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Volume 51, No. 2

Summer 2018

The Summer 2018 issue continues Roger Terry’s important series on “Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 2.” Brian Birch considers “A Portion of God’s Light: Mormonism and Religious Pluralism.” And Kim Abunuwara will look at the “Provo Tabernacle and Interfaith Cooperation.” The issue has some enviormental flavor with a review of George Handley’s new novel American Fork as well as Steven Peck’s beautiful homage to his mother interspersed with descriptions of the recent solar eclipse. Plus a lovely memorial to longtime Dialogue author Neil Longo. And so much more!

  • Topics
  • priesthood,interfaith,enviroment,religion

Contents

Articles

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 2: Ordinances, Quorums, Nonpriesthood Authority, Presiding, Priestesses, and Priesthood Bans



Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
In the prequel to this article, I discussed in general contours the dual nature of authority—individual and institutional—and how the modern LDS concept of priesthood differs significantly from the ancient version in that it has become an abstract form of authority that can be “held” (or withheld, as the case might be).



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The Provo Tabernacle and Interfaith Collaboration



In October of 1996, Father William Flegge and his St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a problem. Renovations had left their beautiful Spanish Mission–style building unsafe for the high volume of parishioners expected for the upcoming Christmas services. That was when Father Flegge telephoned LDS Church headquarters to ask if Christmas Mass could be held at the Provo Tabernacle. In addition to welcoming Father Flegge and his flock to the tabernacle, LDS leaders invited them to bring into the tabernacle whatever sacred dress, objects, and symbols they needed to realize this important ceremony.Julie Boerio-Goates, pastoral coordinator for the parish, had plenty of experience staging Mass in the three-hundred-seat St. Francis building but was nervous about staging it in the two-thousand-seat tabernacle. The parish moved a lot of materials necessary for Christmas Mass from the St. Francis church, but since the tabernacle was so much bigger than St. Francis, more set dressing was needed. Serendipitously, seminarian Patrick Elliot had just been assigned to the parish as an assistant. Elliot had a good eye and knew where to find additional decorations. On December 24, two Christmas Masses were held in the evening and one at midnight.These services provide a vivid illustration of the Provo Tabernacle’s use for interfaith cooperation. 



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Mormon-Catholic Relations in Utah History: A Sketch



One of the happy surprises that makes history so interesting is the fact that Utah ever became Mormon Country, for during the roughly one hundred years before 1847 it had been, if anything, Catholic Country. Catholic explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, and traders had repeatedly plied their trades back and forth through the territory. Brigham Young University historian Ted J. Warner offers an intriguing speculation as to what might have happened if the Franciscan friars Dominguez and Escalante had been able to fulfill their promise to the Indians at Utah Lake that they would return and establish a mission among them.



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“A Portion of God’s Light”: Mormonism and Religious Pluralism



In 2015, the Catholic Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its landmark proclamation Nostra aetate. As one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate laid the foundation for contemporary Catholic interreligious engagement. Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, the document opened up multiple pathways to dialogue and identified the theological parameters within which these dialogues and collaborative projects could be undertaken.



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“Behold, Other Scriptures I Would that Ye Should Write”: Malachi in the Book of Mormon



The years following the return of the Jewish captives from Babylon were filled with tension. While literal walls were being built around Jerusalem to keep the city safe, pious Jewish leaders were constructing religious walls around the Jewish faith to ensure that YHWH would never again become angry enough to allow his holy city to be destroyed. It was during this period that an unknown author, known later as “Malachi,” produced the final book of the Nevi’im or “Prophets.”



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Fiction

City of Saints



When Dennis Cormier arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City, his first appointment was already waiting. The visitor was fleshy, jowls and hips, about Dennis’ age, and…



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Light Departure



For Doug Thayer  There was a knock at the apartment door. My companion, Carr, slouched at his desk, tinkering with a delicate butterfly he’d just formed from a piece of thin copper wire he’d retrieved…



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Personal Voices

I Am Not Your Trigger



I feel the need to call attention to a pattern of destructive behavior that I believe needs to stop immediately. Like all destructive behavior, the only people we ultimately hurt with it is our ourselves.…



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Reverse Perspective



May 14, 2017  I dreamt of Pavel Florensky, black-bearded, white-robed, scrunched and sharpened face, quizzical eyes, stepping into a dark classroom, eerie light in a still shaft from the rain-battered skylight above, unblinking student cadets…



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Poetry

A Better Country



With seedling splintered bone and seminal tears 
They planted furrows of themselves to please 
The God of distant rest, whose mysteries 
Confirmed the city and sustained its seers. 



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Soft



A drive for its own sake 
five o’clock on a lazy New Year’s Day, 
our kids, aged two and one, coming down 
from the cocktail of cousins and sugar.  



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the fog



but then when I was crazy 
broken             exiled to the downtown dark 
hidden in a red brick fist of space 
between the sanctuary of First Presbyterian 



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Reviews

“Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry | Lance Larsen, What the Body Knows



What makes something a poem? How do you recognize one, even if it has no broken lines? For most of us who read and love poetry, the answer is, “I just know.” There is the buzz of new vision from a surprising metaphor or imaginative framing, the sensual delight of rhythm and rhyme. But even more, there is the feeling. A good poem sends sparks through our synapses, makes us feel more alive. “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” says Emily Dickinson. It’s visceral.



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Lost in Translation | Adam S. Miller, The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs



In my review of Adam Miller’s wonderfully imaginative and provocative book of criticism, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (2012), I stated: “At times, Miller seems as much poet as theologian. Essay after essay does what Robert Frost says poetry is supposed to do: ‘begin in delight and end in wisdom,’ although at times Miller’s essays begin in wisdom and end in delight. In reality, Miller’s writing is often theology as poetry.”



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The Gift of Language | Heidi Naylor, Revolver



The stories in Heidi Naylor’s short story collection Revolver present characters who have experienced regret, grief, loss, and even death. As readers, we have the opportunity to peer into the abyss of their lives, while still garnering from the experience some little hope to carry on. Sounds grim, perhaps, but literature allows us to experience vicariously the circumstances, situations, and tragedies we would rather avoid in our own lives, perhaps with the hope that we might learn therefrom.



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Envisioning Mormon Art | Laura Allred Hurtado, Immediate Present



Last summer, the Church History Museum was busy preparing to send art from Salt Lake City to New York City. The backstory of this move was the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. This nonprofit is the brainchild of historian Richard Bushman and author Glen Nelson, trying to fill a gap in what they saw in Mormon arts and arts scholarship.



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The Empty Space between the Walls | Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record



The intellectual strength of Mormon scholarship lies in the academic study of its own history. As important as the study of that history is, less than one percent of the world’s population has any interest in it. If Mormonism wishes to become more than a local sect, if it wishes to become a global religion, it must stop being so self-absorbed and start speaking a moral language comprehensible to a larger portion of the world.



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Sermon

My Mother’s Eclipse



My Mother died on July 13, 2017. 

One late afternoon about a month later, on August 20, 2017 to be exact, my friend Steve and his wife Jill picked me up along with my adult son Jaron to chase the total eclipse tacking across the United States the next day.



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Volume Art

The Loss of Art, The Art of Loss



Sylvia Plath wrote “Dying / Is an art, like everything else.” Perhaps there is an art to grieving as well. People talk about “closure” and “saying goodbye” like discrete events: things you do once—well or poorly—and then move on. But where exactly do we move on to? As Mark Strand points out, “In a field / I am the absence / Of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” Since my father’s death, my missing place keeps converging with his ever-shifting empty place in surprising ways. I miss Paul, miss him the same way I might miss an imagined top stair on an unfamiliar staircase in the dark: the same betrayal of expectation, the same queasy-falling feeling in the stomach, the same jolt against reality. 



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