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Genetics and Gathering the House of Israel

Questions from My Past Listen to an interview about this piece here. My patriarchal blessing indicates that I am a literal descendant of Ephraim and heir to specific blessings and promises. But what does this…

The Correct [Domain] Name of the Church: Technology, Naming, and Legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition

Of all the changes made in response to the 2018 decision to emphasize the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, those made to the official Latter-day Saint web and digital…

Drum Rhythms and Golden Scriptures: Reasons for Mormon Conversion within Haiti’s Culture of Vodou

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. At first glance, it may be difficult to see a relationship between Haitian Vodou and Mormonism.[1] How could Mormonism, which established and upheld racist policies…

Understanding the Community of Christ’s Doctrine and Covenants Dale E. Luffman, Commentary on the Community of Christ Doctrine and Covenants. Volume 2: The Reorganization—Community of Christ Era

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

This is an important, accessible book that should be in the hands of everyone who thinks deeply about Mormonism’s place in the world. Writing for the Cambridge Element series on religion and violence, Patrick Mason…

Sweater

Horizontal stripes 
black and white 

With Marbles for Eyes

As they crested the final hill into town, the speed limit dropped and the noise from the tires was quieter and less constant. Travis looked out Sarah’s window and she looked at him like he…

The Empty Space between the Walls | Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record

The intellectual strength of Mormon scholarship lies in the academic study of its own history. As important as the study of that history is, less than one percent of the world’s population has any interest in it. If Mormonism wishes to become more than a local sect, if it wishes to become a global religion, it must stop being so self-absorbed and start speaking a moral language comprehensible to a larger portion of the world.

Not Alone | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death is one of the great anxieties and mysteries that permeate human existence. Through various art forms, and across different contexts, people have sought to alleviate the sorrow and grief that stem from death. Moth and…

Envisioning Mormon Art | Laura Allred Hurtado, Immediate Present

Last summer, the Church History Museum was busy preparing to send art from Salt Lake City to New York City. The backstory of this move was the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. This nonprofit is the brainchild of historian Richard Bushman and author Glen Nelson, trying to fill a gap in what they saw in Mormon arts and arts scholarship.

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Genetics and Gathering the House of Israel

Questions from My Past Listen to an interview about this piece here. My patriarchal blessing indicates that I am a literal descendant of Ephraim and heir to specific blessings and promises. But what does this…

The Correct [Domain] Name of the Church: Technology, Naming, and Legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition

Of all the changes made in response to the 2018 decision to emphasize the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, those made to the official Latter-day Saint web and digital…

Drum Rhythms and Golden Scriptures: Reasons for Mormon Conversion within Haiti’s Culture of Vodou

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. At first glance, it may be difficult to see a relationship between Haitian Vodou and Mormonism.[1] How could Mormonism, which established and upheld racist policies…

Understanding the Community of Christ’s Doctrine and Covenants Dale E. Luffman, Commentary on the Community of Christ Doctrine and Covenants. Volume 2: The Reorganization—Community of Christ Era

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

This is an important, accessible book that should be in the hands of everyone who thinks deeply about Mormonism’s place in the world. Writing for the Cambridge Element series on religion and violence, Patrick Mason…

Sweater

Horizontal stripes 
black and white 

With Marbles for Eyes

As they crested the final hill into town, the speed limit dropped and the noise from the tires was quieter and less constant. Travis looked out Sarah’s window and she looked at him like he…

The Empty Space between the Walls | Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record

The intellectual strength of Mormon scholarship lies in the academic study of its own history. As important as the study of that history is, less than one percent of the world’s population has any interest in it. If Mormonism wishes to become more than a local sect, if it wishes to become a global religion, it must stop being so self-absorbed and start speaking a moral language comprehensible to a larger portion of the world.

Not Alone | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death is one of the great anxieties and mysteries that permeate human existence. Through various art forms, and across different contexts, people have sought to alleviate the sorrow and grief that stem from death. Moth and…

Envisioning Mormon Art | Laura Allred Hurtado, Immediate Present

Last summer, the Church History Museum was busy preparing to send art from Salt Lake City to New York City. The backstory of this move was the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. This nonprofit is the brainchild of historian Richard Bushman and author Glen Nelson, trying to fill a gap in what they saw in Mormon arts and arts scholarship.

Horror Becomes Banal Under Scrutiny but Loss is Lasting in The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner | Jennifer Quist, The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Although courtroom dramas can be entertaining, providing a formula for introducing new information through surprise witnesses or new evidence, simple procedurals can grow tired. An antidote is a realistic courtroom novel, where inner change and contemplation…

Helping Us Think and Be in the World | Linda Sillitoe, Owning the Moon

Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below. In 2016, the poet Solmaz Sharif said, “More and more, I am becoming convinced that poetry is not a form of…

The Gift of Language | Heidi Naylor, Revolver

The stories in Heidi Naylor’s short story collection Revolver present characters who have experienced regret, grief, loss, and even death. As readers, we have the opportunity to peer into the abyss of their lives, while still garnering from the experience some little hope to carry on. Sounds grim, perhaps, but literature allows us to experience vicariously the circumstances, situations, and tragedies we would rather avoid in our own lives, perhaps with the hope that we might learn therefrom.

A Life Worth Living | George B. Handley, Learning to Like Life: A Tribute to Lowell Bennion

The highest achievement for a volume of Festschrift is to prompt readers to revisit the life and teachings of that individual in whose honor it has been composed and move them to act in furtherance of…

Traveling “the undiscovered country” | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death comes into our lives all too often; we don’t seek it out. As much as possible, we focus on essential, everyday concerns and keep death in the distance, at the edge of the horizon.…

A Philosophical Portrait in Pieces | Steven L. Peck, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats

It has now been months since I first made the acquaintance of Gilda Trillim, but even now I must admit that I do not completely understand her.

Art

Gender Structures within Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition | Sandra Clark Jergensen and Shelah Mastny Miner, eds. Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition

Aptly titled, Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition is a well-curated collection of prose and poetry featuring a specific demographic of Mormon women who read and contribute to the literary journal and blog Segullah. Eleven thoughtfully arranged categories containing fifty-eight voices capture a diversity of experiences that occasionally touch on issues of class, sexual orientation, ability, race, and ethnicity, but primarily plumb the life and death observations and gendered experiences of a middle-class swath of well-educated, able-bodied, heteronormative, married women from different age groups and North American geographies (their rare references to race or ethnicity also suggest racial homogeneity among them).

The Song of the Righteous is a Prayer unto Me

One of my favorite types of sacred music is the music of the Russian Orthodox church. It has its origins in Byzantine chant, but developed its own distinct style called Znamenny Chant. It is sung in Old Slavonic, so I cannot understand it with the exception of a word here or there that is similar in modern Russian, but I find it incredibly beautiful. Sung in resonant sacred spaces as part of worship services, you hear the devotion in the music. Not only are the sounds and attitudes of the singers imbued with beauty, the music is part of a rich symbolism, together with candles and incense, that help the worshipper to look upward to the divine. Other religious traditions have similarly beautiful elements involving music. For example, a muezzin calls out the adhan, or call to prayer, from the mosque five times during the day; a hazzan, or cantor, is a trained musician who sings prayers in the synagogue. 

On Apple Seeds, Rats, and the State of Mormon Literature | Steven L. Peck, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats

Steven L. Peck has long been seen as a pioneer in the field of Mormon letters, because of his ability to move beyond the usual clichés and expectations that often come with fiction about the faith. In two of his previous novels, The Scholar of Moab and A Short Stay in Hell, he successfully moved the genre into the twenty-first century because of his willingness to push boundaries, embrace the unorthodox, and explore difficult themes. His latest contribution, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats, follows this same vein by branching out into even newer territory, but unfortunately, it often gets lost along the way. 

Resisting Interpretation | Lisa Bickmore, Ephemerist

Ephemerist, n.: (1) after the Greek word for day, a journal keeper; (2) a collector of ephemera (see archivist); (3) an inventor of ephemera (see capitalist); (4) a devotee of ephemera (see nudist); (5) one who privileges ephemera (see nepotist); (6) a scientist whose subject is ephemera (see mycologist).

What follows is a lecture on three samples from a known ephemerist.

Problem Plays that Cultivate Compassion | Melissa Leilani Larson, Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love

Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love brings together two plays by award-winning playwright Melissa Leilani Larson: Happy Little Secrets and Pilot Program. The plays are presented chronologically by premier year. Happy Little…

Opening Invisible Doors: Considering Heavenly Mother | Rachel Hunt Steenblik, Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother

Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother is a collection of poems written by Rachel Hunt Steenblik and illustrated by Ashley Mae Hoiland. Divided into four sections and armed with nearly thirty pages of notes, the work of this book appears to be two-fold: first, to enter into a discoveratory conversation about the nature of Heavenly Mother, and second, an outcropping of the research Steenblik conducted for the scholarly article “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven.”

Judith Freeman: A Remarkable Memoir of an Unremarkable Life | Judith Freeman, The Latter Days: A Memoir

Judith Freeman’s The Latter Days: A Memoir is a remarkable memoir of an unremarkable life. The American novelist ticks all of the standard boxes when recounting her childhood—abusive father, distant mother, disowned sibling, youthful indiscretion—none falling…

The Life of a Spiritualist Saint | Scott H. Partridge, ed., Thirteenth Apostle: The Diaries of Amasa M. Lyman, 1832–1877

In historic accounts of Mormonism’s founding leaders, Amasa M. Lyman is often absent. However, despite this absence, Lyman is noteworthy for the many roles he played in the formative years of the Church. He was…

Anything but Orthodox | Matthew James Babcock, Heterodoxologies

I was nineteen years old when I first learned about the essay form. I was enrolled in an introductory survey of creative writing, sitting in a middle row of pocked and drab desks in a…

Thin Volume, Thick Questions | Luisa Perkins, Prayers in Bath

The half-inch thickness of the thin paperback belies its contents. Some context on the limited edition, published by Mormon Artists Group, explains the dense publication: fifty hand-bound copies in Asahi silk, hand numbered, and signed with color reproductions of the four original art pieces created by Jacqui Larsen for the book.

As the Savor: The Poetry of R. A. Christmas | R. A. Christmas, Saviors on Mt. Disneyland: New and Collected Poems

If you have never read a poem by Bob Christmas, this book is your chance to catch up. Take it. 

If you have read poems by Bob Christmas, this book is your chance to enjoy yourself all over again. Plunge in.

Raw Hope and Kindness: The Burning Point | Tracy McKay, The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope

When reading a good book I’ll often hop online to supplement or enrich my sensory experience. This time I sought a detailed close-up for mala beads, a tactile sense of the silk handkerchief around a deck of tarot cards, an image of a gilded ketubah, and a sense of the gleaming stained glass medallion in the Nauvoo temple—but Tracy McKay’s memoir also gave me opportunities to look up some classic songs and spend some time enjoying them through a new auditory “lens.”

Our Artistic Potential | The Mormon Arts Center, The Kimball Challenge at Fifty: Mormon Arts Center Essays

The occasion for this slim new volume of essays is the fiftieth anniversary of Spencer W. Kimball’s “Education for Eternity” talk, delivered to Brigham Young University faculty at the commencement of fall semester 1967. Although…

Duties of a Deacon

I never got to do it when I was a twelve-year-old Mormon boy even if it is, technically, as much a duty of a deacon as passing the sacrament—and I doubted anyone in my presidency…

The Pew

Helen realizes at church Sunday morning that still, after all these years, she does not have fond feelings for the chapel. She doesn’t want to hold on to any grudges against it—she doesn’t take it…

The Making of a Hard, Then Softened Heart in The Book of Laman | Mette Harrison, The Book of Laman

A fallen prophet. An abandoned wife and mother. A starving little brother. A big brother whose street smarts and steel are the linchpin to his family’s survival. The cast of Mette Harrison’s alternative telling of…

Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, with Mormonism as an Option

Dialogue 50.3 (Fall 2017): 89–115
I thus argue that Mormonism exists wherever there is belief in the Book of Mormon, even though many adherents reject the term “Mormonism” to distance themselves from the LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake City.

