Book Review: Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl.
December 29, 2017
Laughter, Depth, and Insight: Enid Rocks Them All
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl. Parts One and Two. Kofford Books. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 169 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Reviewed by Steven L. Peck. Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
When I was growing up, comic strips provided part of the ontology of my world. I devoured regular comic books, graphic novels, and other bubble-voiced media, but comic strips played a different and more important role than these other closely related forms. It was in the four-paneled strip that I was rst introduced to philosophical thought, political commentary, satire, and the exploration of questions rather than the explication of information toward an answer. Plus they made me laugh. There was a point being made. About life. And often about my place in it. Comic strips were my first introduction into a weird form of deep psychology that let me explore what it meant to be me. The sign on Lucy’s famous wooden stand in Peanuts, offering, instead of lemonade, “Psychiatric Help: 5¢: The Doctor is IN” does not seem an inappropriate way to express one of the functions these comic strips played in my life. I suppose given my age it is not surprising that it was Charles Schultz’s famous comic that proved the gateway drug to my infatuation with the medium.
The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah
April 28, 2020Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.
A $5 fun fundraiser
August 11, 2014Dialogue has fashioned a $5 fun fundraisier and invites you to join in! Donating just $5.00 will not only help Dialogue in its quest to continue to be one of the most integral, insightful, and…
Sitting at Sunstone dialoguing about Dialogue
July 31, 2016
Dialogue sat down with writer Carol Lynn Pearson to ask what Dialogue has meant to her.
Find some of Carol Lynn Pearson’s Dialogue work here:
Review of Beginnings.
Review of Will I Ever Forget This Day? Excerpts from the Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson.
Photo essay including Carol Lynn Pearson.
And be sure to watch for excerpts of Pearson’s newest book Ghosts of Eternal Polygamy in the Fall 2016 Dialogue.
Racial Innocence and the Christus-Based Latter-day Saints Symbol
December 22, 2023On April 4, 2020, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) formally adopted an institutional symbol that is now prominently displayed on the Church logo and is imprinted on Church publications, websites, videos,…
Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads
March 16, 2018Dialogue 44.1 (Spring 2011): 53–84
This essay explores conflicting messages within LDS teaching on LGBT rights, when it both opposed same-sex marriage and in the wake of Prop 8 also came out in support of other LGBT rights that display both wrath and mercy. It explores a theory of LDS teachings on homosexuality along these lines, as well as the context of shifting norms around sexual identity.
Mormons & Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks & Patriarchal Blessings, 1830–2018
January 14, 2019Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 83–129
The priesthood revelation of 1978 eased some of the tension when the apostles affirmed that Blacks could now be “adopted into the House of Israel” as full participants in Mormon liturgical rites. But this doctrinal shift did not resolve the vexing question of whether or not Black people derived from the “seed of Cain.”
$5 Fundraiser
November 23, 2015
As the season of giving begins, Dialogue has fashioned a $5.00 fundraiser and invites you to join in. Giving just $5.00 will not only help Dialogue continue it’s quest to be one of the most integral, insightful, and intellectual Mormon journals available, but will also enter you into a drawing for one of three signed copies from these friends of Dialogue.
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So join in and become a supporter of Dialogue today!
Queer Mormon Pioneers Camp Out In Brooklyn
November 5, 2013Rachel Farmer guest posts at Feminist Mormon Housewives to discuss her new art exhibit in New York, and describes her encounters with the archives of Dialogue.
It’s funny to exhibit my little ceramic pioneers here on the east coast. People wonder who they are and what they are doing. Are they prairie moms? Eastern European peasants? Pilgrims? What are those carts they are lugging around? Are they peddlers? One thing is certain – these women know how to work!
This fascination with my ancestry — and questions about my own place in the Mormon narrative — led my young nerdy self on a quest to read all the back-issues of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (that my parents kept conveniently stacked in their study).
The women I met on these pages forever changed my worldview: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Lavina Fielding Anderson. Though they wrote about contemporary feminist issues, it was their insights into Mormon women’s more independent and expansive role in the early church that gave me some extra backbone.
Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution
March 17, 2018Dialogue 43.1 (Spring 2010): 1–36
And in fact, what might it mean that God “used” evolution tocreate life’s diversity? Was this a choice for God among other al-ternatives? Do Wildman’s pessimistic conclusions hold for Mor-monism? Does evolution imply a noninterventionist Deity? Arethere more optimistic views possible, some of which may actuallysuggest that evolution enhances and expands our view of God?