Summer 2014
The Summer 2014 issue begins with a thought provoking and honest discourse between Ryan Cragun and Seth Payne about the terminology and narrative surrounding those who leave the church. This is followed by Roger Terry's look at Mormonism's use of archaic and outdated English pronouns, then Stan Larson takes another look at Joseph Smith's accounts of the first vision. Emily Jensen then provides the highlights of 10+ years of Dialogue online. Also included in this issue is a great selection of poetry, round table discussions, fiction, and reviews.
What shall we do with thou? If this question grates on your ear, it may be because you recognize that thou is a nominative pronoun (a subject) and therefore never follows a preposition. If it doesn’t grate, then you are living, breathing evidence of the difficulties presented by archaic second-person pronouns in twenty-first-century Mormonism.
The First Vision, that seminal event which has inspired and intrigued all of us for nearly two centuries, came into sharp focus again in 2012 when another volume of the prestigious Joseph Smith Papers was published. Highlighting the volume is the earliest known description of what transpired during the “boy’s first uttered prayer”near his home in Palmyra in 1820. The narrative was written by Joseph Smith with his own pen in a ledger book in 1832.
Over ten years ago, blogs changed the look, feel, and immediacy of Mormon discourse almost overnight. The ongoing lively conversations, brilliantly constructed posts, and sometimes even unruly debates have not stopped since. Dialogue both views and participates in this online dialogue, submitting archival references to current discussions and writing pieces in concert with the printed prose found within its present-day pages.
We didn’t have much stuff when we moved into the new place. Not carpets or a dining table, or even curtains or beds at first. My dad must have thought if we weren’t allowed our…
Ryan T. Cruger, “Apostates,” “Anti-Mormons,” and Other Problems in Seth Payne’s “Ex-Mormon Narratives and Pastoral Apologetics”
Seth Payne, Response
So there’s my sort-of-neighbor big Bo, who despite owning two rock-solid Scandinavian names including, yes, Bo, doesn’t exactly seem to have things rock-solidly together.
Across the field, a partial hedgeline planted
three hundred years ago still winds its way
between an ancient English oak and plum.
At sunset, their silhouettes turn granite-gray,
I want to eat God, limb and line.
Each yellowing ivory Bible verse
Every sacrament of soft white
Bread and cool waters,
All of Him in a single bite.
Like Eve, I won’t even leave the core.
His death being end-stopped
never justifies
the enjambment
of my survival
that goes on and on,
To exist without beginning’s
ultimate mystery;
to comprehend end’s easy
as eternity’s imagined;
This excellent collection of essays not only honors one of the most influential LDS thinkers of the past forty years, David L. Paulsen, but does so as a beautiful example of the very sort of critically reflective and respectful interfaith dialogue that he worked so hard to encourage throughout his career as both a teacher and a writer.
Stephen Webb is a Roman Catholic scholar who has made a great effort to understand and interact with Mormonism in sympathetic ways. In his prior volume on this topic, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (Oxford University Press, 2011), Webb considered the possibility of the materiality and divine embodiment of God by way of elements in the history of Christian thought, specifically “heavenly flesh” Christology. In Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints, he narrows his focus to consider Mormon materialist metaphysics and what this might mean for his own Catholicism, as well as the doctrine of the rest of historic Christendom.
This paper is entitled “Religious Studies as Comparative Religion,” and its purpose is to suggest that comparative religion, as one way of engaging in religious studies, can be fruitful for historians of Mormonism.
In a polemical treatise from late antiquity, Tertullian famously asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” The readers of this essay might ask a similar rhetorical question of “What does Kashi have to do with Salt Lake?” What could we actually learn from the comparative study of Asian religions with Mormonism? Armed with tools and theories that largely extol the particular over the general, most contemporary scholars have been shaped to be suspicious of comparisons that excise the historical and universalize the local. Comparative projects seem so very retrograde. We snicker when we hear individuals cite comparative works like The Golden Bough or theories like phenomenology as authoritative sources or methods. Those projects were so pre-postmodern, we think as we roll our eyes. Nevertheless, I argue that if academic comparisons of Mormonism and Asian religions are disciplined, modest, and pragmatic, Kashi and Salt Lake have much to do with one another.
Nine years ago, my husband Kyle was offered an attractive job at Tulane University in New Orleans. At the same time, he was offered—and ultimately accepted—a position at Indiana University. Six months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and Tulane shut down for an extended period. If Kyle had accepted that job, we likely would have been displaced indefinitely from home and work and schools. We felt empathy for those who suffered, and we thanked our lucky stars that we had dodged this bullet.
