Dialogue 23.1 (Spring 1990): 39–55
Few Brazilian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints will forget 1978, the year when two events significantly changed the Church in this South American country.
Dialogue 25.4 (Winter 1992): 81–96
A history of ethnic wards and branches as the church struggled with integration vs. segregation of immigrant communities.
Dialogue 23.1 (Spring 1990): 11–36
A history of Black LDS social groups and organizations. The Genesis Group gave African Americans a better chance to connect with fellow African Americans through frequent socials. The first group was founded in Salt Lake City. Even being based in Utah, they couldn’t depend on a lot of outside support from other members or Church leaders, which became isolating for them.
On May 16, 2005, Joseph Edward Duncan murdered Brenda Groene, her thirteen-year-old son, and her boyfriend. Police officers in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, found their bodies “face down in a welter of blood” (1). They didn’t…
Introduction I and many Mormons ache to apologize for our 130-year practice of excluding people of Black African ancestry from temple and priesthood participation. We long to apologize for our community’s attempts during and afterwards…
Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 167–180
Brooks talks about the period from 1970s Mormon feminism in Boston to the present and imagines what needs to be part of the future. She identifies five areas for Mormon feminism: theology, institutions, racial inclusion, financial independence, and spiritual independence.
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon. Before that, women weren’t allowed to enter marathons. There’s an iconic photo of Switzer just a few miles into the race…
Of the legacy of Joseph Smith, historian Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1936, “The vision perishes; it is the vertigo that endures.” Reading the novel The Prophet’s Wife by Libbie Grant is to feel that same…
You’re sure to hear a few such discordant notes as Brooks’s fingers glide up and down the scale, but to focus on such slips overlooks the book’s overall melody, the song of a Mormon girl whose nascent faith is challenged, lost, found, and refined by fire throughout. She’s the prodigal daughter telling only a little about years of riotous living, more about the faith of her youth and the re-visioned faith of her adulthood. Memoirs aren’t intended to tell a disconnected story of one’s life, but to invite readers into an intensely subjective world. The best memoirs aren’t written as how-to manuals (like the Marie Osmond brand beauty and fashion instructions Brooks read as an awkward, body-conscious young girl. You’re sure to laugh out loud as she spends a chapter pillorying such fluff). Instead, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, good memoirs awaken “a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, and they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”2 American publisher William Sloan says readers of such works are not so much saying to the author “Tell me about you,” but rather “Tell me about me; as I use your book and life as a mirror.”
Theology as Poetry A review of Adam S. Miller’s Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 132 pp. Robert A. Rees “If I read a book and it…