Certain Places
August 26, 2020He folds his sash, his apron, his robe. Stacks them on the cold laminate counter. Places the cap on top. Slides the sacred items into the white cotton envelope. The fabric is thin and the…
DiaBLOGue
Hug a Queer Latter-day Saint
August 26, 2020Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 33–44
“Queer Polygamy,” is an innovating mashup that looks beyond monogamy as the only authorizing type of same-sex relationships—it really pushes the boundaries of what queer scholarship had done. Drawing on contemporary polyamory to critique the limitations of heterosexual monogamy, and putting that into conversation with the LDS tradition of plural marriage, Ostler imagines a new type of polygamy, queer polygamy, that sheds the patriarchal baggage of the 19th century version and its continuation in fundamentalist Mormonism, as well as thinking beyond its presumed heterosexulity.
Pando: The Secret Life of Trees
August 26, 2020Pando extends, a network of aspen one mile south of Fish Lake in central Utah. At eighty thousand years, it is one of the oldest and heaviest living organisms on the planet. Pando has survived…
Joseph Smith and the Face of Christ
August 26, 2020“He will unveil his face to you.” D&C 88:67–68 “Everything in the realm of nature and human existence is a sign—a manifestation of God’s divine names and attributes. . . . As it is said in the Qur’an,…
Ace of Saints
August 26, 2020Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 108–123
I felt free. I felt empowered. I might fall in love and get married, or
I might not. Either way would be fine. I didn’t need to have the same
life path as all of my friends and family. I realized that I am the way I
am, and I couldn’t change it. I needed to respect it. I had to listen to
myself, and not to everyone around me, including Church leaders. I
had to follow my heart and do what makes me happy, and it would all
get figured out in the end.
A Commentary on Joseph Smith’s Revision of First Corinthians
August 26, 2020Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 57–106
Although Smith desired to publish the new translation, circumstances were such that publication at that time was not possible.
What Size of City, and What Sort of City, Could (or Should) the City of Zion Be?
August 26, 2020At a session of general conference in 1949, Elder John A. Widtsoe shared an interesting message with the assembled Saints—a message that contained, so far as I have been able to discover, the strongest agrarian sentiment ever formally expressed by a major Church leader in the whole history of the LDS Church:
Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr.
August 26, 2020Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 1–35
This article will explore how one of the most open-ended psychological interpretations of Smith’s prophetic leadership and motivation might contribute to better understanding the trajectory of this extraordinarily talented and conflicted individual whose life has so deeply impacted the religious movement he founded and, increasingly, the larger world.
A 1945 Perspective
May 5, 2020This 1945 ward teachers’ message on the obedience apparently required of Church members, the response it sparked from a concerned Salt Lake City Unitarian minister, and the response of Church President George Albert Smith to…
The Gebirah and Female Power
April 29, 2020My girlhood fascination with princesses and queens has curbed only slightly, if at all, in my young adult years. I first encountered them in the fairy tale, as most of us do, but they have…