Mormon-Catholic Relations in Utah History: A Sketch

One of the happy surprises that makes history so interesting is the fact that Utah ever became Mormon Country, for during the roughly one hundred years before 1847 it had been, if anything, Catholic Country. Catholic explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, and traders had repeatedly plied their trades back and forth through the territory. Brigham Young University historian Ted J. Warner offers an intriguing speculation as to what might have happened if the Franciscan friars Dominguez and Escalante had been able to fulfill their promise to the Indians at Utah Lake that they would return and establish a mission among them.

A Capacious Priesthood and a Life of Holiness

As an offering in speculative theology, this paper reconsiders the current normative understanding of a male-only priesthood as presented in the Book of Mormon, specifically in Alma 13:1–20, and proposes that Alma presents a more capacious model. While this text is generally accepted as supporting the establishment and practice of a male-only priesthood (and a model of the Melchizedek Priesthood), I argue that Alma’s message was meant to expand the role of priesthood in society and to provide a way for an entire community to enter into a life of holiness.The exegesis that this paper presents is not simply an attempt to bring women into the conversation but to expand the conversation for the entire community—the community of all believers: men, women, and the rest of us. 

The Provo Tabernacle and Interfaith Collaboration

In October of 1996, Father William Flegge and his St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a problem. Renovations had left their beautiful Spanish Mission–style building unsafe for the high volume of parishioners expected for the upcoming Christmas services. That was when Father Flegge telephoned LDS Church headquarters to ask if Christmas Mass could be held at the Provo Tabernacle. In addition to welcoming Father Flegge and his flock to the tabernacle, LDS leaders invited them to bring into the tabernacle whatever sacred dress, objects, and symbols they needed to realize this important ceremony.Julie Boerio-Goates, pastoral coordinator for the parish, had plenty of experience staging Mass in the three-hundred-seat St. Francis building but was nervous about staging it in the two-thousand-seat tabernacle. The parish moved a lot of materials necessary for Christmas Mass from the St. Francis church, but since the tabernacle was so much bigger than St. Francis, more set dressing was needed. Serendipitously, seminarian Patrick Elliot had just been assigned to the parish as an assistant. Elliot had a good eye and knew where to find additional decorations. On December 24, two Christmas Masses were held in the evening and one at midnight.These services provide a vivid illustration of the Provo Tabernacle’s use for interfaith cooperation. 

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 2: Ordinances, Quorums, Nonpriesthood Authority, Presiding, Priestesses, and Priesthood Bans

Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
In the prequel to this article, I discussed in general contours the dual nature of authority—individual and institutional—and how the modern LDS concept of priesthood differs significantly from the ancient version in that it has become an abstract form of authority that can be “held” (or withheld, as the case might be).

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 1: Definitions and Development

Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
The issue of authority in Mormonism became painfully public with the rise of the Ordain Women movement.

A Book Full of Insights | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is one of the most decorated historians of early America. Her book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990) earned her both…

Lapsing into Daredevilry | Shawn Vestal, Daredevils

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 Fruit of Knowledge | Thomas F. Rogers, Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty

As a book of short, religious, and academic non-fiction, Thomas F. Rogers’s Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand is extremely valuable to the Mormon intellectual community; but as a reflection of a devoted disciple and…

Just Saying | Stanton Harris Hall, Just Seeing

Stan Hall was one of Dialogue’s most enthusiastic volunteers back in the ’70s when I was its editor. We published some of his poetry then and were sorry when he moved back to his home turf in the Northwest. I was therefore happy to see that he had continued to hone his poetic gift in his privately published collection Just Seeing. The quality of this work causes me to hope that it will be read beyond his family circle, extending even into a second volume, perhaps entitled Just Saying. 

Asking the Questions | Julie J. Nichols, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories

In her full-length debut, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories, Julie J. Nichols presents the interconnected lives of various women living in Salt Lake City over a span of thirty years, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the seven stories focuses on a different main character until their lives become so entangled that the narratives converge in tragedy, heartache, and eventual healing. Some of these stories appeared previously in other publications, including Dialogue.

Faith, Family, and Art | Jack Harrell, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism

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…

Exploring the Unfamiliar Realm of Religion in Young Adult Literature | Julie Berry, The Passion of Dolssa; Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

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 New Descartes and the Book of Mormon | Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself

The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy and a leading figure in the rationalist movement. Descartes was weary of past authority and of knowledge gained through the senses.…

Past Second Base | Joey Franklin, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married

At the last Association of Writiers & Writing Programs conference, a famed historical literary figure stood for pictures and selfies next to booths piled high with books. He was bald except for a tuft of…

Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives: Ceaselessly into the Past | Karen Rosenbaum, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives

When reading Karen Rosenbaum’s short story collection Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives, I kept thinking about the end of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s haunting conclusion: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”So it is with the women who populate Rosenbaum’s fourteen stories in this collection. The past defines them, breathes always within them.

Quiet Stories, Complex Emotion | Darin Cozzens, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories

Darin Cozzens’s second collection, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories, contains Emus and Mormon spinsters, ill-fated wedding ceremonies and wheelchair races in the dementia ward, washtub nostalgia and the ambiguous values…

Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.

The Source of God’s Authority: One Argument for an Unambiguous Doctrine of Preexistence

The famous couplet coined by Lorenzo Snow in 1840, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,”rears its head every now and then, inspiring both awe and some confusion among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints while causing at least a degree of discomfort for Church leaders and spokespeople who are trying to make Mormonism more palatable for our mainstream Christian friends and critics. Some observers have even suggested that the Church is intentionally downplaying this doctrine.Nevertheless, the couplet found its way into the 2013 Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manual Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, and this distinctive doctrine also appeared prominently in previous manuals containing the teachings of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

Gerontocracy and the Future of Mormonism

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 broke a centuries-old tradition within Roman Catholicism of service until-death of its top leader. If, as many expect, Pope Francis I eventually follows Benedict’s lead, it is likely that a new and enduring tradition will have been effected.The astounding transformation of the Roman Catholic Church under the younger and energized Francis underscores the importance of Benedict’s courageous decision. 

Scared Sacred: How the Horrifying Story of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Can Help Save Us

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 75–88
Probably the most destabilizing piece of historical information most Mormons come across is Joseph Smith’s polygamy.

A View from the Inside: How Critical Ethnography Changed My Mind About Polygamy

My first entry into the world of so-called Mormon polygamy began on June 17, 2010 when I attended the second annual conference of Safety Net, an organization that seeks “to assist people associated with the practice of plural marriage, whether an active polygamist or exiting polygamist.” Safety Net strives for neutrality toward the actual practice of plural marriage so they can “meet physical, emotional, and educational needs.”The goal of their annual conferences is to increase awareness of the issues surrounding the practice of plural marriage, present individual stories of polygamy, and discuss resources available to those wanting to leave polygamous family structures.

Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Levirate Widow

Polygamy is, for many Americans, Mormonism’s defining feature. Even now, over a century after the main church abandoned the practice, images of Latter-day Saint polygamy persist in the popular and scholarly imagination. Most accounts of Mormon polygamy have either emphasized sexual experimentation and marital reform on the one hand or biblical primitivism on the other.While these accounts are at least partly true—Joseph Smith did believe that he was replacing a failed system of marriage, and he and his colleagues frequently invoked Bible patriarchs to explain their behaviors and doctrines—polygamy was also a solution to a specific set of contemporary cultural problems—remarriage after bereavement—refracted through biblical interpretation.

The Celestial Law

Mary Cooper and James Oakey, my maternal great-grandparents, married in 1840 and settled in Nottingham, England. Victoria was on the throne, and occasionally the citizens of Nottingham came out to pay honor as the queen in her carriage passed through on the way to Belvoir Castle. Mary gave birth to seven living children. James became a designer and maker of lace and also helped to develop new lace-making machinery.

Jesus Christ, Marriage, and Mormon Christianities: 2016 Smith-Pettit Lecture, Sunstone Symposium

According to his official history, that’s all Joseph Smith said to his mother after God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him while he prayed by himself in the woods. Whether or not Presbyterianism was true was a more pressing question for the young Joseph Smith than it is for most of you. Sometime in the mid-1820s, Lucy Mack Smith and several of Joseph’s siblings joined a Presbyterian church. Joseph must have wrestled with his mother’s choice. Like his father, though, he never joined any Protestant church. But it was surely a major point of controversy and discussion in the family. 

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

I am the Mormon among Catholics part of this equation. I was raised in Utah Valley—well I got taller, anyway. I got my undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University (BYU) and both of my graduate…

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic Among Mormons

Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time. 

Abundant Grace: The Humanness of Catholics and Latter-day Saints as a Basis for Friendship and Collaboration

At the conclusion of each Mormon History Association’s annual conference, there is a “devotional.” (Until I became a devotee of Mormon history, devotional was always an adjective, as in “devotional literature,” but the Latter-day Saints have shifted my grammatical foundations, and, because of my exposure to Mormons, I’ll never hear words like “fireside,” “garments,” or even “Jell-O” in the same way.) At these devotionals, I always look to see if my favorite LDS hymn is being featured—“The Spirit of God”—number 2 in the LDS hymnal.

Ordination and Blessing

I grew up in an anti-Catholic world. The first thing I remember hearing about Catholics in the small town in which I was raised was not just negative, it was extremely so. Everyone I knew was distrustful, suspicious, or hateful toward Catholics. When I joined the LDS Church at age ten, I heard more anti-Catholic sentiment, including the branding of the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and “the great and abominable church” or “church of the devil,” based on a biased reading of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:6, 14:9).

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

I would like to begin with an image. There is a tree in the middle of a barren field. A rod of iron extends from it. People jeer from a large building bounded by a river nearby. Those holding on to the rod ignore the jeering from the building and partake of the tree’s sweet fruit, but there are some who heed the jeering and become ashamed even after eating the fruit, and are lost. This image is intimately familiar to so many Latter-day Saints as Lehi’s dream from 1 Nephi 8 in the Book of Mormon. It is, however, a relatively new image for me. I did not grow up with the image.

More than a Different Color | W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness

Three decades after the LDS Church lifted the priesthood ban on African Americans, scholars are offering readers a host of new studies that address the legacy of racial thought and practice in the LDS Church.…

A Cluttering of Symbol and Metaphor | David G. Pace, Dream House on Golan Drive

How to represent lived religious experience without either underplaying its reality or slipping into the magical-fantastical is an ongoing difficulty in Mormon literature. David G. Pace, in his novel Dream House on Golan Drive, has decided…

Mormonism from Varied Fictional Perspectives | William Morris, Dark Watch and Other Mormon-American Stories

Short story collections are a medium well suited to explorations of Mormonism as a culture and what it means to be Mormon. They allow for diversity. They impose few limitations. They permit an author to…

Walking the Narrow Path | Patrick Q. Mason, Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt

While reading Planted one evening, I turned to my wife, Sara, and said, “I think that we are in the book.” I was reading an anecdote that Patrick shares near the end about some non-LDS Christian friends who attend a ward Christmas party. As they observe people talking and children running around, the friends comment on how much they admire the community because it feels like a real family (170). I remember making those comments.

