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.

Articles

The Witty and Witless Saints of a Nobel Prize Winner

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…

Creation

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…

Faith

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…

Every Soul Has Its South

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

“’I Never Knew a Time When I Did Not Know Joseph Smith”: A Son’s Record Of The Life And Testimony Of Sidney Rigdon

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

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…

On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature

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…

The New English Bible: Three Views: A Literary View

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…

Far Beyond the Half-Way Covenant

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…

The Comforter

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

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,…

My Children on the Beach at Del Mar

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

The flaws of Mormon fiction are many. But so are the possibilities.

Mormon Arts — A Contradiction: A Review Essay | Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives

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…