DiaBLOGue

Shifting Attitudes: Nauvoo Polygamy | Merina Smith, Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853

March 14, 2018

Merina Smith’s book continues the fascination with Nauvoo polygamy. Other authors have considered such topics as Joseph Smith and his wives, the experience of those entering polygamy in Nauvoo (as well as the numbers and names of those who did so), the theology underpinning plural marriage, and much more. The major question Smith deals with is how Latter-day Saints “were persuaded to shift their understanding of marriage not only to accommodate polygamy, but to regard it, at least officially, as the ideal form of marriage” (2). Larry Foster has dealt with this question, though Smith explores it in more depth and frames her answer with theology rather than theory. 

Pre-Mortal Existence and the Problem of Suffering: Terryl Givens and the Heterodox Traditions | Terryl L. Givens, When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought

March 14, 2018

Terryl Givens’s work has, with good reason, become quite popular in Mormon circles over the past few years. Since The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (1997), he has become the most prolific and perhaps most important scholar writing about Mormon culture and theology today. He is difficult to categorize. He doesn’t quite fit the traditional roles of historian, literary critic, or theologian.

Moving On

March 14, 2018

So I’m down in Payson helping my father, Wymond, move his new wife’s things into storage. The landowner Peg has been renting from is selling out to developers who want the farmland. It’s early on…

The Postum Table

March 14, 2018

The family had been in the dream house about three months. It was October, and they were gathered for Family Night. A box of See’s chocolates, wrapped in glossy white paper, sat like the fruit…

A company man on his day off

March 14, 2018

thinks of:

blue sky
not the oppressive space of huge warehouses
chopped by endless categories of air

Archaic Pronouns and Verbs in the Book of Mormon: What Inconsistent Usage Tells Us about Translation Theories

March 14, 2018

Dialogue 44.3 (Fall 2014):53–101
Initially, I intended only one article on the usage of archaic pronouns
and the implications of certain irregularities. But as I delved deeper
into the implications, particularly what the erratic usage suggests
about the translation of the Book of Mormon, it became obvious
that this particular detour needed to stand alone as a companion
piece to the main article

Crossing the Planes: Gathering, Grafting, and Second Sight in the Hong Kong China International District

March 14, 2018

Hong Kong, Dan Rather declared as he began his television coverage of the 1997 “handover” from British to Chinese sovereignty, “is Asia for beginners.” That is what it was for me, although it has been my home now for more than twenty years. In all of that time and in all of my work on American culture in transnational contexts, considering how people are changed by their cross-cultural encounters, I have never written about Mormonism and its various crossings in Asia. Although I have no doubt that my beliefs infuse my professional work, as I thought about Asia in my Mormonism, trying to parse influences and see where the academic training and the Mormon upbringing inform one another became impossible.