Planted: An Earthy Approach to Faith and Doubt | Patrick Q. Mason, Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt

Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt by Patrick Mason is part of the Living Faith series by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Announcing the series, the Maxwell Institute wrote: “Each [book] will contain the voice of a scholar who has cultivated a believing heart while engaging in the disciplines of the Academy.”

How Can a Religious Person Tolerate Other Religions?

When I was in my early twenties, a prominent American rabbi, Yitz Greenberg, once heard me lecture to a Jewish group. I was offering comparisons between Judaism and other religions. Afterward he complimented me on…

Why do Some Perceive the Church to be a Cult? Inside and Outside Perceptions versus Reality

The Golden Dream and the Nightmare: The Closet Crusade of A.C. Lambert

Pillars of My Family: A Brief Saga

Dissent and Schism in the Early Church: Explaining Mormon Fissiparousness

Dancing Through the Doctrine: Observations on Religion and Feminism

Dialogue 28.3 (Fall 1995): 1–12
As American feminist thinkers and organizers, we’ve walked a long road since then, a road that has led us farther and farther away from religious discourse and Christian justification. Our reasons have been good: We didn’t want to limit or exclude. We didn’t want to direct all feminists down a single philosophical path.

Leaders and Members: Messages from the General Handbook of Instructions

The Book of Mormon as Great Literature | Richard Dilworth Rust, Feasting on the Word

A number of years ago when I was attending Bowling Green University as a graduate student, I was introduced to the writings of John Muir, the American naturalist. One of the approaches we used in…

Informed Scholarship | Donald W. Parry and Dana M. Pike, eds., LDS Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) among Latter-day Saints, prompted in part by the appointment of several BYU faculty (Donald W. Parry, David R. Seely, Dana M.…

Wayward Saints: The Conflict of Opposing Visions | Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young

Roanld W. Walker’s study Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young is a valuable contribution to recent Mormon scholarship. Among other things, the book illuminates important questions and concerns of both past and present. Walker…

CAUTION: Men in Trees | Darrell Spencer, CAUTION: Men in Trees

CAUTION: Men in Trees. Hmmm, one might say. Are these men swaying from limb to limb like the perennial hero, Tarzan? Are these men going out on a limb or barking up the wrong tree?…

Mormonism and the Radical Religious Movement in Early Colonial New England

Mormons believe that forerunners prepared the way for the restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ in the latter days. This paper examines a special set of those forerunners, namely, the progenitors of the early converts to the LDS church, whose religious experiences took them through a refiner’s fire so significant and revolutionary that it helped provide their descendants with the disposition to embrace a new, radical faith.

The Discovery of Native “Mormon” Communities in Russia

In early June 1998, Sheridan Gashler, president of the Russia Samara Mission, felt moved to place missionaries in a small village called Bogdanovka. This was an exciting change in policy. Early LDS missionary work in Russia had been concentrated in large urban areas where most missionaries could enjoy such civilized luxuries as paved roads, frequent public transportation, telephone lines, and running water. In recent years missions branched into smaller cities, but the Russian village was an altogether new frontier. Bogdanovka, although it is only 100 miles or so from the large regional capital city of Samara, is a world apart. 

Parallelomania and the Study of Latter-day Scripture: Confirmation, Coincidence, or the Collective Unconscious?

Dialogue 33.2 (Summer 2001):139–173
This article looks at some of the ways parallels have been used by Nibley in the exposition of latter-day scripture, the types of parallels employed, and some of the problems that arise from this comparative exercise.

Ritual as Theology and as Communication

Theology is usually considered an intellectual activity for philosophers and educated religionists. Actually, most humans discuss the same sub jects, but at a different level than do the pundits. Commoners too cogitate upon the nature of suprahuman power, the possibilities and limitations of humankind, the means by which we and the cosmos came into existence, and our ultimate fate.

Analyzing LDS Growth in Guatemala: Report from a Barrio

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (usually called Mormon or LDS church) is having enormous success in most parts of the world. Growth is particularly impressive in Latin America. In 1971 there were only 217,500 LDS members on this continent, accounting for no more than seven percent of the church’s total membership.

Making Miracles | Phyllis Barber, Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination

When I was twelve, the youth in our ward did baptisms for the dead in the Los Angeles temple. To pique our interest, our leaders told tales of spirits appearing to the living and thanking…

Restless Grace | Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

I first met Terry Tempest Williams in January 1999 at a commemoration in Tucson, Arizona, for my uncle, United States Representative Morris Udall. The beautiful eulogies honoring his many accomplishments, particularly his record on the…

The Dangers of Missionary Work | Ken Driggs, Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders

On a quiet Monday evening in 1974, two Mormon missionaries visited a Texas trailer house—oddly situated behind a taxidermy shop—at the invitation of the occupant, Bob Klea son, an inactive member of the church. Instead…

Textual Tradition, the Evolution of Mormon Doctrine, and the Doctrine & Covenants | H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary

H. Michael Marquardt published his early monographs with anti-Mor mons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, but these works exhibited higher scholarly standards than the Tanners’ work. Marquardt co-authored Inventing Mor monism: Tradition and the Historical Record[1]…

The Idea of a University | Sterling M. McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion, and Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel, The Lord’s University: Freedom and Authority at BYU

Each of these books provides a thoughtful, intimate account of the uneasy co-existence of scholarly life and Mormon orthodoxies. Read together, the long journey of a prominent heretic and the recent conflicts over academic freedom…

Bird Island

It will come as news to all Latter-day Saints that after many years of deep scholarly research the Hill Cumorah has finally been located—at the north end of Bird Island in Utah Lake. Those familiar…

A Tentative Approach to the Book of Abraham

During the 1830’s John Whitmer wrote, in connection with the ancient Egyptian records purchased by the church in July 1835 from Michael H. Chandler,

The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation

Ever since Fawn Brodie wrote No Man Knows My History in 1946 and emphatically denied that there was any valid evidence that Joseph Smith experienced a visitation from the Father and the Son in 1820,…

The Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History

The philosopher Plato, to whom dialogue was the highest expression of intellectuality, defined thought as “the dialogue of the soul with itself.” It is thus altogether fitting that the editors of Dialogue should encourage Mormon…

What the Church Means to People Like Me

A natural reaction to my title—since this is not a testimony meeting in which each speaker is his own subject—might be, “Who cares?” For who in this congregation, with the possible exception of my brother,…

The Challenge of Honesty

Both the Protestant and Catholic communities are being swept by a passion for honesty. They are scrutinizing centuries-old suppositions and re-examining current attitudes and goals. In the Protestant world, the writings of Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich,…

About this Commemorative Issue

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott McLemee fixes the onset of the abundantly energetic “field of Mormon Studies” with two debuts: the Mormon History Association was organized in 1965 and…

A Variety of Women’s Voices | Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., Life Writings of Frontier Women Series, Vol. 1-5

This laudable and ambitious series presents a variety of life writing by Mormon women, ranging from diaries and letters to memoirs and more formal autobiography. Series editor Maureen Ursenbach Beecher begins each volume by advocating…

A Travelogue Nonpareil | Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons

“Mormonism, unlike other modern religions, is a faith cast in the form of history,” argues historian Jan Shipps in this outstanding collection of articles and essays (p. 165). Implicitly, the volume presents an argument for…

Ridiculously Sublime | Elouise Bell, Madame Ridiculous and Lady Sublime

Midway through her latest collection of humorous essays, former Brigham Young University professor Eloise Bell pleads for a calculated spontaneity in humorous writing. “I do in fact know that much humor is intentional and crafted.…

Inherit the Wind, Mormon Style | Stan Larson, ed., Can Science be Faith-Promoting by Sterling B. Talmage, and Trent D. Stephens, D. Jeffrey Meldrum, and Forrest B. Peterson, Evolution and Mormonism

In 1925, the town fathers of Dayton, Tennessee secured their place in history by trying John Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools.[1] With William Jennings Bryan as prosecutor, Clarence Darrow for the defense,…

LDS “Headquarters Culture” and the Rest of Mormonism: Past and Present

In December 1830 the founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. announced a revelation which established the doctrine of “gathering” the new church’s members at a headquarters area: “And again, a commandment I give unto the church, that it is expedient in me that they should assemble together at the Ohio. … ” (D&C 37: 3). Prior to that date, believers in The Book of Mormon were concentrated in three locations of western New York State: at Manchester /Palmyra (where the Smith family had lived a dozen years), also at Colesville, and at Fayette. Then from February 1831 to the end of 1837, the church was headquartered in Kirt land, Ohio (near Cleveland). 

Coyote Laughter

The flask lay under a loose plank on the back porch. To someone lifting the board there was only an empty space, but when Wayne knelt and reached to his elbow beneath the adjacent board,…

Antidote for Solitude: The Life of Bonnie Bobet

The death of a loved one may evoke anguish, regret, confusion, anger, shock, bitterness, despair, relief, gratitude, nostalgia, even joy. But the death of my friend Bonnie evoked in me, both on that Friday morning…

Why Mormons Should Celebrate Holy Week

Each spring the Christian world celebrates the most important week in history—Passion Week or Holy Week, the time between Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his atonement, death, and resurrection. Throughout the world the majority…

Where Can I Turn for Peace?

9/11. For seeming forever, a call for help. Since 2001 a blast of grief swallowed like debris from the heap of rubble and human remains on the streets of Manhattan, of the New York until…

Sexual Morality Revisited

It’s a boggy acre, surely. Is there any greater conundrum than human sexuality? Is there any aspect of our lives about which it is more difficult to generalize? Is there anything in our experience so…

Good News for Fiction Readers | Jack Harrell, Vernal Promises, and Douglas Thayer, The Conversion of Jeff Williams

In 2003, Signature Books hit 100 percent from the free-throw line when both of the novels it published that year won manuscript awards from the Association for Mormon Letters. Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises and Douglas…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

Relations and Principles: The Mormon Dialectic | Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism

Douglas J. Davies offers novel thematic interpretations of LDS theology that are provocative in both academic and devotional contexts. He identifies two theological commitments present throughout the historical development of LDS cosmology, ritual, scripture and…

Singing the Differences to Sleep | Heidi Hart, Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice

A grace note is a musical term for a miniature note placed before a prominent note in a musical phrase. If music is the direct line to human emotion, as Heidi Hart claims in her…

A Maturing View of the Book of Mormon | Grant H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins

This book is something of a watershed in the study of Mormon history and Mormon scripture. It is the first significant popularization of evidence by a writer within the Church indicating that Joseph Smith’s ancient…

Religion and Natasha McDonald

I AM NATASHA MCDONALD. THIS IS MY MOM AND DAD. I HAVE CEREBRAL PALSY. I THINK AND FEEL LIKE YOU DO BUT THE PART OF MY BRAIN THAT CONTROLS MY PHYSICAL SELF WAS DAMAGED WHEN…

Householding: A Quaker-Mormon Marriage

The scene: my house on any weekday evening. The table’s scattered with toy airplanes, homework, books, the orange-eyed cat that’s recently adopted us, and several chewed-up pencils. I’m hunting for my keys on my way…

Napoleon Dynamite, Priesthood Skills, and the Eschatology of the Non-Rational: A Nonwarranted Physiotheologic Analysis

Napoleon fever has struck. Thousands of young girls are adorning their walls with posters of the nerdy hero in the sweet brown suit and scrambling to learn the womanly art of weaving key chains from…

The Man Lying in the Grass

We’re in Ogden, Utah, on the second day of May, heading home to Orem after a Sunday afternoon with grandchildren. Carol is driving south on Washington Boulevard passing low business buildings whose shadows are covering the lawns and reaching out into the street. Up ahead, I spot a man lying in the grass maybe twenty feet back from the curb. A drunk sleeping himself sober? I wonder. Probably drunk . . . But what if he’s a diabetic whose sugar is low and he can’t get up? 

