Item Detail
-
31490
-
0
-
0
-
English
-
What Size of City, and What Sort of City, Could (or Should) the City of Zion Be?
-
Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
-
Summer 2020
-
53
-
2
-
Champaign, IL
-
University of Illinois Press
-
37-55
-
"But whatever the value of these two interpretive strategies—treating Widtsoe's agrarian paean as either a dated romantic reflex or an irrelevant conservative worry—they both miss something: namely, the third paragraph quoted above. For Widtsoe, in this sermon at least, there was a specific root to what he called the Mormon “belief in the land,” and that was the “ideal city” of Joseph Smith. How did that city, and the wide range of speculations and experiments associated with building Zion communities that frequently characterized American Mormonism in the decades that followed, serve as a component of Widtsoe’s inspired defense of the farm? Let’s think about Smith’s “Plat of Zion,” the document where he laid out his outline for an ideal city, and see what connections we can find."