Summer 2013
The Summer 2013 issue begins with a look at polygamy as doctrine, including the development of the doctrine and it's implementation. This is followed by a take on the Celestial Kingdom and the influence Millennialism has had on the doctrine. Finally David W. Scott and Daniel A. Stout provide a re-introduction of Jesus Christ in the modern LDS perspective. Also included is a fascinating personal voice from Richard T. Hughes in "America and the One True Church: What My Church Taught Me About My Country." If that's not enough there are several beautiful works of poetry, a work of fiction, and multiple reviews.
Dialogue 46.2 (Spring 2016): 1–39
Blythe shows the denial among Culterites followers that the founder was involved in plural marriage.
Early Mormonism was thoroughly premillennial. The saints watched for latter-day signs of the times in anticipation of Jesus Christ’s imminent return, spoke of them in sermons, and published them in newspapers. The righteous would reign for one thousand years while the wicked would be swept off the earth to await their resurrection and judgment. Mormon missionaries urgently preached that God was gathering his elect before Christ’s coming in the clouds—a priority that overshadowed a salvation to-heaven-or-damnation-to-hell eschatology in Mormon discourse of the period. Latter-day Saint views of the very nature of eternal post-mortality, which to the present are considered a distinctive aspect of Mormon belief, developed out of their anticipation of Christ’s millennial reign.
There is a growing recognition among scholars that museums are discursively constructed sites. One scholar noted that museums often are merely a “structured sample of reality” where science empowers their message. Alternatively, museums might encourage a pseudo-religious experience of ritually “attending” them— factors, some critics observe, that reduce the probability of resistant readings by patrons.
I was looking at the morning through the window in the front room like a bear in a cage remembering somewhere there are meadows, and I noticed how much water was running down the gutter…
Shawn Tucker conducted this interview with Tom Mould in April, 2013, in Elon, North Carolina. In 2011, Utah State University Press published Tom’s book Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition. Shawn is Tom’s colleague at Elon University, and Tom interviewed Shawn as part of his field work. A brief excerpt of the book follows the interview (reprinted with the kind permission of the Utah State University Press).
Precious few Americans outside the South know much about my church—the Church of Christ—and that’s a shame, since it illumines so well the character of the American nation. Because my church is relatively small (c.…
My grandson, ten,
hates the rain,
as he does this Sunday morning
when dark clouds bring the sky down.
“I’m sad.
It feels like the whole world
is inside me,” says
my five-year-old grandson, naming,
In 1886, Sister Sallie Stephensen
of Fairview, Idaho, was possessed
of an evil spirit for a sabbath of weeks.
The congregation fasted and prayed, but
When the Mormons asked sculptor Cyrus Dallin
for a statue of their Angel Moroni to top the
Salt Lake Temple, initially he refused by saying
he didn’t believe in angels.
Somewhere beyond our fire’s glow,
beyond the pops and hisses of the wood,
somewhere beyond the cool sand
covering my feet as I curl and uncurl my toes,
Unload on the dresser top
black brick cell phone, keys,
waxy-wrapped cough drops,
two mechanical pencils, Hertz
Two thousand pieces, but who
counts them? Each a puzzle
unto itself, a question of interlocking
limbs and sockets. Each a question
A sustained tone, our conductor says,
must narrate our belief: begin, develop,
then patiently subside. That’s what she
learned in the Welsh choirs of her
Jesus and I were the only white people in the sanctuary. One summer, while outside Washington, D.C., on a college internship, I walked across the street to church. When I opened the door and went inside, I saw only black people—with one prominent exception: Above a side door, the church displayed a picture of Jesus. It was Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ. I wasn’t sure how church members felt about white visitors, but I didn’t think it appropriate to leave a church simply because of race. So I sat down. In this church, the deacons sat at the front and looked out at the congregation during the service. I wondered what they thought about a twenty-year-old white kid sitting in their church. It turns out they were extremely welcoming. I also wondered why a group of African American Baptists had a picture of a white Jesus.
With Mitt Romney’s loss and the end of the 2012 campaign season, many have declared an end to our current Mormon Moment. But while America’s recent attention to the Mormons may have been unusually focused—particularly…
Albert Einstein famously wrote: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God, of course, but A. Scott Howe and Richard L. Bushman do, and ask the same questions in their book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision. Written from the point of view of faithful LDS scientists and engineers, Bushman and Howe (an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab) attempt to tackle a question that has long fascinated me: what can we learn if we analyze God’s creations as the master work of the master Engineer?
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often perplexed when they are accused of not being Christian. We worship Christ, acknowledge him as the divine Son of God, and believe our hope for salvation centers on the atonement made possible by his sacrifice. Christ is central in Mormon scripture: his birth, death, and atonement are foretold by Book of Mormon prophets, revealed through terrestrial signs, and revealed in the flesh in Christ’s ministry to his “lost sheep” of the New World. Mormons celebrate Christian holy days such as Easter and Christmas. The very name of the Church points to Christ as our center.
Brock Cheney’s history of Mormon food, Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers does much to fill a surprising lacuna in Mormon history. Although a number of books on food and religion exist, there is little academic exploration of the role that food played in the shaping and development of Latter-day Saint culture. While Cheney’s work reads a bit like a church potluck, lacking the unity of a well-constructed menu, it nonetheless provides interested readers and academics alike with a variety of tempting morsels to inspire further exploration.
The 2010 videogame Epic Mickey, before its release, was looking to be one of the more controversial games of the year. And that’s without any sex or decapitation. What made it so controversial? Because its Mickey was a bit more adventurous and scrappy and dangerous than the carefully controlled Mickey Mouse that developed in the animated cartoons. But that Mickey was never the only Mickey—or even the original Mickey.
When I first learned that Reid L. Neilson, the managing director of the LDS Church Historical Department and an old friend from BYU days, was planning to publish a few dozen letters from Wilford Woodruff…
We like to pretend that things were different back then, back when gods and giants roamed the earth. What would the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson need with thirty-second attack ads? Would Alexander Hamilton haggle over a top marginal tax rate? Or would Benjamin Franklin try to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee? Certainly the idols of our tribe were above such nonsense.
There is a growing recognition among scholars that museums are discursively constructed sites. One scholar noted that museums often are merely a “structured sample of reality” where science empowers their message. Alternatively, museums might encourage a pseudo-religious experience of ritually “attending” them— factors, some critics observe, that reduce the probability of resistant readings by patrons.
