midgley fulminating on the literary front of were so outlandish that it was hard Nephi story for commercial exploitation that the great debate on Mormon intellectualism, to remember who was who .... In spoils the other pleasures that this book Card has gone so far as to declare that Mor- spite of these shortcomings I am might otherwise have given me. This is not a mon literature (e.g., the writings of "Jack eagerly awaiting the publication of matter of offended religious sensitivities in Weyland and his ilk") must not be judged by the next book. I enjoyed reading my case. But recognizing Nephi in this book critical method at all; rather, prevailing criti- The Memory of Earth because it was (despite the standard disclaimer on the fly- cal methods are to be judged (and rejected) exciting. I thought that the idea of leaf that all "people and events portrayed... on the basis of an esthetic standard that Card having the people of Harmony re- are fictitious, and any resemblance to real finds implicit in Mormonism (Card, 25). duced to a state where they people or events is purely coincidental") had This argument is patently specious, a de- couldn’t even think of making any the jarring effect of making me anticipate scent into religious solipsism and intellectual inventions that had even the slight- something serious or substantial or of good singularity that could only hold water in the est possibility of inducing a war report or praiseworthy in its pages. I was sort of worlds that Card creates in. his novels. made it more credible that human- disappointed to find nothing of the sort. The overblown character of these assertions kind was still lasting .... Instead, I had the same feeling reading notwithstanding, there is no question that It is clear from these few quoted lines that The Memory of Earth that I sometimes experi- Card is right to insist that there is value in some readers will find much to enjoy in The ence when joining my younger children to plot-driven popular writing in which Memory of Earth. This is not only true of watch a morning cartoon that has cast its plot "redeemable, perfectible, happy, competent adolescents but of anyone with a taste for in the mold of a well known European people" carry the day. fabulous adventure or speculative writing M~rchen or Shakespearean drama. Romeo and We consume books--as we do movies, about possible human cultures. Card has Juliet doesn’t suffer anything because the plays, paintings, and other forms of commu- produced a readable, if not spectacular, con- writers of Astroboy form an episode around it, nicative art--for many valid reasons, only a tribution in this area with the first volume of but I still feel a sense of proprietary anger that few of which are serious or critical in nature. his new series. something beautiful, polysemous, and uni- It might even be that on most days, most of Yet I can’t help returning to my dislike for versal has been transmogrified into a silly us reading on lunch break or after work on a this particular work of adventure fantasy, and half-hour designed to keep young American slow TV night want an uncomplicated or my urge to denounce it. It is not, I hope, consumers watching between commercials. I happy experience through our reading. intellectual snobbery that drives this urge. think that many Mormon readers will share Readers who open The Memory of Earth in Nor is it a civic feeling that those who might my sense of disappointment that nothing search of distraction, or high adventure, or read it with serious intent--seeking an expe- more than techno-distraction is offered by the entertainment of possible technologies rience not of swords and computers but of this author borrowing so heavily from "the portrayed in exotic invented landscapes will human dilemmas, griefs, and joys, let’s say-- most perfect book" in the world. The more almost certainly find some satisfaction in its need to be warned, lest they suffer some theologically conservative, indeed, may take pages. aesthetic disappointment. After all, most offense at the misappropriation of their My thirteen-year-old daughter Abbie is readers picking up The Memory of Earth for prophet for a character in a romantic adven- such a reader; she typically consumes ten or the Proustian echoes of its title would scan ture devoid of literary style, moral purpose, more novels a week and will reread favorite the first page and set it aside unread. or intellectual verve. ~ books (including some of Card’s ,earlier nov- els and series) many times over. When I told her the new Scott Card book had .just arrived in the mail for review she whisked it away, finishing it before the next afternoon. Abbie is generally dismissive of my tastes in litera- ture, which she considers overly cerebral and IMPLOSION "sucky." She was not happy, tk~erefore, in reading the first draft of this review to see that I won’t tell you in March I had panned the book. At my suggestion she that your Xmas tree droops undertook her own review to counter the the boughs bending harshness of mine. In it she states; that too near the earth The Memory of Earth was a pretty with glass balls and tinsel. good book but it wasn’t nearly as I won’t complain in April good as some of the others that he when walking barefoot has written such as Ender’s Game through your shag and Wyrms .... I thought that Card as another pine needle should have added more details to pokes through my sole. his explanation of the characters. For instance, although Nafai But in May I’ll say it’s time spends a lot of his time iin his to box up your lights. Your long celebration mother’s house and with the girls makes neighbor boys steal there, Card describes the female to hear your globes crack and implode. characters even less than he: does --B.J. FOG~

