Winter 2024
Our Winter 2024 Issue is filled with fascinating studies on the theme of "The Family in Latter-day Saint Culture and Thought." Begin with James E. Faulconer's "On a Philosophy of Marriage" and follow it up with Kate Mower's "Rule of Lawyers: Latter-day Saint Entanglement in Eastern European Anti-LGBTQI+" and if that isn't enough, learn about "The Legacy of the 1960’s 'New Era' and Singing Mothers Tour on Latter-Day Saint Gender Roles and the Family in Great Britain" by Elizabeth Mawlam. Then delve into five fantastic personal voice essays, some thoughtful poetry and Karen Rosenbaum's newest fiction piece "Subjunctive Cases." Plus what books are reviewed this time? So much important scholarship to be found. Purchase an individual issue here. And click here for an overview of the issue by our knowledgeable subject editors!
Listen to an interview about this piece here. Many have seen one or another movie or television version of the Frankenstein story. The first was made in 1910 and there have been many since. The…
Dialogue 57:4 (Winter 2024) 33-66
Over the past decade, a growing and exciting body of scholarship in Mormon studies has applied critical theory to Mormon history, specifically queer and race critical theory.
On February 27, 1961, two hundred British Singing Mothers, dressed in matching Utah-sewn white blouses and fashioning neat, short, curled hair, stood in tiers on the stage of London’s most prominent music hall. From the…
Laurie zips up her red jacket and curses God and Dennis. Except God probably doesn’t exist. Dennis exists. He is right in this moment existing in their bed while she is dragging the recycling and…
A family is a thing with edges. The edges can grow, shrink, smooth off, and get spikey and sharp. The changes that happen can be full of joy, sadness, loss, trauma, comfort, or strength. None…
Dialogue 57:4 (Winter 2024) 107-112
Since joining the Church, I have been blessed with a number of revelations relating to my life as a gay Mormon. Perhaps more remarkable may be how few of these I actually understood correctly when I first received them. Time has provided them clarity.
From Matriarchs I come from a multigenerational line of women who crave Mother Earth. My great-grandma worked in Yellowstone National Park every summer and married a Yellowstone architect. My grammie basically grew up there, as…
Stonehenge was a disappointment. If we had shown up for the summer solstice, we could have touched the stones while watching the sun rise. However, that would have involved fighting our way through a crowd…
“Pretty girls don’t buy cocaine,” Greta[1] says and laughs as she walks out the front door. My hands and face sting as I stand frozen in the entryway and hear her start the car. I’d…
While you sleep with abandon, I quiverbeside you, what ifs crawling my skin.You, warm beside me: liquidstillness. You toil not, neither do you spin. I wishI could ladle you over me, rub youinto the creases…
No words make a difference
against the child’s cries and damp heat—
only the rocking, rocking,
It was the high Uintas,
evening of our first day-hike
with grandchildren . . . their lives until then
seeming distant, clustered and glowing
as the far Pleiades to our gazing.
On Mother’s Day it snows
in our backyard, the kind that grows
on cottonwoods and makes my nose
itch inside the nostrils, pinch half-closed
Confirmed in the slim night shadows,
a four-toed blue and gold dragon ridges
the tiles of the moss-glazed roof, ascends
to the slivering waxed Têt moon, an off-center
In my estimation, Sara M. Patterson’s The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism will be regarded as one of the most important works of Latter-day Saint/Mormon scholarship of the twenty-first century.…
“That’s just cheap social issue novel bullshit. . . . [It] makes people like us hope for a smaller, neater world where stories make sense and converge” (228). This is protagonist Cassandra Soelberg’s response when confronted by…
In the summer of 2009, as a master’s student, I sat in one of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s summer seminars when the topic turned to the absence of a biography on Joseph F. Smith.…
If the strength of a religious community is determined by how vigorously its leaders, scholars, and members can renegotiate the historical and common interpretations of its sacred texts while maintaining community cohesion, then the (re)scripturalization…
