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Volume 50, No. 3

Fall 2017

Inside the Fall 2017 Issue you’ll find Benjamin Knoll and Jana Riess’s comprehensive look at “‘Infected With Doubt’: An Empirical Overview of Belief and Non-Belief in Contemporary American Mormonism” and Kristeen L. Black’s “A Capacious Priesthood and a Life of Holiness.” Neil Longo and Stephen Carter are Dialogue’s featured personal voices for fall. And it concludes with a beautiful sermon by Sariah Toronto on “The Song of the Righteous is a Prayer unto Me.” Plus brand new reviews, fiction, poetry and gorgeous art.

  • Topics
  • doubt,priesthood,temple,

Contents

Articles

“Infected With Doubt”: An Empirical Overview of Belief and Non-Belief in Contemporary American Mormonism

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Daniel, twenty-eight, is an active Church member and temple worker who served a mission and now holds a calling as a young single adult representative for his stake. He says he has both seen and performed miracles, and has a strong belief in Jesus Christ. But he has also struggled at times with doubt, which he says has “come along in many different forms” throughout his adult life.



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Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists



My mission was a complicated time for me. I was a Harvard undergradu ate, newly theist but uncertainly Mormon, and I was living in southern Louisiana. I’d been a strident atheist for years before a conversion at age eighteen, and I’d managed to keep myself separated from much of folk Mormon belief, even as my family and I had been supported by wonderful Mormon folk in 1980s Davis County, Utah. I was finding my way to faith in the miserable, wet poverty of southern Louisiana, but it was a faith inflected by my lifelong skepticism and general readerliness.



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A Capacious Priesthood and a Life of Holiness



As an offering in speculative theology, this paper reconsiders the current normative understanding of a male-only priesthood as presented in the Book of Mormon, specifically in Alma 13:1–20, and proposes that Alma presents a more capacious model. While this text is generally accepted as supporting the establishment and practice of a male-only priesthood (and a model of the Melchizedek Priesthood), I argue that Alma’s message was meant to expand the role of priesthood in society and to provide a way for an entire community to enter into a life of holiness.The exegesis that this paper presents is not simply an attempt to bring women into the conversation but to expand the conversation for the entire community—the community of all believers: men, women, and the rest of us. 



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Fiction

The Pew



Helen realizes at church Sunday morning that still, after all these years, she does not have fond feelings for the chapel. She doesn’t want to hold on to any grudges against it—she doesn’t take it…



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Duties of a Deacon



I never got to do it when I was a twelve-year-old Mormon boy even if it is, technically, as much a duty of a deacon as passing the sacrament—and I doubted anyone in my presidency…



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Personal Voices

Three Sealings



My mother made spiral-bound books for the first few of her nine children: pastel-colored accounts (which she wrote, illustrated, and laminated) of how we had made our way from the spiritual realm to the mortal;…



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Cry for the Gods: Grief and Return



Fires were raging in the hills near Hearst Castle in the late summer of 2016. They spread and spread, consuming the Monterey pines and golden hills of the most remote area of the California coast, extending close enough to the castle that, at last, tours were cancelled and plans were made to remove the most precious art. From the darkened dining hall, the orange shadow of the flame cast an eerie half-light on the stone walls which, for the first time since their construction, shone no light, were hid by no tapestries, echoed no sound. The Mediterranean towers and domes once spoke of the power of humanity’s conquest and wealth—now they stood abandoned, a desperate testament to the beauty humanity creates and is unworthy of.



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Poetry

Trevor at the Fountain



Armed lightly with his dark English wit, and a shade 
of amber from Woodpecker Ale, Trevor’s blue eyes glaze 
a smile as he reclines at the market fountain in Cambridge, 
just like a Roman soldier would resting in his rags after 



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Sonnet—For Solstice



Look: 
            My wife’s distended belly reaches 
Into the room as if it wishes 
To announce a separate humanity 
In curves both out from and into her body. 



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Reviews

Sermon

The Song of the Righteous is a Prayer unto Me



One of my favorite types of sacred music is the music of the Russian Orthodox church. It has its origins in Byzantine chant, but developed its own distinct style called Znamenny Chant. It is sung in Old Slavonic, so I cannot understand it with the exception of a word here or there that is similar in modern Russian, but I find it incredibly beautiful. Sung in resonant sacred spaces as part of worship services, you hear the devotion in the music. Not only are the sounds and attitudes of the singers imbued with beauty, the music is part of a rich symbolism, together with candles and incense, that help the worshipper to look upward to the divine. Other religious traditions have similarly beautiful elements involving music. For example, a muezzin calls out the adhan, or call to prayer, from the mosque five times during the day; a hazzan, or cantor, is a trained musician who sings prayers in the synagogue. 



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Volume Art