In the Spring issue you’ll find pieces from three early influencers of Dialogue: Bob Rees, Francis Menlove, and Robert Christmas. Also read Brad Cook’s exploration of “Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul” as well as Allen Hansen & Walker Wright’s “Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism.” A special roundtable featuring Neylan McBaine, Mette Harrison and Maxine Hanks will consider “Gender, Authority and Identity.” Multiple fiction and poetry pieces grace this issue and Ben Park reviews Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s new look at polygamy A House Full of Females. Finally, Paul Nibley wonders “What Does it Mean to be Truly Christian?”
Levi S. Peterson’s “Kid Kirby” from the Dialogue Summer 2016 issue won a 2016 Association for Mormon Letters award for best short fiction. In honor of this award, Dialogue has released the article early. Find the article by clicking here. From the AML website: “When asked what the purpose of literature is, the short story writer Issac Bashevis Singer responded succinctly that literature is to entertain and instruct. There’s no end to good short stories that meet one of these criterion, but a story that both entertains and instructs, a rarer specimen in the literary world, might be called a great story. Levi Peterson’s poignant and captivating ‘Kid Kirby’ is unequivocally a great story."
New Dialogue 50th Anniversary Gallery
Dialogue Podcast #33 with Matthew Garrett
Just released to the Open Archive: In what’s become a memorable issue, Winter 2014 features some powerful women’s voices beginning with Joanna Brooks’s survey of Mormon feminism. Courtney Rabada looks at the “swelling tide” of sister missionaries and Nancy Ross and Jessica Finnigan study the growing feminist presence online. Then Courtney Kendrick, Rosalynde Welch, and Ashley Mae Hoiland give three different mediations on women and the priesthood. Ann Cannon and Maren Christiansen then provide some needed perspectives on modesty and chastity. Editor Kristine Haglund interviews Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, Neylan McBaine’s new book gets not one, but two reviews, and teenager Megan Fox looks at Adam Miller’s “Letter to a Young Mormon.” Plus find new fiction from Levi Peterson, thoughtful poetry, and a gorgeous sermon by Hannah Prichett. Art by Amy Jorgensen.
Just released to the Open Archive! Within the pages of the Fall 2014 issue, Michael Austin explores the literary heritage of Vardis Fisher, Staci Ford looks closely at the multicultural Latter-day Saint community in the Hong Kong China District and Roger Terry continues his two-part series about LDS usage of archaic pronouns. The issue features poetry by Mark D. Bennion, Sarah Dunster and Ronald Wilcox. You’ll also find James McLachlan’s fascinating review of Terryl Given’s When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought. Also be sure not to miss Charles Inouye’s beautiful sermon on the intersections of Mormonism and nature. Cover and inside art by Maddison Colvin.

Broader Dialogue

UPDATED WITH VIDEOS: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith and Translation Conference

Dialogue was able to attend and tweet about a recent conference at Utah State University called “New Perspectives on Joseph Smith and Translation.” Participants in the all-day conference included many friends of Dialogue including Richard Bushman, Terryl Givens, Jana Riess, Samuel Brown, Jared Hickman and Rosalynde Welch. The conference was conceived and hosted by Philip Barlow and the USU Dept. of History and Religious Studies, and was sponsored by the Faith Matters Foundation.

Now the videos are being made available, with all the videos slated to be up by May 20. Visit faithmatters.org to see a produced, session-by-session video of the conference, with some additional graphic features and context added.

UPDATED WITH VIDEOS: Multicultural Mormonism Conference: Religious Cohesion in a New Era of Diversity

The 2017 Mormon Studies Conference is themed “Multicultural Mormonism: Religious Cohesion in a New Era of Diversity” and was held March 30 and 31st at Utah Valley University. Find videos of the presentations here.

This conference explored multicultural and intercultural interactions within Mormonism, focusing on issues surrounding ethnicity, race, and class; and with an eye toward the future of Mormonism as a global religion.

It included presentations by Gina Colvin, Ignacio Garcia, Janan Graham-Russell, Moroni Benally, Anapesi Ka’ili, Darron Smith, and more.

Find the entire schedule and video links here.

The Slowing of Church Growth

Christian Anderson, who has an article in the upcoming Spring Issue, takes a hard look at membership numbers after they were released in April 2017 conference. Here’s a taste of his post “The Slowing of Church Growth.”

“Using the same methodology I used in (Dialogue Spr 2017; in press), making some reasonable assumptions about death rates and removals, the membership statistics suggest approximately 30,000 members were excommunicated or resigned in 2016, bringing the total for the last four years to just over 150,000. This value is based on several fudge-factors, and should only be taken as a rough order-or-magnitude guess. Randall Bowen at churchistrue.com used different fudge-factors (including assuming an increasing rate of removals of 110 year old lost members, and 9 year old children of record who had not been baptized) to arrive at an estimate of 20,000 defecting members in 2016 and about 95,000 over the last four years.”

2017 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest

In the spirit of Gene’s writings, entries should relate to Latter-day Saint experience, theology, or worldview. Essays will be judged by noted Mormon authors and professors of literature. Winners will be notified by email and announced in our Winter issue and on Dialogue’s website. After the announcement, all other entrants will be free to submit their essays elsewhere.

Prizes:

First place, $300; second place, $200; and third place $100

Invisible Men / Invincible Women

Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories. San Francisco: Outpost 19, 2016. 150 pp. Paperback: $16.00.

Reviewed by Lisa Rumsey Harris
Dialogue. Winter 2016

The gaze of the girl on the cover of Eric Freeze’s short story collection arrested me—stopped me. Her eyes, full of hostility, told me that if I opened the book, I would be intruding. Her bright knee-length plaid skirt, reminiscent of schoolgirl uniforms, belied the knowledge behind her glare. If it wasn’t for her posture, her arms embracing something, I wouldn’t have noticed the titular Invisible Man next to her on the cover.

