Dialogue 33.4 (Winter 2001):127–173
Upon an initial and cursory reading, the book appears to be a simple morality play. A zealous purveyor of an unusual gustatory selection hawks his wares to an Everyman, whose initial biases preclude his acceptance of the unfamiliar.
Title: The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus
Author: John Dominic Crossan
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: New Testament
Year: 2012
Pages: 259
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-06-187569-4
Price: $25.99
By Blair Hodges
Jesus was so meta. In his famed parable of the Sower “the word” is compared to seed being cast onto the ground where it might grow or perish. And the word “parable” itself comes from the Greek—para (“with” or “alongside”) and ballein (“to put” or “to throw”). As popular biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan observes in his latest book: “Jesus was not trying to improve the agricultural yield of lower Galilee.” The activity of sowing is “cast alongside and compared with” the dissemination of the word; this is essentially a parable using parable as parable (10).
Crossan explores this manner of teaching in his provocatively-titled The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.
Jack Harrell. Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 156 pp. Paperback: $18.95. ISBN: 978-1-58958-754-0.
Reviewed by Jennifer Quist
The back cover of Jack Harrell’s new collection Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism describes the book as a continuation of “a conversation as old as Mormonism itself.” It’s a fraught phrase, bringing to mind the image of an academic, artistic, and social in-group that has been conversing among themselves for a very long time. It isn’t the in-group’s fault that the conversation happens in the absence of non-members and newcomers to the Church, neither is it their fault that it goes on without writers, readers, and scholars unconnected to the American Mormon heartland. None of this is the in-group’s fault, but perhaps all of it is their problem. Many in the in-group strive to, in Harrell’s words,“giv[e] the church and its religion a human and literary face” (99). However, we can’t understand what our own faces look like without relying on the re ections and perceptions of people and objects outside ourselves. Perhaps Jack Harrell, as a previous outsider to not just the Mormon literary world but the Mormon world altogether, is especially well-suited to put himself forward to articulate what Mormon letters are and what they ought to be and become.
Dialogue 31.3 (Fall 1998): 49–57
In Fall 1998 just a few years after The Family Proclamation, Gary Watts wrote, “The Logical Next Step: Affirming Same-Sex Relationships.” He notes the inner conflict that gay LDS members faced, having to choose between their desires to have a relaitonship and their desires to be in the church. It draws a lot of personal experiences and conversation to assess the issues. And he proposes that affirming committed, monogamous same-sex relationships would not change doctrines about reserving sexual initimacy for marriage, but proposed that these relationhips would not be eligible for sealings.
When I was about twelve, yet another retelling of the Cinderella story was released into theatres in a magic-free but nonetheless magical version called Ever After. One of my favorite scenes in this film involves…
Today, June 20, 2021, is the first day since March 15, 2020 that we in the Stanford First Ward have been allowed to attend service in our own building without masks and social distancing. As…
Dialogue 19.4 (Winter 1988):157–192
The major problem with the “Study” is that, if one takes it as anything more than an analysis of possibilities, it must be viewed as an example of the genetic fallacy (that something can be explained solely by its cultural context).
Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 61–64
Over the past forty years the top leadership of the Community of Christ church (until recently the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ o f Latter -Day Saints) has gone through significant changes in religious thought. I have contended elsewhere that the decisive changes occurred in the 1960s.
Dialogue 19.1 (Spring 1986): 69–75
How does the Book of Mormon present the basic doctrines of the gospel? What role should the Book of Mormon play in our religious and intellectual lives?
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 51–60
“Of course, I didn’t really want to be a wife. But I was eight years old, and in my mind, if all I really wanted from the future was a husband, then that must mean that I wanted to be a wife.”