Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 17–28
Huston argues that we should interpret that text in its historical context and glean from it new possibilities. Drawing on feminist interpretive strategies, Huston reads for the “theological trajectory,” rather than the plain meaning, to discern principles that might endure beyond a narrowly heterosexual nuclear family.
Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 1–16
Essentially, the debate becomes whether it is appropriate to apply the adjectives “gay,” “homosexual,” “transgender,” or similar terms to persons who lived before these terms had any meaning. Yale historian John Boswell freely used the term “gay” for medieval and ancient subjects who expressed a preference for same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, while recognizing it was a label impossible for them to apply to themselves, “making the question anachronistic and to some extent unanswerable.”
The most beautiful thing about Kathleen Peterson’s “The Woman Taken in Adultery” is not simply that it is a painting about Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I have spent my life trying to listen to Jesus.
Poetry is a kind of embodiment, a conjuring. Through writing, poets can materialize anything whether it’s a hammock in Pine Island, Minnesota or a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain. But in addition to creating wordy,…
More Americans are leaving organized religion, and the fastest-growing faith tradition in the United States for some years now has been “no religion.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not been as…
At the end of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, having semi-retired from her fight for women’s suffrage, decided to create what would come to be known as The Woman’s Bible. This biblical production sought to academically redress gender as it was then seen in the primary text. By working with a group of scholars and translators to re-navigate the conceptions of gender in the narrative, Stanton sought to radically liberate women from their contemporary oppressions, which she saw as being caused at least in part by the machinations of religion. I begin this review by turning to Stanton’s work because I believe Mette Harrison’s The Women’s Book of Mormon: Volume One is delving into similar territory by telling the story of the Book of Mormon through lenses, points of view, and characters that are rarely, if ever, seen in the text: the woman, the transgender person, the homosexual, the bisexual, the genderqueer, the asexual, the widowed, the unmarried, the demisexual, the nonbinary being, and more.
The dry wasteland of early Nevada’s Big Muddy Valley is the setting of two recent novels that capture the colorful era when Brigham Young sent a colony of Saints to establish St. Thomas southwest of…
Years ago, I was attending a local discussion group hosted by a fairly traditional (and Christian, though ecumenical) private school near the university where I teach. It was a great discussion, but one participant—a successful…
Lavina Fielding Anderson’s new book, Mercy without End, is a collection of essays, mostly delivered as public presentations and later published, mostly in the 1990s, by one of the most erudite and articulate living women…
Dust clogged my nose and the strong smell of horses, the clump, clump of their hoofs regular-like and slow, the heavy creak of the wheels, and over and above everything else, like sad heartbeats, the solemn thud, thud of the muffled drums. A sort of sigh went over all the multitude, and a woman sobbed out loud once. But mostly folks were quiet. A hush and a fear like the day of doom. You didn’t dare look, and yet it was like something glued your eyes toward that wagon passing, the stars and stripes with the black crepe edgings fluttering clean to the wheels.