Spring 2006
The Spring 2006 issue begins with John-Charles Duffy looking at the image problem the church has, noting that around the world and in the academic community Mormons are still viewed as exotic and because of this, secular and interfaith study of Mormonism suffers. Following this is "Pre-Mortal Spirits: Implications of Cloning, Abortion, Evolution, and Extinction" by Kent C. Condie, which looks at the moral and religious problems questions that need to be answered in the near future due to scientific advancement. Finally, we have "The Divine-Infusion Theory: Rethinking the Atonement" by Jacob Morgan which introduces a new way of looking at the atonement to replace the commonly held penal-substitution theory. Also included in this issue are a pair of personal voices, a work of fiction, and a variety of poems.
Wayne C. Booth, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, died on October 10, 2005. From humble beginnings in American Fork, Utah, he went on to become one of the…
Unquestionably, Dialogue has a tradition. It has been on the Mormon scene for forty years now, and those who manage, edit, and read it are determined to see it make another forty.
Supposedly, now is an auspicious time to be doing scholarship on Mor monism. According to a 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Mormon studies has received a “surge of scholarly interest” from specialists in various…
Dialogue 39.1 (Spring 2006): 1–18
Perhaps no other moral issue divides the American public more than abortion. In part, the controversy hinges on the question of when the spirit enters the body. If a spirit were predestined for a given mortalbody and that body is aborted before birth, the spirit would, technically,never be able to have a mortal existence.
1 have always wondered about the meaning of the atonement. Why was it necessary for Christ to suffer? What did his suffering accomplish? How did it work? Growing up as a Latter-day Saint, I was…
It would take a detailed map of Ethiopia to help you locate the village of Lalibela more than four hundred miles north of Addis Ababa. Save for a lyrically beautiful name, there is little to distinguish this place except that it contains some of the world’s most amazing monuments to religious devotion—the “mysterious subterranean, monolithic rock hewn churches,” as one travel guide describes them.
Whether you were driving in from the east or the west you got to our mother’s from Canal Street here in southern Ohio. There at the big Mc Donald’s in Nelsonville you took the crossroad…
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,…
If we simply open our eyes and look about us, it would seem that Amos got it wrong. In societies insulated by affluence, where life runs in routine and moves by diversion, it is visible that the word of God is something most people get along very well without. But in the lives of individuals and societies, tragedies befall, the comforts of routine and the anodyne of affluence cease to satisfy, and people are at length obliged to look for what supports life at its foundations.
A few years back, I was assisting the Ethics Committee of a large metropolitan hospital. The second case on our agenda one afternoon was presented by a pediatric nurse. Two weeks earlier, a baby in…
Mormons love telling each other what to do more than any group I know.
When we meet up together at that great regional conference in the sky and the Lord reviews our collective performance at keeping the commandments, I think that he, unlike most of us, will start with our strengths and congratulate us for observing, to a man [person] and to a fault, the injunction to “give your language to exhortation continually” (D&C 23:7).
Since my teenage years, I have been interested in all things Mormon. I have given countless hours to studying the history, corporate structures, leadership, scriptures and theology of the Latter-day Saints. It has led me…
For the first and only time, my wife sent my father a letter. I have since retrieved the letter and have it still. It is two deckle sheets neatly typed on the electric portable I…
So this is how you’ll preserve
me, Lord? in a slosh of brine?
Go ahead, though I’ve borne no fruit, torn
loose from my roots and gone my own way.
I once sat on a plateau’s edge
It began on my back, with updrafts.
They rose along the white escarpment
She never speaks to him anymore. Her tongue
is as bone-dry as an irrigation ditch in winter,
her ankles grimy as a crooked ewe’s. Dribbled
wine and spots of sour milk stain her blouse,
and now his lead sheep has given up the bell.
Our children were conceived
in a carved maple bed sent
from Milwaukee on the train
by my husband’s grandmother in 1937.
I trace my past life through hairdos: ringlets,
pigtails, finger waves, straightened-on-juice-cans,
bouffant, French braids, and—worst—sausage rolls
flying back from my face like ditsy, exuberant wings.
More than thirty years ago, I made a decision that seemed simple enough at the time but that would have a far-reaching impact on my professional career. I became an archivist at the LDS Church…
Contained in this informative volume are ten essays originally delivered as annual lectures from 1995 through 2004 honoring Leonard J. Arrington, renowned scholar of Utah-Mormon history, former LDS Church Historian, and one-time Utah State University…
I have a distant relative who is an avid genealogist. She is fond of joking that, whenever two people talk about genealogy, one of them is bored. If this quip has any truth to it,…
Those of us who study material culture frequently use “rootedness,” which is the quality of an object or a structure when it is fixed in association with a geographical place. For example, a group of…
A native of Salt Lake City, Bonnie Posselli was introduced early by her mother to plein air painting, which she describes as her “abiding love and strongest asset.” She has traveled extensively to paint in…
