Spring 2016
The Spring 2016 issue begins with an article by Fiona Givens on the collaborative nature of Joseph Smith's theology, Melvin Bashore expands on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in "Yearning for Notoriety: Questionable and False Claimants to America's Worst Emigrant Massacre." Also included are several poems, an insightful catholic-mormon dialogue, and a new voice in Christinah Cross and her take on baptism.
According to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter, “the LDS church” or “LDS Mormonism”), Joseph Smith’s motivation to start a new religious movement began with a particularly difficult epistemological problem.
Benjamin Franklin purportedly offered some counsel for those wanting to be remembered long after they are dead and buried: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”Sage advice. But for many, if not most people, their writing talents or life events doom them to being remembered on little more than census rolls and tax lists. In the annals of history, most will never be mentioned in so much as a footnote. Even that widely sought-after but short-lived fifteen minutes of fame eludes most people, and only a small circle of friends and family will hold them in remembrance after they die.
Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.
I am delighted and honored to serve as the new editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. It is particularly exciting to be coming on board as we anticipate the journal’s fiftieth anniversary. (Stay…
The world was divided into three. Three shards of sagebrush and sky. That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…
The first time I remember seeing a baptism was at a tiny Southern Baptist chapel in Chiefland, Florida. All dolled up in my frilly pastel dress, white buckled shoes, and lacy socks, my brother and I walked across the hot parking lot from Grandma’s black Mazda truck into the homey brick chapel, each holding a finger of our grandmother’s hand. She had pressed her best dress so stiff she may as well have washed it in pure starch. My little brother’s six-year-old indoctrinated Southern etiquette displayed itself proudly—church was not a regular outing, and he didn’t mind being suited up and shown off. Plenty of others coming into the chapel were in their Sunday best, most of whom gave the air of being “regulars,” but medleys of worn denim mixed with the collared shirts and skirts didn’t seem out-of-place.
is a volatile fuel
that blazes you far
into the white desert
like some 50s speed test pilot
My sister once died,
alone, on the operating table.
They brought her back of course
—no harm done—
Very bold,
I saw a star fall from heaven,
Kindle a fire in the valley of decision.
There could be nothing upon earth
So exquisite
Boo and Yamba climb fast, finding trail in dusk, and I follow
on stiffening mud and snowcrust from last week’s first snow.
They skirt Cliff Lake then Petit, Linear, and so between glacial morains,
taciturn boys bewildered by plunging cold and this sudden-setting
behavior of water. The lakes bend in each ascending basin,
The moon is up, and the fire has burned down.
Benjamin stoops, coaxes embers to life.
“Hello,” he says.
“Cold?” I ask.
“Not so much,” he says.
Orange lightning burns
the Detroit sky tonight.
We just got out of the temple,
two hours of white stillness,
Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man.
Wrestling the Angel is the first volume in Terryl Givens’s latest project on the “foundations of Mormon thought and practice” (ix). The first of a two-volume work, this book deals with theology while the subsequent…
If someone ever asks me what kinds of things Steven Peck writes, the best answer I can give goes like this: the BYU biology professor and raconteur writes primarily in the fields of evolutionary biology, speculative theology, literary fiction, computer modeling, poetry, existential horror, satire, personal essay, tsetse fly reproduction, young-adult literature, human ecology, science fiction, religious allegory, environmentalism, and devotional narrative. You know, that kind of thing.
There has never been any official theological dialogue between the Roman Catholic and LDS Churches, but Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill have opened an unofficial one in Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation.…
I would like to begin with an image. There is a tree in the middle of a barren field. A rod of iron extends from it. People jeer from a large building bounded by a river nearby. Those holding on to the rod ignore the jeering from the building and partake of the tree’s sweet fruit, but there are some who heed the jeering and become ashamed even after eating the fruit, and are lost. This image is intimately familiar to so many Latter-day Saints as Lehi’s dream from 1 Nephi 8 in the Book of Mormon. It is, however, a relatively new image for me. I did not grow up with the image.
I grew up in an anti-Catholic world. The first thing I remember hearing about Catholics in the small town in which I was raised was not just negative, it was extremely so. Everyone I knew was distrustful, suspicious, or hateful toward Catholics. When I joined the LDS Church at age ten, I heard more anti-Catholic sentiment, including the branding of the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and “the great and abominable church” or “church of the devil,” based on a biased reading of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:6, 14:9).
At the conclusion of each Mormon History Association’s annual conference, there is a “devotional.” (Until I became a devotee of Mormon history, devotional was always an adjective, as in “devotional literature,” but the Latter-day Saints have shifted my grammatical foundations, and, because of my exposure to Mormons, I’ll never hear words like “fireside,” “garments,” or even “Jell-O” in the same way.) At these devotionals, I always look to see if my favorite LDS hymn is being featured—“The Spirit of God”—number 2 in the LDS hymnal.
Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time.
I am the Mormon among Catholics part of this equation. I was raised in Utah Valley—well I got taller, anyway. I got my undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University (BYU) and both of my graduate…
I may be too old, too apparently single (though I am not; I am married to a Jewish man now, who is respectful of the religion, though not interested in conversion), or too peripheral, but this talk has been given only in my thoughts. I have many speeches to give, but alas, it is now the turn of others. Thanks to Dialogue for allowing those who don’t give talks to give them here.
For more than a decade the LDS Church has organized an International Art Competition, each with its own theme. Variety and diversity figure centrally into the competition and the exhibit that results from it. Submissions…
