Back to all Issues
Download PDF Icon Download ePub Icon

Volume 50, No. 1

Spring 2017

In the Spring issue you’ll find pieces from three early influencers of Dialogue: Bob Rees, Francis Menlove, and Robert Christmas. Also read Brad Cook’s exploration of “Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul” as well as Allen Hansen & Walker Wright’s “Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism.” A special roundtable featuring Neylan McBaine, Mette Harrison and Maxine Hanks will consider “Gender, Authority and Identity.” Multiple fiction and poetry pieces grace this issue and Ben Park reviews Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s new look at polygamy A House Full of Females. Finally, Paul Nibley wonders “What Does it Mean to be Truly Christian?”

  • Topics
  • dialogue,women,islam,polygamy

Contents

Articles

Reimagining the Restoration: Why Liberalism is the Ultimate Flowering of Mormonism



Tonight I want to challenge some of the conventional axioms of Mormon religion and culture and to propose a more progressive Mormonism. Let me begin, however, with a tribute to my dear friend Eugene England. In the introduction to the festschrift I edited in his honor titled Proving Contraries (which is an apt summary of Gene’s life), I wrote, “Outside of some in the general Church leadership, perhaps no Latter-day Saint of our generation enjoyed such wide and deep affection and respect as Gene did.”I imagine that when some scholar writes the history of modern Mor monism Gene will be seen as one of our most enlightened and influential teacher/scholars. My hope is that what I have to say tonight illuminates some of the ideas that animated his discipleship and exemplifies some of the virtues that governed his life. It has been an enormous loss these past fourteen years to have been deprived of his intellect and spirit. Gene had a good heart. Like most liberals, it was a little to the left.



Read more

Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul



Across centuries and cultures, the origin of the human soul has been a subject of deep interest and yearning, often finding wondrous expression in theology, philosophy, science, and art. Ruminating on the profound mystery of earthly existence, the noted medieval Ṣūfī mystic Jalāluddin Rūmī (d. 1273 CE) pondered: 

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. 
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea. 
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, 
and I intend to end up there.



Read more

“All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism

and

In his 2005 commencement speech, the late novelist David Foster Wallace provided an unexpectedly frank description of American adulthood for the recent graduates of Kenyon College. Listing painfully familiar annoyances associated with what he calls the “day in day out” of middle-class America—including a hilarious retelling of the common supermarket experience—Wallace urges his audience to fight against their “natural, hard-wired default setting” that tells them they are “the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”



Read more

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note



With this issue, Dialogue begins its sixth decade. To celebrate this milestone, we are pleased to present new work from three long-time friends. Frances Lee Menlove was a Dialogue founder and served as its first…



Read more

Fiction

The Darkest Abyss in America



Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity—thou must…



Read more

Personal Voices

The Unending Conversation



Looking back with the perspective of fifty years, I can see (and feel) a sustaining philosophy that has guided Dialogue through its amazing half-century tenure, more than a quarter of the entire history of the LDS Church. 



Read more

Personal Voices: Eyes to See



My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every fourth grade photo, my eyes hid behind a glint of green flashing fire, but I did not care because when I slid the glasses on in the doctor’s office, the blurry rack of “For Sale” frames suddenly snapped into distinct lines and angles. I slipped the glasses off, then on again—watching the frames become blurry, then crisp again. Yet even knowing about the stunning change, I jerked to a stop outside the doctor’s office door, my mom and the trail of siblings piling up behind me. I stared at the trees across the street. Angular leaves fluttered in the breeze, avocado undersides distinct from their forest green tops.



Read more

Poetry

Solomon the Wise



Mom remarried and moved out just after I turned six. To move is to
choose (which none of us wanted to do), as remarry is to wary, or to
worry. Like what I did the first night my brother and I stayed at Mom’s
new house. Dad was alone. All alone. Burn. Reburn. So Mom drove me



Read more

Christus



As a child first, the ramp was 
forever. Walking, counting stars, planetgazing, 
still walking; music playing, missionaries talking. 
Your feet, eye-level, substantial and white, perfect 



Read more

Ajalon Moon



Five kings fell when Joshua prayed first for Gibeon sun
Then moonlight in the valley of Ajalon to stay slant and 
Still beam; freeze a span of time beyond its allotted measure.  



Read more

Reviews

Asking the Questions | Julie J. Nichols, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories



In her full-length debut, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories, Julie J. Nichols presents the interconnected lives of various women living in Salt Lake City over a span of thirty years, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the seven stories focuses on a different main character until their lives become so entangled that the narratives converge in tragedy, heartache, and eventual healing. Some of these stories appeared previously in other publications, including Dialogue.



Read more

Just Saying | Stanton Harris Hall, Just Seeing



Stan Hall was one of Dialogue’s most enthusiastic volunteers back in the ’70s when I was its editor. We published some of his poetry then and were sorry when he moved back to his home turf in the Northwest. I was therefore happy to see that he had continued to hone his poetic gift in his privately published collection Just Seeing. The quality of this work causes me to hope that it will be read beyond his family circle, extending even into a second volume, perhaps entitled Just Saying. 



Read more

Lapsing into Daredevilry | Shawn Vestal, Daredevils



It’s a hard truth: you have to be damn smart to be a writer of good fiction. If you’re dumb, forget it. You have to hear words in your head—and who doesn’t? But you also have to know how to put them together in a sentence that’s not only grammatical but original in its context, truer than any other sentence could possibly be. Then you have to do that with paragraphs and chapters in the service of a whole whose shape knocks readers right out of unconsciousness, makes them alive, blasts their eyes open so they see the world new.



Read more

Roundtable

Mormon Women and the Anatomy of Belonging



Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 193–200
In looking at the definition of Mormon womanhood, it seems to me that the boundaries of that community have shifted over the past almost two hundred years from being initially proscribed by the institution, in the early days of the Nauvoo Relief Society, to essentially being defined by the Mormon women themselves in today’s modern global Church.



Read more

Sermon

Volume Art

Thoughts on Lane Twitchell



The German painter Gerhard Richter once wrote: “I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself, and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent).” Lane Twitchell is an artist whose particular skillset produces immense works that are both furiously energized and so stylistically distinctive that one could recognize one of his paintings even if obscured by the most impervious haze the Wasatch Front is capable of generating. By contrast, Lane also sometimes makes pictures that self-consciously eschew “style” with a commitment very likely borne of his first direct encounter with Richter’s work, visiting a Virginia gallery a missionary for his natal religious tradition in the mid 1980s. So Lane works in two very different but not unrelated modes, each tied in its own way to his distinctive creative tools. Lane’s work is ferociously intelligent, frenzied, brimming with ideas, occasionally political, and above all a sheer pleasure to look at.



Read more