Spring 2019
Spring Issue carefully considers the temple as women discuss recent changes in beautiful and profound ways. Includes Kathryn Knight Sonntag discussing "The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root" and Jody England Hansen considering "Women and the Temple." It also presents a special interview with Maxine Hanks. This issue also includes nine poets such as Rachel Steenblik, Mette Harrison, Linda Kimball, and Teresa Wellborn. So much goodness to be found!
Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
I do not lend the weight of truth to the language of ritual. Such language is symbolic. But even in the context of symbolism, language that is so preferential toward men and dismissive of women—especially when such language more aptly demonstrates the bias of the writers than the purpose of the ritual—needs to be removed.
Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.
Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 33–43
Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems might be resolved if it is put into a new type of model that she terms “Queer Polygamy.”
From “Homing” In which our protagonist, a crabby aging mother and professor, drives from Salt Lake City to her father’s birthplace—Safford, Arizona—to visit an infant’s gravesite. Year: 2016. Grandma Anderson said one of the best…
Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 45–76
A Feminist Family Home Evening discussion with Maxine Hanks regarding women in the church as seen through temple theology.
My earliest memory takes place in 1960s Wilkinsburg, where we lived while Dad finished his schooling at Carnegie Tech. Dark brick house and heavy gray sky. Warm, prickly air; a carpet of clover in the grass. A thick cement porch I loved, anchored with square pillars of the same black brick. Chipped concrete steps with graveled wounds and patches.
Today, I went to the new initiatory session. When I arrived, the cute workers excitedly whispered to each other, “we have a patron!” I was the first of the day. It felt so good to…
If a man has a dream and the dream is from God and the man writes a
play based on the dream, the God, and other things he believes to be Godly
If a man has an experience one might classify as transcendent and the
man tries to put that wordless vision into words and practices
What I want is between softness and stone,
between god and Adam— what I want,
is something between fruits and meats.
I want to move on the water and out of the water,
I want to hang from the tree and rot in the earth.
Had I one word to describe our Temple,
The word used would undoubtedly be “white.”
The corridors inside all glow with light,
And purity within this space is ample.
The beach is my temple,
The water the voice of God shooshing toward me, inviting, calm,
The stones the decorations that light the fire of the pillar,
The sand the handshake that draws me to the holy of holies.
Before I clothe myself in the holy garments of my grandmother’s priest-
hood, my hands thin cocoa butter over the veins of my temple.
I have to protect my skin.
I walk into the baptistry
In our modest, midwestern temple
Eager to fold fluffy towels
Into their honorable offerings.
Her favorite is the whisper of slippers on plush carpet.
Her favorite is the window of stained glass, jewel-bright, reminding her
of a wildflower field and that cathedral in France.
Hello, God, small and obscure, distant twinkly point of light.
Perhaps, you are the portal and I am the time. I long
thought the other way ‘round.
A ring of women
Spontaneously gathered round
Willing hands outstretched
Gently pulling, untwisting, unbraiding
One time, in the temple,
after looking, and smelling,
and asking, and listening,
a quietness spoke back
The lost daughter woke up
and returned to herself,
and determined she no
longer wanted to be lost,
and determined to
return to her Mother.
Every Tuesday morning, sky dark,
I rise to the temple. Today, by the
time we reach the Garden, the
actors need help with their lines.
Hildebrando de Melo is probably not a Mormon artist you’ve heard of. And that’s just the point. Mormon Arts Centerco-founders Glen Nelson and Richard Bushman believe that bringing lesser-known artists to the attention of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enriches the audience and can facilitate a more dynamic engagement with religious art.
As I savored Ryan Habermeyer’s debut short-story collection The Science of Lost Futures, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, I remembered a quote attributed to Dostoyevsky in which the prolific Russian author underscores the…
There is a kind of madness that comes from living in Utah. Its sources are many—tall mountains and vast deserts, the ability to see a hundred miles at a time, the imaginative force of a…
If Matthew Babcock’s Four Tales of Troubled Love is about something, it is about private worlds; the reconciliation of self and other; the reckoning of what two people are with each other, without each other, and with the people that made them and that they make in turn; the luke and warm compromise of to-be-with-you and as-I-am.
“I’m like Alma’s daughters,” rough-and-tumble ranch girl Rachel O’Brian tells her polygamist stepfather J.D. Rockwell. “Someone has to speak up to you patriarchs” (118). An Unarmed Woman is a gripping murder mystery as well as…
Brigham Young University School of Family Life professor David C. Dollahite’s memoir God’s Tender Mercies primarily focuses on Dollahite’s conversion, his mission to the Boston area, and his courtship and marriage to Mary Kimball. One…
Dialogue 52.1 (2019): 169–178
Young shares her testimony of temple work even though she found some wording in the endowment ceremony sexist.
After a painting by Emily Fox King
This blood, this longing was meant for
your particular darkness. That shadow,
the red droplet on the floor, a new wound:
These are mine to name. And in my name
you are known, no less worthy than your
brother. No less chosen for this canvas of
violence and change.