My Belief

In 1831 at the same time that Joseph Smith was receiving visions and establishing a new church because no contemporary religion was true—they had all become dead relics with no prophecy in them—Scottish writer Thomas…

An Interview with Darrell Spencer

In addition to many stories in quarterlies, Darrell Spencer has published four collections of stories, Bring Your Legs with You, Caution: Men in Trees, Our Secret’s Out, A Woman Packing a Pistol, and a novel,…

True to the Faith: A Snapshot of the Church in 2004

In July 2004, the LDS Church published True to the Faith, a handbook of doctrines and beliefs arranged alphabetically from A (“Aaronic Priesthood”) to Z (“Zion”): 190 pages of what Mormons are supposed to believe, know, and do. Arguably, in creed-free and catechism-free Mormonism, the appearance of this concise compendium represents a new development. Its closest parallels may be the missionary “white book,” which spells out behavioral rules, the pocket-sized handbooks for Latter-day Saints in the military, or the newest revision of “For the Strength of Youth,” which provides explanations of principles governing correct behavior but is also quite clear about what that correct behavior is. All of these works are contemporary and concise. 

Grant McMurray and the Succession Crisis in the Community of Christ

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 67–90
Members of the Community of Christ were shocked when our president, W. Grant McMurray, announced that he had resigned on November 29, 2004 , effective immediately.

King Benjamin and the Yeoman Farmer

Acccording to republican purists of the Revolutionary generation, the values of commerce, which “fostered a love of gain, ostentatious living, and a desire for luxuries,” could be contrasted with those of agriculture, which encouraged frugality, industry, and a desire for competence. The contrast was largely a fiction, of course, and de Crevecoeur’s recognition that self-interest was what held farming communities together should warn us against a naive reading of Jeffersonian texts. Nevertheless, as the income of most small farmers in North America in the late eighteenth century did not allow for conspicuous consumption, and rural neighbors were bound together by interlacing social obligations and debts, the farmer of the Revolutionary generation could legitimately be given iconic status as the antithesis of aggressive commercial individualism. But what if agriculture were itself to become (even more) commercialized? What if obligations to others were reduced to the honoring of debts, and benevolence was thought to lie, not in traditional acts of charity such as helping the needy, but rather in helping the bottom line—in inducing men “to pursue with increased energy, that business, or that course of conduct, to which their true interest directs them”? 

An Inside View of Polygamy in the Midwest | Vickie Cleverley Speek, “God Has Made Us a Kingdom”: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons

Vickie Speek is a fifth-generation Mormon whose progenitors were pioneers in Idaho. An award-winning journalist, she received the Award of Excellence from the Illinois Historical Society in 2001 for her research on the Civil War.…

Colonizing the Frontier between Faith and Doubt | Levi S. Peterson, A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography

It would be difficult for me to overstate the influence that Levi Peterson has had on both my spiritual and my intellectual development, “The Confessions of St. Augustine,” which I found by accident a few…

Where We Lay Our Scene

Her ticket is at will-call. She needs no help finding their seats, but Tom repeatedly cranes his neck to check the doors at the back of the hall. He likes it when she emerges from…

The Nature of Comets

We found the remains just below the embankment of an antediluvian oxbow. She had been lying there a long time, before the Cayuse and Lewis and Clark and the Grand Coulee Dam and long before…

An Old Mormon Writes to Harold Bloom

In the fall of 1990, I was retired and we were back in academia fulltime at BYU: Carol was studying anthropology and I was studying English. We went to the University of Utah to listen…

Writing: An Act of Responsibility

You’re a writer who loves these big, tough songs that pierce your heart and make you feel alive all over again. You believe in literature with a soul—the book that makes you think, that makes you feel as though you’ve been somewhere and experienced something, that you’re a different person for having read it. Writing just to entertain isn’t your goal. Writing to impress others with your cleverness or hoped-for-brilliance doesn’t matter as much as it once did. Your desire is something like Chekhov’s who spoke about writers describing situations so truthfully that readers could no longer avoid them. Or in your own words, to wrangle with the tough places in yourself and your subject. That’s what matters to you. 

Should Mormon Women Speak Out? Thoughts on Our Place in the World

I am happy to pay tribute to Gene England, a vivid and significant twentieth-century intellectual of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gene influenced many Mormons with his rigorous ethics, his lived religion, his human interactions, and his ability to record his life and get it all down. He certainly influenced me. 

What I Would Be If I Weren’t A Mormon

When I first asked myself the question in the title, I was wondering specifically what religion I would participate in if I weren’t Mormon. I soon tangled myself up in questions about what it means…

“A Climate Far and Fair”: Ecumenism and Abiding Faith

Two analogies occurred to me as I developed this essay—first, that of a dialectical assertion with its thesis, antithesis, and subsequent synthesis. The second analogy, more visual, is of a triptych, with two opposing side panels and finally a central one—an attempt to integrate and reconcile the other two. Hence, the essay’s three divisions. It is less an argument than a plea. Its reconciliations depend upon the reader’s willingness to make the shifts in perspective necessary to see, in the same moment, the opposing panels and the emergent synthesis of the center. 

A Year of Dialogue: Thinking Myself into Mormonism

The Green Library stacks are a study in contradictions.

Outside lies Stanford grandeur—three-story stucco architecture spread across multiple thousands of acres, perfectly manicured lawns and plant arrangements, arches, gates, fountains. The rest of Green Library shares that aura: airy rotundas with marble floors and booming ceilings, elegantly decorated study lounges with comfortable, oversized couches, crisp clean top-of-the-line Apple G5 computers, luxurious carpeting, and well-lit lines of bookshelves holding knowledge in tens of different languages.

Straight Home

Six cars pulled through the intersection, one after the other over the course of an hour, but none of them was hers. Barefoot, Bart waited on the slat bench outside his front door, picking away…

Badge and Bryant, or, the Decline and Fall of the Dogfrey Club

Badge and Bryant Braunhil were first cousins, but they could have passed for fraternal twins, having—both of them—bright blue eyes, big grins, and unkempt blond hair. They lived in Linroth, a Mormon town in northern…

Scandals, Scapegoats, and the Cross: An Interview with René Girard

Note: Mack Stirling, Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Munson Medical Center, Traverse City, Michigan, and Scott Burton, director of the LDS Institute of Religion at Ohio State University, conducted this interview with René Girard,…

Eternal Misfit

For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.  Coldplay[1] Some of the functions in the celestial body will not appear in the terrestrial body, neither in the telestial body, and…

The Canyon That is Not a Canyon

This is Dagan on the day after a 4 a.m. porn binge. Another. The third in as many weeks. He drifts into the living room in late afternoon, sees Tam at his computer, freezes. He…

Ghost Towns

George Borrow, an English travel writer, descended from the hills one evening in 1854 to report on Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, at that time the busiest iron smelting and coal town in the common wealth. I imagine he used a walking stick, picking his way through the mountain brush of the South Wales hills to a valley of light and a hillside of blazes. On reaching the valley, he identified the source of brilliance to be lava-like material that zigzagged down the hill above him. 

LDS Youth in an Age of Transition | Bruce A. Chadwick, Brent L. Top, and Richard J. McClendon, Shield of Faith: The Power of Religion in the Lives of LDS Youth and Young Adults, and Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults

One of the most difficult and perilous times in a life is the transition from childhood to adulthood. Moving into the freedoms of adult life while still relying on parents to pay the bills creates tensions within the adolescent even as it brings frustrations for the parents. How does one make the leap from dependent to depend able, from reactionary to responsible? And will religious faith survive, go stagnant, or flourish through these changing roles and identities? 

Navigating Mortality | Angela Hallstrom, ed., Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction

The cover of Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction shows clocks on long poles dipped into a blue lake surrounded by mountains. At first glance, the image symbolically suggests that this is the last dispensation and that all the…

From Exotic to Normal | Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry, eds., Utah in the Twentieth Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the state of Utah had been marginalized and exotic; at the 2002 Winter Olympics held in Salt Lake City, however, it presented itself as central and metropolitan. Hailed…

Breaking New Ground | Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide

In On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary (2d ed., Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), we get a fascinating peek into Richard Lyman Bushman’s psyche immediately after the publication of his…

Pirouettes on Strings | Phyllis Barber, Raw Edges

A mobile hangs from the ceiling above Phyllis Barber’s writing desk: tissue-paper ballerinas suspended in midair, light and delicate, twirling in currents of warmth from the nearby fireplace. As she labored to finish Raw Edges,…

Mormonism Goes Mainstream | Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin, eds., Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen

In an article posted in September 2010 on Patheos.com, a website devoted to the discussion of religion and spirituality, Michael Otterson, managing director of Public Affairs for the LDS Church, wrote: “During the past few years, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has navigated a period of intense public attention and scrutiny rarely seen during any other time in its history.” He buttressed this claim with the fact that for over a year “media attention far exceeded even the considerable interest generated during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.” While Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen looks at artistic productions rather than traditional journalism, its editors Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin agree with Otter son, stating that “Mormons and Mormonism have seen increasing scrutiny during the previous decade” (1). They even cite many of the same causes. 

Short Shrift to the Facts | Douglas A. Abbott and A. Dean Byrd, Encouraging Heterosexuality: Helping Children Develop a Traditional Sexual Orientation

The title of this book may elicit wry smiles. Even casual consideration suggests that heterosexuality is doing just fine on its own, without the need for outside encouragement. The authors’ purpose, of course, is not to encourage heterosexuality so much as it is to discourage and disparage homosexuality based on their belief that it is a learned and chosen condition that can and must be changed because of its negative consequences for individuals, families, and society at large. The book is targeted primarily at a Mormon audience, although citations of LDS scriptural passages and statements by LDS authorities are presented as the words of “Christian prophets” or generic “church leaders.” Its pages provide self-help advice to parents about how to prevent or alter the unwanted same-sex attractions of their homosexual children.

Part of a Bigger Story | Craig H. Harline, Conversions: Two family stories from the Reformation and Modern America

Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University, needs little introduction. His award-winning previous books on European religious history include The Burdens of Sister Margaret, A Bishop’s Tale, and Miracles at the Jesus Oak.…

Faith and Doubt in the First-Person Singular | Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel; Robert Rees, ed., Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons; and Thomas Riskas, Deconstructing Mormonism:An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith

In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

This essay is an experiment of sorts. For some time, Mormon Studies has attempted to move beyond the narrow confines of its past, with its focus on institutional histories and biographies of important people (mostly white men), toward a more methodologically nuanced and interpretive multi-disciplinary approach. Part of that growth requires that the data of Mormon Studies be scrutinized through the theoretical approaches coming out of disciplines such as religious studies. This essay does two things. First, it describes Orsi’s method and situates it within the context of religious studies methodology. Second, it scrutinizes the historical narratives associated with Joseph Smith’s “golden plates” through the lenses provided by Robert Orsi’s theory of “abundant events” in order to test the suitability of Orsi’s method to the data of Mormon Studies.

