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Volume 46, No. 1

Spring 2013

The Spring 2013 issue begins with an enlightening article about the magazine campaign against the Mormon Church in the early twentieth century. Following this is Terence L. Day and "Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." This article takes a look at spousal abuse and the distinction between emotional and physical abuse, as well as the causes and a culture that contributes to abuse. Roger Terry provides a nuanced perspective to church history and doctrine in "Why The True Church Cannot Be Perfect," explaining that perhaps the phrase "perfect church, imperfect people" is an outdated one. The final article in the issue deals with the practice of dusting off feet and ritual cursing in the Mormon church. The issue finishes with several works of poetry, a work of fiction, and a beautiful sermon by Boyd Peterson.

  • Topics
  • dialogue,truth,abuse,fiction

Contents

Articles

“And Now It Is the Mormons”: The Magazine Crusade against the Mormon Church, 1910–1911



From September 1910 through August 1911, in an unusual confluence of focus, four popular national magazines critiqued the Mormon Church and its prophet in a series of articles that Mormon leader and historian B. H. Roberts characterized as the “magazine crusade” against the Church. All of the articles were written by prominent muckraking journalists who sought both to identify church practices that needed to be reformed and to sell magazines by presenting their critiques in a way that would appeal to Progressive America. The articles did, in fact, have at least two long-term effects on the Church: they accelerated the true demise of polygamy in the institutional Church by increasing the resolve of leaders to discipline prominent Church members who had insisted on continuing to encourage, perform, and enter into new plural unions, and they contributed to the Church’s development of effective strategies to defend itself against attack and its appreciation of the importance of competent public relations. The articles also had the shorter-term effect of re-igniting substantial anti-Mormon activity in the United States and Western Europe. 



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Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints



While I was serving as a stake high councillor, a Latter-day Saint woman confided in me, “Bones heal faster.” She spoke with the authority of a victim of both physical and emotional abuse. When I confidentially shared her comment with the director of a mental health clinic, he affirmed that many abused women would validate the woman’s statement.Popular opinion notwithstanding, verbal abuse is harder to live with than physical abuse, can be more op pressive than being beaten, and leaves deeper scars. 



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Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect



In an August 2008 letter to Brigham Young University’s student newspaper, a disgruntled student (who believed campus Republicans were deflating his car tires because of his Obama bumper sticker) made this inadvertently revealing statement: “I do realize that although the church itself is perfect, the people in it are definitely not.”He was right about the members, of course, but his naïve assumption that the Church is perfect is as illuminating as it is pervasive among Latter-day Saints. It is also fundamentally inaccurate. Indeed, I suspect that this misconception lies at the heart of many of the struggles the Church and its members find themselves facing in our increasingly complex and information-saturated world. 



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“Shake Off the Dust of Thy Feet”: The Rise and Fall of Mormon Ritual Cursing



In July 1830, just three months after the formal organization of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation that promised, “in whatsoever place ye shall enter in & they receive you not in my name ye shall leave a cursing instead of a blessing by casting off the dust of your feet against them as a testimony & cleansing your feet by the wayside.”Subsequently, the historical record is replete with examples of ritual cursing being performed up through the 1890s. While many of Smith’s revelations and doctrinal innovations continue to be practiced by the LDS Church today, cursing has fallen into disuse. Despite this ritual’s unique status as an act of formally calling down God’s wrath upon others, it has received surprisingly little attention in scholarly studies. 



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Fiction

Interview

“An Exquisite and Profound Love”: An Interview with Andrew Solomon

and

Andrew Solomon has written about mental health, politics, and culture for the New York Times and the New Yorker and is the author of four books. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. In his most recent book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Solomon explores what it means to be a parent in the context of adversity. Dialogue board member Gregory A. Prince interviewed Solomon on March 28, 2011, in New York City. 



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Personal Voices

Home Again: Part Three of Immortal for Quite Some Time



I know the standard plot lines, the ones that move from desire to fulfillment, or from desire to fulfillment to tragedy. As this story follows its meanders I don’t find myself to be a satisfied, fulfilled member of my church, but neither is mine the story of a brave individual triumphantly separating himself from an abusive religion. I live chapters of each of these stories. But always intermediary chapters, it seems, never the climactic ones. Absent is the single seductive strand that engages and satisfies—and falsifies. What will it mean to finish this manuscript? To finish writing about my brother? To finish thinking about him? To abandon him again? To jettison this means of access to our past and present experience? 



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Poetry

Offerings



The way he leaves a banana-mayo sandwich
on the counter. His special blend
of applesauce with too much cinnamon
brims over a white glass bowl. 
The scratchy blue-and-green-car sheets
left folded on the hide-a-bed. 



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Ghazal



You said to wait but how I wanted to be free again
Find a way to get a taste of the fruit from off that tree again 

The Day of Judgment hangs above my neck just like a flaming sword
Each night the angels say it’s time to enter my plea again



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Fractals



Dwarfed by other forms of life, the leaves fall 
into this world without cadence that changes colors
each time it kisses something goodbye. 



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Same-Sex Attraction



There are many myths mistaking the domestication of Hydrangeas, 
not least: the degree to which color can be manipulated or controlled. 
White Hydrangeas never can be pink, red can’t bloom in southern soils. 



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Reviews

Worth the Wait | Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds., Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839; Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April 1843



I am a relative newcomer to the academic side of Mormon history. I never traded photocopies of photocopies of historical documents. I only know of the most scandalous shenanigans in the field through my reading of secondary treatments such as Turley’s Victims and my own limited sleuthing of such primary sources as issues of the Seventh East Press and federal court records. I did start researching in the old LDS Church Archives on the first floor of the Church Office Building in 2006 and I have sometimes been denied access to materials requested, but I personally only know a field of increasing access, openness, and—as evidenced by the Joseph Smith Papers Project—institutional support.



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Sermon

An Imperfect Brightness of Hope



After admonishing his people to follow Christ and be baptized, Nephi said, “Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life” (2 Ne. 31:20). I see a paradoxical tension between the concepts of “enduring” and “having a perfect brightness of hope.” The word “endure” connotes little in the way of pleasure; its etymological root is “hard.” In French the word dure, which comes from the same Latin root, means “difficult,” “harsh,” “severe,” or “stern.” On the other hand, the words “perfect brightness of hope” connote light and optimism, warmth and peace. The two concepts don’t seem to go together. 



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Volume Art

About the Art: Valerie Atkisson



“Tanner Spiral” is an exploration of my great-grandfather’s (Henry S. Tanner) family. He decided to take his first polygamous wife ten years after the first Manifesto. He had already been the mission president of the…



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