Letters to the Editor
September 13, 2020Dear Sirs: This is to acknowledge with gratitude the receipt of your letter of December 6. The honor accorded me* I consider a great one indeed, the more so as I reflect on the many…
DiaBLOGue
A letter from the West
September 1, 2020
Totality & Light
August 26, 2020We climbed to the ridgeline atop the cliffs. With the rest of the crowd we laid out blankets, and I set up a camera. The moon slowly started to move in front of the sun. We could only see this with eclipse glasses that filtered away nearly all the sun’s light.
What the Second Coming Means to People Like Me
August 26, 2020A few of you will remember Carl Poll, who served maybe three decades ago as bishop of the Palo Alto Ward. In 1967 his brother, historian Richard Poll, visited Palo Alto and gave a sacrament…
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…
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.