Book Review: Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories.
June 24, 2017
Invisible Men / Invincible Women
Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories. San Francisco: Outpost 19, 2016. 150 pp. Paperback: $16.00.
Reviewed by Lisa Rumsey Harris
Dialogue. Winter 2016
The gaze of the girl on the cover of Eric Freeze’s short story collection arrested me—stopped me. Her eyes, full of hostility, told me that if I opened the book, I would be intruding. Her bright knee-length plaid skirt, reminiscent of schoolgirl uniforms, belied the knowledge behind her glare. If it wasn’t for her posture, her arms embracing something, I wouldn’t have noticed the titular Invisible Man next to her on the cover.
Her warning wasn’t wrong. I felt like an intruder as I began to read. I could only take it in small doses—read, then turn the ideas over and over in my mind, like rubbing a smooth stone between my fingers.
Commentary: Putting our shoulders to the wheel to end racism and white supremacy in Mormonism
August 17, 2017The Salt Lake Tribune printed this important “Commentary: Putting our shoulders to the wheel to end racism and white supremacy in Mormonism.” Here is an excerpt:
As Mormons, we raise our voices to decry as wholly immoral the forces of white supremacy, racism, and neo-Nazism that are becoming more visible and emboldened in the United States.
We raise our voices to denounce as an affront to our faith the abuse of LDS scriptures, doctrines, and images of apostles and prophets to advance white supremacy and racism.
White supremacists have comfortably used LDS scriptures and quotes from apostles — even the image of Joseph Smith — to support their cause on social media, seemingly without fear of being held accountable…
hose of us who grew up in the LDS Church Young Women’s program pledged every week to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things and in all places.
We stand now, in our time, on this issue, and in the places where we live, and we say that there is nothing of God in racism, white supremacy, or neo-Nazism.
Topic Pages: Christian Holidays
December 3, 20202013: Robert Rees, “Easter,” Dialogue 46.2 (Summer 2013): 92 – 93. A poem about a grandfather watching his grandson experience Easter. 2013: Michael Hicks, “Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy,” Dialogue 46.2 (Summer 2013): 103. A poem…
Topic pages: Polygamy
July 27, 20212019: Blaire Ostler, “Queer Polygamy” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 52 No. 1 (2019): 33–43. Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems…
Call for Papers: D. Michael Quinn: The Life and Times of a Mormon Historian
September 15, 2021Few figures in the development of Mormon studies during the late-twentieth century are more significant than D. Michael Quinn. Educated at Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and Yale University, Quinn was among scholars…
Book Review: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad. Way Below the Angels, by Craig Harline
June 24, 2016
Craig Harline. Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014.
Reviewed by Rosalynde Frandsen Welch
Craig Harline’s mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary, is a hilarious, heart-of-gold account of the highs and lows of the author’s experiences in the Belgium Antwerp Mission in the early 1970s. The story proceeds chronologically through the events of Harline’s mission call and training period in the old LTM, his arrival in Belgium and subsequent travails with uninterested Belgians, and his eventual return home as a slightly-older and probably-a-bit-wiser young man. Throughout, young Elder Harline wrestles with his own unrealistic expectations of grandeur and occasionally encounters a moment of shimmering grace. The events and settings are, on the surface, highly entertaining but hardly exceptional. Non-Mormon readers, who are the primary audience for the book’s publisher, Eerdmans, will come away with a lightly-seasoned glimpse of a Mormon mission experience in Europe; Mormon readers familiar with mission culture will respond with recognition and identification.
Dialogue Lectures #34 w/Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
August 31, 2017
In the newest Dialogue podcast Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Harvard University professor, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, discusses her new book A House Full of Females – Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835 -1870.
From the Miller Eccles website:
In January 1870, three or four thousand Latter-day Saint women gathered in the old tabernacle in Salt Lake City to protest federal anti-polygamy legislation pending in Congress. To the astonishment of outsiders, the Utah Territorial Legislature soon granted women the vote, an action that eventually brought them into the most radical wing of the national women’s rights movements. Then, as now, observers asked how women could simultaneously support a national campaign for political and economic rights while defending marital practices that to most people seemed relentlessly patriarchal.
Pioneers in Dialogue
July 25, 2021On July 24, Utah celebrates the state holiday of Pioneer Day, in commemoration and honor of the Mormon pioneers. With a hallowed and complicated history, pioneers are a mainstay in the history of Mormonism. Below…
Roundtable: The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU
August 13, 2021The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…
Politicking with the Saints: On Reading Benjamin Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
April 24, 2021In an era awash in a sea of reboots and re-examinations, one may be forgiven for initially wondering why yet another treatment of Mormon Nauvoo is strictly necessary. The city, after all, has received its…