DiaBLOGue
Deep Cheer
March 14, 2018Nine years ago, my husband Kyle was offered an attractive job at Tulane University in New Orleans. At the same time, he was offered—and ultimately accepted—a position at Indiana University. Six months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and Tulane shut down for an extended period. If Kyle had accepted that job, we likely would have been displaced indefinitely from home and work and schools. We felt empathy for those who suffered, and we thanked our lucky stars that we had dodged this bullet.
God’s “Body” and Why It Matters | Stephen H. Webb, Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints
March 14, 2018Stephen Webb is a Roman Catholic scholar who has made a great effort to understand and interact with Mormonism in sympathetic ways. In his prior volume on this topic, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (Oxford University Press, 2011), Webb considered the possibility of the materiality and divine embodiment of God by way of elements in the history of Christian thought, specifically “heavenly flesh” Christology. In Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints, he narrows his focus to consider Mormon materialist metaphysics and what this might mean for his own Catholicism, as well as the doctrine of the rest of historic Christendom.
Dialogue at the Crossroads | Jacob T. Baker, ed., Mormonism at the Crossroads of Philosophy and Theology: Essays in Honor of David L. Paulsen
March 14, 2018This excellent collection of essays not only honors one of the most influential LDS thinkers of the past forty years, David L. Paulsen, but does so as a beautiful example of the very sort of critically reflective and respectful interfaith dialogue that he worked so hard to encourage throughout his career as both a teacher and a writer.
Katy, My Sister
March 14, 2018We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…
As Presently Constituted: Mormon Studies in the Field of Religion | What Does Kashi Have to Do With Salt Lake?: Academic Comparisons, Asian Religions, and Mormonism
March 14, 2018In a polemical treatise from late antiquity, Tertullian famously asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” The readers of this essay might ask a similar rhetorical question of “What does Kashi have to do with Salt Lake?” What could we actually learn from the comparative study of Asian religions with Mormonism? Armed with tools and theories that largely extol the particular over the general, most contemporary scholars have been shaped to be suspicious of comparisons that excise the historical and universalize the local. Comparative projects seem so very retrograde. We snicker when we hear individuals cite comparative works like The Golden Bough or theories like phenomenology as authoritative sources or methods. Those projects were so pre-postmodern, we think as we roll our eyes. Nevertheless, I argue that if academic comparisons of Mormonism and Asian religions are disciplined, modest, and pragmatic, Kashi and Salt Lake have much to do with one another.
As Presently Constituted: Mormon Studies in the Field of Religion | Religious Studies as Comparative Religion
March 14, 2018This paper is entitled “Religious Studies as Comparative Religion,” and its purpose is to suggest that comparative religion, as one way of engaging in religious studies, can be fruitful for historians of Mormonism.
Faith
March 14, 2018To exist without beginning’s
ultimate mystery;
to comprehend end’s easy
as eternity’s imagined;
Let Rocks Their Silence Break (Luke 19)
March 14, 2018To hold the disciples’ throats
against His praise,
after the tied colt
is ushered in,
Grass Whistles
March 14, 2018Children’s fingers folded in,
thumbs aligned,
hands heart-shaped,
knuckled boxes.