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 59 NEWS UPDATE

parole option, and since the death penalty has not been shown as an effective deterrent, Sims.said the only motive for the death penalty could be revenge and "revenge is not ours for the taking .... Murder or not, it is not our right." Mormon humanitarian Lowell Bennion said, "America is the only Christian nation that has capital punishment. All the nations of Europe have given up on capital punishment. I have mixed feelings about capital punishment. I don’t see how the state killing [someone] would diminish killing in society; I think it would almost stimulate it. I think, too, since Andrews didn’t kill anybody, that’s another reason why we shouldn’t execute him. I believe that we ought to make every appeal to stop this execution. I think sometimes we execute people out of a feeling of revenge. To put Andrews in jail for life without opportunity for parole would protect society... ’Blessed are the merciful,’ God help us to be merciful." In the discussion that followed, some lamented that the LDS Lowell Bennion speaks against capital punishment while church has not taken a stand on capital punishment when it does participants Eugene England, Frank Christensen, take active stands on other moral issues such as lottery and parimu- Anne Clark, and Steve Sims look on. tuel betting and alcohol regulation. Others, however, felt that the lay nature of the Church empowered individuals to act on their beliefs MORMONS PROTEST AGAINST DEATH and criticized the lack of letters by Mormons in the local papers PENALTY supporting clemency. In response to a request from the Associated Press for a statement, A GROUP of Mormons against the death penalty rallied in front of the day before the rally Bruce Olsen, managing director of the LDS the Utah governor’s mansion on 23 July to plead for convicted murderer William Andrews’s life. Lowell Bennion and four other public affairs department, said: "Although we are sensitive to the Mormons spoke to about thirty individuals who gathered to add a concerns surrounding this issue, we regard the question of whether Mormon voice to the chorus of other religious voices that opposed- and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punish- ment as a matter to be decided by the prescribed processes of the execution of Andrews, who was sentenced to death for his role in the 1974 Ogden Hi Fi Shop murders that involved administering criminal law. For this reason we feel it would be inappropriate for us Drano to the victims, although he was absent when the victims were to express an opinion on the judgment imposed by the courts or the shot. More than thirty-five non-LDS Utah religious leaders signed a decisions of the Board of Pardons." letter asking the Board of Pardons to commute Andrews’s sentence. Neither Utah Governor Norm Bangerter nor the Board of Pardons Later Pope John Paul II sent a request for the sentence to be com- intervened in the sentence, and after a flurry of last-minute appeals muted, "as an act of mercy." Andrews was put to death on 30 July 1992. Speaking at the rally, BYU student Frank Christensen called upon fellow Mormons to "take the spiritual high road" and demand clem- NUMBER OF LDS YOUNG MEN CHOOSING ency for Andrews. He said that we should "love our enemies and MISSIONS REMAINS CONSIANT forgive all people" and that when asked the question, What would Jesus do?, he said he could not imagine Jesus administering the A 1991 Church study of LDS young men found that 32 of every 100 poisonous injection to Andrews. Anne Clark, Utah chair for Femi- baptized Mormon males embark on missions between the ages of 19 nists for Life in America, said Mormons’ pro-life theology should and 21. This percentage is unchanged from a similar survey in 1982. apply to Andrews. She said that rewarding violence with violence According to an Associated Press news story that was carried in both "encourages the upward spiral of brutality in an already brutal the and the Salt Lake Tribune, the percentage of North society." American males serving missions has remained "roughly constant" BYU Professor Eugene England asked for mercy for Andrews since the early 1960s when President David O. McKay urged "every because it was a central Mormon value. He quoted President Gordon member a missionary." The study also noted a slight rise from 1982, B. Hinckley from the April 1993 general conference: "Mercy is the in the percentages of young men entering the Aaronic priesthood essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the reality of our disciple- offices at the appropriate age. In 1982 76 percent of baptized males ship to Christ is directly measured by how merciful we are." England at age 12 were ordained deacons, in 1991 79 percent were. For cited examples where Jesus showed mercy to the adulterous woman teachers ordained at age 14 the percentages rose from 65 to 70. For who was sentenced to capital punishment and at his own execution priests ordained at age 16 the percentages remained constant at 58 Jesus asked for mercy for his executioners. "As Mormons, it is one percent.. thing to say we believe in mercy, but we have to act on it," he said. He quoted the Sermon on the Mount that the merciful shall obtain MISSIONARIES ROBBED mercy and said we should extend mercy because we need mercy SIXTEEN LDS missionaries were bound, held at gunpoint for more Utah resident Steve Sims said that "it would be incongruent for than an hour, and robbed of their cash, ATM bank cards, and other one to call himself a Christian while at the same time calling for the valuables by two masked assailants in an LDS chapel forty-five miles blood of anyone, criminal or not." Now that Utah has a life-without- southwest of Sacramento on 11 August, according to a KSL-TV report.

