DiaBLOGue

“Who Shall Sing If Not the Children?” Primary Songbooks, 1880-1989

March 23, 2018

In 1989, the Primary Association released a new songbook for Mormondom’s children, its first since 1969. Evaluating it for a professional hymnody publication, one reviewer commented: “This handsome volume’s 8V2 x 11″ pages exude a special kind of coziness…. The plentiful decorative illustrations use pastel colors exclusively—and so, in their way, do most of the songs…. [F]or every song about a specifically Mormon doc trine or practice, at least four would fit into practically any Christian, in deed any civilized context.”

Ecclesiastical Polity and the Challenge of Homosexuality: Two Cases of Divergence within the Mormon Tradition

March 23, 2018

The respective websites of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and the Community of Christ,[1] provide explicit access to the public images both churches wish to project. Upon these websites, each denomination…

Toward a “Marriage Group” of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories

March 23, 2018

In a now canonical article in 1912, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” George Lyman Kittredge applied the term “marriage group” to a subset among Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath (and her polemic and confessional prologue), the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Franklin. Later scholars sometimes enlarged the group or questioned the inclusion of various tales, but it has persisted as an object of critical attention. Obviously, in proposing a “marriage group” of contemporary Mormon short stories, I cannot expect to discover the kind of “conversation” or “debate” that Chaucerians from Kittredge to Kaske and beyond have analyzed.

Embodied Mormonism: Performance, Vodou, and the LDS Faith in Haiti

March 23, 2018

In Haiti religions are rarely understood to be autonomous from one another. It is not unusual for seemingly disparate mythological systems to coexist not only across the Haitian landscape, but also within individual Haitian practice.…

Letters to the Editor

March 23, 2018

D. Jeff Burton, Tolerance for “Cultural Mormons”
Gerry L. Ensley, Joseph, Peepstones, and Pirates
Dan Vogel, Serving Two Masters
Gary James Bergera, Civility, Compassion, Honesty
Richard L. Bushman, Fair-Minded People
Sarah Barringer Gordon, Jana Riess, and Valeen Tippetts Avery, An Excess of Zeal
Ralf Gruenke, Room for Reason and Study
Doug Ward, Respecting Opposite Opinions

About the Artist

March 23, 2018

Marylee Mitcham was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1943. She received a B.A. in English literature in 1967 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She and Carl, her husband of forty years, currently reside in…

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

March 23, 2018

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

Good News for Fiction Readers | Jack Harrell, Vernal Promises, and Douglas Thayer, The Conversion of Jeff Williams

March 23, 2018

In 2003, Signature Books hit 100 percent from the free-throw line when both of the novels it published that year won manuscript awards from the Association for Mormon Letters. Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises and Douglas…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

March 23, 2018

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

Relations and Principles: The Mormon Dialectic | Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism

March 23, 2018

Douglas J. Davies offers novel thematic interpretations of LDS theology that are provocative in both academic and devotional contexts. He identifies two theological commitments present throughout the historical development of LDS cosmology, ritual, scripture and…