DiaBLOGue

Mormonism’s Worldwide Aspirations and its Changing Conceptions of Race and Lineage

March 28, 2018

Mormon history contains its fair share of ironies and unintended consequences. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a mission to restore the ancient church, but not for everyone at the same time. In its earliest days, the church was preoccupied with its mission to seek out the descendants of Abraham through Jacob or Israel; these Israelites, in turn, would prepare the world for the millennial reign of the Messiah.

About my Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever

March 28, 2018

Run your finger across the arc of my cheekbone.
Notice how it curves like the hull of Noah’s ark
that propelled life through earth’s watery death.

Root and Branch: An Abstract of the Structuralist Analysis of the Allegoryof the Olive Tree

March 28, 2018

The Allegory of the Olive Tree, as found in Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon, is one of the most complicated and enigmatic of texts. These com plications, however, can be resolved when the…

Forever Family

March 28, 2018

Five of his and four of hers were
step-this-and-that to each other.

The Church said, “Families Are
‘Forever'”—in their case it was more

The LDS Sound World and Global Mormonism

March 28, 2018

The expansion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may be described from a broadly phenomenological perspective in terms of sound and silence. My observations here deal with the outer, open dimension of…

Dig

March 28, 2018

I began to dream I
was soil and you
were a plant that grew
in me, root hard

The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Guatemala, 1948-1998

March 28, 2018

The U.S.-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is rapidly becoming a worldwide church, particularly since the 1950s. One major reason for this is the church’s ambitious evangelization program: In 2000 it had 60,000…

The Book of Mormon and Religious Epistemology

March 28, 2018

In his important study of Language, Belief, and Experience, the ethnographer Rodney Needham tells of a dream which disturbed his sleep one night. He found himself among a people he had once studied, the Penan of Borneo, struggling to converse with them in their native tongue. He was distressed to realize he could not translate one particular phrase: “I believe in God.”

Legacy

March 28, 2018

Her afghans and roses give her day a pattern
that will untighten her mouth pursed by a memory—
how her mother would fatten the favored son with milk,
claiming only boys needed calcium, not girls.

Gethsemane and Calvary in LDS Soteriology

March 28, 2018

In this paper I explore one of the key ways in which the idea of salvation as formulated within LDS thought differs from expressions of salvation in other religious groups. I will also raise the…