DiaBLOGue

In Light

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 89–94
The day the missionaries came to our house in 1988, a rainbow fell across the sky in our neighborhood on the hill. I stood on the ledge of the bathtub and curled my fingers on the windowsill to pull my scrawny body up to see.

Mormon Priesthood Against the Meritocracy

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 85–90 Defenses of the male-only LDS priesthood generally pursue a combination of three approaches: ground the practice in ancient scripture, secure it in Restoration history and tradition, or justify it through its sociological effects on gender culture and family formation in the present day.

A Letter to My Mormon Daughters

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 79–84 One day you’ll probably hear the name Kate Kelly. And you’ll probably ask me my thoughts about her and her work with Ordain Women and her subsequent excommunication.

Mormon Feminism: The Next Forty Years

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.

Learning to Read with the Book of Mormon

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.

The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife; Tim Wirkus, City of Brick and Shadow

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.

Mormons Are a Different Country | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife

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.”