PAGE 60 SEPTEMBER 1992 MISSIONARIES PULLED FROM HONDURAS that for whatever reason, [BYU] draws on one region heavily in hiring their professors," said PBK society secretary Douglas Foard. "We want THIS SEPTEMBER the LDS church evacuated all of its North Ameri- a wide representation of Phi Beta Kappa schools at our chapter can missionaries from Honduras for security reasons. Approximately universities." The primary reason BYU has few PBK faculty is because half of the 275 were reassigned to U.S. missions and the other half many faculty received their undergraduate degrees at BYU which has went to other Latin American countries. Native LDS Hondurans andno chapter. "It’s a Catch-22 situation," said Ted Lyon, associate missionaries from other Spanish-speaking countries will staff the director of BYU’s Kennedy Center and PBK member. Of the twenty BYU Honduras mission. Kent Clayton, a recently returned missionary in faculty who are PBK members, thirteen received their undergraduate Honduras, told the Salt Lake Tribune that North American missionar- degrees at the University of Utah, which has a chapter. ies are in danger because of skirmishes between Nicaraguan and This time the reviewing committee also said they were troubled Salvadoran guerrillas and the perceived U.S. involvement in the by two sentences in the university’s mission statement that appear to conflict. Honduras has 29,000 Mormons. limit academic freedom: "All students at BYU should be taught the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any education is inadequate BYU TO DEVELOP SMALL-SCALE PECULIAR PEOPLE FARMS IN MEXICO ON 13 April 1992 Brigham Young University signed a fifteen-year RELIGIOUS GROUPS OVER ONE MILLION: agreement with the Mexican Ministry of Education to start a program UNITED STATES, 1989-90 for small-scale agriculture in Mexico. The program, which the ministry wants to integrate into forty agricultural colleges, was ALTHOUGH ONLY six protestant denominations are larger than the developed by BYU’S Ezra Taft Benson Agriculture and Food Institute LDS church, the LDS population is relatively small in comparison in order to help farmers produce all the food necessary to feed a with other major religious groups According to the National Survey family of seven by cultivating small, two-acre plots of land. Benson of Religious Identification conducted by the Graduate School and Institute Director James B. Jensen said the Mexicans are anxious to University Center of the City University of New York, 1.4 percent of promote small-scale agriculture because it will strengthen one of the the U.S. Adult population identifies themselves as Mormons or weakest links in their food production chain. Although Mexico members of the LDS church. In addition to the larger protestant exports vast quantities of food, it has problems feeding its own denominations, there are substantially more non-denominational people. The program works because it caters to the specific needs of Christians and protestants, and more people with no religious pre- small Latin American farms instead of trying to translate the ference than there are Mormons. Although figures from the study large-scale farming of the United States into a small-scale plan for must be interpreted with caution because they are based on sample Latin America. data from telephone interviews (113,000 households were sur- veyed), comparison with LDS membership statistics suggests that about 7 percent of the LDS population on membership records PACKER ON DUNN FAMILY’S FINANCES choose not to identify themselves as LDS members in national FREE-LANCE JOURNALIST Lynn Packer’s latest expose on Paul H. surveys. Dunn appeared in the June 1992 Utah Holiday. Packer reports on various financial ventures engaged in by Dunn, his son-in-law Jeril Christian-n.d. Winger, and other members of the Dunn clan. One venture, Values Roman Catholic Institute, Inc., was promoted, both to prospective customers as well as to the star-studded list of participants, as a non-profit organization Protestant-n.d. whereby young people could interact on a spiritual as well as an Baptist educational basis with top LDS sports figures. Values Institute, it turns out, was actually a for-profit venture. Methodist When Values Institute ran into trouble, Winget formed American Values Foundation (AVF), a non-profit corporation run by Dunn Lutheran family members. AVF’s "primary, purpose is to educate and teach PresByterian youth and families in traditional American morals and leadership values" as well as have youth interact with LDS sports stars. Report- Pentecostal | edly investors are dubious about investing in AVF. Episcopalian | Mormon BYU REJECTED BY PHI BETA KAPPA l Adventist I PHI BETA KAPPA, the national honor society for arts and sciences, rejected Brigham Young University’s third bid for a campus chapter Jewish because of concerns about academic freedom. The stated reasons for No religion the two previous rejections were because of the society’s concern Agnostic about the academic maturity of the students and the few number of I faculty members of Phi Beta Kappa. They were reiterated this time as 0 10 20 30 5O a lack of diversity among BYU faculty and the few number of PBK Source: National Survey of tenured faculty who would have to support the society. "It appears Religious Identification, Graduate # in millions School, CUNY, March, 1991.

