Continuing the Dialogue Topics Podcast, Dialogue Editor Taylor Petrey walks us through the history of feminism in the pages of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. From the Pink Issue in Summer 1971 to fight…
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering: “Christmas Morning—1906” a personal essay by Aldyth Morris
Here’s a taste:
“Winter of 1906 came late to Logan, Utah, the small Rocky Mountain town where I grew up. The mild autumn weather had held through Thanksgiving, but next day large feathery flakes began to fall and continued, silent and relentless, for days. When at last they stopped, volunteers turned out to clear the sidewalks, leaving snow banks so high that when Bishop Newbold passed on his way to the Fourth Ward meeting house all I could see from our parlor window was the tip of his black hat.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering:”The Second Coming of Santa Clause: Christmas in a Polygamous Family” a personal essay by Samuel W. Taylor
Here’s a taste:
“Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice
to us, instead of just the single time he visited homes of those unfortunates whose fathers had only one wife. We were taught how blessed we were, to be among the very last to be privileged to live the fullness of the gospel; and here was a tangible evidence.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering: “A Jew Among Mormons“ (In honor of the first night of Hanukkah) a personal essay by Steve Siporin
Here’s a taste:
“When Christmas approaches, our usually sensitive system suddenly suspends the separation of church and state. Ethnocentrism takes over and runs amuck. To protest puts one in the position of Scrooge in the perennial favorite, A Christmas Carol.To protest is to spoil everyone’s fun, to refuse to join in and be a part of it all. But Jews cannot, by definition, be part of Christmas, if they are to be Jews.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering: “A Flicker of Hope in Conflict’s Moral Twilight“ a personal essay from Iraq by Matthew Bolton
Here’s a taste:
“From these passages, we see that the Christmas story is not a sugary fairy tale. It is a story that cries out from the depths of a people’s despair,
“Enough is enough!” This story does not focus on the comings and goings of the celebrities of the day. It is a story about a God who so loved the
world, who so cared for the lowly, the poor, the forgotten invisible people of this world that s/he took on their wretched form and dwelt among them—among us.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering: ““My Personal Rubicon” a personal essay by Eleanor Ricks Colton
Here’s a taste:
“Disappointed by the biased reporting of Sonia’s excommunication, I wrote a letter to The Washington Post. One of the editors called me on Christmas Eve to say that since Sonia had written an editorial the week before, perhaps I would like to write one too. Although this was the last thing I wanted to think about on Christmas, I told them that if they would allow me a few days to prepare, I would oblige. This was my second positive experience with the Post. Although a number of other Mormon women could have been more articulate than I, few could have been hurting more than I was at that time. My editorial appeared December 28, 1979.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
Happy Holidays from Dialogue Journal!
As a special advent-themed treat, Dialoguejournal.com will be featuring holiday-flavored offerings from it’s archives leading up to Christmas Day.
Today’s offering:”Yesterday’s People” a personal essay by Gary Huxford
Here’s a taste:
“Our second Christmas in East Africa—last year in Kenya, this year in Ethiopia. I write this sitting beside Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. It is evening and the water birds return to their nesting sanctuaries. This is the final day of a week of travel along the historical route in Northern Ethiopia, travel that included the churches of Lalibela, truly one of the world’s great architectural wonders.”
Click to see all the 2012 Christmas countdown features.
After looking at “The King James Bible and the Future of Missionary Work” for Dialogue last summer, Grant Hardy now looks at the recent scriptural changes for Faith Promoting Rumor at Patheos, lamenting that accuracy has been unfortunately delayed in “The 2013 Adjustments to the Book of Mormon.”
Here’s an excerpt:
“…So for the Book of Mormon, the 2013 adjustments are a holding pattern. I look forward to the day when the Church will return to trajectory set in 1981 of “bring[ing] the material into conformity with prepublication manuscripts and early editions edited by the Prophet Joseph Smith.” Perhaps in that future, more fully revised edition, we will also get indications of the original, longer chapter divisions (since the original manuscript suggests that those breaks were written on the Gold Plates, and hence were intended by Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni), and maybe even a return to paragraphs—the formatting of the Book of Mormon during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.”
Cross-posted at By Common Consent by Blair Hodges
What is a human?
David Grandy called my attention to Richard Dawkins calling attention to G.G. Simpson’s assertion that “all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the year Darwin published Origin of the Species] are worthless and . . . we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”[1] Pay no attention to the human behind the definition of “human,” we’re told–or perhaps, warned. After all, paying close attention to the ways the human has been defined historically will certainly upset Fundamentalist-minded atheists and Christians alike; the folks who fear the liminal, the shifting, the outer rims, the ungraspable, the uncontrollable, the monster.
Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. 257 pp. Paperback: $24.95.
Reviewed by Scott Russell Morris, Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that seems to sell the book—and this review, too, apparently, as I am writing that first despite my best intentions—but really, this book is not about his brother John or about the homophobic culture of the LDS Church and many of its adherents, despite both of those being common motifs. It is about Scott Abbott. And, as all good personal non fiction is, it isn’t really about Scott Abbott either, but rather about what it means to grow up in a culture that is so overwhelmingly shaping that it “informs even your sentence structure” (89) and then to find that you no longer want to have a place in it. In the last few weeks as I’ve contemplated what I might say about Abbott’s book and as I’ve discussed it with others (one of whom saw it on my couch and asked, based on the title, if it was a vampire novel), I’ve described it in a few ways: It is about a BYU professor who was in the thick of the academic freedom concerns at BYU in the ’90s. Or, it is about a brother going through his dead brother’s things and thinking about what that might mean about the two of them, both nonconformists. For those more interested in writing and less about the story, I’ve told them about the most interesting feature of the book: It is written mostly as a series of journal entries, but there are a lot of other voices; for example, a female critic consistently questions the stories and rhetoric in Abbott’s entries, which he responds to in a separate editorial voice. There are also his brother’s words, at first taken from found texts like notebooks, letters, and book annotations, but then, toward the end, John actually speaks from the dead, directly to the narrator, though mostly to underscore the fact that he no longer has a voice, deflecting questions by responding, “You can probably answer that yourself,” and “I don’t really get to answer that, do I?” (207, 202).