The Revelations & Opinions of the Rev. Clive Japhta, D.D.

as extracted from a series of emails James Goldberg discovered in his junk folder  I am—without question—an American. If I’ve ever doubted that, it was clear the moment I walked into the humidity and human…

Rethinking the LDS Aversion to the Cross | Michael G. Reed, Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often perplexed when they are accused of not being Christian. We worship Christ, acknowledge him as the divine Son of God, and believe our hope for salvation centers on the atonement made possible by his sacrifice. Christ is central in Mormon scripture: his birth, death, and atonement are foretold by Book of Mormon prophets, revealed through terrestrial signs, and revealed in the flesh in Christ’s ministry to his “lost sheep” of the New World. Mormons celebrate Christian holy days such as Easter and Christmas. The very name of the Church points to Christ as our center.

Genetics and Gathering the House of Israel

Questions from My Past Listen to an interview about this piece here. My patriarchal blessing indicates that I am a literal descendant of Ephraim and heir to specific blessings and promises. But what does this…

The Correct [Domain] Name of the Church: Technology, Naming, and Legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition

Of all the changes made in response to the 2018 decision to emphasize the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, those made to the official Latter-day Saint web and digital…

Drum Rhythms and Golden Scriptures: Reasons for Mormon Conversion within Haiti’s Culture of Vodou

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. At first glance, it may be difficult to see a relationship between Haitian Vodou and Mormonism.[1] How could Mormonism, which established and upheld racist policies…

Understanding the Community of Christ’s Doctrine and Covenants Dale E. Luffman, Commentary on the Community of Christ Doctrine and Covenants. Volume 2: The Reorganization—Community of Christ Era

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

This is an important, accessible book that should be in the hands of everyone who thinks deeply about Mormonism’s place in the world. Writing for the Cambridge Element series on religion and violence, Patrick Mason…

Sweater

Horizontal stripes 
black and white 

With Marbles for Eyes

As they crested the final hill into town, the speed limit dropped and the noise from the tires was quieter and less constant. Travis looked out Sarah’s window and she looked at him like he…

The Empty Space between the Walls | Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record

The intellectual strength of Mormon scholarship lies in the academic study of its own history. As important as the study of that history is, less than one percent of the world’s population has any interest in it. If Mormonism wishes to become more than a local sect, if it wishes to become a global religion, it must stop being so self-absorbed and start speaking a moral language comprehensible to a larger portion of the world.

Not Alone | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death is one of the great anxieties and mysteries that permeate human existence. Through various art forms, and across different contexts, people have sought to alleviate the sorrow and grief that stem from death. Moth and…

Envisioning Mormon Art | Laura Allred Hurtado, Immediate Present

Last summer, the Church History Museum was busy preparing to send art from Salt Lake City to New York City. The backstory of this move was the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. This nonprofit is the brainchild of historian Richard Bushman and author Glen Nelson, trying to fill a gap in what they saw in Mormon arts and arts scholarship.

Horror Becomes Banal Under Scrutiny but Loss is Lasting in The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner | Jennifer Quist, The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Although courtroom dramas can be entertaining, providing a formula for introducing new information through surprise witnesses or new evidence, simple procedurals can grow tired. An antidote is a realistic courtroom novel, where inner change and contemplation…

Helping Us Think and Be in the World | Linda Sillitoe, Owning the Moon

Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below. In 2016, the poet Solmaz Sharif said, “More and more, I am becoming convinced that poetry is not a form of…

The Gift of Language | Heidi Naylor, Revolver

The stories in Heidi Naylor’s short story collection Revolver present characters who have experienced regret, grief, loss, and even death. As readers, we have the opportunity to peer into the abyss of their lives, while still garnering from the experience some little hope to carry on. Sounds grim, perhaps, but literature allows us to experience vicariously the circumstances, situations, and tragedies we would rather avoid in our own lives, perhaps with the hope that we might learn therefrom.

A Life Worth Living | George B. Handley, Learning to Like Life: A Tribute to Lowell Bennion

The highest achievement for a volume of Festschrift is to prompt readers to revisit the life and teachings of that individual in whose honor it has been composed and move them to act in furtherance of…

Traveling “the undiscovered country” | Stephen Carter, ed., Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Death comes into our lives all too often; we don’t seek it out. As much as possible, we focus on essential, everyday concerns and keep death in the distance, at the edge of the horizon.…

A Philosophical Portrait in Pieces | Steven L. Peck, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats

It has now been months since I first made the acquaintance of Gilda Trillim, but even now I must admit that I do not completely understand her.

Art

Gender Structures within Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition | Sandra Clark Jergensen and Shelah Mastny Miner, eds. Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition

Aptly titled, Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition is a well-curated collection of prose and poetry featuring a specific demographic of Mormon women who read and contribute to the literary journal and blog Segullah. Eleven thoughtfully arranged categories containing fifty-eight voices capture a diversity of experiences that occasionally touch on issues of class, sexual orientation, ability, race, and ethnicity, but primarily plumb the life and death observations and gendered experiences of a middle-class swath of well-educated, able-bodied, heteronormative, married women from different age groups and North American geographies (their rare references to race or ethnicity also suggest racial homogeneity among them).

The Song of the Righteous is a Prayer unto Me

One of my favorite types of sacred music is the music of the Russian Orthodox church. It has its origins in Byzantine chant, but developed its own distinct style called Znamenny Chant. It is sung in Old Slavonic, so I cannot understand it with the exception of a word here or there that is similar in modern Russian, but I find it incredibly beautiful. Sung in resonant sacred spaces as part of worship services, you hear the devotion in the music. Not only are the sounds and attitudes of the singers imbued with beauty, the music is part of a rich symbolism, together with candles and incense, that help the worshipper to look upward to the divine. Other religious traditions have similarly beautiful elements involving music. For example, a muezzin calls out the adhan, or call to prayer, from the mosque five times during the day; a hazzan, or cantor, is a trained musician who sings prayers in the synagogue. 

On Apple Seeds, Rats, and the State of Mormon Literature | Steven L. Peck, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats

Steven L. Peck has long been seen as a pioneer in the field of Mormon letters, because of his ability to move beyond the usual clichés and expectations that often come with fiction about the faith. In two of his previous novels, The Scholar of Moab and A Short Stay in Hell, he successfully moved the genre into the twenty-first century because of his willingness to push boundaries, embrace the unorthodox, and explore difficult themes. His latest contribution, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats, follows this same vein by branching out into even newer territory, but unfortunately, it often gets lost along the way. 

Resisting Interpretation | Lisa Bickmore, Ephemerist

Ephemerist, n.: (1) after the Greek word for day, a journal keeper; (2) a collector of ephemera (see archivist); (3) an inventor of ephemera (see capitalist); (4) a devotee of ephemera (see nudist); (5) one who privileges ephemera (see nepotist); (6) a scientist whose subject is ephemera (see mycologist).

What follows is a lecture on three samples from a known ephemerist.

Problem Plays that Cultivate Compassion | Melissa Leilani Larson, Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love

Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love brings together two plays by award-winning playwright Melissa Leilani Larson: Happy Little Secrets and Pilot Program. The plays are presented chronologically by premier year. Happy Little…

Opening Invisible Doors: Considering Heavenly Mother | Rachel Hunt Steenblik, Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother

Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother is a collection of poems written by Rachel Hunt Steenblik and illustrated by Ashley Mae Hoiland. Divided into four sections and armed with nearly thirty pages of notes, the work of this book appears to be two-fold: first, to enter into a discoveratory conversation about the nature of Heavenly Mother, and second, an outcropping of the research Steenblik conducted for the scholarly article “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven.”

Judith Freeman: A Remarkable Memoir of an Unremarkable Life | Judith Freeman, The Latter Days: A Memoir

Judith Freeman’s The Latter Days: A Memoir is a remarkable memoir of an unremarkable life. The American novelist ticks all of the standard boxes when recounting her childhood—abusive father, distant mother, disowned sibling, youthful indiscretion—none falling…

The Life of a Spiritualist Saint | Scott H. Partridge, ed., Thirteenth Apostle: The Diaries of Amasa M. Lyman, 1832–1877

In historic accounts of Mormonism’s founding leaders, Amasa M. Lyman is often absent. However, despite this absence, Lyman is noteworthy for the many roles he played in the formative years of the Church. He was…

Anything but Orthodox | Matthew James Babcock, Heterodoxologies

I was nineteen years old when I first learned about the essay form. I was enrolled in an introductory survey of creative writing, sitting in a middle row of pocked and drab desks in a…

Thin Volume, Thick Questions | Luisa Perkins, Prayers in Bath

The half-inch thickness of the thin paperback belies its contents. Some context on the limited edition, published by Mormon Artists Group, explains the dense publication: fifty hand-bound copies in Asahi silk, hand numbered, and signed with color reproductions of the four original art pieces created by Jacqui Larsen for the book.

As the Savor: The Poetry of R. A. Christmas | R. A. Christmas, Saviors on Mt. Disneyland: New and Collected Poems

If you have never read a poem by Bob Christmas, this book is your chance to catch up. Take it. 

If you have read poems by Bob Christmas, this book is your chance to enjoy yourself all over again. Plunge in.

Raw Hope and Kindness: The Burning Point | Tracy McKay, The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope

When reading a good book I’ll often hop online to supplement or enrich my sensory experience. This time I sought a detailed close-up for mala beads, a tactile sense of the silk handkerchief around a deck of tarot cards, an image of a gilded ketubah, and a sense of the gleaming stained glass medallion in the Nauvoo temple—but Tracy McKay’s memoir also gave me opportunities to look up some classic songs and spend some time enjoying them through a new auditory “lens.”

Our Artistic Potential | The Mormon Arts Center, The Kimball Challenge at Fifty: Mormon Arts Center Essays

The occasion for this slim new volume of essays is the fiftieth anniversary of Spencer W. Kimball’s “Education for Eternity” talk, delivered to Brigham Young University faculty at the commencement of fall semester 1967. Although…

Duties of a Deacon

I never got to do it when I was a twelve-year-old Mormon boy even if it is, technically, as much a duty of a deacon as passing the sacrament—and I doubted anyone in my presidency…

The Pew

Helen realizes at church Sunday morning that still, after all these years, she does not have fond feelings for the chapel. She doesn’t want to hold on to any grudges against it—she doesn’t take it…

The Making of a Hard, Then Softened Heart in The Book of Laman | Mette Harrison, The Book of Laman

A fallen prophet. An abandoned wife and mother. A starving little brother. A big brother whose street smarts and steel are the linchpin to his family’s survival. The cast of Mette Harrison’s alternative telling of…

Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, with Mormonism as an Option

Dialogue 50.3 (Fall 2017): 89–115
I thus argue that Mormonism exists wherever there is belief in the Book of Mormon, even though many adherents reject the term “Mormonism” to distance themselves from the LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake City.

Mormon-Catholic Relations in Utah History: A Sketch

One of the happy surprises that makes history so interesting is the fact that Utah ever became Mormon Country, for during the roughly one hundred years before 1847 it had been, if anything, Catholic Country. Catholic explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, and traders had repeatedly plied their trades back and forth through the territory. Brigham Young University historian Ted J. Warner offers an intriguing speculation as to what might have happened if the Franciscan friars Dominguez and Escalante had been able to fulfill their promise to the Indians at Utah Lake that they would return and establish a mission among them.

A Capacious Priesthood and a Life of Holiness

As an offering in speculative theology, this paper reconsiders the current normative understanding of a male-only priesthood as presented in the Book of Mormon, specifically in Alma 13:1–20, and proposes that Alma presents a more capacious model. While this text is generally accepted as supporting the establishment and practice of a male-only priesthood (and a model of the Melchizedek Priesthood), I argue that Alma’s message was meant to expand the role of priesthood in society and to provide a way for an entire community to enter into a life of holiness.The exegesis that this paper presents is not simply an attempt to bring women into the conversation but to expand the conversation for the entire community—the community of all believers: men, women, and the rest of us. 

