Fall 2024
It's been 50 years since Lester Bush's seminal article and Dialogue celebrates this with a roundtable looking at its impact and what came after. Featuring Darius Gray, Gregory Prince, Ross Peterson, Newel Bringhurst, Robert Rees and Yvonne Bush. If that wasn't enough, the Fall 2024 Issue includes "Gethsemane and Atonement Again" by Grant Adamson "Brigham Young as Pastor: Compassion and Mercy During the Utah War, 1857–1858" by William P. MacKinnon and "'I Am Commanded to Stand and Testify Unto This People The Things Which Have Been Spoken By Our Fathers': Lehi’s and Nephi’s Influence on Alma 5" by Matthew Stott Stenson. Plus so many reviews, gorgeous personal voices and poetry and fiction and art. So much goodness to be found!
In his 2022 Dialogue article “The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo,” Jeremy Christiansen adds to a fuller understanding of LDS reception history of the Lukan account of “Gethsemane,” namely Jesus’ agony and sweat/blood…
Will I run from the sheep? No. Will I forsake the flock? No. . . . I want you to understand that if I am your earthly shepherd you must follow me, or else we shall be…
Yea, he saith, come unto me and ye shall partake of the fruit of the tree of life.—Alma 5:34 One of the most referenced sermons in the Book of Mormon is Alma’s discourse to the…
I wish I had stopped my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that rest stop in western PA. I will stop my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that…
Last night, I sat on the ballroom’s hardwood floor and laced up my practice shoes. Their black canvas fabric hugged the contours of my feet as I flexed, pointed, and rolled them out before a…
Sometimes in the morning, I wake earlier than the others. I slip out of my room and sit down on that well-worn spot on the couch that over time has become mine—the one the boys…
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterward.—Wallace Stegner They must have had names. To us…
The holiest things are always veiled:
sealed sections of holy writ
sacramental emblems
holy of holies
Her
I’ll take your thigh road,
so rugged, overgrown,
that you and I can build upon each other
here, in our bed,
A city, full up to the brim with light,
stood on a hill. It overlooked a valley
of shadow, death, and longing. Then, one day,
the raging radiance began to spill
Let there be light, the goddess shouted
when she struck up the match
and pressed its flame onto a patch
of wiggling hydrogen. Flares spouted
William Jankowiak’s book Illicit Monogamy provides an in-depth look at the intricacies of life in plural families within a specific fundamentalist Mormon community referred to as Angel Park. His work is monumental for its analysis…
I didn’t open it for a few months after receiving I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders. I had been delighted when asked to review it, but when the time came, anxiety overwhelmed me. I knew I would see myself in this book in an intimate, painful way, even though many of the narratives don’t directly reflect my own lived experiences. It was clear that reading this anthology of essays would make me feel vulnerable, striking close to my little queer heart, but I knew it would be healing to feel seen.
“I am finally no longer asked to believe in things for which not only is there no evidence, but which the evidence strongly condemns on fair inspection. . . . Let me be clear: I believe in God,…
For Mormonism’s nearly two-century existence, few subjects have brought it more into the public spotlight than polygamy. Most writers and scholars have focused on Joseph Smith as they told this story. Until Todd Compton came…
When I picked up William V. Smith’s The King Follett Sermon: A Biography, I was expecting to find a history of the text of the famous sermon from April 1844. I found that it was…
The life of Maurine Whipple, lauded Mormon author of the 1941 novel The Giant Joshua, is one of the saddest stories in LDS literature. She loved her people, the tough and hardscrabble settlers of St.…
Beehive Girl is a delightful book. Mikayla Orton Thatcher takes the reader on her journey completing the 1915 Beehive Girls program—an invigorating and intensive achievement plan for young women in the Church of Jesus Christ…
Julie Them, the focal character of Theric Jepson’s new novel Just Julie’s Fine, is a Mary Sue character: “so perfect every reader hates her” while “in the fictional world all people, heroes and villains alike,…
When the Dialogue office moved from Stanford to Los Angeles, it found a home in the University Religious Conference, which was kitty-corner from the UCLA School of Dentistry, where I was a student. Occasionally, I…
When I received a copy of Dialogue volume 8 in the spring of 1973, my mind was immersed in Watergate, Vietnam, and civil rights. Lester Bush’s article on the evolution of a policy relative to…
Those of you who have paid attention along the way know quite a bit about Lester’s 1973 article, particularly because of the follow-up article he published in the Journal of Mormon History in 1999 that…
On this the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lester E. Bush’s landmark Dialogue article “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” I, along with other knowledgeable students of Mormon studies, gratefully acknowledge the crucial role…
Typical of far too many youths of my generation, I grew up in a racist home, a racist community, and in racist Latter-day Saint congregations. As a young man, I harbored deep racist sentiments and…
Lester Bush’s 1973 Dialogue article is the focus here, as it brought much-needed clarity to the convoluted, deeply entrenched Mormon attitude toward race. We all know the story. Prior to June 1978 the Church of…
