Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 167–180
Brooks talks about the period from 1970s Mormon feminism in Boston to the present and imagines what needs to be part of the future. She identifies five areas for Mormon feminism: theology, institutions, racial inclusion, financial independence, and spiritual independence.
Dialogue 48.1 (Spring 2015):169–177
In this “From the Pulpit,” Jared Hickman discussed the self-confessed weaknesses of multiple authors in the Book of Mormon, indicating that the text is not the literal word of God. He observes that it still has sacred truths to teach us including on racism.
Mystery fiction and Mormonism grew up together. The first modern writer of mystery tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), was an exact contemporary of Joseph Smith (1805–1844). The most famous literary detective in the English-speaking world, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, got his start in A Study in Scarlet (1887)—a novel set partly in Utah among the Latter-day Saints. And during the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Mormon mysteries became a recognizable sub-genre in series by Robert Irvine, Gary Stewart, and Sarah Andrews, and in bestselling single installments by (among many others) Tony Hillerman, Stephen White, Karen Kijewski, and Scott Turow.
Mette Ivie Harrison’s new novel is a work of genre fiction. Like other mysteries, The Bishop’s Wife revolves around a crime the main character eventually solves. In this case, a young woman disappears, leaving her husband both bereft and suspect. The husband first turns to Bishop Kurt Wallheim for help, but it is the bishop’s wife, Linda Wallheim, who becomes involved in the case. Like other mysteries, including Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries, whose characters lend Harrison’s their approximate names, there will be subsequent volumes, for this is “A Linda Wallheim Novel.”
This book is a gem. Paula Kelly Harline’s writing shines. She has compiled excerpts from twenty-nine diaries and autobiographies of women who lived in polygamy between 1847, when the Mor mons first arrived in Utah,…
Michael Austin’s book aims to convince Mormons that the manner in which the Latter-day Saints have traditionally (since the early 1970s, if not longer) read the Book of Job is wrong and unhelpful and that…
Section Title Spring Hill Luisa Perkins Becca was taking too long. Emma huddled against the iron fencepost and hugged her knees. The chilly breeze had dried her tears, but her nose was still running. She…
Timothy smiles as he hands a five-dollar bill to the teenager behind the window. “Keep the change,” he says. The teenager—a red-headed seventeen-year-old with almost as many piercings on her face as freckles—giggles and gives…
The sun streamed unimpeded through the kitchen window, warming Jake’s back as he ate a bowl of cereal. It was a pleasant feeling, but also strange. Usually the light couldn’t get in. His RV blocked…
Every Mormon writer has heard Orson F. Whitney’s claim that “we will yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” Mormon writers have been so excited, overwhelmed, and preoccupied by this statement that we still…