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Roundtable: Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

January 14, 2019

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.

Article Spotlight: Stephen Taysom, “Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism”

January 7, 2013


In case you missed it during the business that is the holiday season, the winter issue of Dialogue appeared on its website. As its lead article, our own Steve Taysom offers a fabulous look at one of the new and provocative theories in religious studies: Robert Orsi’s “abundant events.” This theory should be familiar with Mormons studies practitioners and Dialogue readers since Orsi, Richard Bushman, and Susanna Morrill did an interview about it in Dialogue‘s fall 2011 issue. Put simply, Orsi’s theory starts with the problem that plagues many scholars: what does one do with supernatural events that are claimed by the religious people one studies? Or as Steve summarizes, “how do scholars of religion account for experiences that are simultaneously irrational and real?” (4-5) Orsi’s response is to construct a conceptual category that both avoids the reductionism of skeptical scholars while still providing a framework in which the importance of the claimed experience can still be analyzed. Taysom examines the theory and sees how it works when applied to the study of Mormonism’s gold plates.

Second Place: Pressed Palms

February 16, 2023

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12:2 One spring weekend, with a six-­month-­old…

Board member Mike Austin looks at The Book Of Mormon Musical

September 4, 2013

Trouble, Right Here in Sal Tlay Ka Siti
“I always think there’s a band, kid.” —Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man
By the time that I figured out that I hated The Music Man, it had been my favorite musical for more than 20 years. When I was ten, my mother took me to see Tony Randall as Professor Harold Hill at the Tulsa Little Theatre, and I was hooked. I listened to the LP for hours at a time, and, when the Robert Preston/Shirley Jones movie came to HBO a few years later, I watched it almost every day for two months. I have seen five stage versions and two film versions of the play a total of probably 30 times. I probably have most of the lines by heart.
I was in my 30s before I figured out that the ultimate message of The Music Man—that exciting lies are better than boring old truths—is one that I find morally reprehensible. When Harold Hill comes into River City and convinces people that he is going to build a boys’ band, everybody gets excited. People are nicer, more confident, and happier than they were before. So the whole town more or less colludes with Marian Paroo to keep the deception alive. If you want to be happy, The Music Man insists, just find a good-looking lie and pretend hard enough until it comes sort of true.
Which brings me to The Book of Mormon, which I saw last week in Dallas.

Book Review: Common Ground/Different Opinions: Latter-day Saints and Contemporary Issues

November 5, 2013

51xxyLsqujL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Another review of Common Ground/Different Opinions: Latter-day Saints and Contemporary Issues, eds. Justin F. White and James E. Faulconer by Michael Austin, Dialogue Board member, and Provost of Newman University in Wichita, KS.

Cross-posted at By Common Consent

As citizens, we must argue with each other about important things. Participating in an inherently adversarial political system means proposing arguments and defending positions. Both our nation and the Constitution that governs it are built on a process designed to turn vigorous discussion and debate into manageable lumps of compromise that permit us to move ahead.
As Latter-day Saints, however, we must be of one heart and one mind. Becoming a Zion people means that we covenant to bear one another’s burdens that they may be light, to mourn with those that mourn, to comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God in all times and in all things (Mosiah 18:8-9).
These are not mutually exclusive responsibilities, of course, but they can be difficult to reconcile in the real world. To be good citizens and good saints, we must either learn how to agree with each other about everything, which is impossible, or we must find ways to disagree as loving brothers and sisters, which is really hard.

Book Review: The Bible Tells Me So, by Peter Enns

October 7, 2014

enns-coversCross-posted at By Common Consent
Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian and a Bible scholar—two identity markers that’ve raised a few conflicts for him. Which really is too bad, because he seems like a pretty faithful, intelligent, funny guy. At least, he seems like that based on this faithful, intelligent, and funny book he just wrote about the Bible. It’s called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.
I think a lot of Mormons could really benefit from Enns’s experience.

Book Review: Mormons and the American Liberal Order

November 17, 2014

By Review Editor [Cross-posted to In Medias Res and By Common Consent]
Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics is a superb work of social science. David Campbell, John Green, and Quin Monson make exhaustive use of numerous recent surveys conducted by the Pew Forum and Gallup, and a half-dozen surveys which they designed themselves, to produce about as detailed and revealing a look at the political preferences and peculiarities of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in America as probably any group of scholars ever could. While some of the information which the authors make use of has already been reported in American Grace (a blockbuster in the sociology of religion in America which Campbell co-authored with Robert Putnam), here that information is packaged alongside numerous historic observations and other scholarly insights, resulting in something which stands entirely on its own. Of course, as with any academic study that depends largely upon survey research and the self-reporting of those interviewed, the compiled results need to be recognized for what they are: namely, the best conclusions that correlational and regression analysis allows. Still, I think it is fair to say that just as all serious discussions of actual religious practices and behaviors in the U.S. need to take Putnam and Campbell’s work into consideration, this book by Campbell, Green, and Monson is indisputably the new starting point for all serious conversations about American Mormons and politics from here on out.

Ashley Mae Hoiland on Faith

September 21, 2015

From By Common Consent. For another beautiful example of Ashley’s writing, check out her piece from the Winter 2014 Issue: “In Light” released for free for everyone to enjoy.
Ashley Mae Hoiland received a BFA in studio arts and an MFA in poetry, both from Brigham Young University. She served a mission in Uruguay. She now lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband, Carl, and two children, Remy and Thea. She has written and illustrated several children’s books and once headed a project that printed poetry on billboards. More of her writing can be found at www.birdsofashmae.com. We are glad to welcome Ashmae as a guest of BCC.
There I am, a little sprite of a girl, lion-haired and scrape-kneed, taking bouncy skipping steps along the dirt path. Quiet morning sun peers through the leaves like the light through stained glass at the front of a cathedral. As a thirty-year-old, I stand at the top of my childhood hill and look down. I can see my 8-year-old self stopping to bend near the ground and hold some leaves between her fingers. I hear the scuffle and scrape of dust and rocks beneath worn tennis shoes. My tiny self is alone and canopied by the canyon oaks and crooked spruces.

Dialogue Lectures #28 w/Jared Hickman

May 2, 2016

The newest Dialogue podcast features Dr. Jared Hickman, Assistant Professor in the English Department of Johns Hopkins University. Professor Hickman speaks on his essay “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” which was published in American Literature, a literary journal published by Duke University Press. Hickman-Jared
From the Miller Eccles website: Recent official statements have left some doubt about the traditional understanding of the Book of Mormon as a history of “the Indians.” This presents us with two especially important tasks: 1) to understand why the “Indian question” seemed important enough, both politically and theologically, in Joseph Smith’s time and place, to claim such attention in a new scripture; and 2) to pay closer attention to the Book of Mormon text, which itself, in emphasizing the “Indian question,” offers a new narrative for understanding what it means. If we read with such questions in mind, we can recognize in the Book of Mormon a vision (or program) for Native American resurgence radically opposed to the European and American colonialism of Joseph Smith’s time.