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Volume 51, No. 3

Fall 2018

The Fall issue commemorates the lifting of the priesthood ban and in true Dialogue style, scholars discuss and dissect it’s implications. Lester Bush starts the issues by “Looking Back, Looking Forward” while Joanna Brooks examines “Possessive Investment in Rightness.” Robert Greenwell looks at “One Devout Mormon Family’s Struggle With Racism.” Matthew Harris includes a groundbreaking study on “Mormons and Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks and Patriarchal Blessings, 1830-2018.” And Dialoguing around the Roundtable is the voices of Alice Faulkner Burch, Janan Graham-Russell, Gail Turley Houston, Melodie Jackson and Cameron McCoy. And Darron Smith discusses “Negotiating Black Self-Hate Within the LDS Church.” And so much more!

  • Topics
  • race, priesthood, temple, ban

Contents

Articles

Looking Back, Looking Forward: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” 45 Years Later



It has been forty-five years since Dialogue published my essay entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”and forty years since Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood/temple ban. It seems like a good time to take stock of where we are: what has changed, what has stayed the same, what changes still need to happen, and what steps need to occur to bring about those changes. 



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Interview

Father-Daughter Interview on Blacks and the Priesthood



Verlyne: We saw a documentary a few weeks ago and you were featured in it, with Darius Gray. I don’t know when it was done, but it was on Blacks and the priesthood. 

Greg: Thank you. 

Egide: I want to thank you for all the work that you have done to clarify all of the history. That’s just amazing, the things we are learning now.



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Poetry

Self-Portrait of Mormon Middle Child as Isabella



One by one within a month, four siblings bring their grievances before 
Father, ruler of our domain. The laws of the home are too strict, they 
complain, no gum in the house—let alone sex or booze. No shoes on 
the living room’s cream carpet. A three-hour dose of church Sunday 



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Reviews

Mother, May We? | Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido, eds., Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry



She is willful. She is in the other room. She is “the feminine / present subjunctive.” She is “tessellating.” She is “throneless, / wanders.” She is “queen of heaven.” She is a “Heavenly Hausfrau.” She is “Medusa in the kingdom.” She is the “Pillar of Womanhood.” She is “executrix.” She is a “mahogany” woman. She is “the Holy Soul.” She is. 



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Priesthood Power | Jonathan A. Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology



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.



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Roundtable

When Did You Become Black?



Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”



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Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice



Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.



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The Black Cain in White Garments



Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 209–211
Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society, chastity, and virtue. To Brigham, I was Cain’s curse. To McConkie, I was an unfaithful spirit, a “fence-sitter.” To you, I am colorless, my Blackness swallowed in that whiteness reclaimed, “a child of God.”



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Sermon

Creating a Zion Church



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.



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Volume Art

Out of Angola



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.



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