Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal. —Doctrine & Covenants 29:31 The therapist I had…
I miss Gene England! I have especially missed his voice these past twenty years. So many times, I have wondered, “What would Gene have said about . . .” as we have stumbled and bungled…
Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 33–43
Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems might be resolved if it is put into a new type of model that she terms “Queer Polygamy.”
Dialogue 5.3 (Fall 1966): 85–100
During the years of the Utah Territory, outsiders got appointed to the terrority to serve in various positions. For the most part, these Gentiles weren’t sympathetic towards the church, and one of the more famous outsiders is Chief Justice James B. McKean who tried to crack down on plural marriage.
Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 158–166
Despite what researchers have said over the years regarding for why men married plural wives, Embry argues that a significant portion of husbands married plural wives because of their religious beliefs.
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…
By Blair Hodges
Cross-posted at By Common Consent
What if Joseph Smith’s vision of God really does have something important to say to all Christians today?“
— Stephen H. Webb
The recent “Mormon moment” exasperated theologian Stephen Webb. It wasn’t that Mitt Romney’s presidential run lent undue legitimacy to the LDS Church, or that Webb thought the media went too soft on the religious background of the Republican nominee. Although he is not a Mormon himself, Webb was unnerved by shallow discussions about Mormon underwear and other apparent trivialities. According to Webb, such conversations fail to pay due attention to Mormon metaphysics—the way Mormons understand the nature of matter, humans, God, and existence. His new book, Mormon Christianity, explores the development and coherence of this core belief taught by Joseph Smith: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes…” (D&C 131:7). Mormons make no ultimate distinction between spirit and matter, the natural and supernatural, which largely sets them apart from the broader Christian tradition. ”The Mormon imagination is solidly grounded in material reality,” writes Webb, “but it takes the physical world to new and unheard-of heights” (10). Webb believes Christian lungs can benefit from the rarefied air of these heights.
Here’s a snippet of a brilliant and fascinating post by Wilfried Decoo as a continuation of his research of same-sex marriage and Mormonism. Be sure the check out his just-released article in the Fall 2013 issue comparing the Mormon and Catholic positions on ethical issues and same-sex marriage here.
What do church members around the world think about same-sex marriage?
There are no surveys yet, like this one for Utah. I base my information mainly on personal conversations and email exchanges with respondents in a dozen countries in various continents. With more than half of the Mormon membership outside the U.S., we are dealing with very dissimilar countries as to member ratios, church experience, socio-political tendencies, lifestyle, and ethical traditions. My analysis is therefore tentative. Also, attitudes not only vary from country to country, but also from urban to rural areas in the same country, from the educated to the less educated, and from individual to individual.
From the information I obtained, the following four factors play a role in attitudes of members in the international church. Overall these attitudes pertain to the situation of non-members. Indeed, none of the following implies that members condone homosexual behavior or same-sex marriage for Latter-day Saints.
Crossposted at By Common Consent
Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem
By Michael Austin, Dialogue Board Member
Greg Kofford Books, 2014
$20.95
Academic approaches to scripture sometimes arouse suspicion in LDS circles, especially when they include the Higher Criticism (“Moses didn’t write the five books of Moses?”) or reading the Bible as literature (“So you think this is a work of fiction?”). People using or advocating these approaches often draw charges of privileging the intellectual ways of the world over the pure spiritual truth of God, of trusting in the arm of flesh, or of kowtowing to secular disbelief in the interest of seeming more acceptable.
“God gives us a world in which we may borrow wisdom from others, but we also must learn through the exercise of free will, through mistake-making, through the earnest seeking of truth based in our own thinking, discerning, and seeking,” says Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife in this must-read new interview from the Winter 2014 issue. Check out “Developing Integrity in an Uncertain World:An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife” and download either the pdf version or the html version for free! And have you checked out the rest of the magnificent Winter 2014 issue yet? It features Joanna Brooks’s survey of Mormon feminism, Courtney Rabada’s study of sister missionaries and Nancy Ross and Jessica Finnigan’s look at the feminist presence online, plus many other powerful women’s voices.
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