by Clayton White “…most men, it seems to me, do not care for nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, so long as they may live, for a stated sum…It is for…
Announced in the just-released Summer 2012 issue, Dialogue’s Best of 2011 Awards.
For Best Article: Taylor Petrey,“Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology”–Winter
For Fiction: David G. Pace, “American Trinity”–Summer
For Poetry: Anna Christina Kohler Lewis, “Dishes”–Fall, Matt Nagel, “Blessing My Son”–Fall, Paul Swenson, “Marginalia”–Spring
For Personal Voices: Scott Davis, “The Fabulous Jesus: A Heresy of Reconciliation”–Fall
For “From the Pulpit”: W. Paul Reeve “That the Glory of God Might be Manifest”–Spring
For just $5.00, you can purchase a downloadable version of the complete collection of The Best of 2011.
Or for just $9.99, you can purchase a Kindle version of the complete collection of The Best of 2011.
Click on “Read more” to well, read more about the winning pieces:
Cross-posted at By Common Consent.
By Board Member Michael Austin.
I read the Qur’an often because it speaks peace to my soul.
I know that sounds kooky, but I promise I’m not a hippie or anything. I don’t burn incense or wear sandals. I wouldn’t even call it a spiritual experience. It’s more like a calming effect. I love to read the text, and I love to listen to the recitations of a talented qāri’ (which I am doing even as I write). It’s not the meaning of the words that does the peace-speaking; it’s the words themselves. I have long been deeply affected by the way that the Qur’an represents the voice of God.
The divine voice that I encounter in the Qur’an is one of the most comforting things that I know. It reminds me of my own father’s voice when I was very young: calm and powerful, impossibly distant yet completely intimate, and supremely confident in who and what he is. Whatever this voice may be saying to other people, what it says to me is, “You can feel safe in my home because I’ve got everything under control. I’m not going to let bad things happen to you because you are mine.” This is how I need God to sound when it hurts.
This is why I become defensive when somebody says, “The Qur’an is an inherently violent book” or “Islam is a religion of hate.”
Cross-posted at By Common Consent
By Board Member Michael Austin
What began as a hobby horse for me has now graduated to a soapbox. And the soapbox goes like this: Americans and other Westerners really need to start learning things about Muslim religion and culture. And by “things” I mean real things . We are doing quite nicely with broad brush strokes and glaring generalizations, thank you very much.
But as presidential candidates propose to cheering throngs that we ban Muslims from our midst, close down mosques, and otherwise betray the foundational principles of our country, the rest of us have an obligation to understand what is being invoked to scare us.
Mormon Tradition and the Individual TalentMary Lythgoe Bradford. Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2015. 185 pp.
Reviewed by Joey Franklin
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”1 This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.2 Tradition, to Eliot, was the deep well of Western literature. Studying the personal essay in school, tradition for me meant the work of the genre’s luminaries—Montaigne and Bacon, Hazlitt and Lamb, Woolf and Didion, Baldwin and White.
States of Deseret. William Morris, editor. Peculiar Press, 2017. Alternative history short story anthology. 109 pages, $3.00.
Reviewed by Barrett Burgin
Last year I presented this scenario to my classmates: what if the Civil War had never ended and Deseret had become its own nation? This idea of an alternate Mormon history really took hold on a classroom of BYU Media Arts students. Later, I found myself similarly fascinated while reading the new alternative history story collection States of Deseret. There is, perhaps, something inherently interesting to Mormons about reimagining our own brief history. Whether it’s a Zionistic yearning for our unfinished theocracy or a regretful wish to rewrite past wrongs, States of Deseret taps into our cultural dance with history and uses it as a platform to entertain, educate, and inquire.
The Future of Book of Mormon Studies: A Response to Dialogue’s Book Review Roundtable for Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon by William L. Davis I…
On February 16, Dialogue Board members Fiona Givens and Patrick Mason joined Collin McDonald to talk with Salt Lake Tribune Reporter Jennifer Napier-Pearce on Trib Talk about whether there is “A new Mormon faith crisis?” The dialogue that resulted on this issue is both enriching and vitally important. Dialogue transcribed and is providing this transcript of Trib Talk, with permission from The Salt Lake Tribune.
Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon cannot quite be described as “groundbreaking.” It covers ground, the editors acknowledge right up front, that has been broken many times before. In their introductory essay, Elizabeth Fenton…
In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…