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From By Common Consent
Another year, another Christmas gift book guide.
     
Mormon Studies Review $25 ($10 digital)
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought $50 ($25 digital) [see comments for discount]
Journal of Mormon History $70 ($30 digital)
BYU Studies Quarterly (currently offline – call only)
The annual subscriptions. The Mormon Studies Review is one of three journals by the Maxwell Institute (formerly FARMS). It provides reviews and essays by top scholars of Mormon Studies. This is to keep on top of the field. One issue a year, but you get digital access to all the journals with either paper or digital only subscription. BYU Studies and Dialogue are general Mormon Studies publications. You’ll find a little bit of everything (though Dialogue also has regular fiction).

Prominent French intellectual René Girard recently passed away. His influence was felt in the pages of Dialogue due to Mack C. Stirling’s work on “Violence in the Scriptures: Mormonism and the Cultural Theory of René Girard” that also resulted in a marvelous dialogue with Joseph Spencer responding: “René Girard and Mormon Scripture: A Response.” Stirling also had the opportunity to interview Girard back in 2009: “Scandals, Scapegoats, and the Cross: An Interview with René Girard.” Here’s a taste: Girard: “If God had created man as happy and peaceful as cows in a nice meadow, there would be no point to the creation. In a way, suffering is part of education, but that is all we can say. We see it at only the human level. If you want to educate yourself, you have to suffer. It is more difficult than playing cards all day long. This explanation is imperfect and incomplete and doesn’t help much. Christianity is a religion which demands faith, and faith makes sense precisely because we don’t have all the pieces for understanding. Otherwise, it is not faith.

Cross posted at Times and Seasons
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought gets a new editor every five or six years, and that time is now upon us. As a subscriber and supporter, I wanted to get a sense of where the incoming editor, Boyd Jay Petersen, is going to take the journal, so I bought a copy of his Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Culture, and Family(Greg Kofford Books, 2013) to get the lowdown. After all, Kristine is a hard act to follow. After reading the book, I am optimistic. To offer a few comments, I will highlight one essay from each of the three sections in the book.
Faith. Chapter 5, “LDS Youth in an Age of Transition,” was originally a 2011 Dialogue article reviewing two books reporting survey data about the beliefs and religious activity of Christian and LDS youth. The review is also a response of sorts to an earlier published essay, “Soulcraft 101: Faith, Doubt, and the Process of Education,” in which Petersen reflects on the interactions he had with students while teaching Mormonism at UVU. Most online conversations about LDS youth are more pessimistic than warranted by the facts. Here is encouraging commentary offered by Petersen in Chapter 5:

Cross-posted at By Common Consent
By Steve Evans
Trevor Southey passed away yesterday.Southey was an artist, sculptor, Mormon, gay man, husband, ex-husband, father and a host of other adjectives.
Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Southey joined the Church in South Africa and moved to Utah. He studied and taught at BYU. His ‘Alpine modernist’ style combines realistic forms in with abstract elements. The human form was at the center of much of his work. He saw grace and beauty in the human body, even while administrators around him would not permit sketching from nudes. “the reason the human is central to my work is because it’s central to my life,” he said. He would establish an artistic community in Alpine.

Brian Birch and Spencer Fluhman look at the “Past, Present, and Possible Futures of Mormon Studies” at this Mormon Matters podcast. From the website: “The academic study of religion has been around for a long time. And although there are many examples of books and articles that have used academic lenses to explore various aspects of Mormonism, it’s only in the past two decades that we’ve begun to see the formal rise of “Mormon Studies.” In this episode, Brian Birch and Spencer Fluhman, two thought leaders in this emerging field, help us understand Mormon Studies….Birch and Fluhman are very forthcoming about these and other questions, and they also let us peek a little bit behind the curtain into past and contemporary debates at places and organizations such as Utah Valley University and the Brigham Young University religion department, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, as well as the Mormon Studies Review and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Along with Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon, who also has studied religion in the academy, they also share their own experiences studying their religion through academic lenses. How has it benefited their feeling at home within Mormonism? What other payoffs from their academic work have they felt in their own spiritual journeys?”

From By Common Consent. For another beautiful example of Ashley’s writing, check out her piece from the Winter 2014 Issue: “In Light” released for free for everyone to enjoy.
Ashley Mae Hoiland received a BFA in studio arts and an MFA in poetry, both from Brigham Young University. She served a mission in Uruguay. She now lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband, Carl, and two children, Remy and Thea. She has written and illustrated several children’s books and once headed a project that printed poetry on billboards. More of her writing can be found at www.birdsofashmae.com. We are glad to welcome Ashmae as a guest of BCC.
There I am, a little sprite of a girl, lion-haired and scrape-kneed, taking bouncy skipping steps along the dirt path. Quiet morning sun peers through the leaves like the light through stained glass at the front of a cathedral. As a thirty-year-old, I stand at the top of my childhood hill and look down. I can see my 8-year-old self stopping to bend near the ground and hold some leaves between her fingers. I hear the scuffle and scrape of dust and rocks beneath worn tennis shoes. My tiny self is alone and canopied by the canyon oaks and crooked spruces.