The Provo Tabernacle and Interfaith Collaboration

In October of 1996, Father William Flegge and his St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a problem. Renovations had left their beautiful Spanish Mission–style building unsafe for the high volume of parishioners expected for the upcoming Christmas services. That was when Father Flegge telephoned LDS Church headquarters to ask if Christmas Mass could be held at the Provo Tabernacle. In addition to welcoming Father Flegge and his flock to the tabernacle, LDS leaders invited them to bring into the tabernacle whatever sacred dress, objects, and symbols they needed to realize this important ceremony.Julie Boerio-Goates, pastoral coordinator for the parish, had plenty of experience staging Mass in the three-hundred-seat St. Francis building but was nervous about staging it in the two-thousand-seat tabernacle. The parish moved a lot of materials necessary for Christmas Mass from the St. Francis church, but since the tabernacle was so much bigger than St. Francis, more set dressing was needed. Serendipitously, seminarian Patrick Elliot had just been assigned to the parish as an assistant. Elliot had a good eye and knew where to find additional decorations. On December 24, two Christmas Masses were held in the evening and one at midnight.These services provide a vivid illustration of the Provo Tabernacle’s use for interfaith cooperation. 

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 2: Ordinances, Quorums, Nonpriesthood Authority, Presiding, Priestesses, and Priesthood Bans

Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
In the prequel to this article, I discussed in general contours the dual nature of authority—individual and institutional—and how the modern LDS concept of priesthood differs significantly from the ancient version in that it has become an abstract form of authority that can be “held” (or withheld, as the case might be).

Authority and Priesthood in the LDS Church, Part 1: Definitions and Development

Dialogue 51.1 (Spring 2018): 167–180
The issue of authority in Mormonism became painfully public with the rise of the Ordain Women movement.

A Book Full of Insights | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is one of the most decorated historians of early America. Her book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990) earned her both…

Lapsing into Daredevilry | Shawn Vestal, Daredevils

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 Fruit of Knowledge | Thomas F. Rogers, Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty

As a book of short, religious, and academic non-fiction, Thomas F. Rogers’s Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand is extremely valuable to the Mormon intellectual community; but as a reflection of a devoted disciple and…

Just Saying | Stanton Harris Hall, Just Seeing

Stan Hall was one of Dialogue’s most enthusiastic volunteers back in the ’70s when I was its editor. We published some of his poetry then and were sorry when he moved back to his home turf in the Northwest. I was therefore happy to see that he had continued to hone his poetic gift in his privately published collection Just Seeing. The quality of this work causes me to hope that it will be read beyond his family circle, extending even into a second volume, perhaps entitled Just Saying. 

Asking the Questions | Julie J. Nichols, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories

In her full-length debut, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories, Julie J. Nichols presents the interconnected lives of various women living in Salt Lake City over a span of thirty years, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the seven stories focuses on a different main character until their lives become so entangled that the narratives converge in tragedy, heartache, and eventual healing. Some of these stories appeared previously in other publications, including Dialogue.

Faith, Family, and Art | Jack Harrell, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism

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…

Exploring the Unfamiliar Realm of Religion in Young Adult Literature | Julie Berry, The Passion of Dolssa; Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

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 New Descartes and the Book of Mormon | Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself

The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy and a leading figure in the rationalist movement. Descartes was weary of past authority and of knowledge gained through the senses.…

Past Second Base | Joey Franklin, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married

At the last Association of Writiers & Writing Programs conference, a famed historical literary figure stood for pictures and selfies next to booths piled high with books. He was bald except for a tuft of…

Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives: Ceaselessly into the Past | Karen Rosenbaum, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives

When reading Karen Rosenbaum’s short story collection Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives, I kept thinking about the end of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s haunting conclusion: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”So it is with the women who populate Rosenbaum’s fourteen stories in this collection. The past defines them, breathes always within them.

Quiet Stories, Complex Emotion | Darin Cozzens, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories

Darin Cozzens’s second collection, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories, contains Emus and Mormon spinsters, ill-fated wedding ceremonies and wheelchair races in the dementia ward, washtub nostalgia and the ambiguous values…

Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.

The Source of God’s Authority: One Argument for an Unambiguous Doctrine of Preexistence

The famous couplet coined by Lorenzo Snow in 1840, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,”rears its head every now and then, inspiring both awe and some confusion among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints while causing at least a degree of discomfort for Church leaders and spokespeople who are trying to make Mormonism more palatable for our mainstream Christian friends and critics. Some observers have even suggested that the Church is intentionally downplaying this doctrine.Nevertheless, the couplet found its way into the 2013 Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manual Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, and this distinctive doctrine also appeared prominently in previous manuals containing the teachings of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

Gerontocracy and the Future of Mormonism

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 broke a centuries-old tradition within Roman Catholicism of service until-death of its top leader. If, as many expect, Pope Francis I eventually follows Benedict’s lead, it is likely that a new and enduring tradition will have been effected.The astounding transformation of the Roman Catholic Church under the younger and energized Francis underscores the importance of Benedict’s courageous decision. 

Scared Sacred: How the Horrifying Story of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Can Help Save Us

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 75–88
Probably the most destabilizing piece of historical information most Mormons come across is Joseph Smith’s polygamy.

A View from the Inside: How Critical Ethnography Changed My Mind About Polygamy

My first entry into the world of so-called Mormon polygamy began on June 17, 2010 when I attended the second annual conference of Safety Net, an organization that seeks “to assist people associated with the practice of plural marriage, whether an active polygamist or exiting polygamist.” Safety Net strives for neutrality toward the actual practice of plural marriage so they can “meet physical, emotional, and educational needs.”The goal of their annual conferences is to increase awareness of the issues surrounding the practice of plural marriage, present individual stories of polygamy, and discuss resources available to those wanting to leave polygamous family structures.

Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Levirate Widow

Polygamy is, for many Americans, Mormonism’s defining feature. Even now, over a century after the main church abandoned the practice, images of Latter-day Saint polygamy persist in the popular and scholarly imagination. Most accounts of Mormon polygamy have either emphasized sexual experimentation and marital reform on the one hand or biblical primitivism on the other.While these accounts are at least partly true—Joseph Smith did believe that he was replacing a failed system of marriage, and he and his colleagues frequently invoked Bible patriarchs to explain their behaviors and doctrines—polygamy was also a solution to a specific set of contemporary cultural problems—remarriage after bereavement—refracted through biblical interpretation.

The Celestial Law

Mary Cooper and James Oakey, my maternal great-grandparents, married in 1840 and settled in Nottingham, England. Victoria was on the throne, and occasionally the citizens of Nottingham came out to pay honor as the queen in her carriage passed through on the way to Belvoir Castle. Mary gave birth to seven living children. James became a designer and maker of lace and also helped to develop new lace-making machinery.

Jesus Christ, Marriage, and Mormon Christianities: 2016 Smith-Pettit Lecture, Sunstone Symposium

According to his official history, that’s all Joseph Smith said to his mother after God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him while he prayed by himself in the woods. Whether or not Presbyterianism was true was a more pressing question for the young Joseph Smith than it is for most of you. Sometime in the mid-1820s, Lucy Mack Smith and several of Joseph’s siblings joined a Presbyterian church. Joseph must have wrestled with his mother’s choice. Like his father, though, he never joined any Protestant church. But it was surely a major point of controversy and discussion in the family. 

Deus Mea Lux Est: A Mormon Among Catholics

I am the Mormon among Catholics part of this equation. I was raised in Utah Valley—well I got taller, anyway. I got my undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University (BYU) and both of my graduate…

Into a Foreign Land: A Catholic Among Mormons

Although I was brought up in a Congregational church and my husband in an Episcopal church, after reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain in the early 1970s, we converted to Catholicism. There we found a spiritual home. I now help out in a seven-month class for those who want to become Catholic. Why is a Catholic from Seattle interested in Mormon history? My background includes Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Unitarians. It involves belief, dissent, and conversion, and then belief, dissent, and conversion all over again, with some large doses of persecution thrown in from time to time. 

Abundant Grace: The Humanness of Catholics and Latter-day Saints as a Basis for Friendship and Collaboration

At the conclusion of each Mormon History Association’s annual conference, there is a “devotional.” (Until I became a devotee of Mormon history, devotional was always an adjective, as in “devotional literature,” but the Latter-day Saints have shifted my grammatical foundations, and, because of my exposure to Mormons, I’ll never hear words like “fireside,” “garments,” or even “Jell-O” in the same way.) At these devotionals, I always look to see if my favorite LDS hymn is being featured—“The Spirit of God”—number 2 in the LDS hymnal.

Ordination and Blessing

I grew up in an anti-Catholic world. The first thing I remember hearing about Catholics in the small town in which I was raised was not just negative, it was extremely so. Everyone I knew was distrustful, suspicious, or hateful toward Catholics. When I joined the LDS Church at age ten, I heard more anti-Catholic sentiment, including the branding of the Catholic Church as “the Whore of Babylon,” and “the great and abominable church” or “church of the devil,” based on a biased reading of the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:6, 14:9).

Mormon/Catholic Dialogue: Thinking About Ways Forward

I would like to begin with an image. There is a tree in the middle of a barren field. A rod of iron extends from it. People jeer from a large building bounded by a river nearby. Those holding on to the rod ignore the jeering from the building and partake of the tree’s sweet fruit, but there are some who heed the jeering and become ashamed even after eating the fruit, and are lost. This image is intimately familiar to so many Latter-day Saints as Lehi’s dream from 1 Nephi 8 in the Book of Mormon. It is, however, a relatively new image for me. I did not grow up with the image.

More than a Different Color | W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness

Three decades after the LDS Church lifted the priesthood ban on African Americans, scholars are offering readers a host of new studies that address the legacy of racial thought and practice in the LDS Church.…

A Cluttering of Symbol and Metaphor | David G. Pace, Dream House on Golan Drive

How to represent lived religious experience without either underplaying its reality or slipping into the magical-fantastical is an ongoing difficulty in Mormon literature. David G. Pace, in his novel Dream House on Golan Drive, has decided…

Mormonism from Varied Fictional Perspectives | William Morris, Dark Watch and Other Mormon-American Stories

Short story collections are a medium well suited to explorations of Mormonism as a culture and what it means to be Mormon. They allow for diversity. They impose few limitations. They permit an author to…

Walking the Narrow Path | Patrick Q. Mason, Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt

While reading Planted one evening, I turned to my wife, Sara, and said, “I think that we are in the book.” I was reading an anecdote that Patrick shares near the end about some non-LDS Christian friends who attend a ward Christmas party. As they observe people talking and children running around, the friends comment on how much they admire the community because it feels like a real family (170). I remember making those comments.

Planted: An Earthy Approach to Faith and Doubt | Patrick Q. Mason, Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt

Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt by Patrick Mason is part of the Living Faith series by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Announcing the series, the Maxwell Institute wrote: “Each [book] will contain the voice of a scholar who has cultivated a believing heart while engaging in the disciplines of the Academy.”

How Can a Religious Person Tolerate Other Religions?

