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Volume 48, No. 1

Spring 2015

The Spring 2015 Issue begins with Samuel Brunson and "The Present, Past, and Future of LDS Financial Transparency," followed by David Mason, who takes a deep dive in his article "On The Existential Impossibility of a Religious Identity: I'm a Mormon." These are followed by an inspiring script titled "For and In Behalf Of" by Allan Davis. Also contained in this issue are works of poetry, several works of fiction and short stories, book reviews and more. To finish off this issue is a thought provoking sermon from Jared Hickman titled "Learning to Read with the Book of Mormon."

  • Topics
  • financial, identity, scripture

Contents

Articles

The Present, Past, and Future of LDS Financial Transparency



Every April in the Saturday afternoon session of its semi-annual General Conference, the managing director of the Auditing Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) reads his department’s report for the prior year. The annual report invariably concludes that “in all material respects, contributions received, expenditures made, and assets of the Church . . . have been recorded and administered in accordance with appropriate accounting practices, approved budgets, and Church policies and procedures.” Presenting the Church Auditing Department’s reports at General Conference dates back at least to 1906. And today, this annual report provides the sole window into the global finances of the LDS Church.



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On the Existential Impossibility of a Religious Identity: I’m a Mormon



Psychologist William James referred to personal identity as psychology’s “most puzzling puzzle.”The oracle of Delphi’s most famous charge—Know Yourself—affirms that human puzzlement over the nature of identity goes back to the early days of civilization, since the oracle would hardly find this counsel significant enough to utter if everyone already knew themselves as a matter of course. Descartes thought he had solved the problem by locating identity itself in the irreducible fact of consciousness, or the cogito of I think, therefore I am, but in our own day, philosopher-theologian Paul Ricoeur points out that the I implicit in Descartes’s first-person verb presumes itself, rather than proves itself, so that Descartes’s assurance only demands that we ask, “. . . what is this ‘I’”?A person’s very first step toward a definitive declaration of identity—in terms such as I am . . .—has no ground on which to land. Insofar as what constitutes any identity, or human identity, per se, still baffles us, we find ourselves unmoored even before we consider a question such as what constitutes a specific kind of identity. 



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Editor's Note

Fiction

“Slippery”



The sun streamed unimpeded through the kitchen window, warming Jake’s back as he ate a bowl of cereal. It was a pleasant feeling, but also strange. Usually the light couldn’t get in. His RV blocked…



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Living Scriptures



Timothy smiles as he hands a five-dollar bill to the teenager behind the window. “Keep the change,” he says. The teenager—a red-headed seventeen-year-old with almost as many piercings on her face as freckles—giggles and gives…



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Spring Hill



Section Title  Spring Hill  Luisa Perkins  Becca was taking too long. Emma huddled against the iron fencepost and hugged her knees. The chilly breeze had dried her tears, but her nose was still running. She…



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Personal Voices

For and In Behalf Of



For the premiere production held in the Cafritz Foundation Theatre at the University of Maryland, College Park on December 10–12, 2014. The production was supported by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Second Season Program…



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Poetry

Chauvinist



Moses murdered the Egyptian for a wickedness
less miserable than its subsequence: dead children,
every firstborn son (daughters spared the ordination
for being less blessed of our God who murders
whom He chooses and for the least ignominy). 



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Reviews

Mormons Are a Different Country | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife



Mette Ivie Harrison’s new novel is a work of genre fiction. Like other mysteries, The Bishop’s Wife revolves around a crime the main character eventually solves. In this case, a young woman disappears, leaving her husband both bereft and suspect. The husband first turns to Bishop Kurt Wallheim for help, but it is the bishop’s wife, Linda Wallheim, who becomes involved in the case. Like other mysteries, including Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries, whose characters lend Harrison’s their approximate names, there will be subsequent volumes, for this is “A Linda Wallheim Novel.” 



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The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up | Mette Ivie Harrison, The Bishop’s Wife; Tim Wirkus, City of Brick and Shadow



Mystery fiction and Mormonism grew up together. The first modern writer of mystery tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), was an exact contemporary of Joseph Smith (1805–1844). The most famous literary detective in the English-speaking world, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, got his start in A Study in Scarlet (1887)—a novel set partly in Utah among the Latter-day Saints. And during the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Mormon mysteries became a recognizable sub-genre in series by Robert Irvine, Gary Stewart, and Sarah Andrews, and in bestselling single installments by (among many others) Tony Hillerman, Stephen White, Karen Kijewski, and Scott Turow.



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Sermon

Learning to Read with the Book of Mormon



Dialogue 48.1 (Spring 2015):169–177
In this “From the Pulpit,” Jared Hickman discussed the self-confessed weaknesses of multiple authors in the Book of Mormon, indicating that the text is not the literal word of God. He observes that it still has sacred truths to teach us including on racism.



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