Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 73–77
Responding to Bush, Hugh Nibley argues that it is God who chooses who he wants to ordain and who should be denied due to various reasons, hence the scripture “Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The sacrament feels like a medical procedure these days. It’s passed by men, not boys. I wondered about that requirement until I looked around the chapel at our scanty,…
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 24.4 (Winter 1991): 75–96
IMMEDIATELY UPON THE PASSAGE of territorial legislation enfranchising Utah’s women in 1870, almost fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to American women, arguments erupted between the Mormon and non-Mormon community over the reasons behind this legislation.
Watch Jana Riess discuss her new book “Flunking Sainthood” at Benchmark Books last week:
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.
Crossposted at By Common Consent.
By Blair Hodges
Did the law of consecration become effectively suspended or temporarily replaced by the law of tithing when the early Latter-day Saints couldn’t make it work out? Joseph M. Spencer answers no in For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. Spencer’s latest book offers an analysis of the law of consecration through a close and detailed reading of selections from Paul’s letter to the Romans and Joseph Smith’s revelation now canonized as section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants.
When I heard that Professor Givens had embarked on a work of “Mormon Theology” I was more than a little skeptical. Not that it hasn’t been done before. That isn’t the problem. It’s just that theology, as James Faulconer has written, is something that just doesn’t seem to fit Mormonism. However, when I got my greedy little hands on Givens’ book, I was pleased to see that it is a work of theological heritage. In Givens’ words: “I am here tracing what I regard as the essential contours of Mormon thought as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present, not pretending to address the many tributaries in and out of Mormonism’s main currents.”(x)
Peggy Fletcher Stack interviews Mormon biblical scholars Philip Barlow, Patrick Mason, Julie Smith, Eric Huntsman, about how “And it came to pass, one day the Book of Mormon overtook the Bible — in LDS eyes” specifically the role President Ezra Taft Benson played.
“‘Mormons have developed a kind of amnesia towards the Bible since 1980,’ says Philip Barlow, a Utah State University historian. ‘It really has changed the consciousness of Mormons. They don’t bear testimony of the truthfulness of the Bible much these days, but really specify the Book of Mormon.’
And when Latter-day Saints talk about their scriptural heroes, he says, they are not talking about Noah, Gideon or David, but rather Nephi, Alma, and Moroni— figures from the faith’s unique text.”
And Julie Smith weighed in:
“The Book of Mormon gives just one record of Jesus’ sojourn in the Americas, unlike the four New Testament Gospels, says Julie M. Smith, an LDS New Testament scholar in Austin, Texas. ‘Christ doesn’t interact with individuals to the same extent or with women. There are no exorcisms. It’s generally a really different portrait than in the Bible.'”
Son of the Black Sword: The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior I
Larry Correia
Baen, 2015
Hardcover, 412 pp., $25.00
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
Larry Correia’s action-adventure novels range from military thrillers to urban fantasies to epic high fantasies, often with accurately detailed depictions of modern and imagined weaponry. His first novel, Monster Hunters International, placed on the Locus bestsellers list; its sequel appeared on the New York Times lists, as have subsequent books. His series include Grimnoir Chronicles, Dead Six (with Mike Kupari), and now The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior. His work in speculative fiction/fantasy is highly regarded, as is the straightforwardness with which he defends his stands on such diverse issues as the role of speculative fiction in society and gun use and gun control.
For readers familiar with Correia’s work only through his Monster Hunters International series, Son of the Black Sword might seem like an established approach to an accustomed pattern. In the first pages, Correia presents his hero, Ashok Vadal, with a monster to be dispatched: a sea-demon threatening to destroy villages along the coast of the continent Lok