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.”
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.
Cross-posted at By Common Consent by Blair Hodges
Last week, popular Christian evangelist Ravi Zacharias returned to Salt Lake City to address Mormons and other Christians from the Tabernacle pulpit. Back in 2004, Zacharias’s historic Tabernacle address was overshadowed in the news by Richard Mouw’s controversial introductory remarks. Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, issued an apology to Mormons on behalf of evangelicals who he said had sinned against Mormonism by misrepresenting their beliefs and practices. Over the past decade, the evangelical (Calvinist) Christian has continued to dialog with various Mormons in order to promote better interfaith relationships. During the last two presidential elections he became one of the many go-to sources for news outlets seeking soundbites on evangelical views of Mormonism. He’s taken a lot of heat for this within his religious community–early on being told that he didn’t know Mormons well enough and so would easily be deceived by them, later being told he had become too close to Mormons to have a clear view of their dangerous heresies.
His new book Talking with Mormons: An Invitation to Evangelicals is an effort to educate the evangelical community about his ongoing work with Mormonism.
Levi S. Peterson’s “Kid Kirby” from the Dialogue Summer 2016 issue won a 2016 Association for Mormon Letters award for best short fiction. In honor of this award, Dialogue has released the article early so that everyone can read it. Find “Kid Kirby” here.
From the AML website: “When asked what the purpose of literature is, the short story writer Issac Bashevis Singer responded succinctly that literature is to entertain and instruct. There’s no end to good short stories that meet one of these criterion, but a story that both entertains and instructs, a rarer specimen in the literary world, might be called a great story. Levi Peterson’s poignant and captivating ‘Kid Kirby’ is unequivocally a great story.”
Thomas F. Rogers. Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty. Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2016. 349 pp.
Reviewed by Mahonri Stewart
As a book of short, religious, and academic non-fiction, Thomas F. Rogers’s Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand is extremely valuable to the Mormon intellectual community; but as a reflection of a devoted disciple and a soulful artist, it goes beyond even that to be authentically moving. In a modern world where spirituality and religious belief is a place of tension and contention, Rogers has written from his place of the faithful agitator—pushing our culture’s boundaries where needed and then turning around to help the Mormon community reach inward and pull the wagons around shared principles.
Listen on Apple Podcasts. Listen on Spotify. Dialogue is proud to launch a new monthly podcast series on the dialoguejournal.com/topicpages, exploring key issues in the history of LDS scholarship. Join host Taylor Petrey, editor of…
When it comes to sacred places, I feel considerable holy envy toward the Latter-day Saints. Their sacred sites stretch across the continent, from Vermont to California. Mormons can visit their founding prophet’s birthplace, the grove…
Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 1–16
Essentially, the debate becomes whether it is appropriate to apply the adjectives “gay,” “homosexual,” “transgender,” or similar terms to persons who lived before these terms had any meaning. Yale historian John Boswell freely used the term “gay” for medieval and ancient subjects who expressed a preference for same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, while recognizing it was a label impossible for them to apply to themselves, “making the question anachronistic and to some extent unanswerable.”
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 45–50
“I am the mother of a queer son. I am also an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a professor at Brigham Young University, where I teach courses in literacy education, educational research methods, and multicultural education.”