Her warning wasn’t wrong. I felt like an intruder as I began to read. I could only take it in small doses—read, then turn the ideas over and over in my mind, like rubbing a smooth stone between my fingers.

Speaking for Herself

Ashley Mae Hoiland. One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God. Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2016. 212 pp. Paperback: $11.92.

Reviewed by Glen Nelson.
Dialogue, Winter 2016

One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God is a collection of short missives—poems, essays, and autobiographical sketches— grouped loosely and thematically into thirteen sections and an epilogue. Ashley Mae Hoiland is the author/illustrator of three self-published children’s books, a contributor to a collection of essays, Fresh Courage Take: New Directions by Mormon Women (Signature Books, 2015), a blogger (under the name ashmae) for By Common Consent, and the creator of a collection of sixty (trading or ash) cards of notable women in history, We Brave Women (Kickstarter, 2015).

Book Review: Patrick Madden. Sublime Physick: Essays.

A Candid and Dazzling Conversation

Patrick Madden. Sublime Physick: Essays. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 244 pp. Hardcover: $24.95.

Reviewed by Joe Plicka
Dialogue, Winter 2016

Patrick Madden’s second book of collected essays, following 2010’s Quotidiana (which won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters and was a nalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award), bears the mark of a writer hitting his stride. All the usual adjectives apply: the essays are at times witty, profound, charming, moving, playful (even cheeky), and wise. As anyone who has hung around a creative writing classroom knows by now, personal essays are grounded in a carefully curated friendship between reader and writer, a dialogue, an intimacy—a formulation probably most plainly expressed (recently) by Phillip Lopate in the introduction to his seminal anthology The Art of the Personal Essay. It is this quality of friendship, of candid and dazzling conversation, that engages and entices me as a reader throughout Sublime Physick’s dozen entries

Book Review: Three frontier-era novels republished and annotated

Old Words, New Work: Reclamation and Remembrance

John Russell. The Mormoness; Or, The Trials of Mary Maverick: A Narrative of Real Events. Edited and annotated by Michael Austin and Ardis E. Parshall. The Mormon Image in Literature. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016 [1853]. 114 pp. Paperback: $12.95.

Alfreda Eva Bell. Boadicea; The Mormon Wife: Life-Scenes in Utah. Edited and annotated by Michael Austin and Ardis E. Parshall. The Mormon Image in Literature. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016 [1855]. 151 pp. Paperback: $15.95.

Nephi Anderson. Dorian: A Peculiar Edition with Annotated Text & Scholarship. Edited by Eric W. Jepson. Annotated by Mason Allred, Jacob Bender, Scott Hales, Blair Dee Hodges, Eric W. Jepson, Sarah C. Reed, and A. Arwen Taylor. El Cerrito, Calif.: Peculiar Pages, 2015 [1921]. 316 pp. Paperback: $21.99.

Reviewed by Jenny Webb
Dialogue, Winter 2016

The continual rising interest in all things Mormon, whether they be historical, cultural, social, doctrinal, or even theological, has led to a number of interesting publication projects. The texts gathered in this review represent a particular focus within this broader interest: the recovery and re-examination of the various historical forms of the “Mormon novel.”

Award-winning short fiction by Levi S. Peterson

Levi S. Peterson’s “Kid Kirby” from the Dialogue Summer 2016 issue won a 2016 Association for Mormon Letters award for best short fiction. In honor of this award, Dialogue has released the article early so that everyone can read it. Find “Kid Kirby” here.

From the AML website: “When asked what the purpose of literature is, the short story writer Issac Bashevis Singer responded succinctly that literature is to entertain and instruct. There’s no end to good short stories that meet one of these criterion, but a story that both entertains and instructs, a rarer specimen in the literary world, might be called a great story. Levi Peterson’s poignant and captivating ‘Kid Kirby’ is unequivocally a great story.”

Book Review: For Time and All Eternities, by Mette Ivie Harrison

For Time and All Eternities. By Mette Ivie Harrison. Soho Press, 2017

Reviewed by Heather B. Moore

For Time and All Eternities is the third installment of the Linda Wallheim mystery series. For Time works well as a standalone—in fact, I read the first book The Bishop’s Wife, but not the second book. I didn’t feel lost, which I appreciated. Linda Wallheim is the wife of an LDS Bishop, and although she and her husband have raised five children together, recent months in their marriage has been rocky. Linda is sympathetic to those who have struggled with a church policy change, and she finds that her sympathies have created a deep divide between her and her husband Kurt. Regardless, they continue to move through the motions of their marriage until the day that Linda’s son Kenneth comes to tell her he is marrying a young woman from a polygamist family. Linda and Kurt are shocked, but they agree to meet the young woman Naomi, who in turn, invites Linda and Kurt to meet her very large family–which includes Naomi’s father Stephen Carter, his five wives, and dozens of children.

Dialogue Podcast #33 w/Matthew Garrett

In the newest Dialogue podcast Matthew Garrrett, Professor of History at Bakersfield College and winner of the 2015 Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon Studies, discusses his research on the Indian Student Placement Program sponsored by the Church and documented in his recent book, Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000, published by The University of Utah Press.

From the Miller Eccles website:

Dr. Garrett traces his adventures as a Native American history scholar meandering into the world of Mormon Studies, with special attention paid to the various perspectives and conflicts of both his own personal academic journey as well as those of the LDS Indian program he studied. From 1970s era protests over colonization, to conflicting views of Indian participants and church administrators, Professor Garrett will survey some of the past disputes that ultimately led to internal acrimony that destabilized, eroded, and finally terminated the LDS Indian programs.