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Mormon Dissent in the Age of Fracture

When fifteen hundred progressive Mormons attended Sunstone Symposium in August 1992, they did so in protest. The symposium had become a center point in the growing battle between Latter-day Saint leaders and activists, especially as…

The September Six and the Evolution of Mormon Magisteria

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published a short essay aimed at limning the conflict between science and religion, particularly with respect to the question of evolution as the mechanism of generating life on Earth. In…

Mormonism’s Inside-Outsider Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait: How a Methodist Girl from Hueytown, Alabama, Became an Acclaimed Mormon Studies Scholar

Excommunication and Finding Wholeness

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 69–79
Five years after my excommunication, I met and entered into a relationship with the man who is my husband to this day. We became a couple in 1991; we held a public commitment ceremony in 1995, a time when same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the United States; we purchased a home together in 1996; and we legally married in California in 2008. Regardless of how or why I was excommunicated in 1986, current Church policy is such that if I were a member, my bishop would have grounds for excommunicating me now, and I cannot currently be reinstated into membership.

Being, A Household World

Reading the Word: Spirit Materiality in the Mountain Landscapes of Nan Shepherd

Review: Lost in Translation Adam S. Miller. The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Review: Nothing by Itself George B. Handley. American Fork

Review: Expertly Built: Stories within Stories Tim Wirkus. The Infinite Future

Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists

The Student: His University and His Church

The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism

The Challenge of Honesty

By Study and By Faith

Every Soul Has Its South

Dialogue 1.2 (Summer 1966): 72–79
In this important article in one of the earliest Dialogue issues, Keller says “I went because I was frankly worried: worried that my wife and children should find me slipping after talking intense brotherhood, worried that the church members I led and taught should know where the doctrine but not the action in life is, worried that the students I counseled and read and philosophized with where I taught should reach for meaning for their lives and find no guts, worried in fact that I should somehow while propagating and preaching the Kingdom of God miss it, miss it altogether. The rest was nonsense.”

Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History: Thoughts on Anti-Intellectualism: A Response

Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History

The Intellectual Tradition of the Latter-day Saints

The Sterling M. McMurring Papers

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

The Rise and Fall of Courage, an Independent RLDS Journal

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/  Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).

Windmill Jousting and Other Madness: Century 2

New Messenger and Advocate

Sunstone

A Wider Sisterhood

BYU Studies, How She Is

Gospel by the Month

Hying to Kolob

An “Inside-Outsider” in Zion

Ideas as Entities: Religion, Reason, and Truth — Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by Sterling M. McMurrin

Beyond Literalism

In loco parentis — Alive and Well in Provo: Brigham Young University: A House of Faith

A Survey of Current Dissertations

Historiography and the New Mormon History: A Historian’s Perspective

Explorations in Mormon Social Character Beyond the Liahona and Iron Rod

B.H. Roberts’s Autobiography

The B.H. Roberts Papers at the University of Utah

Intellectuals in Mormon History: An Update

Famine Relief, the Church, and the Environment

Consecration, Stewardship, and Accountability: Remedy for a Dying Planet

The Church and the Community: Personal Reflections on Mormon Intellectual Life

Freedom and Grace: Rethinking Theocracy

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

Satan’s Foot in the Door: Democrats at Brigham Young University

Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century

Mormonism in Modern Japan

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia

Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?

Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-first Century

Ethnization and Accommodation

Feeding the Fleeing Flock

Science and Mormonism: Past, Present, Future

Dialogue 29.1 (Spring 1996): 80–97
Will the church be able to retain the essence of its theology in the faceof challenges from science? Will the church’s discourse on scientific topicsbe marked by fundamentalism, isolationism, or progressivism? Will the church be able to retain its large contingent of professional scientists?

Thinking About the Word of God in the Twenty-First Century

Membership Growth, Church Activity, Missionary Recruitment

Membership Growth, Church Activity, Missionary Recruitment

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Renegotiating Scylla and Charybdis: Reading and the Distance between New York and Utah

A Saint for All Seasons

Max Weber and Lowell Bennion: Towards an Understanding of Hierarchy and Authority

A Hard Day for Professor Midgely: An Essay for Fawn McKay Brodie

Good Literature for a Chosen People

Ella Smyth Peacock: Seeking Her Place in the West

The Zion University Reverie: A Quantitative Assessment of Brigham Young University’s Academic Climate

Evidence Without Reconciliation: The Creation of the Book of Mormon: A Historical Inquiry by Lamar Petersen

Bringing Balance to Our Historical Writing: From Mission to Madness: Last Son of the Mormon Prophet by Valeen Tippetts Avery

Missionaries, Missions, Converts, Cultures: Mormon Passage: A Missionary Chronicle by Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd

