Summer 2023
We present this special Dialogue Issue: Health and Healing in the Mormon Tradition. You'll find "'Fast from that Which is Not Perfect': Food Abstinence and Fasting Cures in the Kingdom of God" by Cristina Rosetti, “'My Indignation Has Got the Better of My Intention': A Case Study in Latter-day Saint and 'Gentile' Female Family Correspondence in Nineteenth-Century America" from Bonnie Young and "Truth and Reconciliation: Reflections on the Fortieth Anniversary of the LDS Church’s Lifting the Priesthood and Temple Restrictions for Black Mormons of African Descent" by Robert Rees. And find five insightful health and healing Personal Essays, gorgeous poetry, some fascinating reviews and a lovely sermon. You won't want to miss this important issue. Purchase single issue here.
Listen to the audio version of this piece here. Content warning: This article contains references to disordered eating and bodily harm. Orlean Beginning in March 1935, Orlean Kingston documented her rigorous fasts and visionary experiences…
Listen to the audio version of this piece here. Although members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared many values with their Christian neighbors, the differences between Mormons and non-Mormons during the…
Listen to the audio version of this piece here. The Church has no power to do wrong with impunity any more than any individual. Brigham Young[1] America’s history of racial inequality continues to haunt us.…
This issue features submissions that address Latter-day Saint and Mormon approaches to health and healing. The topic has seemed especially pressing in recent years as we have both undergone significant losses and disruptions due to…
“Scott Eccles?” “Yes!” “Please follow me.” Scott Eccles leapt from his seat, straightened his tie, and surreptitiously placed his fists on his hips in the Superman pose, for he had watched a video online that…
Dear Editor, After reading Melissa Leilani Larson’s review of Levi Peterson’s short story collection, Losing a Bit of Eden (“The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists,” Dialogue, Summer 2022), I would like to offer…
A knot can be a beautiful thing. A knot can reveal truths about how the world works. Some people are so enraptured by knots, they dedicate their lives to studying them. I’m devoting no energy…
Dialogue 56:2 (Summer 2023) 109-112
“My wife has left me because I’m attracted to men. I can’t live with myself for hurting her. God has abandoned me for going against the teachings of the Bible. I don’t deserve to be alive.” His despair was overwhelming.
I’m an Aries with my sun in the sixth house, which means, according to astrology, that since the moment I was born, health has been my top priority. I had a hard time believing that…
Relational–cultural theory suggests that the primary source of suffering for most people is the experience of isolation and that healing occurs in growth-fostering connection. Judith V. Jordan “For as the body is one, and hath…
Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A crowd of several thousand poured into the Provo Tabernacle. They filled the wooden pews, the kind that are never quite comfortable but perfect for keeping…
I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…
We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right. A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind feels viscous, your body watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense of the smell of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…
1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise. Depression oozes under my door: the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed. One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…
Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt instead of fear. My body forced everyone to consider what it meant to be sick in…
“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…
Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…
Even in the modesty of its title, Picnic in the Ruins is a deceptively ambitious novel. At once wry and gentle, its depiction of the various lives and stories that become snarled up in a…
What would I do if cast out of my life with nothing? Forced to ask ourselves this question in the first two chapters of this genre-bending, disturbing novel—John Bennion’s most complex yet—we get, early on,…
The ten essays in this volume were brought together to facilitate engagement between scholars of “early Mormonism and early American religious and literary history” (ix). With a designedly inter- or transdisciplinary ambition, Envisioning Scripture assembles…
Growing up in the 1990s in a strong Mormon household, I learned that my religion had its own Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It was not published for the faithful to see but transmitted orally, through hushed…
When the curtain rises on the Judeo-Christian garden story, we encounter a series of in-between or liminal phenomena: 1) Adam and Eve, who represent neither fallen humanity nor exalted deities, who “have no status, property,…
