Trying to get to the nursery proper and all of the blooming plants—bright colors, heady smells, early summer at its best—Mona almost walked past his table. It was one of those fold-up numbers with foldout…
Dialogue 10.4 (Winter 1977): 10–45
A great value of these early manuscripts is that for the most part they substantiate the correctness of the present Book of Mormon text—fully 99.9% of the text is published correctly. In textual criticism, however, evidence should be weighed, not counted, since a unique reading in a reliable source may be better than any number of readings in less reliable sources.
We shall be driven to great extremities. I know not what to think of it. Daniel Defoe, Journal of a Plague Year By the end of the fifth wave, people didn’t want to hear about…
Dialogue 18.2 (Summer 1985): 116–127
Women in the Mormon Church are encouraged toward traditional roles and attitudes that discourage personal, familial, and societal change. The ideal female role is that of a non-wage-earning wife and mother in a nuclear family where the husband is the provider and the woman’s energies are directed toward her family, the Church, and perhaps community service.
Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 167–180
This tendency to rewrite Relief Society history continued from the
1850s into the 1990s.
Typhoon rains were pounding the house for the fifth consecutive night. I was preparing for bed with a candle and a bowl of water when I heard urgent feet on the stairs. Belen Rivera, our…
Aunt Ella used to say that a man who doesn’t live his principles is a poor specimen. This observation, like her other nuggets of conventional wisdom, was ostensibly directed at me, but she always cast…
Title: Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958
Author: Marjorie Newton
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: History
Year: 2012
Pages: 343
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-58958-1210
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Amanda Hendrix-Komoto
Note: The term Pakeha refers to the white settler population of New Zealand, while the Maori are the islands’ indigenous peoples.
Tucked in the back of Marjorie Newton’s Of Tiki and Temple is a Maori glossary. It is possible to read and understand her work without referring to it to discover that a mihi is a greeting or welcoming ceremony or that quarterly conferences were called hui pariha in the Mormon Church in New Zealand. The glossary’s existence, however, is evidence of Newton’s commitment to writing a history of the Mormon Church in New Zealand that recognizes the contributions of indigenous Maori culture to the church and is meticulous in its detail.
What’s that you say, Joseph M. Spencer, graduate student of philosophy at San Jose State? You’re just out offering a radical new textually-based interpretation of the entire Book of Mormon in your spare time, hmm? Radical and new. Sounds like a nice little project you got there, yes. Wait, what?!
We’ve had the BoM for over a century now, what can we possibly have missed in all this time? Keep in mind that the assumptions which we readers bring to the text help determine the meaning we receive from the text. Spencer’s two broad guiding assumptions to his new approach to the BoM are (1) That the theological ideas of the BoM have been carefully arranged by the prophets within larger narrative textual structures. Thus, “Embedded in these larger structures, many of the Book of Mormon’s ideas draw meaning and especially nuance from their context” (xi). (2) That “ideas change with time and circumstance.” And because the BoM’s ideas are “woven into a real—and therefore anything but tidy—history,” readers may mistakenly gloss over some of the complexity of ideas within the text, missing out on the complexity within the book (xii). He seems to be saying “we need to quit reading the BoM in such a univocal fashion.” Spencer assumes we have a book sort of like the Bible—an edited compilation with a variety of voices. With this in mind, very interesting things begin to emerge from the text. Not a voice, but voices from the dust.
Modern young adult literature traces its roots to 1967, when S. E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders was published and subsequently devoured by young readers who were desperate for literature that spoke to them and reflected the realities they saw daily. In the ensuing years, young adult literature has bravely explored controversial topics like class struggle, mental illnesses, drug abuse, and sexuality, all in the name of allowing teen readers a chance to explore the “real” world. One element of teens’ lives, however, that has often been overlooked in the literature is religion and spirituality. Despite the results of the recent National Study of Youth and Religion showing that nearly forty percent of teens report actively participating in organized religion, religious characters and explorations of spirituality are rarely treated in young adult literature.