In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published a short essay aimed at limning the conflict between science and religion, particularly with respect to the question of evolution as the mechanism of generating life on Earth. In…
I was a high school senior in September 1993, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides were disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the Church of Jesus…
I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 25, 1993, almost immediately after Lavina Fielding Anderson was forced out of it.[1] Her stake disciplinary council had convened on September…
In September 1993, six people were excommunicated or disfellowshipped from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The events were widely covered in news media. Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, Avraham Gileadi, Paul Toscano, Maxine Hanks,…
When the curtain rises on the Judeo-Christian garden story, we encounter a series of in-between or liminal phenomena: 1) Adam and Eve, who represent neither fallen humanity nor exalted deities, who “have no status, property,…
Dear Editor, After reading Melissa Leilani Larson’s review of Levi Peterson’s short story collection, Losing a Bit of Eden (“The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists,” Dialogue, Summer 2022), I would like to offer…
What would I do if cast out of my life with nothing? Forced to ask ourselves this question in the first two chapters of this genre-bending, disturbing novel—John Bennion’s most complex yet—we get, early on,…
The ten essays in this volume were brought together to facilitate engagement between scholars of “early Mormonism and early American religious and literary history” (ix). With a designedly inter- or transdisciplinary ambition, Envisioning Scripture assembles…
Growing up in the 1990s in a strong Mormon household, I learned that my religion had its own Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It was not published for the faithful to see but transmitted orally, through hushed…