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Volume 44, No. 4

Winter 2011

The Winter 2011 begins with Armand L. Mauss and a look at the role assimilation has played in shaping the culture of the church, both in the early days of the church, and the church's efforts to highlight some of the more distinctive features about the church that were lost during the assimilation efforts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Following this is "The Persistence of Mormon Plural Marriage" by B. Carmon Hardy, who explores the implementation of the doctrine in the early church, as well as the effect it has on Mormonism today. The final article in the issue is written by Taylor Petrey, titled "Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology," which provides an in-depth look at the church's stance on homosexual relationships both in the mortal and post-mortal existence.

  • Topics
  • Taylor Petrey, homosexuality

Contents

Articles

Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest for Respectability



Almost two decades have elapsed since I published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). My book began by acknowledging and illustrating the “Americanization” thesis advanced by others— namely that the LDS Church and religion had spent the first half of the twentieth century in a deliberate policy of assimilation with American society and was thus following the time-honored trajectory traced by such early scholars as Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber—from a peculiar and disreputable sect toward a respectable church, increasingly comfortable with the surrounding American culture.



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The Persistence of Mormon Plural Marriage



This essay addresses the remarkable perseverance of Mormon polygamy.I argue that its survival is chiefly explained by the emphasis it was given in the nineteenth-century Church. The cardinal significance early leaders granted plurality in their teachings, combined with spirited defenses in its behalf, so gilded the doctrine that its enduring attraction was assured. A great deal of research studying patriarchal marriage has occurred in the last thirty or so years.



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Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology



Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 



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Classic Articles

Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology



Dialogue 44.4 (Winter 2011): 106–141
From Editor Taylor Petrey: “Toward a Post-heterosexual Mormon Theology”  was actually the first major article I ever published. I did not know what to expect, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece, accessed tens of thousands of times.⁠ To this day I still receive notes of appreciation for this article. 



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Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures



Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it. 



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Fiction

Scaling Never



There are so many kinds of never. There’s the never that Jacob’s Mum uses when she says, “Never talk to strangers; it’s dangerous,” and there’s the never his Dad uses when he says, “Never play…



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Interview

Walking into the Heart of the Questions: An Interview with W. Grant McMurray



Greg: I’d like to start by talking about the Community of Christ (and its predecessor, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) in the early twentieth century. My recollection is that your faith tradition, like mine, went for a long time mostly holding onto traditions and not worrying too much about substantive change. Is that an adequate way of putting it? If you go back to 1860, you have basically a century where holding the line was primary? 

Grant: I think that’s fair to say. For Community of Christ—or the other names that have been used for it, but we’ll just use that name as representative of the entire period of time—the formative identity of the movement was built around two principles. One was an opposition to the practice of polygamy, which was a key identity element of the LDS Church in the West for most of the nineteenth century; and the second principle was a support for lineal succession as the proper mode of succession for the Church. There were various other modes—seven or eight of them—that can be documented historically as being expressed at some point by Joseph Smith Jr. Of course, the Mormon Church in the West accepted the mode of succession through senior leaders in the Council of Twelve Apostles.



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Personal Voices

Mormonism in Western Society: Three Futures



Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it. 



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from “A Paris Journal”



July 5, 2009. What an idea, a Sunday outdoor market in Paris featuring not antiques, imported fruit, or cast-off clothing, but birds. As good a way as any to worship, so we take a quick…



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Poetry

Four Passes on Mount Horeb



In winters it soothed me, 
the wind blistering peals 
through naked willows in the dark
outside my bedroom window, 
while warm and bound I marked
lost spirits sounding in the cold. 



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Dark Energy



Mathematicians say the universe is a leaking wonder
of heat and cold: immense pressures 
sucking and exhaling, not elegant 
as they’d imagined . . . “preposterous.” 



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Vitae



Lost stories stir up with the dust, 
accented in Swedish: the voyage 
and train rides bringing Grandmother west; 
another linking Grandpa Lee’s drowning 



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Reviews

Canon: Open, Closed, Evolving | David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America



Sacred Borders represents a rigorous and compelling consideration of various traditions about the state of the biblical canon in American religion. For bookish Latter-day Saints, this volume will provide much-needed context for early Mormon beliefs about their open canon as well as a subtle and sympathetic view of both sides of the debate over the closed canon.



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Inside the “Loyal Opposition” | Philip Lindholm, ed., Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority



Few books convey the pain and poignancy of Mormon ecclesiastical discipline as compellingly as Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority, a newly published paperback from Greg Kofford Books. The volume is the product of editor Philip Lindholm’s conversations with several prominent Mormons whose writings and speeches have provoked the ire of the LDS Church. While these dissidents’ recollections and reflections take center stage in Latter-day Dissent, Lindholm uses their stories to advance a reinterpretation of Mormon intellectual history.



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Elder Price Superstar | The Book of Mormon (Broadway musical)



I’ll never forget the first time I heard my mother swear. I was in my thirties and had finally decided to talk to her about her second husband, whom she’d married when I was eleven, divorced two years later, and about whom, as if by a silent contract, we never spoke. “So tell me what was going on in that marriage,” I said to her. She bit her lip, paused, then said, “It was really shitty.” And that was it. This woman from whose mouth I’d never heard a “hell” or a “damn,” a woman who read her Daily Light devotional every morning, listened all day to Christian radio, and kept a pocket-size New Testament in her glove compartment, had now, deliberately and with great care, spoken a word I could never imagine escaping her lips.



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Sermon

“Wholesome, Hallowed, and Gracious”: Confronting the Winter’s Night



In northern Europe, where our celebration of the Christmas season has its roots, the winter nights are long, dark, and foreboding and, at least in myth, teeming with unwelcome mysteries. It was against this backdrop that the early Christian monks and missionaries transformed the pagan Yuletide festivals into our modern Christmas celebration. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the physical and spiritual darkness of winter seemed, for many, to be lifted at the Christmas season. 



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