Book Review: Holly Welker, ed. Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage
January 7, 2018
Baring Imperfect Human Truths
Holly Welker, ed. Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 296 pp. Paperback: $19.95.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Ostler. Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
We all know the Sunday School answers, but life rarely, if ever, plays out like a seminary video. So what do love, sex, and marriage look like in the lived experience of Mormon women?
Journalist, poet, and “spinster who thinks and writes a great deal about marriage” (1) Holly Welker has compiled a collection of essays that unapologetically reveals the intersection of Mormon theology, culture, individuality, and relational living in her latest book, Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage.
Scrying for the Lord: Magic, Mysticism, and the Origins of the Book of Mormon
March 26, 2018Dialogue 36.4 (Winter 2004):109–128
JOSEPH SMITH GREW UP in a time and place where folk magic was an accepted part of the landscape. Before he was a prophet, he was a diviner, or more specifically, a scryer who used his peepstone to discover the location of buried treasure.
Utah Naming Practices, 1960–2020
March 29, 20241. Introduction You can tell you are from Utah if you are Jaxton, your mother is Sariah, and your grandparents are Alma and LaRue. Jokes such as this one, which center on the creative names…
Coming to MHA: the International Mormon Studies Book Drive Summer Fundraiser
January 30, 2012Lucky souls attending the Mormon History Association meeting in Layton, Utah on June 7th and June 8th can stop by the IMS 2013 Summer Fundraiser (graciously hosted by Dialogue) for free Asian treats. We will be raffling off some fabulous prizes collected from across the globe, including boomerangs from Australia and sacks of the tastiest lychee jellies in Asia! Those searching for an original Father’s Day gift will be pleased to learn that we are also selling several colors of the ubiquitous “家庭是永恒的” tie, the favored Sunday tie of the hip, hardworking Mormons of China’s Pearl River Delta. All proceeds will go to the IMS Book Drive project. We hope to raise all remaining funds needed for the 2013 collections at this Summer Fundraiser.
LePetit Richards and the Big Dipper Carpet—An Amusement Based on a Reworking of Whittle’s Research Notes
November 2, 2021Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…
Introducing Religion & Politics
May 3, 2012
This week marked the ignition of the new online journal Religion & Politics with some familiar Dialogue faces participating. Board Member Max Mueller serves as associate editor and Dialogue Associate Editor Matt Bowman contributes a thought-provoking essay.
Within this inaugural issue, there are two Mormon-related pieces.
International Mormon Studies Book Project
February 19, 2013As a followup to Michelle Inouye’s Winter 2012 Letter to the Editor about the International Mormon Studies Book Project, here is a Patheos post with more information on how to donate. “As Mormonism continues to…
Book Review: Son of the Black Sword: The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior I
January 14, 2016
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
Book Review: Daredevils, by Shawn Vestal
September 19, 2017Lapsing into Daredevilry
Shawn Vestal. Daredevils. New York: Penguin Press, 2016. 308 pp.
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols
It’s a hard truth: you have to be damn smart to be a writer of good fiction. If you’re dumb, forget it. You have to hear words in your head—and who doesn’t? But you also have to know how to put them together in a sentence that’s not only grammatical but original in its context, truer than any other sentence could possibly be. Then you have to do that with paragraphs and chapters in the service of a whole whose shape knocks readers right out of unconsciousness, makes them alive, blasts their eyes open so they see the world new.
The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology
April 11, 2018Dialogue 26.1 (Spring 1993): 23–82
THE CLASH BETWEEN OBEDIENCE to ecclesiastical authority and the integrity
of individual conscience is certainly not one upon which Mormonism has
a monopoly. But the past two decades have seen accelerating tensions in
the relationship between the institutional church and the two overlapping
subcommunities I claim—intellectuals and feminists.