Summer 2022
The Summer 2022 Issue is filled with amazing scholarship. It begins with Clyde Ford's "The Sidney Sperry/Heber Snell Debates: Critical Biblical Scholarship and Mormon Tradition" and continues with Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler’s Theological Position on the Nature of God by Loren Pankratz and "Missing and Restoring Meaning" by Jill Mulvay Derr. Then get ready for a roundtable of reviews of the two new Eugene England biographies by Kristine Haglund and Terryl Givens. And if this isn't enough, there is so much new poetry and even more reviews and finally, a beautiful sermon on a "World Without Masks."
In 2018, the Sunday School instructor of my Mormon congregation was assigned to teach the stories about Lot found in Genesis 19. The teacher confessed that he was very uncomfortable discussing these narratives. Instead, he…
Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 37–72
Joseph Smith’s teachings on God found in his preaching at the April 7, 1844 general conference, known as the King Follett Sermon, and Smith’s Sermon in the Grove, given at a meeting held just east of the Nauvoo Temple on June 16, 1844, have appeared to many to give strong support to this view. There, he taught that God was not always God but developed into God over time.
Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 93–102
The way of viewing truth in the Church differs from the common philosophical concept of truth as something that corresponds to the historical or present facts of a given situation.
Listen to the podcast version here. For nearly three hours, I’d been trying unsuccessfully to sleep. It was definitely not the most comfortable bed I’d ever had—only a thin yellow and silver accordion-style pad separated…
Fifty years ago I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shotgun apartment just off Mass. Ave. at Central Square: 22 Magazine Street, Apt. 3. Spring 1971 marked the last months of my master of…
As a mother of six young children, I was surprised when I received the impression to apply for grad school. I already held a bachelor of music, and though I taught voice lessons and sang…
Podcast version of this piece. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt,…
Listen to the podcast version here. The doorbell rang as I hung up the phone, and then I heard my father’s deep, imposing voice fill our entryway. I stood and walked slowly into the unlit…
Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…
Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…
Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…
Podcast version of this piece. I don’t know, Jake,why Dad asked me to drive you there,but I did hear every word Brother Allen said,and here’s a few he skipped: Our Heavenly Fatheris pleased with your…
Podcast version of this piece. I pause on the path, drop my sticks,and bend to read them like runes.Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning asI gather berries…
Podcast version of this piece. Scene: Thicket for a Slaughter We have seenbets, contests— only the greatones sent tospar with God: father, son,sacrifice. Scene: An Examination Question:the brain, a tangledbramble—the fire and the knife,a fearsomebinding.…
Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…
The ten stories that comprise Losing a Bit of Eden sustain Levi Peterson’s position as one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West. Each story is well grounded in a particular time…
Samuel M. Brown’s Where the Soul Hungers is something of a grab bag of sundry reflections on the gospel. As Brown himself explains, the book is intended to be part “pure devotions” and part “philosophical…
On April 13, 2021, President Biden announced that the United States would be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, indicating a shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Saints at War: The Gulf War,…
The attacks of September 11, 2001 are a spectacular reminder that the struggle between religion and politics is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Eugene England’s life, which ended just weeks before those attacks,…
The eight essays in this collection describe and interpret the US Senate’s investigation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the Progressive Era. Nominally an investigative hearing on the election of Utah…
One thing a reader learns from Terryl Givens’s new biography is that no one who knew Eugene England could claim to be an objective appraiser of his life. Countless individuals revered him; he had guided…
I miss Gene England! I have especially missed his voice these past twenty years. So many times, I have wondered, “What would Gene have said about . . .” as we have stumbled and bungled…
This is an important, accessible book that should be in the hands of everyone who thinks deeply about Mormonism’s place in the world. Writing for the Cambridge Element series on religion and violence, Patrick Mason…
Today, June 20, 2021, is the first day since March 15, 2020 that we in the Stanford First Ward have been allowed to attend service in our own building without masks and social distancing. As…
