A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…
Cross posted at By Common Consent
Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. So do I, and the similarities don’t end there. Both of us were both polite and orthodox in our youth and reasonably well behaved in our adolescence, but we both started to push up against institutional boundaries in our early adulthood. We tried hard to walk the line between scholarly inquiry and faithful discourse, but it was a tough line to walk, and sometimes we ended up too much on one side or the other. A lot of our friends left the Church, but we both knew we never could. Mormonism was too much a part of our core identity for us to ever give it up.
Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) 240pp. Mormonism and White Supremacy as an Explanation of Mormonism’s Relationship with White Supremacy Reviewed by James…
I. Seeing Not . . . because they seeing not . . . Matthew 13:13 My first pair of glasses had green plastic rims and Coke-bottle thick, anti-glare-coated lenses, which reflected green light. In every…
Dialogue 50.2 (Summer 2017): 209–213
“I was excommunicated from the Church in 1986. I am a gay man in a twenty-five-year-long relationship with my husband Göran Gustav-Wrathall. We were legally married in July 2008. Over the years, people have asked me how it is that I could consider myself Mormon if I’m not a member of the Church. What covenants are there for me to renew on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews, as I pass, without partaking, the sacrament tray to the person sitting next to me? To the extent that there is a relationship between me and God that has the Church as a context, real as it is to me, it is invisible to outside observers. That’s okay. I stay because I cannot deny what I know.”
The hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which in November 2008 rescinded the legal right to marriage for same-sex couples in California, is evidence of an important political success for religious conservative political groups who support…
MOH: In official LDS Church materials, from magazines to manuals to temple walls, there’s a lack of abstract art, in favor of highly representational, literal art. What is the role of abstraction in religious art,…
Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2013):138–177
In this paper, I argue that this preoccupation with structural collapse legitimizes a critical consideration of the way that language functions in the book, rendering the Book of Mormon particularly well-suited to a reading that employs the techniques of post-structural criticism.
Dialogue 8.3/4 (1973): 4–6
The divergence of science and religion is essentially a modern phenomenon. Until the 18th century, theology was considered the queen of the sciences and scientists considered that their discoveries allowed them “to think God’s thoughts after Him.”
Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs.