In 298 CE, Marcellus, a Roman centurion, was converted to Christ while serving with his unit in Northern Africa. A respite from conflict was taken to celebrate the pagan Roman emperor’s birthday and pledge allegiance to the empire. Marcellus rose before the banqueters, cast off his military insignia, and cried out: “I serve Jesus Christ the eternal King. I will no longer serve your emperors.”
Religious practice is shifting from churches to the internet in what some critics call a “post-denominational era.”One early commentator predicted that “the web would reduce us to a virtual community of believers practicing a kind of ‘McFaith’—fast, convenient, but hardly nourishing.”
I want to begin with a passage of startling—and unsettling—insight, from John Stuart Mill:
There is a class of persons . . . who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion. . . . This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.
Charles Dickens suggests that epochs roll into one another in a cyclical pattern. Each cycle comprises the pairing of opposites: wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, virtue and vice, hope and despair.If Dickens is correct then the “best and worst of times” shall continue as humankind’s constant companions till the last syllable of recorded time. That being said, pillars of light occasionally descend, piercing the choking fog we currently inhabit. Those who witness them are appropriately named luminaries.
Editing this issue, I have thought much on both identity and community. I want to assure Dialogue readers that we remain committed to being a place of continued connection, vibrant welcoming, and life-affirming discussion. In…
I think Dialogue readers might be interested in a recent change at the Church History Building. I was shepherding a group of Young Men from our ward at a youth conference on Temple Square. Several…
In Jacob we read eight times the Lord lamented that it grieved him to lose the branches of his vineyard. Surely it grieves him to lose those who have left the Church today. There are no studies necessary to tell us we are missing family members and old friends. Some left for good reasons—to preserve a family, for instance. But some left with little understanding of the gospel. They know what they don’t like but they don’t know what they are leaving.
The artwork of Hildebrando de Melo rises from Angola itself—from the valleys near Huambo where he was born, through the urban streets of Luanda where he lives with his wife and children, amid the dynamism of one of the world’s most expensive cities, between the sounds of Portuguese and tribal Bantu languages, in the art and artifacts created by centuries of Africans, from the history of his ancestral tribal kingdom of Bailundo, with the political fallout in a country emerging from decades of brutality and war nearly incomprehensible to a foreigner and the convoluted legacies of racism, slavery, colonialism, liberation, interventionist politics, poverty, riches, and injustice, with the artist’s own history, his religious probing, the nation’s budding contemporary art scene, the artist’s global travels—and his attempts to reconcile and personify all of it.
Karen Kelsay’s Of Omens that Flitter delivers on the promise that lyric poetry has made since at least the nineteenth century to let readers overhear the musings of a thoughtful, deep-feeling person as she reflects…
For the past decade-plus, Jonathan A. Stapley (b. 1976) has authored or co-authored a series of peer-reviewed article-length essays treating various aspects of LDS priesthood ritual (expressions of what he defines as liturgy). Though Stapley’s academic background is in science (he holds a PhD in food science from Purdue University), his interests have gradually shifted from developing bio-renewable natural sweeteners to tracing the serpentine contours of LDS liturgical history. This, his first book, represents an expansion of Stapley’s scholarly interests as well as a significant new contribution to LDS history.