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 61 which does not emphasize that His is the only name given under adherence to our religious mission, then of course it’s not even a close heaven whereby mankind can be saved." "Phi Beta Kappa exists to question," Lee said. "We have functioned for more than a century promote and foster a liberal arts education," said Foard. "That means without Phi Beta Kappa and we can continue to do so very consis- freedom of inquiry." Religious affiliation doesn’t prohibit member-tently within our mission." ship, Foard continued, but "if there is a statement that tends to make Nell Rasband, BYU associate dean of general education and hon- the church’s doctrine free of criticism, then they are limiting aca- ors, has directed BYU’S chapter campaign. "An institution established demic freedom and free inquiry." for the purpose of providing an education in an environment consis- BYU President Rex Lee told the Deseret News that he was mystified tent with Christian principles does not preclude free inquiry or by that rationale, saying that either the committee doesn’t understand academic freedom," he told the Daily Universe. Using the same BYU’s good student academic record, including ranking tenth in 1992 examples to prove opposite points, both Foard and Rasband cited in entering U.S. national merit scholars, or that "they don’t under- other religious schools with Phi Beta Kappa chapters whose charters stand what academic pluralism is all about, and I can’t believe that’s explicitly link Christian principles with education, such as George- the case. If it really were to be a choice between [a PBK chapter] and town University and Notre Dame. SUNSTONE CALENDAR

ASSOCIATION FOR MORMON LETTERS will hold its annualtemporary events such as President Bush’s recent BYU Visit, short symposium at Westminster College in Salt Lake City on Saturday, 23 fiction and poetry, and reviews and reports on recent LDS books, January 1993. There will be formal papers and a panel discussion recordings, and videos, plus reviews of American films such as during the morning and afternoon sessions. The luncheon will Disney’s Newsies and Ron Howard’s Far and Away. Subscriptions are feature the election of new officers and an address from the retiring $24.95 for 12 issues--VISA and MasterCard accepted: Contact: LDS AML president, Ann Edwards Cannon. There will also be an evening Entertainment & Lifestyle, 29 West 100 South Street, Payson, UT social at which award winners will read from their works. Contact: 84651 (800/841-7188) ...... Program Chair Richard Cracroft, 3181 JKHB, Brigham Young Univer- MORMON ONE-ACT PLAY CONTEST accepts unpublished sity, Provo, UT 84602 (801/378-3082). plays capable of being performed in under one hour that deal in some THE BROOKIE AND D. K. BROWN FICTION CONTESTgeneral way with the Mormon experience or world view. Winners deadline for short stories (maximum 6,000 words) or short short will be published in SUNSTONE and produced at the 1993 Sunstone stones (maximum 1,000 words) dealing with LDS issues is 1 June symposium in Salt Lake City. Scripts must be submitted between 1 1993. Contact: Sunstone Foundation, 331 Rio Grande Street, Suite and 10 January 1993. For a copy of the rules contact: Sunstone 206, Salt Lake City, UT 84101-1136 (801/355-5926). Foundation, 33i Rio Grande Street, Suite 206, Salt Lake City, UT COMMUNAL SOCIETIES ASSOCIATION will host its 20th84101-1136 (801/355-5926). annual conference in conjunction with the International Communal MORMON WOMEN’S FORUM now has a chapter in the Penin- Studies Associationg fourth international conference on the theme, sula/South Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. The forum meets in "Culture, Thought, and Living in Community" on 14-17 October Cupertino on the third Sunday of each month, except for August and 1993 in New Harmony, IN. One-page proposals with brief biograph- December. Subscriptions to the group’s newsletter are $5.00. Con- ical statements must be submitted before 1 March 1993 to: Donald tact: Nadine Hansen, 20370 Town Center Lane, Suite 100, Cuper- E. Pitzer, Center for Communal Studies, University of Southern tino, CA 95014 (day: 408/253-2506; night: 408/255--7235). Indiana, Evansville, IN 47712, USA (tel: 812/464-1727; fax: MOTHER WOVE THE MORNING, a one-woman play written 812/464-1960). and directed by Carol Lynn Pearson, returns