283: Eugene England’s Life and Legacy Pt. 3

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2011

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eugene England (1933–2001) was one of the founders and great leaders in Mormon Studies and independent Mormon discussions. He and four others founded Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, for which he served as its first editor. He was instrumental in the creation of the Association for Mormon Letters, and he is considered the champion of the “personal essay” as a powerful form for Mormon expression. England was a peace activist, whose reflections on having been present in the Vatican during the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II (one of the bullets nicked his hand and left a small burn on his temple as it whizzed past) led him to found “Food for Poland,” a large-scale effort involving students from many college campuses to provide support for the Solidarity movement when it struggling under Polish government crack downs. He was an innovative and highly influential teacher. He revamped “study abroad” programs at both BYU and Utah Valley State College, leading to unparalleled learning experiences for students who traveled with his groups to London. He supported and was an active voice for academic freedom at BYU, championed the rise of Mormon Studies at UVSC, and was an articulate voice and active supporter for nearly every good cause in independent Mormon circles for nearly four decades. More than any of these or many other accomplishments we didn’t name, however, Eugene England was a person of faith and incredible spiritual depth who, along with Leonard Arrington and Lowell Bennion, stands as an example of a committed, faithful life of intellectual and spiritual integrity, maturity, and grace even as he was often misunderstood and under-appreciated. He is important to get to know, and that is the process that this podcast hopes to help start.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation.
0:12.0	All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping
0:16.4	the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you.
0:21.3	To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today
0:26.6	at MormonStories.org.
0:32.6	Hello everyone, I'm excited to talk with Francis Lee Menlev right now.
0:36.6	She is someone who knew Jean many, many years ago as one of the founders of dialogue,
0:41.6	a journal of Mormon thought.
0:43.6	And we're really pleased that she's agreed to come on.
0:46.6	And to share some impressions about Jean, maybe stories about those early days at dialogue.
0:52.6	And just other encounters with Jean or just general impressions about him that she's gathered through the years.
0:58.6	So Francis, thank you very much for agreeing to come on and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.
1:04.6	Thank you for having me.
1:06.6	Just for a little extra background for those.
1:08.6	Francis and I have been good friends for years through her coming to Sunstone while I was there.
1:14.6	And then she and I have just been working together on editing a bunch of her essays.
1:18.6	So if there's any familiarity that you're hearing, it comes from the fact that I've had the honor of working with her this last year or so on collecting her essays and getting them ready for publication soon.
1:32.6	All right, Francis, tell us about Stanford, how you got, I mean, you don't need a whole lot of detail about how you got to Stanford,
1:39.6	but sort of the Stanford encounter with Jean England that eventually led to formation of dialogue.
1:45.6	Okay, I was at Stanford at the same time, I was a postdoc there.
1:50.6	And what I remember first was going over to the institute and he was teaching, he taught institute classes, but not the kind that I was used to.
1:59.6	He taught, one class I remember was a class on, he didn't call it this, but it was a class on heresy, you know, the strangites and all those people who broke off from the church.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. John Dehlin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Dr. John Dehlin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.