There was no way I could fit all the amazing blogs from the past 10+ years into the print feature in the Summer 2014 Issue so for a special treat for all online Dialogue readers, a supplemental featuring of more wonderful posts from the LDS blog world and beyond. Enjoy! – EmJen
Crossposted at By Common Consent.
By Blair Hodges
Did the law of consecration become effectively suspended or temporarily replaced by the law of tithing when the early Latter-day Saints couldn’t make it work out? Joseph M. Spencer answers no in For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. Spencer’s latest book offers an analysis of the law of consecration through a close and detailed reading of selections from Paul’s letter to the Romans and Joseph Smith’s revelation now canonized as section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants.
Crossposted at By Common Consent
Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem
By Michael Austin, Dialogue Board Member
Greg Kofford Books, 2014
$20.95
Academic approaches to scripture sometimes arouse suspicion in LDS circles, especially when they include the Higher Criticism (“Moses didn’t write the five books of Moses?”) or reading the Bible as literature (“So you think this is a work of fiction?”). People using or advocating these approaches often draw charges of privileging the intellectual ways of the world over the pure spiritual truth of God, of trusting in the arm of flesh, or of kowtowing to secular disbelief in the interest of seeming more acceptable.
When I heard that Professor Givens had embarked on a work of “Mormon Theology” I was more than a little skeptical. Not that it hasn’t been done before. That isn’t the problem. It’s just that theology, as James Faulconer has written, is something that just doesn’t seem to fit Mormonism. However, when I got my greedy little hands on Givens’ book, I was pleased to see that it is a work of theological heritage. In Givens’ words: “I am here tracing what I regard as the essential contours of Mormon thought as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present, not pretending to address the many tributaries in and out of Mormonism’s main currents.”(x)
Cross-posted at By Common Consent
Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian and a Bible scholar—two identity markers that’ve raised a few conflicts for him. Which really is too bad, because he seems like a pretty faithful, intelligent, funny guy. At least, he seems like that based on this faithful, intelligent, and funny book he just wrote about the Bible. It’s called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.
I think a lot of Mormons could really benefit from Enns’s experience.
“Kristine Haglund, the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, said that while she found the church’s new transparency ‘really hopeful,’ she and other women she had talked with were disturbed that the essays do not address the painful teaching about polygamy in eternity.
“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Ms. Haglund said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t be practiced in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are really troubled by it.”
Editor Kristine Haglund is featured in the PBS NewsHour segment “In releasing history, Mormon Church grapples with origins and polygamy.” Watch the video or read the transcript of her remarks.
Here’s a snippet:
KRISTINE HAGLUND: Well, it’s important to remember that Mormonism is a young faith as religions go.
And so I think for the last decade or so, there’s been an increasing recognition that just controlling the message and carefully limiting the amount of information that people have won’t work anymore in the Internet age. There’s been much more openness among scholars about these difficult questions.
Emma Lou Thayne passed away on December 6, 2014, and in honor of this great poet and author, we presents her writings from within Dialogue’s pages:
“Where Can I Turn for Peace?“a personal essay from Fall 2006: “Here in the baffling conundrums of politics and power, we can offer sustenance of heart and means. I can do more than grieve over death and destruction. I can love my country by caring enough to keep informed to all sides and expressing my views.”
“Things Happen” a poem from Summer 1990.
“How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering” from Winter 1984.
In a guest post for Rational Faiths, Board Member Patrick Mason says “It’s pretty obvious that most Mormons are not pacifists. But if we are in fact going to worship Jesus, and not just make a dumb idol out of the Babe of Bethlehem, then we should think long and hard about it.
Mormons have by and large accepted the dominant Christian notion of “just war,” first articulated not in the New Testament nor by the earliest Christians (many of whom went to the lion’s den rather than serve in the military), but rather by the fourth- and fifth-century Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. It’s only natural to believe that if someone hits you, you should hit them back. Or that violence is effective in defeating our enemies. Or that peace can come through war. The trouble is, Jesus taught none of these things—in fact, he taught just the opposite.”
“God gives us a world in which we may borrow wisdom from others, but we also must learn through the exercise of free will, through mistake-making, through the earnest seeking of truth based in our own thinking, discerning, and seeking,” says Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife in this must-read new interview from the Winter 2014 issue. Check out “Developing Integrity in an Uncertain World:An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife” and download either the pdf version or the html version for free! And have you checked out the rest of the magnificent Winter 2014 issue yet? It features Joanna Brooks’s survey of Mormon feminism, Courtney Rabada’s study of sister missionaries and Nancy Ross and Jessica Finnigan’s look at the feminist presence online, plus many other powerful women’s voices.
Click here to purchase individual articles, or, even better, to become a subscriber to Dialogue!