to Salt Lake City on KRCL, 91 FM, the public access, "Radio Free Salt Lake" FM 20-21 November at Bryant Inte~ediate School (40 South 800 East station, features "issues and Explorations," a monthly half-hour Street) at 7:30 P.M. Tickets are available at the door for $12 beginning interview/discussion on issues and topics of contemporary Mormon at 6:00 P.M. Contact: Andrea Moore Emmett, 565-0861. thought and culture. On the fourth Thursday of every month at SUNSTONE LECTURES AND CONFERENCES 12:30 RM. Steven Epperson hosts an LDS scholar or knowledgeable opinion leader for a lively intellectual discussion. Past guests have WASHINGTON, D.C., SYMPOSIUM will be held in March included David Knowlton on the Church in Latin America; Steven 1993. Send proposals for papers and panel discussions to: Alison Olsen on his study of the Book of Mormon; Cecelia Farr on issues of Bethke Gayek, 4908 Cushing Drive, Kensington, MD 20895 women and the Church and BYU; Jill Mulvay Derr on the history of (301/942-3693). the Relief Society; and John Tanner, Jim Gordon, and Scott Abbott on SYMPOSIUM WEST will be held in early March 1993. Send academic freedom at BYU. Upcoming themes include the Church and proposals for papers and panel discussions to: Kim McCall, 1987 politics, Third World economic development, the Mormon Peace Euclid Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415/327-1887). Gathering, Mormon music, Mormon identity in iconography, confds- 1993 SALT LAKE SYMPOSIUM will be held on 11,15 August sions and confidentiality, and the anti-intellectualism in Mormonism. 1993 at the Salt Lake Hilton. Send proposals for papers and panel LDS ENTERTAINMENT & LIFESTYLE (originally titled LDS discussions to: Sunstone Foundation, 331 Rio Grande Street, Suite Entertainment Magazine) is a new full-color magazine edited by 206, Salt Lake City, UT 84101-1136 (801/355-5926), Robert L. Wright and published by So Wright Publications, Inc., that NORTHEAST SUNSTONE SYMPOSIUM will be held 12-13 November 1993 at the Burlington Marriott Hotel. Contact: Don celebrates popular Mormon culture. Covers have featured Mormon musicians Michael McLean and Janice Kapp Perry and a lengthy Gustavson, 413 Clearview Avenue, Torrington, CT 06790 (203/496- feature on former BYU Cougar Ty Detmer. Other stories include 7090). historical vignettes such as a feature on the old BYU Academy, con-

SEPTEMBER 1992 PAGE 62 AWARDS OXYMORMONS

1992 WILBUR AWARD FOR RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATION SALT lAKE TRIBUNE cartoonist Pat Bagley won a Wilbur Award for Religious Communication from the Religious Public Relations Coun- cil, for outstanding communication of religious values in the news and entertainment media, for the above Tribune cartoon that ran 23 April 1991. Other winners included ABC Television, Time and Life magazines, Bill Moyers, CBS Radio, and the National Film Board of Canada. Bagley was the first cartoonist to ever receive a Wilbur award. The Religious Public Relations Council is a sixty-three-year-old interfaith organization of professional religious communicators that has sponsored an awards program for over four decades to recognize the news and entertainment media for excellence in the communica- tion of religious values, issues, and themes. II JOHN WHITMER HISTORICAL II ASSOCIATION Awarded at the annual meeting at Shenendoah, Iowa, 25-27 September 1992 Best Book PAUL EDWARDS Our Legacy of Faith: A Brief History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Herald Publishing House Best Article BARBARA HANDS BERNAUER "Still ’Side by Side’hThe Final Burial of Joseph and Hyrum Smith" John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 11 (1991) Special Certification of Appreciation JOLENE ASHMAN ROBISON "Out in Left Field (A True Story)" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Summer 1992 BONNEVILLE COMMUNICATIONS AN LDS "Homefront" public service announcement produced by Bonneville Communications to honor the Relief Society’s 150th anniversary received a Clio Award in the Television/Cinema National Public Service Category. Written and produced by Michael Dunn, "Service on the Run" depicts a young woman jogger supporting an elderly neighbor with small gestures of anonymous kindness, includ- ing carrying uncollected newspapers from the road to her doorstep thus beginning a daily routine.

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