DiaBLOGue

Queer Bodies, Queer Technologies, and Queer Policies

December 10, 2021

Dialogue 54.4 (Winter 2021): 99–109
Reproductive gender essentialism claims exclude trans persons for their gender identity. However, these same arguments, when taken seriously, also exclude infertile and intersex women too. Such a strict definition of “man” or “woman” does not simply exclude trans folks but also any body not fulfilling its biological utility. After all, biological potential and utility is the basis of a biological sex assignment

Getting the Cosmology Right

December 10, 2021

Sporadically over the past few years I have been writing a personal document titled “What I Believe.” The reason for this is twofold. First, as I have learned more, my beliefs have shifted. This is…

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

December 10, 2021

Dialogue 54.4 (Winter 2021): 35–70
When we assess Joseph Smith’s early trials as if the word “pretended” indicated deliberate deception on Joseph’s part, we miss the larger picture.

Joseph Smith, Thomas Paine, and Matthew 27:51b–53

December 10, 2021

Dialogue 54.4 (Winter 2021): 1–33
Despite its alleged antiquity, jutting back centuries before the Common Era, and its predominant setting in the Americas, the Book of Mormon contains several Matthean and Lukan additions to Mark made in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.

Dialogue Fall 2021

November 2, 2021

Historic Sites Holy Envy Sara M. Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail

November 2, 2021

When it comes to sacred places, I feel considerable holy envy toward the Latter-day Saints. Their sacred sites stretch across the continent, from Vermont to California. Mormons can visit their founding prophet’s birthplace, the grove…

The Words and Worlds of Smith and Brown Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism

November 2, 2021

In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed what was intended to be the crowning accomplishment of physics—an experiment to determine how movement through the luminiferous ether changed the speed of light. What they found…

Unpacking Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Mormonism Taylor G. Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism

November 2, 2021

Inevitably at some point, due to structural white patriarchal privilege and a central and abiding concern with discrete gendered bodies and heteronormative relations, the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will…

Book of Mormon Poetry James Goldberg, A Book of Lamentations

November 2, 2021

A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…

The Dark Side of Devotion Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, The Contortionists

November 2, 2021

When a five-year-old boy tragically disappears from a quiet LDS neighborhood, grief-stricken family members, detectives, ward members, and suspects all struggle to find their footing in the agonizing aftermath. In The Contortionists, the new novel…