Broader Dialogue

Commentary: Putting our shoulders to the wheel to end racism and white supremacy in Mormonism

The Salt Lake Tribune printed this important “Commentary: Putting our shoulders to the wheel to end racism and white supremacy in Mormonism.” Here is an excerpt:

As Mormons, we raise our voices to decry as wholly immoral the forces of white supremacy, racism, and neo-Nazism that are becoming more visible and emboldened in the United States.

We raise our voices to denounce as an affront to our faith the abuse of LDS scriptures, doctrines, and images of apostles and prophets to advance white supremacy and racism.

White supremacists have comfortably used LDS scriptures and quotes from apostles — even the image of Joseph Smith — to support their cause on social media, seemingly without fear of being held accountable…

hose of us who grew up in the LDS Church Young Women’s program pledged every week to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things and in all places.

We stand now, in our time, on this issue, and in the places where we live, and we say that there is nothing of God in racism, white supremacy, or neo-Nazism.

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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.

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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.

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Latest Content

Book Review: Daredevils, by Shawn Vestal

Lapsing into Daredevilry

Shawn Vestal. Daredevils. New York: Penguin Press, 2016. 308 pp.

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols

It’s a hard truth: you have to be damn smart to be a writer of good fiction. If you’re dumb, forget it. You have to hear words in your head—and who doesn’t? But you also have to know how to put them together in a sentence that’s not only grammatical but original in its context, truer than any other sentence could possibly be. Then you have to do that with paragraphs and chapters in the service of a whole whose shape knocks readers right out of unconsciousness, makes them alive, blasts their eyes open so they see the world new.

Shawn Vestal is smart. He’s so smart he could write Daredevils, which is about three daredevil kids on the run, two of the daredevil bad guys they’re on the run from, and Evel Knievel, who was the quintessential iconic daredevil of the United States in the 1970s. He figures just enough in this story to be real. Or almost.

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Book Review: Thomas F. Rogers. Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Re ections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty

The Fruit of Knowledge

Thomas F. Rogers. Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty. Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2016. 349 pp.

Reviewed by Mahonri Stewart

As a book of short, religious, and academic non-fiction, Thomas F. Rogers’s Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand is extremely valuable to the Mormon intellectual community; but as a reflection of a devoted disciple and a soulful artist, it goes beyond even that to be authentically moving. In a modern world where spirituality and religious belief is a place of tension and contention, Rogers has written from his place of the faithful agitator—pushing our culture’s boundaries where needed and then turning around to help the Mormon community reach inward and pull the wagons around shared principles.

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Dialogue Podcast #36 w/Bryce Cook

Part two of Bryce Cook’s “What Do We Know of God’s Will for His LGBT Children? An Examination of the LDS Church’s Position on Homosexuality.” Note that this is a recording of his version found on Mormon LGBT Questions although it is very similar to his Dialogue article. The recording has been split into two pieces for ease of listening.  Enjoy!

Dialogue Podcast #36 w/Bryce Cook [ 1:10:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (227)
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Dialogue Podcast #35 w/Bryce Cook

As a companion to Bryce Cook’s Summer 2017 article “What Do We Know of God’s Will for His LGBT Children? An Examination of the LDS Church’s Position on Homosexuality” we bring you a recording of his article for Dialogue podcasts #35 and #36. Note that this is a recording of his version found on Mormon LGBT Questions although it is very similar to his Dialogue article. The recording is split into two pieces for ease of listening.  Enjoy!

Dialogue Podcasts #35 w/Bryce Cook [ 1:24:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (204)
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Book Review: Julie J. Nichols’s Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories.

Asking the Questions

Julie J. Nichols. Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2016. 148 pp.

Reviewed by Emily Shelton Poole

In her full-length debut, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories, Julie J. Nichols presents the interconnected lives of various women living in Salt Lake City over a span of thirty years, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the seven stories focuses on a different main character until their lives become so entangled that the narratives converge in tragedy, heartache, and eventual healing. Some of these stories appeared previously in other publications, including Dialogue.