When I was in my early twenties, a prominent American rabbi, Yitz Greenberg, once heard me lecture to a Jewish group. I was offering comparisons between Judaism and other religions. Afterward he complimented me on…

Why do Some Perceive the Church to be a Cult? Inside and Outside Perceptions versus Reality

The Golden Dream and the Nightmare: The Closet Crusade of A.C. Lambert

Pillars of My Family: A Brief Saga

Dissent and Schism in the Early Church: Explaining Mormon Fissiparousness

Dancing Through the Doctrine: Observations on Religion and Feminism

Dialogue 28.3 (Fall 1995): 1–12
As American feminist thinkers and organizers, we’ve walked a long road since then, a road that has led us farther and farther away from religious discourse and Christian justification. Our reasons have been good: We didn’t want to limit or exclude. We didn’t want to direct all feminists down a single philosophical path.

Leaders and Members: Messages from the General Handbook of Instructions

The Book of Mormon as Great Literature | Richard Dilworth Rust, Feasting on the Word

A number of years ago when I was attending Bowling Green University as a graduate student, I was introduced to the writings of John Muir, the American naturalist. One of the approaches we used in…

Informed Scholarship | Donald W. Parry and Dana M. Pike, eds., LDS Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) among Latter-day Saints, prompted in part by the appointment of several BYU faculty (Donald W. Parry, David R. Seely, Dana M.…

Wayward Saints: The Conflict of Opposing Visions | Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young

Roanld W. Walker’s study Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young is a valuable contribution to recent Mormon scholarship. Among other things, the book illuminates important questions and concerns of both past and present. Walker…

CAUTION: Men in Trees | Darrell Spencer, CAUTION: Men in Trees

CAUTION: Men in Trees. Hmmm, one might say. Are these men swaying from limb to limb like the perennial hero, Tarzan? Are these men going out on a limb or barking up the wrong tree?…

Mormonism and the Radical Religious Movement in Early Colonial New England

Mormons believe that forerunners prepared the way for the restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ in the latter days. This paper examines a special set of those forerunners, namely, the progenitors of the early converts to the LDS church, whose religious experiences took them through a refiner’s fire so significant and revolutionary that it helped provide their descendants with the disposition to embrace a new, radical faith.

The Discovery of Native “Mormon” Communities in Russia

In early June 1998, Sheridan Gashler, president of the Russia Samara Mission, felt moved to place missionaries in a small village called Bogdanovka. This was an exciting change in policy. Early LDS missionary work in Russia had been concentrated in large urban areas where most missionaries could enjoy such civilized luxuries as paved roads, frequent public transportation, telephone lines, and running water. In recent years missions branched into smaller cities, but the Russian village was an altogether new frontier. Bogdanovka, although it is only 100 miles or so from the large regional capital city of Samara, is a world apart. 

Parallelomania and the Study of Latter-day Scripture: Confirmation, Coincidence, or the Collective Unconscious?

Dialogue 33.2 (Summer 2001):139–173
This article looks at some of the ways parallels have been used by Nibley in the exposition of latter-day scripture, the types of parallels employed, and some of the problems that arise from this comparative exercise.

Ritual as Theology and as Communication

Theology is usually considered an intellectual activity for philosophers and educated religionists. Actually, most humans discuss the same sub jects, but at a different level than do the pundits. Commoners too cogitate upon the nature of suprahuman power, the possibilities and limitations of humankind, the means by which we and the cosmos came into existence, and our ultimate fate.

Analyzing LDS Growth in Guatemala: Report from a Barrio

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (usually called Mormon or LDS church) is having enormous success in most parts of the world. Growth is particularly impressive in Latin America. In 1971 there were only 217,500 LDS members on this continent, accounting for no more than seven percent of the church’s total membership.

Making Miracles | Phyllis Barber, Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination

When I was twelve, the youth in our ward did baptisms for the dead in the Los Angeles temple. To pique our interest, our leaders told tales of spirits appearing to the living and thanking…

Restless Grace | Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

I first met Terry Tempest Williams in January 1999 at a commemoration in Tucson, Arizona, for my uncle, United States Representative Morris Udall. The beautiful eulogies honoring his many accomplishments, particularly his record on the…

The Dangers of Missionary Work | Ken Driggs, Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders

On a quiet Monday evening in 1974, two Mormon missionaries visited a Texas trailer house—oddly situated behind a taxidermy shop—at the invitation of the occupant, Bob Klea son, an inactive member of the church. Instead…

Textual Tradition, the Evolution of Mormon Doctrine, and the Doctrine & Covenants | H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary

H. Michael Marquardt published his early monographs with anti-Mor mons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, but these works exhibited higher scholarly standards than the Tanners’ work. Marquardt co-authored Inventing Mor monism: Tradition and the Historical Record[1]…

The Idea of a University | Sterling M. McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion, and Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel, The Lord’s University: Freedom and Authority at BYU

Each of these books provides a thoughtful, intimate account of the uneasy co-existence of scholarly life and Mormon orthodoxies. Read together, the long journey of a prominent heretic and the recent conflicts over academic freedom…

Bird Island

It will come as news to all Latter-day Saints that after many years of deep scholarly research the Hill Cumorah has finally been located—at the north end of Bird Island in Utah Lake. Those familiar…

A Tentative Approach to the Book of Abraham

During the 1830’s John Whitmer wrote, in connection with the ancient Egyptian records purchased by the church in July 1835 from Michael H. Chandler,

The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation

Ever since Fawn Brodie wrote No Man Knows My History in 1946 and emphatically denied that there was any valid evidence that Joseph Smith experienced a visitation from the Father and the Son in 1820,…

The Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History

The philosopher Plato, to whom dialogue was the highest expression of intellectuality, defined thought as “the dialogue of the soul with itself.” It is thus altogether fitting that the editors of Dialogue should encourage Mormon…

What the Church Means to People Like Me

A natural reaction to my title—since this is not a testimony meeting in which each speaker is his own subject—might be, “Who cares?” For who in this congregation, with the possible exception of my brother,…

The Challenge of Honesty

Both the Protestant and Catholic communities are being swept by a passion for honesty. They are scrutinizing centuries-old suppositions and re-examining current attitudes and goals. In the Protestant world, the writings of Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich,…

About this Commemorative Issue

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott McLemee fixes the onset of the abundantly energetic “field of Mormon Studies” with two debuts: the Mormon History Association was organized in 1965 and…

A Variety of Women’s Voices | Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., Life Writings of Frontier Women Series, Vol. 1-5

This laudable and ambitious series presents a variety of life writing by Mormon women, ranging from diaries and letters to memoirs and more formal autobiography. Series editor Maureen Ursenbach Beecher begins each volume by advocating…

A Travelogue Nonpareil | Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons

“Mormonism, unlike other modern religions, is a faith cast in the form of history,” argues historian Jan Shipps in this outstanding collection of articles and essays (p. 165). Implicitly, the volume presents an argument for…

Ridiculously Sublime | Elouise Bell, Madame Ridiculous and Lady Sublime

Midway through her latest collection of humorous essays, former Brigham Young University professor Eloise Bell pleads for a calculated spontaneity in humorous writing. “I do in fact know that much humor is intentional and crafted.…

Inherit the Wind, Mormon Style | Stan Larson, ed., Can Science be Faith-Promoting by Sterling B. Talmage, and Trent D. Stephens, D. Jeffrey Meldrum, and Forrest B. Peterson, Evolution and Mormonism

In 1925, the town fathers of Dayton, Tennessee secured their place in history by trying John Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools.[1] With William Jennings Bryan as prosecutor, Clarence Darrow for the defense,…

LDS “Headquarters Culture” and the Rest of Mormonism: Past and Present

In December 1830 the founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. announced a revelation which established the doctrine of “gathering” the new church’s members at a headquarters area: “And again, a commandment I give unto the church, that it is expedient in me that they should assemble together at the Ohio. … ” (D&C 37: 3). Prior to that date, believers in The Book of Mormon were concentrated in three locations of western New York State: at Manchester /Palmyra (where the Smith family had lived a dozen years), also at Colesville, and at Fayette. Then from February 1831 to the end of 1837, the church was headquartered in Kirt land, Ohio (near Cleveland). 

Coyote Laughter

The flask lay under a loose plank on the back porch. To someone lifting the board there was only an empty space, but when Wayne knelt and reached to his elbow beneath the adjacent board,…

Antidote for Solitude: The Life of Bonnie Bobet

The death of a loved one may evoke anguish, regret, confusion, anger, shock, bitterness, despair, relief, gratitude, nostalgia, even joy. But the death of my friend Bonnie evoked in me, both on that Friday morning…

Why Mormons Should Celebrate Holy Week

Each spring the Christian world celebrates the most important week in history—Passion Week or Holy Week, the time between Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his atonement, death, and resurrection. Throughout the world the majority…

Where Can I Turn for Peace?

9/11. For seeming forever, a call for help. Since 2001 a blast of grief swallowed like debris from the heap of rubble and human remains on the streets of Manhattan, of the New York until…

Sexual Morality Revisited

It’s a boggy acre, surely. Is there any greater conundrum than human sexuality? Is there any aspect of our lives about which it is more difficult to generalize? Is there anything in our experience so…

Good News for Fiction Readers | Jack Harrell, Vernal Promises, and Douglas Thayer, The Conversion of Jeff Williams

In 2003, Signature Books hit 100 percent from the free-throw line when both of the novels it published that year won manuscript awards from the Association for Mormon Letters. Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises and Douglas…

Reed Smoot and the Twentieth-Century Transformation of Mormonism | Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle

On June 23, 2004, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States can bestow, at a White House ceremony presided over by the…

Relations and Principles: The Mormon Dialectic | Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism

Douglas J. Davies offers novel thematic interpretations of LDS theology that are provocative in both academic and devotional contexts. He identifies two theological commitments present throughout the historical development of LDS cosmology, ritual, scripture and…

Singing the Differences to Sleep | Heidi Hart, Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice

A grace note is a musical term for a miniature note placed before a prominent note in a musical phrase. If music is the direct line to human emotion, as Heidi Hart claims in her…

A Maturing View of the Book of Mormon | Grant H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins

This book is something of a watershed in the study of Mormon history and Mormon scripture. It is the first significant popularization of evidence by a writer within the Church indicating that Joseph Smith’s ancient…

Religion and Natasha McDonald

I AM NATASHA MCDONALD. THIS IS MY MOM AND DAD. I HAVE CEREBRAL PALSY. I THINK AND FEEL LIKE YOU DO BUT THE PART OF MY BRAIN THAT CONTROLS MY PHYSICAL SELF WAS DAMAGED WHEN…

Householding: A Quaker-Mormon Marriage

The scene: my house on any weekday evening. The table’s scattered with toy airplanes, homework, books, the orange-eyed cat that’s recently adopted us, and several chewed-up pencils. I’m hunting for my keys on my way…

Napoleon Dynamite, Priesthood Skills, and the Eschatology of the Non-Rational: A Nonwarranted Physiotheologic Analysis

Napoleon fever has struck. Thousands of young girls are adorning their walls with posters of the nerdy hero in the sweet brown suit and scrambling to learn the womanly art of weaving key chains from…

The Man Lying in the Grass

We’re in Ogden, Utah, on the second day of May, heading home to Orem after a Sunday afternoon with grandchildren. Carol is driving south on Washington Boulevard passing low business buildings whose shadows are covering the lawns and reaching out into the street. Up ahead, I spot a man lying in the grass maybe twenty feet back from the curb. A drunk sleeping himself sober? I wonder. Probably drunk . . . But what if he’s a diabetic whose sugar is low and he can’t get up? 

