The Summer Issue burns bright with powerful photos depicting Mama Dragons combined with important insights about “The LGBTQ Mormon Crisis” from scholars Michael Barker, Daniel Parkinson and Benjamin Knoll. Christian Harrison and Roni Jo Draper both provide some faithful thoughts on Mormons, the LGBTQ community and boundaries. Also inside find the awaited reviews of Planted and Religion of a Different Color. The Exponent II gets a thought-provoking roundtable treatment courtesy of Claudia Bushman, Nancy Tate Dredge, Judy Dushku, Susan Whitaker Kohler, Carrel Hilton Sheldon. And find lovely poetry, new fiction from Theric Jepson and Levi Petersen and a beautiful sermon by Eunice McMurray. Plus welcome the new voice of Neil Longo.
Just released to the Open Archive! The Summer 2014 issue features Roger Terry asking “What Shall We Do with Thou? Modern Mormonism’s Unruly Usage of Archaic English Pronouns.” Next, in one of our most downloaded articles ever, Stan Larson provides another view of Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Then Emily Jensen looks back at ten years of Mormon blogging. The issue also features the poetic musings of Karen Kelsay, Sarah E. Page, Anita Tanner, and Ronald Wilcox. A wonderful conversation between Michael D. K. King and David Howlett with a response from John-Charles Duffy also ensues. Plus find gorgeous personal voices, fiction and sermon. Cover and interior art by Rebecca Sorge.
Sitting down at Sunstone to dialogue

about Dialogue with Jesse Embry,

Carol Lynn Pearson and Devery

Anderson
Dialogue Podcast #30 with Gregory A. Prince
Dialogue Podcast #29 with Editor Boyd Petersen
Just released to the Open Archive, the Spring issue opens with two articles on the Book of Mormon–one on its universalist theology, and one about the practice of hospitality in the text. Next, Russell Stevenson’s article examines sources related to the construction of norms of masculine virtue among 19th-century Latter-day Saints. The issue features work by well-known friends of Dialogue Bob Rees, Phyllis Barber, Karen Rosenbaum, and Dixie Partridge, as well as fiction and poetry from folks Dialogue readers will want to know–Steven Peck and Will Reger. A wonderful conversation between Hugo Olaiz and Restoration historian David Howlett, a beautiful Mother’s Day sermon, and incisive book reviews fill out the issue. Cover and interior art by Annie Kennedy.
The Spring 2016 Issue is just up! As this is the first issue with Editor Boyd Petersen at the helm, he begins with an Editor’s Note. Board member Fiona Givens follows brilliantly with an article on men and women’s issues in “Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making.” Melvin Bashore studies the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Dennis Potter looks at Mormonism and the problem of heterodoxy. A thought-provoking Catholic-Mormon dialogue ensues in these pages among articles by Polly Aird, Zina Petersen, Robert Rees, Mathew Schmal, and Daniel Dwyer. Also find gorgeous poetry, reviews on some of the most fascinating books out recently, thoughtful fiction from Stephen Carter and a lovely sermon by Phyllis Barber. Enjoy!

Broader Dialogue

Exponent Bloggers Celebrate Dialogue: A Journal Of Mormon Thought

d026f7aa9ab09b154ca3ae5bbbb51f06 Cross posted on The Exponent Blog

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. To honor this legendary Mormon publication, I’ve collected from various Exponent bloggers some thoughts about Dialogue‘s role in their lives and about Dialoguearticles that have particularly impacted them. MayDialogue continue on for another 50 years… and many, many more after that.

April Young Bennett:

While researching background information for a Relief Society lesson, I read Jessie L. Embry’s 1982 Dialogue article, “Grain Storage: The Balance of Power Between Priesthood Authority and Relief Society Autonomy“. It was such an eye-opener for me! The article presents compelling evidence that Emmeline Wells and her counselors did not choose to sell several decades of grain storage to the United States government, but rather had their grain storage program sold out from under them by priesthood leaders without their knowledge, something I had not read before in either church published or independent histories. Daughters in my Kingdom, for example, says “the Relief Society sold 200,000 bushels to the United States government.”

Dialogue and the Dangerous, Beautiful Possibilities of Mormon Literature

dialogue-one-189x300 Dialogue and the Dangerous, Beautiful Possibilities of Mormon Literature by Michael Austin

Cross-posted at the Association of Mormon Letters blog.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. This is important for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with Mormon literature. But some of the reasons have a lot to do with Mormon literature, perhaps the most important being that the advent of Dialogue fifty years ago fundamentally altered the possibility space in which Mormon literature could occur.

This happened in two ways. In the first place, Dialogue was the first venue that regularly discussed Mormon literature as an academic discipline. During its first twelve years, Dialogue published four special issues devoted to Mormon literature (here, here, here, and here), the last one being the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters—an organization that was created largely by Dialogue’s earliest contributors.

To understand the significance of this, we have to imagine a world without blogs, e-mail, comment sections, Amazon, or Wikipedia.

The Community of Dialogue

Cross-posted at Professor Park’s blog.

You do a lot of couch surfing as a broke college student. As I was traveling to conferences and archives I relied on the generosity of friends as well as friends-of-friends. I also tried to tap into the vast Mormon network. All to save a buck. I met a lot of great people this way, but it’s always an anxiety-ridden process because you know you are relying on the good will of strangers. There can always be moments of awkwardness.

But I remember once arriving at someone’s house, being welcomed into their living room, seeing an entire run of Dialogue issues displayed prominently on their shelves, and immediately feeling at home. The very presence of those print copies assured me that they were extended family. Even if they hadn’t read all of the articles between each of the covers, mere possession implied an allegiance to a particular sub-culture within the Mormon faith.