Nichols wrote the stories as part of her dissertation for a PhD in English from the University of Utah. Two of the stories were controversial enough that Nichols lost her position as a creative writing instructor at Brigham Young University. I speculated, briefly, about which stories could have brought about Nichols’s dismissal from BYU—was it the lesbian teaching Primary or the woman calling on Heavenly Mother to bless a nearly-drowned child? The reference to abortifacient herbs? Or the faith healing without the official exercise of the priesthood? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Each one touches, to some degree, on the fringy edges of Mormonism, and while the stories are ction and easy to dismiss in an academic way, the existence of actual people on those fringes is a far different matter to consider. In their first iterations, she says, they were unrelated, but many explored “the difficulties of being an educated, unorthodox woman in Utah Mormon culture.”

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Book Review: Julie Berry’s The Passion of Dolssa and Jeff Zentner’s The Serpent King

Exploring the Unfamiliar Realm of Religion in Young Adult Literature

Julie Berry. The Passion of Dolssa. New York: Viking Books for Young Readers, 2016. 496 pp.

Jeff Zentner. The Serpent King. New York: Crown Books for Young Readers, 2016. 384 pp.

Reviewed by Jon Ostenson

Modern young adult literature traces its roots to 1967, when S. E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders was published and subsequently devoured by young readers who were desperate for literature that spoke to them and reflected the realities they saw daily. In the ensuing years, young adult literature has bravely explored controversial topics like class struggle, mental illnesses, drug abuse, and sexuality, all in the name of allowing teen readers a chance to explore the “real” world. One element of teens’ lives, however, that has often been overlooked in the literature is religion and spirituality. Despite the results of the recent National Study of Youth and Religion showing that nearly forty percent of teens report actively participating in organized religion, religious characters and explorations of spirituality are rarely treated in young adult literature.

The two titles I review here, The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry and The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner, counter this trend, presenting characters who wrestle with issues of faith and belief as they navigate the challenges of their world.

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Book Review: Jack Harrell. Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism.

Faith, Family, and Art

Jack Harrell. Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 156 pp. Paperback: $18.95. ISBN: 978-1-58958-754-0.

Reviewed by Jennifer Quist

The back cover of Jack Harrell’s new collection Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism describes the book as a continuation of “a conversation as old as Mormonism itself.” It’s a fraught phrase, bringing to mind the image of an academic, artistic, and social in-group that has been conversing among themselves for a very long time. It isn’t the in-group’s fault that the conversation happens in the absence of non-members and newcomers to the Church, neither is it their fault that it goes on without writers, readers, and scholars unconnected to the American Mormon heartland. None of this is the in-group’s fault, but perhaps all of it is their problem. Many in the in-group strive to, in Harrell’s words,“giv[e] the church and its religion a human and literary face” (99). However, we can’t understand what our own faces look like without relying on the re ections and perceptions of people and objects outside ourselves. Perhaps Jack Harrell, as a previous outsider to not just the Mormon literary world but the Mormon world altogether, is especially well-suited to put himself forward to articulate what Mormon letters are and what they ought to be and become.

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Book Review: Just Saying, by Stanton Harris Hall

Just Saying

Stanton Harris Hall. Just Seeing. Self-published, 2016. 109 pp.

Reviewed by Mary Lythgoe Bradford

Stan Hall was one of Dialogue’s most enthusiastic volunteers back in the ’70s when I was its editor. We published some of his poetry then and were sorry when he moved back to his home turf in the Northwest. I was therefore happy to see that he had continued to hone his poetic gift in his privately published collection Just Seeing. The quality of this work causes me to hope that it will be read beyond his family circle, extending even into a second volume, perhaps entitled Just Saying.

Hall is a poet on whom nothing is lost—whose gimlet eye misses little in nature or in human nature. His ne brush strokes recall the Japanese masters of the haiku. He is adept at sketching the place where nature meets its creator as it dreams of “taking the soul in hand / and twisting / like lime or sassafras / release the dry corona-white spirit / from the body’s moist darkness / the spirit freed / the child reunited” (50).

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