Volume 50, No. 2

Summer 2017

Inside the Summer 2017 issue find important articles regarding LGBTQ issues including Bryce Cook’s “What Do We Know of God’s Will for His LGBT Children? An Examination of the LDS Church’s Position on Homosexuality” and John Gustav-Wrathall’s stellar “Why I Stay” from Sunstone 2017. Colleen McDannell looks at “Mexicans, Tourism, and Book of Mormon Geography” and Julie Smith considers “A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Marks’ Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30).” Plus brand new reviews, fiction, personal voices, poetry and gorgeous art.

Articles

What Do We Know of God’s Will for His LGBT Children?: An Examination of the LDS Church’s Position on Homosexuality

Bryce Cook

Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017): 1–52

“What do We know of God’s Will for his LGBT Children?: An Examination of the LDS church’s position on homosexuality” divides it up into a “doctrinal, moral, and empirical perspective.” Cook’s goal is to understand, to encourage empathy, and to encourage people to see current teachings on homosexuality as incomplete. In this way, it has a lot in common with earlier pastoral approaches. The analysis here is strong, and this division is a version of other theological traditions of reasoning from scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This essay asks some great questions and raises some pretty serious critiques about the problems with contemporary LDS teachings and practices. “The longer this change takes,” he writes, “the more we will lose gay people, their family members, their friends, and other sympathetic Church members, particularly younger people who do not see same-sex marriage as a threat to society or a sin against God.”

Mexicans, Tourism, and Book of Mormon Geography

Colleen McDannell

Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017):55–88
Maintaining a conviction of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon
is no easy task in the era of DNA studies, archaeological excavations, and
aggressive attacks by evangelical Protestants. Latter-day Saints cultivate
commitment to the veracity of the Book of Mormon in many different
ways.

“In Christ All Things Hold Together”: A Christian Perspective (via Levinas and Shimony) on Quantum Entanglement

David Grandy

Christians regard the universe as having divine import. In the gospel of John we read: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).The word world, having more than one meaning, might be taken to denote human society, particularly since the passage seems to zero in on human believers. Who else, we might ask, could exercise faith unto everlasting life?

A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Mark’s Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30)

Julie M. Smith

The Gospel of Mark repeatedly echoes the Hebrew Bible: from the extensive thematic and verbal parallels between Jesus’ calming of the sea and the story of Jonah to the quotation of a single line from a psalm serving as Jesus’ last words while he suffers on the cross, intertextual allusions are frequently recognized by modern interpreters of Mark.This paper considers a reverberation which has, to my knowledge, received no previous exploration:I will show how Mark’s story of the Greek woman echoes the interactions between Hannah and Eli in 1 Samuel 1.

What Happened Sunday Morning

Erika Munson

When Danny DiLorenzo got up to speak I was thinking about how I could loosen my tie. My mother makes me wear one, and after an hour my body fights back. I stand in front…

The Home Teacher

Heidi Naylor

Bishop warned Brock Hartman ahead of time. “They’ll ask for a food order.” He opened a desk drawer and took out a binder filled with requisitions for the storehouse. “But they have a decent income…

That’s Where the Light Enters

Lon Young

I’m writing this from our roof, where I can see over the tops of mango trees, wet from last night’s rain. Mynas swoop from palm to palm, and enough sun filters through the misty dawn…

Dreaming After Trump

Gail Turley Houston

On November 9, 2016, I remained in bed all day. The previous evening— what F. Scott Fitzgerald might have referred to as the “real dark night of the soul”—I had broken all the speed limits…

Two Ideas

C. Dylan Bassett

in counter-sense

the eye hunts out
more than what it holds

Averted Vision

Joanna Ellsworth

There are no streetlights where my cottage hides
within a forest. Nights there grant a cold
permission to the stars who drag along
their lazy arc. Away from manmade glare,

Not the Truman Show

R. A. Christmas

Imagine a world with labels on the leaves,
fossilized scripture in compacted dust,
“God Made” on hooves—where everyone believes
not out of hope or faith, but because they must.

The Grammar of Quench

Ronald Wilcox

The sentence of mortality ends with a period.
Dehydration rolled into one round sound: old.
If I slake my thirst, I prod my prostate to rebel.
If I desire to sin I send my soul reeling to the

Echo of Boy

Darlene Young

My son hunches into the storm in his oversized coat
to collect fast offerings, a two-hour route
because the other mother’s sons stay in when it’s cold.
He is mine.
His wrists

Attempts to Be Whole | Scott Abbott, Immortal for Quite Some Time

Scott Russell Morris

In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that…

The History that Dares Speak Its Name | J. Seth Anderson, LGBT Salt Lake

Gary James Bergera

Seth Anderson’s slim book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s multi-volume Images of Modern America photographic series, is much more than an important new contribution to Utah and LDS history. It is a revelation— a surprising, unexpected…

The Garden of Enid: By a Mormon and For Mormons | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

Brittany Long Olsen

At its core, Scott Hales’s two-volume graphic novel The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl is a coming-of-age-story through a Mormon lens. Self-proclaimed weird Mormon girl Enid is a misfit who feels equally…

Review: Laughter, Depth, and Insight: Enid Rocks Them All | Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Parts One and Two

Steven L. Peck

When I was growing up, comic strips provided part of the ontology of my world. I devoured regular comic books, graphic novels, and other bubble-voiced media, but comic strips played a different and more important…

Baring Imperfect Human Truths | Holly Welker, ed., Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage

Elizabeth Ostler

We all know the Sunday School answers, but life rarely, if ever, plays out like a seminary video. So what do love, sex, and marriage look like in the lived experience of Mormon women?

Journalist, poet, and “spinster who thinks and writes a great deal about marriage” (1) Holly Welker has compiled a collection of essays that unapologetically reveals the intersection of Mormon theology, culture, individuality, and relational living in her latest book, Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage.

Fresh Honesty in Authentic Mormon Identity | Jamie Zvirzdin, ed., Fresh Courage Take: New Directions by Mormon Women

Maxine Hanks

An optimistic title and bright red pomegranate on the cover suggest a fresh approach to perennial gender problems in Mormonism— “a feminism that is about ‘cooperation and compassion.’” Fresh Courage Take is a positive motto…

Why I Stay

John Gustav-Wrathall

Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017): 209–213

“I was excommunicated from the Church in 1986. I am a gay man in a twenty-five-year-long relationship with my husband Göran Gustav-Wrathall. We were legally married in July 2008. Over the years, people have asked me how it is that I could consider myself Mormon if I’m not a member of the Church. What covenants are there for me to renew on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews, as I pass, without partaking, the sacrament tray to the person sitting next to me? To the extent that there is a relationship between me and God that has the Church as a context, real as it is to me, it is invisible to outside observers. That’s okay. I stay because I cannot deny what I know.”

Reflections

Robert De Groff

In 1517, hand-pulled woodcuts, engravings and etchings were the only techniques available to quickly disseminate images and ideas to a worldwide audience. They were the internet of their day. But in case you haven’t noticed,…

Islamic Art and the LDS Faith

Lisa DeLong

My first encounter with Islamic art was a photograph of the Alhambra: architecture transfigured by light, into light. It expressed a spiritual reality in a way I had not seen before.