White Shell
March 22, 2018There are pieces of white shell sifted with the sands and soils of Dinetah that confuse newcomers and outsiders. Tourists look at the shells like puzzle pieces, trying to force them into what they know.…
DiaBLOGue
Householding: A Quaker-Mormon Marriage
March 22, 2018The scene: my house on any weekday evening. The table’s scattered with toy airplanes, homework, books, the orange-eyed cat that’s recently adopted us, and several chewed-up pencils. I’m hunting for my keys on my way…
Napoleon Dynamite, Priesthood Skills, and the Eschatology of the Non-Rational: A Nonwarranted Physiotheologic Analysis
March 22, 2018Napoleon fever has struck. Thousands of young girls are adorning their walls with posters of the nerdy hero in the sweet brown suit and scrambling to learn the womanly art of weaving key chains from…
The Man Lying in the Grass
March 22, 2018We’re in Ogden, Utah, on the second day of May, heading home to Orem after a Sunday afternoon with grandchildren. Carol is driving south on Washington Boulevard passing low business buildings whose shadows are covering the lawns and reaching out into the street. Up ahead, I spot a man lying in the grass maybe twenty feet back from the curb. A drunk sleeping himself sober? I wonder. Probably drunk . . . But what if he’s a diabetic whose sugar is low and he can’t get up?
My Belief
March 22, 2018In 1831 at the same time that Joseph Smith was receiving visions and establishing a new church because no contemporary religion was true—they had all become dead relics with no prophecy in them—Scottish writer Thomas…
Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm
March 22, 2018Dialogue 38.4 (Winter 2006):105–156
He has written about it at least four times. It reflects most of the problems with all of his extended chiasms. My argument is that he has imposed chiasmus on the Book of Mormon where none was intended.
Lehi on the Great Issues: Book of Mormon Theology in Early Nineteenth-Century Perspective
March 22, 2018Dialogue 38.4 (Winter 2006):83–104
Thus, regardless of how one chooses to resolve the issues surrounding its origins, one must conclude that the Book of Mormon’s theological arguments should be seen as designed to be read and understood by its early nineteenth-century audience.
The Diverse Sheep of Israel: Should the Shepherds Resemble Their Flocks?
March 22, 2018Recently, my wife and I became foster parents to two teenagers of Haitian ancestry, a fourteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old boy. It is our first-time parenting experience, and “interesting” is not an adjective that does…
A Marvelous Work and a Possession: Book of Mormon Historicity as Postcolonialism
March 22, 2018Dialogue 38.4 (Winter 2006):45–82
the original text, unfortunately, no longer exists on this earth, and we are left only with the assurances of a “translator” that the testimony contained in the record is “true,” although we do not, in fact, have even the complete text as it left the hand of the translator/scribe.
Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An “Afro-European” View on Religious Colonization
March 22, 2018Mormon history is part of the colonization history of the American West; and the LDS Church, as a major player in that process, still bears a colonization imprint in many ways. The colonizing days are over now, and the Church is part of a major political presence in the world, no longer the colonized, but rather the colonizer. In this article, I argue that the Utah-based modern Church has replicated the same colonization process on its membership abroad to which it was once subjected.