Karl Keller
R, professor of English at San Diego State University and a former member of the Board of Editors of Dialogue. He has published books on the Puritans and on Emily Dickinson and is at work finishing two books, one on Walt Whitman for The Johns Hopkins University Press and one on the Church for Doubleday, The Mormons are Coming, the Mormons are Coming.
The Witty and Witless Saints of a Nobel Prize Winner
Articles/Essays – Volume 06, No. 3
When it was published in English in 1962, Nobel Prize-winner Halldor Laxness’ novel about the Mormons, Paradise Reclaimed, went virtually un noticed in the Mormon community and, as far as I can tell, is still…
Read moreCreation
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 2
God may have his presencein silence only, made so that a man may have space and timeto make himself himself.Whatever is is lost — but the unmade silencesteach hope, and possibility,and all the virtues God gave men to make gods…
Read moreFaith
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 2
Sacramental hours cross this chapel of infinity where the arch of the brain dreams horror.And no one comes. Within the waiting shadows the silence says wait: the darkness is a piece of a piece in the rapture of even being. But no…
Read moreEvery Soul Has Its South
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 2
Dialogue 1.2 (Summer 1966): 72–79
In this important article in one of the earliest Dialogue issues, Keller says “I went because I was frankly worried: worried that my wife and children should find me slipping after talking intense brotherhood, worried that the church members I led and taught should know where the doctrine but not the action in life is, worried that the students I counseled and read and philosophized with where I taught should reach for meaning for their lives and find no guts, worried in fact that I should somehow while propagating and preaching the Kingdom of God miss it, miss it altogether. The rest was nonsense.”
“’I Never Knew a Time When I Did Not Know Joseph Smith”: A Son’s Record Of The Life And Testimony Of Sidney Rigdon
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 4
Dialogue 1.4 (Spring 1966): 15–42
Not very long after the death of Sidney Rigdon, the influential preacher and compatriate to Joseph Smith in the first years of the Church, his son, John Wickliffe Rigdon, wrote an apology for his father.
Pilgrimage of Awe | Clinton F. Larson, The Lord of Experience
Articles/Essays – Volume 03, No. 1
I think that at some far-distant point in time the history of Mormon poetry may well have to be said to have begun with Clinton F. Larson and this first collection of his verse, The…
Read moreOn Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature
Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 3
A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. William Blake Observers of the Church must think it odd that for all…
Read moreThe New English Bible: Three Views: A Literary View
Articles/Essays – Volume 05, No. 4
There is no use discussing the Bible as literature (whether the King James, the New English Bible, or any other version) with anyone who doesn’t read it as literature but merely searches its pages for…
Read moreFar Beyond the Half-Way Covenant
Articles/Essays – Volume 06, No. 1
Puritanism began as a covenant theology. Those who held to its fundamental principles up into the seventeenth century, when it dominated men’s lives in Europe and especially in New England, believed that the foremost of…
Read moreThe Comforter
Articles/Essays – Volume 06, No. 1
The argument holds:
the love of God is lonely as time
and the lines of the world are drawn precise and clean:
nothing transcends the dark but the dark.
The Christian Break
Articles/Essays – Volume 07, No. 2
Christianity is a program for revolution. That’s what I tell my more liberal, anarchic friends in and out of the Church. They never believe me, of course, because they stereotype religious orthodoxy as something rigid,…
Read moreMy Children on the Beach at Del Mar
Articles/Essays – Volume 07, No. 3
These are fragments of myself
playing at being fragments of myself
and they will become fragmented themselves
as like me they become themselves.
The Example of Flannery O’Connor
Articles/Essays – Volume 09, No. 4
The flaws of Mormon fiction are many. But so are the possibilities.
Read moreMormon Arts — A Contradiction: A Review Essay | Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives
Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 2
Bernard Shaw once quipped that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms. And one would think that it is likewise a contradiction in terms to refer to Mormon arts. To prove that this is…
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