Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…
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…
Since he was a child, he’d dreamed of himself in one form and woken up, always disappointed, always jolted by the reality and by the way that others looked at him. In the first years,…
Dialogue 12.4 (Winter 1979): 90–92
In postscript let me say that I have been accused of forging this letter and of taking unfair advantage of President Smith. Let the readers judge. I am personally grateful that the Church has not been caught in the position of taking a stand that might very well prove to be wrong in the future
The Spring issue is on its way to the printer! Highlights include poetry by Timothy Liu, a nice fat book review section, Sam Brown’s much-anticipated article on the early Mormon “Chain of Belonging,” an especially…
In a guest post for Rational Faiths, Board Member Patrick Mason says “It’s pretty obvious that most Mormons are not pacifists. But if we are in fact going to worship Jesus, and not just make a dumb idol out of the Babe of Bethlehem, then we should think long and hard about it.
Mormons have by and large accepted the dominant Christian notion of “just war,” first articulated not in the New Testament nor by the earliest Christians (many of whom went to the lion’s den rather than serve in the military), but rather by the fourth- and fifth-century Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. It’s only natural to believe that if someone hits you, you should hit them back. Or that violence is effective in defeating our enemies. Or that peace can come through war. The trouble is, Jesus taught none of these things—in fact, he taught just the opposite.”
Dear Friend of Dialogue,
Dialogue is entering its Jubilee year – can you believe it’s been five decades? We have many debts to pay to our founders and all the authors, poets, and artists who have made Dialogue so special over the past fifty years. While all those people would no doubt generously forgive our debts to them in the spirit of the Jubilee, it seems to me that the best thing we can do is to pay it forward and ensure that Dialogue remains just as relevant, humane, thought-provoking, and forward-looking for the next fifty years as it has been since 1966.
Relevant, humane, thought-provoking, and forward-looking. That’s why I love Dialogue. In a world overloaded with blogs and tweets and memes, isn’t it nice to slow down and read something that has been carefully crafted, peer reviewed, and professionally edited?
Dialogue and the Dangerous, Beautiful Possibilities of Mormon Literature by Michael Austin
Cross-posted at the Association of Mormon Letters blog.
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. This is important for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with Mormon literature. But some of the reasons have a lot to do with Mormon literature, perhaps the most important being that the advent of Dialogue fifty years ago fundamentally altered the possibility space in which Mormon literature could occur.
This happened in two ways. In the first place, Dialogue was the first venue that regularly discussed Mormon literature as an academic discipline. During its first twelve years, Dialogue published four special issues devoted to Mormon literature (here, here, here, and here), the last one being the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters—an organization that was created largely by Dialogue’s earliest contributors.
To understand the significance of this, we have to imagine a world without blogs, e-mail, comment sections, Amazon, or Wikipedia.