James C. Jones interviewed Dr. Cornel West in February 2023 in New York, New York. Jones: One of the first things that I wanted to just ask, Dr. West, is about your general experience or even your introduction…
On April 23, 1983, a groundbreaking ceremony for the only temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built behind the Iron Curtain was held in the city of Freiberg, in the German…
Kevin Barney gives his personal experience with “Coming to Terms with Folk Magic in Mormon History” in this post at By Common Consent:
Those of you who know me personally know that I have a very laid back personality. I don’t let much bother me too much, and that includes claims made against the Church. Things roll off my back pretty easily. That may be because I never had to drink from a fire hose; I learned the adult version of Church history, scripture, doctrine and practice slowly, incrementally, over time, and I just don’t remember being particularly bothered by any of those things I learned along the way, with one conspicuous exception: the Salamander Letter….
…This is one reason why I’m flummoxed at the semi-official disapproval of Dialogue. That article is simply outstanding, and anyone who had read only that one piece would not have been surprised in the least by the recent photographs of the seerstone.
Title: How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
Author: N. T. Wright
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: New Testament
Year: 2012
Pages: 282
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-06-173057-3
Price: $25.99
Reviewed by Blair Hodges
The crux of Anglican scholar N.T. Wright’s latest book, How God Became King, can be summed up quite easily, if quite dramatically: “most of Western Christianity has simply forgotten what the gospels are really about” (ix). According to a dominant Christian view today, God created the world and called Israel to be His people, and upon their failure he sent down Plan B, Jesus, to fix everything up and take us away to heaven (84). This is all wrong, Wright says, and reflects an over-emphasis of the early creeds on one hand and problematic Reformation additions or over-reliance on critical scholarship on the other, more than it reflects the stories or purposes of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John:
From my youth I was blessed with a God-shaped hole in my identity. I knew I came from somewhere, that my ancestors were whole and bore a cultural armor that it was my right to…
Fifty years ago I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shotgun apartment just off Mass. Ave. at Central Square: 22 Magazine Street, Apt. 3. Spring 1971 marked the last months of my master of…
Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 105–143
Richard Sleegers contrasts 19th century Protestant teachings about salvations to what Joseph Smith taught about life after death.
Dialogue 41.2 (Summer 2009): 85–101
Hardy describes the long, difficult process of researching polygamy during a time that the church wasn’t open about polygamy.
The question I am considering here is at its heart relational. What kind of relationship with scripture exists within performative theology? When we understand scripture as wisdom rather than history, what does this understanding do…
Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1993):15–50
n fact, it may be no more than a kind of perversity that brings me to admit what I will tell you now, namely, that when it comes to the Book of Mormon, that most correct of books, whose pedigree we love passionately to debate and whose very namesakes we have, all of us, become, I stand mostly with Mark Twain.