Building Cultural Bridges: Asian American Mormons: Bridging Cultures by Jessie L. Embry

Mission Complexities in Asia: From the East: The History of the Latter-day Saints in Asia, 1851-1996 by R. Lanier Britsch

Postscript from Iraq: A Flicker of Hope in Conflict’s Moral Twilight

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore  WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: War Is Eternal: The Case for Military Preparedness

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Of Wars, Maps, and Ideals

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: From Flanders Fields

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Reflections on War of a Liberal Catholic in Mormon Utah

A Woman of Influence: An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells by Carol Cornwall Madsen

Choices, Consequences, and Grace: God’s Army 2: States of Grace, written and directed by Richard Dutcher

Remembering Gene and His Generation: Proving Contraries: A Collection of Writings in Honor of Eugene England, edited by Robert A. Rees

How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)

Dialogue 41.4 (Winter 2008): 121–147
In this essay, I shall begin by describing what we can learn about our Mother in Heaven from the scriptures. I then will draw from those descriptions some (very modest) suggestions for how we might actually worship, or at least honor, Her in ways that should not be considered offensive or heterodox by traditionalists. This essay is therefore a little exercise in religion-making. It is my hope that I will be able to express my mediating thoughts in a way that will not be deemed offensive by those of either school of thought on the subject.

Modernism and Mormonism: James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and Early Twentieth-Century Mormon Responses to Biblical Criticism

“Weak-Kneed Republicans and Socialist Democrats”: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1953-61

Seeking a “Second Harvest”: Controlling the Costs of LDS Membership in Europe

Belonging (and Believing) as LDS Scholars of Religion

Toward a Theology of Dissent: An Ecclesiological Interpretation

“That Which Surpasses All Understanding”: The Limitations of Human Thought

The Best Place to Deal with Questions: An Interview with Brady Udall

Walking into the Heart of the Questions: An Interview with W. Grant McMurray

Review: Armand L. Mauss. Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport: Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic

Ex-Mormon Narratives and Pastoral Apologetics

Review: E-mails with a Young Mormon about Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon Adam S. Miller. Letters to a Young Mormon

Developing Integrity in an Uncertain World: An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl

“After the Body of My Spirit”: Embodiment, Empathy, and Mormon Aesthetics

The Last Memory: Joseph F. Smith and Lieux de Mémoire in Late Nineteenth-Century Mormonism

Mormon Dissent in the Age of Fracture

When fifteen hundred progressive Mormons attended Sunstone Symposium in August 1992, they did so in protest. The symposium had become a center point in the growing battle between Latter-day Saint leaders and activists, especially as…

The September Six and the Evolution of Mormon Magisteria

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published a short essay aimed at limning the conflict between science and religion, particularly with respect to the question of evolution as the mechanism of generating life on Earth. In…

Mormonism’s Inside-Outsider Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait: How a Methodist Girl from Hueytown, Alabama, Became an Acclaimed Mormon Studies Scholar

Excommunication and Finding Wholeness

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 69–79
Five years after my excommunication, I met and entered into a relationship with the man who is my husband to this day. We became a couple in 1991; we held a public commitment ceremony in 1995, a time when same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the United States; we purchased a home together in 1996; and we legally married in California in 2008. Regardless of how or why I was excommunicated in 1986, current Church policy is such that if I were a member, my bishop would have grounds for excommunicating me now, and I cannot currently be reinstated into membership.

Being, A Household World

Reading the Word: Spirit Materiality in the Mountain Landscapes of Nan Shepherd

Review: Lost in Translation Adam S. Miller. The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Review: Nothing by Itself George B. Handley. American Fork

Review: Expertly Built: Stories within Stories Tim Wirkus. The Infinite Future

Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists

The Student: His University and His Church

The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism

The Challenge of Honesty

By Study and By Faith

Every Soul Has Its South

Dialogue 1.2 (Summer 1966): 72–79
In this important article in one of the earliest Dialogue issues, Keller says “I went because I was frankly worried: worried that my wife and children should find me slipping after talking intense brotherhood, worried that the church members I led and taught should know where the doctrine but not the action in life is, worried that the students I counseled and read and philosophized with where I taught should reach for meaning for their lives and find no guts, worried in fact that I should somehow while propagating and preaching the Kingdom of God miss it, miss it altogether. The rest was nonsense.”

Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History: Thoughts on Anti-Intellectualism: A Response

Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History

The Intellectual Tradition of the Latter-day Saints

The Sterling M. McMurring Papers

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

The Rise and Fall of Courage, an Independent RLDS Journal

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/  Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).