Being a Mormon of a certain stripe can be a lonely affair. Especially if you live away from the Mormon belt—where even if there’s a dogmatic and orthodox culture, there’s still a presence of like-minded members—you might be separated from other people anxious to discuss the complexities of being Mormon and modern. This problem has been partly alleviated through the bloggernacle and social media, but before those digital networks Dialogue was the primary mode of progressive Mormon belonging. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the journal in the Mormon tradition’s transformation over the past half-century. That alone justifies its celebration.

Dialogue, and Me, at 50

Cross posted at By Common Consent
Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. So do I, and the similarities don’t end there. Both of us were both polite and orthodox in our youth and reasonably well behaved in our adolescence, but we both started to push up against institutional boundaries in our early adulthood. We tried hard to walk the line between scholarly inquiry and faithful discourse, but it was a tough line to walk, and sometimes we ended up too much on one side or the other. A lot of our friends left the Church, but we both knew we never could. Mormonism was too much a part of our core identity for us to ever give it up.

Now, at 50, we have both gotten a lot better at being faithful Latter-day Saints on our own terms. We have figured out how to embrace and even celebrate the contradictions of being academic and Mormon at the same time. We both relish the kind of faith that has gone through the crises and the difficult questions and emerged fundamentally changed, but still fundamentally Mormon.

In celebration of our mutual jubilee, I would like to share a few memories that I have of our five decades together. Let’s start at the beginning.

Book Review: Sistering, by Jennifer Quist

Jennifer Quist. Sistering. Linda Leith Publishing, 2015.

Reviewed by Shelah Miner.

In her second novel, Sistering, Canadian author Jennifer Quist draws on her personal expertise as the oldest of five sisters in a book that is as much about the ways that a group of sisters see themselves and come together as a family unit as it is about the accidental death at the heart of the plot.
Quist’s first novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death (2013) was serious and poetic . . . While neither novel is overtly Mormon, the main characters in Love Letters display signs that tip off their religion to an LDS audience. The same is not true of Sistering, where questions of faith and afterlife take a back seat to what is happening in the here and now.

Why I still need ‘Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought’ by Jana Riess

about-jana-riess

Dialogue has been hugely important in my life. In fact, I’m not sure I would have ever converted to Mormonism without it.” – Jana Riess

Click in for Jana’s full love-letter to Dialogue on the occasion of it’s 50th anniversary.

Dialogue Conference Presenter Bios

download Who is speaking at our “Spirit of Dialogue” conference on September 30th at UVU? Speakers will include Dialogue luminaries Armand Mauss, Darius Gray, Alice Faulkner Burch, Ignacio Garcia, Gabrielle Blair, Patrick Mason, Meg Conly, Greg Prince, Michael Austin, Ben Park, Courtney Clark Kendrick, Paul Reeve, and Eric Samuelsen and more discussing LDS art, the issues surrounding Mormon groupthink, the place of Dialogue within Mormon studies and more. Find biographies of the presenters here.

SUMMER PREVIEW: Dialogue releases research on youth suicide rates

Screenshot 2016-08-08 at 11.07.47 PM

Analysis of the data suggests that the problem is worse in LDS communities than the national average,” says researchers Michael Barker, Daniel Parkinson, and Benjamin Knoll in their new article “The LGBTQ Mormon Crisis: Responding to the Empirical Research on Suicide” found in the upcoming Summer 2016 Issue of Dialogue: A journal of Mormon thought.
And in the supplemental article, “Youth Suicide Rates and the Mormon Context: An Additional Empirical Analysis,” Knoll looks at the research “in wake of the November 2015 (Mormon Church) handbook policy change that categorizes same-sex married couples as ‘apostates’ and forbids baptism to children in same-sex married households.”

Click in to purchase these articles.

Dialogue Podcast #30 w/Gregory Prince

1002497_10151944138363296_1551919275_n-copy-450x359 The newest Dialogue podcast features Board Member Gregory A. Prince, who spoke on his new book, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, published by the University of Utah Press at a recent Miller Eccles presentation. From the Miller Eccles website: “Dr. Prince earned doctorate degrees in dentistry and pathology from UCLA. A prodigious student of Mormon history, he is also a prolific author of numerous articles and books on Mormon topics.

Dialogue Podcast #30 w/Gregory Prince [ 1:15:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (992)

Dialogue Podcast #29 w/Editor Boyd Petersen

10002306 Editor Boyd J. Petersen spoke at a recent Miller Eccles group on “Landing Instructions How to Navigate (or Help Someone Navigating) a Faith Crisis.” Petersen is the Program Coordinator for Mormon Studies at Utah Valley University and the newly appointed editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He is also a prolific essayist who will draw from his book of essays titled Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Family and Culture.

Dialogue Podcast #29 w/Editor Boyd Petersen [ 1:14:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (856)

Book Review: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad. Way Below the Angels, by Craig Harline

Craig Harline. Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014.

Reviewed by Rosalynde Frandsen Welch

Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man. Throughout, young Elder Harline wrestles with his own unrealistic expectations of grandeur and occasionally encounters a moment of shimmering grace. The events and settings are, on the surface, highly entertaining but hardly exceptional. Non-Mormon readers, who are the primary audience for the book’s publisher, Eerdmans, will come away with a lightly-seasoned glimpse of a Mormon mission experience in Europe; Mormon readers familiar with mission culture will respond with recognition and identification.

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Dialogue has been hugely important in my life. In fact, I’m not sure I would have ever converted to Mormonism without it.” – Jana Riess