The fever is on me now.
Since morning I can do nothing
but crack pistachios between
my thumbs and listen
to the woody tinkle of their shells
hitting the floor.
I mutter haiku at the cat
who bats them as they fall.
Sometimes you speak
and I hear
the words between us,
Death does not
disturb me, nor fear
of death.
Driving past the humongous brick building set way back from the street, I do an instant double take. Did I just see what I thought I saw? Did that sign say, “Sinners Welcome Here?” While I’m supposed to be negotiating traffic on my way to Costco, I’m rubbernecking, and I see that the sign says what I thought it said. The words are painted on a shiny plastic, weatherproof banner attached near the top of the building.
Sexuality in antebellum America constituted a set of contradictions. Men should be steely, resolved, and assertive; women ought to be reserved, flighty, and, under the right conditions, sexually explosive. As historian Karen Lystra has observed, “There are no sexual absolutes. Sexual experience is time-bound,” a fact that holds true for the Mormon experience as well.
Dialogue 47.1 (Spring 2014):24–57
his article will examine hospitality as it is found in the Book of Mormon. We will look at instances when a person (or group) invites an outsider (or group of outsiders) into the home or community, making note of how the hospitality is exercised, what motivates it, what role it plays in the Book of Mormon narrative, and what spiritual or religious dimensions it is assigned.
Dialogue 47.1 (Spring 2014):1–23
This conclusion is obviously problematic, as it implies that the early Church repudiated teachings from the Book of Mormon immediately following its publication. Thus there is a need for a reassessment of the relation between early nineteenth-century Universalism and the teachings of the Book of Mormon and subsequent revelations.
Nine 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.
Stephen 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.