These special Dialogue podcasts, released in honor of our Dialogue Jubilee on September 30, has writers, thinkers, scholars, historians, advocates, editors and leaders presenting their ideas on what has made Dialogue strong in the past 50 years and what will continue it’s legacy in the coming decades. In this fourth session, Armand Mauss discusses “The Dialogue Dream: From Inception to the Present.”
by Richard Sherlock As a pacifist for my entire adult life, I find the Dialogue call for papers too inviting to ignore. During the Vietnam War thirty-five years ago, I came to grips with what…
Baring Imperfect Human TruthsHolly 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.
Dialogue 52.2 (Spring 2019):1–58
ttributing the Book of Mormon’s origin to supernatural forces has
worked well for Joseph Smith’s believers, then as well as now, but not so
well for critics who seem certain natural abilities were responsible. For over
180 years, several secular theories have been advanced as explanations.
Dialogue 8.3/4 (1973): 43–73
Ever since his great synthesis, Darwin’s name has been a source of discomfort to the religious world. Too sweeping to be fully fathomed, too revolutionary to be easily accepted, but too well documented to be ignored, his concepts of evolution1 by natural selection have been hotly debated now for well over a century.
Dialogue readers, take note!
Modern young adult literature traces its roots to 1967, when S. E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders was published and subsequently devoured by young readers who were desperate for literature that spoke to them and reflected the realities they saw daily. In the ensuing years, young adult literature has bravely explored controversial topics like class struggle, mental illnesses, drug abuse, and sexuality, all in the name of allowing teen readers a chance to explore the “real” world. One element of teens’ lives, however, that has often been overlooked in the literature is religion and spirituality. Despite the results of the recent National Study of Youth and Religion showing that nearly forty percent of teens report actively participating in organized religion, religious characters and explorations of spirituality are rarely treated in young adult literature.
Dear Friend of Dialogue:
The past year has been an outstanding one for Dialogue. I hope you have found articles that speak to you. I must admit that I often turn first to the book reviews—it is a way for me to obtain thoughtful insight into the best of the new Mormon-themed books that are published each year….
Dialogue is more than just a print journal. If you haven’t visited our website lately, please do. You can find all the past Dialogue articles there, as well as pieces on selected Mormon current affairs. You might want to take a moment to click on the “Contact Us” link and skim the biographies and photos of our Board of Directors to see who’s working behind the scenes.
Steven L. Peck. Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2015. 220 pp. Paperback: $14.95. ISBN: 978-0988323346.
Steven L. Peck. Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist. Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2015. 211 pp. Paperback: $19.95. ISBN: 978-0842529440.
Reviewed by Michael Austin
If someone ever asks me what kinds of things Steven Peck writes, the best answer I can give goes like this: the BYU biology professor and raconteur writes primarily in the fields of evolutionary biology, speculative theology, literary fiction, computer modeling, poetry, existential horror, satire, personal essay, tsetse fly reproduction, young-adult literature, human ecology, science fiction, religious allegory, environmentalism, and devotional narrative. You know, that kind of thing.
Jack Harrell. Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 156 pp. Paperback: $18.95. ISBN: 978-1-58958-754-0.
Reviewed by Jennifer Quist
The back cover of Jack Harrell’s new collection Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism describes the book as a continuation of “a conversation as old as Mormonism itself.” It’s a fraught phrase, bringing to mind the image of an academic, artistic, and social in-group that has been conversing among themselves for a very long time. It isn’t the in-group’s fault that the conversation happens in the absence of non-members and newcomers to the Church, neither is it their fault that it goes on without writers, readers, and scholars unconnected to the American Mormon heartland. None of this is the in-group’s fault, but perhaps all of it is their problem. Many in the in-group strive to, in Harrell’s words,“giv[e] the church and its religion a human and literary face” (99). However, we can’t understand what our own faces look like without relying on the re ections and perceptions of people and objects outside ourselves. Perhaps Jack Harrell, as a previous outsider to not just the Mormon literary world but the Mormon world altogether, is especially well-suited to put himself forward to articulate what Mormon letters are and what they ought to be and become.