My Belief

In 1831 at the same time that Joseph Smith was receiving visions and establishing a new church because no contemporary religion was true—they had all become dead relics with no prophecy in them—Scottish writer Thomas…

An Interview with Darrell Spencer

In addition to many stories in quarterlies, Darrell Spencer has published four collections of stories, Bring Your Legs with You, Caution: Men in Trees, Our Secret’s Out, A Woman Packing a Pistol, and a novel,…

True to the Faith: A Snapshot of the Church in 2004

In July 2004, the LDS Church published True to the Faith, a handbook of doctrines and beliefs arranged alphabetically from A (“Aaronic Priesthood”) to Z (“Zion”): 190 pages of what Mormons are supposed to believe, know, and do. Arguably, in creed-free and catechism-free Mormonism, the appearance of this concise compendium represents a new development. Its closest parallels may be the missionary “white book,” which spells out behavioral rules, the pocket-sized handbooks for Latter-day Saints in the military, or the newest revision of “For the Strength of Youth,” which provides explanations of principles governing correct behavior but is also quite clear about what that correct behavior is. All of these works are contemporary and concise. 

Grant McMurray and the Succession Crisis in the Community of Christ

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 67–90
Members of the Community of Christ were shocked when our president, W. Grant McMurray, announced that he had resigned on November 29, 2004 , effective immediately.

King Benjamin and the Yeoman Farmer

Acccording to republican purists of the Revolutionary generation, the values of commerce, which “fostered a love of gain, ostentatious living, and a desire for luxuries,” could be contrasted with those of agriculture, which encouraged frugality, industry, and a desire for competence. The contrast was largely a fiction, of course, and de Crevecoeur’s recognition that self-interest was what held farming communities together should warn us against a naive reading of Jeffersonian texts. Nevertheless, as the income of most small farmers in North America in the late eighteenth century did not allow for conspicuous consumption, and rural neighbors were bound together by interlacing social obligations and debts, the farmer of the Revolutionary generation could legitimately be given iconic status as the antithesis of aggressive commercial individualism. But what if agriculture were itself to become (even more) commercialized? What if obligations to others were reduced to the honoring of debts, and benevolence was thought to lie, not in traditional acts of charity such as helping the needy, but rather in helping the bottom line—in inducing men “to pursue with increased energy, that business, or that course of conduct, to which their true interest directs them”? 

An Inside View of Polygamy in the Midwest | Vickie Cleverley Speek, “God Has Made Us a Kingdom”: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons

Vickie Speek is a fifth-generation Mormon whose progenitors were pioneers in Idaho. An award-winning journalist, she received the Award of Excellence from the Illinois Historical Society in 2001 for her research on the Civil War.…

Colonizing the Frontier between Faith and Doubt | Levi S. Peterson, A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography

It would be difficult for me to overstate the influence that Levi Peterson has had on both my spiritual and my intellectual development, “The Confessions of St. Augustine,” which I found by accident a few…

Where We Lay Our Scene

Her ticket is at will-call. She needs no help finding their seats, but Tom repeatedly cranes his neck to check the doors at the back of the hall. He likes it when she emerges from…

The Nature of Comets

We found the remains just below the embankment of an antediluvian oxbow. She had been lying there a long time, before the Cayuse and Lewis and Clark and the Grand Coulee Dam and long before…

An Old Mormon Writes to Harold Bloom

In the fall of 1990, I was retired and we were back in academia fulltime at BYU: Carol was studying anthropology and I was studying English. We went to the University of Utah to listen…

Writing: An Act of Responsibility

You’re a writer who loves these big, tough songs that pierce your heart and make you feel alive all over again. You believe in literature with a soul—the book that makes you think, that makes you feel as though you’ve been somewhere and experienced something, that you’re a different person for having read it. Writing just to entertain isn’t your goal. Writing to impress others with your cleverness or hoped-for-brilliance doesn’t matter as much as it once did. Your desire is something like Chekhov’s who spoke about writers describing situations so truthfully that readers could no longer avoid them. Or in your own words, to wrangle with the tough places in yourself and your subject. That’s what matters to you. 

Should Mormon Women Speak Out? Thoughts on Our Place in the World

I am happy to pay tribute to Gene England, a vivid and significant twentieth-century intellectual of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gene influenced many Mormons with his rigorous ethics, his lived religion, his human interactions, and his ability to record his life and get it all down. He certainly influenced me. 

What I Would Be If I Weren’t A Mormon

When I first asked myself the question in the title, I was wondering specifically what religion I would participate in if I weren’t Mormon. I soon tangled myself up in questions about what it means…

“A Climate Far and Fair”: Ecumenism and Abiding Faith

Two analogies occurred to me as I developed this essay—first, that of a dialectical assertion with its thesis, antithesis, and subsequent synthesis. The second analogy, more visual, is of a triptych, with two opposing side panels and finally a central one—an attempt to integrate and reconcile the other two. Hence, the essay’s three divisions. It is less an argument than a plea. Its reconciliations depend upon the reader’s willingness to make the shifts in perspective necessary to see, in the same moment, the opposing panels and the emergent synthesis of the center. 

A Year of Dialogue: Thinking Myself into Mormonism

The Green Library stacks are a study in contradictions.

Outside lies Stanford grandeur—three-story stucco architecture spread across multiple thousands of acres, perfectly manicured lawns and plant arrangements, arches, gates, fountains. The rest of Green Library shares that aura: airy rotundas with marble floors and booming ceilings, elegantly decorated study lounges with comfortable, oversized couches, crisp clean top-of-the-line Apple G5 computers, luxurious carpeting, and well-lit lines of bookshelves holding knowledge in tens of different languages.

Straight Home

Six cars pulled through the intersection, one after the other over the course of an hour, but none of them was hers. Barefoot, Bart waited on the slat bench outside his front door, picking away…

Badge and Bryant, or, the Decline and Fall of the Dogfrey Club

Badge and Bryant Braunhil were first cousins, but they could have passed for fraternal twins, having—both of them—bright blue eyes, big grins, and unkempt blond hair. They lived in Linroth, a Mormon town in northern…

Scandals, Scapegoats, and the Cross: An Interview with René Girard

Note: Mack Stirling, Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Munson Medical Center, Traverse City, Michigan, and Scott Burton, director of the LDS Institute of Religion at Ohio State University, conducted this interview with René Girard,…

Eternal Misfit

For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.  Coldplay[1] Some of the functions in the celestial body will not appear in the terrestrial body, neither in the telestial body, and…

The Canyon That is Not a Canyon

This is Dagan on the day after a 4 a.m. porn binge. Another. The third in as many weeks. He drifts into the living room in late afternoon, sees Tam at his computer, freezes. He…

Ghost Towns

George Borrow, an English travel writer, descended from the hills one evening in 1854 to report on Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, at that time the busiest iron smelting and coal town in the common wealth. I imagine he used a walking stick, picking his way through the mountain brush of the South Wales hills to a valley of light and a hillside of blazes. On reaching the valley, he identified the source of brilliance to be lava-like material that zigzagged down the hill above him. 

LDS Youth in an Age of Transition | Bruce A. Chadwick, Brent L. Top, and Richard J. McClendon, Shield of Faith: The Power of Religion in the Lives of LDS Youth and Young Adults, and Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults

One of the most difficult and perilous times in a life is the transition from childhood to adulthood. Moving into the freedoms of adult life while still relying on parents to pay the bills creates tensions within the adolescent even as it brings frustrations for the parents. How does one make the leap from dependent to depend able, from reactionary to responsible? And will religious faith survive, go stagnant, or flourish through these changing roles and identities? 

Navigating Mortality | Angela Hallstrom, ed., Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction

The cover of Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction shows clocks on long poles dipped into a blue lake surrounded by mountains. At first glance, the image symbolically suggests that this is the last dispensation and that all the…

From Exotic to Normal | Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry, eds., Utah in the Twentieth Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the state of Utah had been marginalized and exotic; at the 2002 Winter Olympics held in Salt Lake City, however, it presented itself as central and metropolitan. Hailed…

Breaking New Ground | Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide

In On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary (2d ed., Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), we get a fascinating peek into Richard Lyman Bushman’s psyche immediately after the publication of his…

Pirouettes on Strings | Phyllis Barber, Raw Edges

A mobile hangs from the ceiling above Phyllis Barber’s writing desk: tissue-paper ballerinas suspended in midair, light and delicate, twirling in currents of warmth from the nearby fireplace. As she labored to finish Raw Edges,…

Mormonism Goes Mainstream | Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin, eds., Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen

In an article posted in September 2010 on Patheos.com, a website devoted to the discussion of religion and spirituality, Michael Otterson, managing director of Public Affairs for the LDS Church, wrote: “During the past few years, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has navigated a period of intense public attention and scrutiny rarely seen during any other time in its history.” He buttressed this claim with the fact that for over a year “media attention far exceeded even the considerable interest generated during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.” While Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen looks at artistic productions rather than traditional journalism, its editors Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin agree with Otter son, stating that “Mormons and Mormonism have seen increasing scrutiny during the previous decade” (1). They even cite many of the same causes. 

Short Shrift to the Facts | Douglas A. Abbott and A. Dean Byrd, Encouraging Heterosexuality: Helping Children Develop a Traditional Sexual Orientation

The title of this book may elicit wry smiles. Even casual consideration suggests that heterosexuality is doing just fine on its own, without the need for outside encouragement. The authors’ purpose, of course, is not to encourage heterosexuality so much as it is to discourage and disparage homosexuality based on their belief that it is a learned and chosen condition that can and must be changed because of its negative consequences for individuals, families, and society at large. The book is targeted primarily at a Mormon audience, although citations of LDS scriptural passages and statements by LDS authorities are presented as the words of “Christian prophets” or generic “church leaders.” Its pages provide self-help advice to parents about how to prevent or alter the unwanted same-sex attractions of their homosexual children.

Part of a Bigger Story | Craig H. Harline, Conversions: Two family stories from the Reformation and Modern America

Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University, needs little introduction. His award-winning previous books on European religious history include The Burdens of Sister Margaret, A Bishop’s Tale, and Miracles at the Jesus Oak.…

Faith and Doubt in the First-Person Singular | Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel; Robert Rees, ed., Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons; and Thomas Riskas, Deconstructing Mormonism:An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith

In 1979, Mary Bradford published in these pages an important personal essay on personal essays. Titled “I, Eye, Aye,” the piece first outlines a brief history of the genre within Mormon letters and then offers its…

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

This essay is an experiment of sorts. For some time, Mormon Studies has attempted to move beyond the narrow confines of its past, with its focus on institutional histories and biographies of important people (mostly white men), toward a more methodologically nuanced and interpretive multi-disciplinary approach. Part of that growth requires that the data of Mormon Studies be scrutinized through the theoretical approaches coming out of disciplines such as religious studies. This essay does two things. First, it describes Orsi’s method and situates it within the context of religious studies methodology. Second, it scrutinizes the historical narratives associated with Joseph Smith’s “golden plates” through the lenses provided by Robert Orsi’s theory of “abundant events” in order to test the suitability of Orsi’s method to the data of Mormon Studies.

The Revelations & Opinions of the Rev. Clive Japhta, D.D.

as extracted from a series of emails James Goldberg discovered in his junk folder  I am—without question—an American. If I’ve ever doubted that, it was clear the moment I walked into the humidity and human…

Rethinking the LDS Aversion to the Cross | Michael G. Reed, Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often perplexed when they are accused of not being Christian. We worship Christ, acknowledge him as the divine Son of God, and believe our hope for salvation centers on the atonement made possible by his sacrifice. Christ is central in Mormon scripture: his birth, death, and atonement are foretold by Book of Mormon prophets, revealed through terrestrial signs, and revealed in the flesh in Christ’s ministry to his “lost sheep” of the New World. Mormons celebrate Christian holy days such as Easter and Christmas. The very name of the Church points to Christ as our center.