Samuel M. Brown’s Where the Soul Hungers is something of a grab bag of sundry reflections on the gospel. As Brown himself explains, the book is intended to be part “pure devotions” and part “philosophical…
F. LaMond Tullis’s Grass Roots in Mexico: Stories of Pioneering Latter-day Saints explores the lives of nineteen people who influenced the founding and growth of Mormonism in Mexico. Tullis is a retired professor of political…
Dialogue 44.3 (Fall 2014):53–101
Initially, I intended only one article on the usage of archaic pronouns
and the implications of certain irregularities. But as I delved deeper
into the implications, particularly what the erratic usage suggests
about the translation of the Book of Mormon, it became obvious
that this particular detour needed to stand alone as a companion
piece to the main article
Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 82–91
Any constitutional amendment unavoidably casts a shadow of uncertaintyover its future interpretation and implementation. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, has far exceeded the originally perceived purpose—elevating thestatus of blacks—and has come to serve as a tool of justice for many oppressedpersons and groups.
In giving my remarks a title, I have quite promiscuously mixed two statements from the New Testament that come from different speakers, at different times, addressing different audiences for different reasons. I even supplied my…
Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 89–94
The day the missionaries came to our house in 1988, a rainbow fell across the sky in our neighborhood on the hill. I stood on the ledge of the bathtub and curled my fingers on the windowsill to pull my scrawny body up to see.
By Eugene England Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. —Paul the Apostle The paradoxical words of Paul quoted above are an obvious place to begin to consider the possibilities of dialogue about…
Listen to the Dialogue Podcast #2 featuring John G. Turner discussing his new book Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet? Then check out this roundtable conclusion at Juvenile Instructor (with all the contributions listed at the end) wherein Turner responds:
Four-and-a-half years ago, during my initial research trip to Utah, I ventured down to Provo and had lunch with Spencer Fluhman and several of his students. Among them were David Grua and Chris Jones (and Stan Thayne, I think). The Juvenile Instructor was a newborn blog at the time. So it’s a bit surreal for me to have read the topical reviews of Pioneer Prophet over the past six weeks at this blog.
I love the field of Mormon history for many reasons. The rich sources. The voluminous scholarship. Most of all, I love the fact that so many people care about the Mormon past. This has some downsides. It makes the field contentious and testy.
Problem Plays that Cultivate CompassionMelissa Leilani Larson. Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love. Salt Lake City: BCC Press, 2017. 142 pp.
Reviewed by Julie Bowman. Published in Dialogue, Fall 2017 (50:3)
Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love brings together two plays by award-winning playwright Melissa Leilani Larson: Happy Little Secrets and Pilot Program. The plays are presented chronologically by premier year. Happy Little Secrets premiered at the New Play Project in 2009, Pilot Program at Plan-B Theatre Company in 2015. Each won the Association for Mormon Letters award for Drama.
The book’s deceptively bright cover, illustrated with a young girl in a solo game of hoop rolling, belies the complexities and maturity of the plays in this compact edition. With hoop rolling as a metaphor for keeping things going, we may take Third Wheel’s cover as cautionary. The plays are thought problems that take us in a bit of a circle. The endings endorse a quiet kind of endurance. There’s nothing wrong with endurance, but it can be frustrating if one wants a conclusion that arrives at a point of view on either of the highly-charged issues that comprise the plays’ central conflicts: same-sex attraction and polygamy.
(This Question and Answer took place between Dialogue and Quincy D. Newell, an associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College and co-editor of the Mormon Studies Review. Dr. Newell recently finished her new book,…