The Interview
April 18, 2018Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…
Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…
by Clayton White “…most men, it seems to me, do not care for nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, so long as they may live, for a stated sum…It is for…
As I’ve thought about this, I have come up with an idea that might be helpful for people troubled by their internet-based discoveries about the Church. I am going to call this the “Dialogue diet.” What I propose is a program of reading (with some skimming and skipping allowed, of course) the entire print run of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. (You can start at the beginning and work your way forward, or start with the most recent issue and work your way backward, I don’t think it really matters very much which direction you go.) My thinking behind this is as follows:
Just telling someone to “become extremely well read in Mormonism” is less than helpful. Your average member simply would have no idea where to start on such a quest, and the task would seem so overwhelming as to be self-defeating from the start. Reading Dialogue from stem to stern is at least a very well defined task.
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…
Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…
Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 123–136
Hugo Oliaz intervews two important figures in LDS LGBTQ organzing, a former diretor of Affirmation and the founder of Gay LDS Youth, a group that briefly flourished in the early 2000s. A great resource for learning more about LDS LGBTQ organizing in this period.
Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 85–97
Chronicling the history of baptizing for the dead during the Nauvoo Period, this article introduces the practice from the first baptizers to how it was altered after Joseph Smith’s death.
I was a high school senior in September 1993, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides were disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the Church of Jesus…
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 1–24
The November 2015 LDS handbook policy change that identified mem- bers who participate in same-sex marriages as “apostates” and forbade children in their households from receiving baby blessings or baptisms sparked ongoing attention to the topic of LGBTQ Mormon well-being, mental health, and suicides.