Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 Issue studies the Book of Mormon in varied ways: Brian Hales kicks it off with an update on Automatic Writing and the Book of Mormon; then Ryan Thomas looks at the Gold Plates and Ancient Metal Epigraphy followed by Larry Morris considering the Empirical Witnesses of the Gold Plates. Finally, Rebecca Roesler studies the Plain and Precious Things Lost: The Small Plates of Nephi. If this isn't enough, there are reviews, poetry, a Levi Peterson fiction piece and colorful summer art by Royden Card.
Dialogue 52.2 (Spring 2019):1–58Attributing the Book of Mormon’s origin to supernatural forces has
worked well for Joseph Smith’s believers, then as well as now, but not so
well for critics who seem certain natural abilities were responsible. For over
180 years, several secular theories have been advanced as explanations.
Dialogue 52.2 (Summer 2019):37–58
Ryan Thomas highlights the different metal writing cultures from around the same time as the Book of Mormon periods to see if it is historically likely for the Gold Plates to exist from that time period.
Dialogue 52.2 (Summer 2019): 59–84
Due to the fact that visiting with angels isn’t part of the normal human experience, it makes it hard for historians to prove that it happened through an academic investigation. The best way, as discussed by the author, to determine what really happened is by studying other individual’s first-hand accounts about the Gold Plates.
Dialogue 52.4 (Winter 2019): 85
Such inconsistencies may cause some readers to question the credibility of the text. Upon observing doctrinal andprophetic variation within the Book of Mormon, some dismiss the book’s divinity
Listen to the piece here. It may seem odd that an experienced fornicator like Bode Carpenter would get the girl pregnant in the first place—particularly because he carried a condom in the watch pocket of…
I remember that the sun shone warm but the air felt cool. A robin would have chirped in the branches that shaded my father, who was immersed in the savory smoke rising from the built-in…
Surviving my mother by twelve years, my father
became my perfect friend,
having evolved from the anxious and overly-protective
father I’d known as a teenager.
Last Vegas, Nevada : March, 1992
Fresh from Mountain Meadows, headed home
from the Nevada Test Site, we were high
from crawling under barbed wire, and trespassing,
when I flipped the doe into the suicide lane.
I most recall the river music. Smetana’s Moldau
meandered often into the air at our house,
European classical sounding in the high Utah parroquia.
For serious readers of scripture, the publication of a major study edition is cause for great rejoicing. The HarperCollins Study Bible and the major Oxford Study Bibles (the Jewish Study Bible, the Catholic Study Bible,…
The cover photo startles us into the book’s theme: two tribes, ghosts and mortals, staring off in the same direction. Beyond that cover we take a trek through Mormonism’s pageantry—not the pageantry of temple rituals…
Every writer, whether prophetic or not, questions some things and assumes others. One of the attractions of a retelling is the way it highlights subjectivity—something we tend to ignore as readers of history, myth, or…
I’m still haunted by a woman who died in our intensive care unit a decade ago. She was eighteen weeks pregnant and had a kidney infection serious enough that her lungs failed. She quickly ended up on maximal life support, barely surviving from day to day.
1952. I was born in Canada and raised in Utah. Received a BFA and MFA from BYU and taught printmaking there for sixteen years. Drawing and then painting desert landscape has been my primary focus…
