BYU Studies Vol 4

I'm slowly reading through the BYU Studies Journals.  They're included in the LDS Library 2009 CD which is an awesome deal.  It's so awesome that you can't get it anymore.  On this blog I'm going to start with Vol 4 because I've read the others already and I'm not going to go back to them.

Vol 4 was for the year 1961-62 and I really enjoyed BYU Studies.  It was written in 1961 the year I was born so that's very cool.

It's cool seeing how different the Journal used to be when it was starting out.  It seemed to be more oriented to literature and didn't have as many gospel oriented articles as it does now.  That's just my impression.  Some of the articles I just set aside because I wasn't interested in them, or didn't have any idea what they were talking about.  When I read the current Journals I almost always read them all the way through, unless it's really boring or I just can't get interested in what the article is about.  I'm not sure what my criteria is for reading or not reading an article is.  I guess it just depends on if I like it or not.  Some of the articles in the volume were fascinating.

The first two articles "Poetry in the Free World" by Carlton Culmsee and "Response" by Veneta Nielsen were talks that were given to some type of gathering of poets and were talking about the calling of poets and how they are to touch and change the world.  They had some pretty good ideas.

"Plato's Trinity And Problem and Promise in University Life" didn't finish reading.

"The War-Making Power: Congress Vs. the President" by Van L. Perkins.  This was a fascinating article.  It was talking about the Korean War, and the "Formosa" and some islands incident.  I was reading this and wondering just where is Formosa, and wondered if it's Thailand and that was correct, Thailand used to be called Formosa which means "Beautiful Island" in Dutch or Portuguese I think.

The fascinating thing about this is that the Vietnam War, or involvement with Vietnam or whatever you want to call it was just getting started when this article was being written.  I guess that the author probably knew about Vietnam but I wonder if he knew just how much the article's title was.

The author seems to think that Truman and Eisenhower took to much power unto themselves by their actions in Korea and Formosa.  Truman committed American forces before getting the UN OK for it, but doing it seems to have been a good thing.  I don't know exactly what was happening with Eisenhower but there was some problem over Formosa, and Eisenhower took a third, and new way than other presidents have done.  The article makes clear that the president as commander in chief can use the armed forces in ways that will get the USA into a "de facto" war.  I think the author says that this is what Truman did in Korea.  Eisenhower however saw that a situation in Formosa was arising that could very well lead to conflict.  He did something that no other president has ever done and got a pre-war declaration.  In other words he got Congress to pass a bill basically giving the president the OK to go to was with the Chinese over Formosa.  Some Senator's said when they voted for this that they weren't really doing anything that the president couldn't already do.  In my opinion, and the author says this as well, this would have been a very powerful political statement to the Chinese.

I'd never known this had happened and it really adds new understanding to what happened in Vietnam, and what is happening now, that our Nobel Peace Prize Winning President has used the presidential powers to get the USA into another war.

"Ibsen on Art"  This is a translation of a letter and an article by Henrik Ibsen.  The person who included it said that the things that Henrik said were meaningful to LDS artists of the time.  I didn't know who Ibsen was very well except that I'd recently heard a lecture about him from one of the Teaching Company Sets about Great Authors of the Western Tradition.  I also looked him up on Wikipedia.

At the time that he wrote this letter he was the director of the national theater of Norway and he was trying to get more money for the theater.  Of course this is always something that a director wants.  But the points that he makes are very interesting and applicable.  He says that the theater is the combination of all arts.  Painting, sculpture or the plastic arts as Henrik says, and literature.  OK I can see that this could be true, and I wonder just how much more it applies to movies which is an even tighter combination of all the arts.  Although I think the written word gets the short shrift in movies.

Which brings me to the second article "The Theater".  This was an article that was written by Henrik early in his career.  It talks about the fact that people go to the Opera to listen to the music but not to pay attention to the libretto.  The amazing thing is that I know what the libretto is.  Henrik says the opera is only great when t

"William James: Philosopher-Educator" by Truman G. Madsen.  Ok I like William James and Truman Madsen so I read this article and it was interesting.  William James sounds like he was a great teacher and influential man.

"Leonardo Da Vinci–Pioneer Geologist" by Daniel J. Jones  This was an interesting article and it sounds like Leo was very interested in geology and made some perceptive observations.  However, is he a pioneer if no one builds on his discoveries?  We already know he was a great man, now we know he was even greater.

"What is the Proper Role of the Latter-Day Saint With Respect to the Constitution?"  This was a series of articles that talked about the constitution that seriously got me to think about what the constitution is and what my relationship to it is.  I was seriously startled when I actually considered that the government might have responsibility to take care of people with social services, but it did.

Great series of articles I thought.

"A New Emphasis for the American Dream" by Weldon J. Taylor.  This article was very interesting.  It was written in the midst of the Cold War and basically it says that America has reached the point where they're able to fulfill the physical needs of most Americans, and in order to keep developing we're going to have to change the work environment of most Americans so that they can keep achieving higher levels of production.  The interesting about this article is it is saying things that the article presents as new ideas that might be controversial, but today are pretty much standard.  Basically it says that management is going to have to find ways so that workers fill more fulfilled at their jobs.