Flaming
October 26, 2018One day, I woke up blinded by white light stinging my sleeping eyes. A thin, radiant line created by a break in my window blinds had been making a slow sojourn, day by day, across…
DiaBLOGue
The Unending Conversation
October 26, 2018Looking back with the perspective of fifty years, I can see (and feel) a sustaining philosophy that has guided Dialogue through its amazing half-century tenure, more than a quarter of the entire history of the LDS Church.
Do We Have to Believe That? Canon and Extra-Canonical Sources of LDS Belief
October 26, 2018For two days in October 2010, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” was part of the LDS canon. Maybe.
That’s Where the Light Enters
October 26, 2018I’m writing this from our roof, where I can see over the tops of mango trees, wet from last night’s rain. Mynas swoop from palm to palm, and enough sun filters through the misty dawn…
A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Mark’s Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30)
October 26, 2018The Gospel of Mark repeatedly echoes the Hebrew Bible: from the extensive thematic and verbal parallels between Jesus’ calming of the sea and the story of Jonah to the quotation of a single line from a psalm serving as Jesus’ last words while he suffers on the cross, intertextual allusions are frequently recognized by modern interpreters of Mark.This paper considers a reverberation which has, to my knowledge, received no previous exploration:I will show how Mark’s story of the Greek woman echoes the interactions between Hannah and Eli in 1 Samuel 1.
A Documentary Note on a Letter to Joseph Smith. Romance, Death, and Polygamy: The Life and Times of Susan Hough Conrad and Lorenzo Dow Barnes
October 26, 2018Dialogue 49.4 (Winter 2016): 87–108
The history behind a letter that was written by missionary Jedediah Morgan Grant to Joseph Smith, which contained information about Susan Hough Conrad and her brief love writings with a missionary who was serving in England named Lorenzo Dow Barnes.
“All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism
October 26, 2018In his 2005 commencement speech, the late novelist David Foster Wallace provided an unexpectedly frank description of American adulthood for the recent graduates of Kenyon College. Listing painfully familiar annoyances associated with what he calls the “day in day out” of middle-class America—including a hilarious retelling of the common supermarket experience—Wallace urges his audience to fight against their “natural, hard-wired default setting” that tells them they are “the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”
The Holy Priesthood, the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Community
October 26, 2018In response to the question “How can a spirit be a member of the godhead?” Joseph Fielding Smith wrote, “we should have no time to enter into speculation in relation to the Holy Ghost,” suggesting that we “leave a matter which in no way concerns us alone.”Perhaps because of this, the Holy Ghost has become one of the “most taboo and hence least studied”subjects in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nevertheless, here I will explore the Holy Ghost’s purview, in its particular relation to priesthood. It may prove most useful to begin the conversation with four statements from Joseph Smith that directly relate, unify, or explicitly link “the Holy Priesthood & the Holy Ghost.”
Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul
October 26, 2018Across centuries and cultures, the origin of the human soul has been a subject of deep interest and yearning, often finding wondrous expression in theology, philosophy, science, and art. Ruminating on the profound mystery of earthly existence, the noted medieval Ṣūfī mystic Jalāluddin Rūmī (d. 1273 CE) pondered:
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
“In Christ All Things Hold Together”: A Christian Perspective (via Levinas and Shimony) on Quantum Entanglement
October 26, 2018Christians regard the universe as having divine import. In the gospel of John we read: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).The word world, having more than one meaning, might be taken to denote human society, particularly since the passage seems to zero in on human believers. Who else, we might ask, could exercise faith unto everlasting life?