Windmill Jousting and Other Madness: Century 2

New Messenger and Advocate

Sunstone

A Wider Sisterhood

BYU Studies, How She Is

Gospel by the Month

Hying to Kolob

An “Inside-Outsider” in Zion

Ideas as Entities: Religion, Reason, and Truth — Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by Sterling M. McMurrin

Beyond Literalism

In loco parentis — Alive and Well in Provo: Brigham Young University: A House of Faith

A Survey of Current Dissertations

Historiography and the New Mormon History: A Historian’s Perspective

Explorations in Mormon Social Character Beyond the Liahona and Iron Rod

B.H. Roberts’s Autobiography

The B.H. Roberts Papers at the University of Utah

Intellectuals in Mormon History: An Update

Famine Relief, the Church, and the Environment

Consecration, Stewardship, and Accountability: Remedy for a Dying Planet

The Church and the Community: Personal Reflections on Mormon Intellectual Life

Freedom and Grace: Rethinking Theocracy

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

Satan’s Foot in the Door: Democrats at Brigham Young University

Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century

Mormonism in Modern Japan

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia

Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?

Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-first Century

Ethnization and Accommodation

Feeding the Fleeing Flock

Science and Mormonism: Past, Present, Future

Dialogue 29.1 (Spring 1996): 80–97
Will the church be able to retain the essence of its theology in the faceof challenges from science? Will the church’s discourse on scientific topicsbe marked by fundamentalism, isolationism, or progressivism? Will the church be able to retain its large contingent of professional scientists?

Thinking About the Word of God in the Twenty-First Century

Membership Growth, Church Activity, Missionary Recruitment

Membership Growth, Church Activity, Missionary Recruitment

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Renegotiating Scylla and Charybdis: Reading and the Distance between New York and Utah

A Saint for All Seasons

Max Weber and Lowell Bennion: Towards an Understanding of Hierarchy and Authority

A Hard Day for Professor Midgely: An Essay for Fawn McKay Brodie

Good Literature for a Chosen People

Ella Smyth Peacock: Seeking Her Place in the West

The Zion University Reverie: A Quantitative Assessment of Brigham Young University’s Academic Climate

Evidence Without Reconciliation: The Creation of the Book of Mormon: A Historical Inquiry by Lamar Petersen

Bringing Balance to Our Historical Writing: From Mission to Madness: Last Son of the Mormon Prophet by Valeen Tippetts Avery

Missionaries, Missions, Converts, Cultures: Mormon Passage: A Missionary Chronicle by Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd

Building Cultural Bridges: Asian American Mormons: Bridging Cultures by Jessie L. Embry

Mission Complexities in Asia: From the East: The History of the Latter-day Saints in Asia, 1851-1996 by R. Lanier Britsch

Postscript from Iraq: A Flicker of Hope in Conflict’s Moral Twilight

Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore  WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: War Is Eternal: The Case for Military Preparedness

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Of Wars, Maps, and Ideals

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: From Flanders Fields

In the Service of Peace, in the Defense of War: Reflections on War of a Liberal Catholic in Mormon Utah

A Woman of Influence: An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells by Carol Cornwall Madsen

Choices, Consequences, and Grace: God’s Army 2: States of Grace, written and directed by Richard Dutcher

Remembering Gene and His Generation: Proving Contraries: A Collection of Writings in Honor of Eugene England, edited by Robert A. Rees

How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)

Dialogue 41.4 (Winter 2008): 121–147
In this essay, I shall begin by describing what we can learn about our Mother in Heaven from the scriptures. I then will draw from those descriptions some (very modest) suggestions for how we might actually worship, or at least honor, Her in ways that should not be considered offensive or heterodox by traditionalists. This essay is therefore a little exercise in religion-making. It is my hope that I will be able to express my mediating thoughts in a way that will not be deemed offensive by those of either school of thought on the subject.

Modernism and Mormonism: James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and Early Twentieth-Century Mormon Responses to Biblical Criticism

“Weak-Kneed Republicans and Socialist Democrats”: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1953-61

Seeking a “Second Harvest”: Controlling the Costs of LDS Membership in Europe

Belonging (and Believing) as LDS Scholars of Religion

Toward a Theology of Dissent: An Ecclesiological Interpretation

“That Which Surpasses All Understanding”: The Limitations of Human Thought

The Best Place to Deal with Questions: An Interview with Brady Udall

Walking into the Heart of the Questions: An Interview with W. Grant McMurray

Review: Armand L. Mauss. Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport: Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic

Ex-Mormon Narratives and Pastoral Apologetics

Review: E-mails with a Young Mormon about Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon Adam S. Miller. Letters to a Young Mormon

Developing Integrity in an Uncertain World: An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl

“After the Body of My Spirit”: Embodiment, Empathy, and Mormon Aesthetics

The Last Memory: Joseph F. Smith and Lieux de Mémoire in Late Nineteenth-Century Mormonism