Elder Price Superstar
September 3, 2011by Michael Hicks I’ll never forget the first time I heard my mother swear. I was in my thirties and had finally decided to talk to her about her second husband, whom she’d married when…
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Merry Christmas!
December 8, 2011In this issue, Armand Mauss looks back over the decades since his book The Angel and the Beehive was published, with its seminal theory of LDS assimilation and retrenchment, while Fred Gedicks looks forward to…
Spring 2012 Issue online for subscribers…
February 21, 2012…and the Spring 2010 Issue is now open to all
The Spring 2012 Issue opens with a feisty stack of letters to Dialogue before delving into Shawn Tucker’s exploration of Mormonism’s contribution to the “Virtues and Vices” tradition in various religious and philosophical schools of thought. Then John Bennion contributes a tribute to his ancestor Lucile Cannon Bennion and Gary Bergera examines the cases of two “liberal” professors at BYU during the Wilkinson years, offering new insight into Wilkinson’s modes of thought and management. Other highlights include poetry by Elizabeth Willes, creative nonfiction by A Motley Vision’s William Morris, an Easter homily and a Mother’s Day sermon you will actually like (really!).
By Common Consent
April 20, 2012A blog by members of Dialogue’s editorial team and friends that’s spirited, spiritual, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking.
Recent offerings:
- Why I don’t like the priesthood-motherhood analogy: Part one of a million partsby Rebecca J
- Reaching the Isolated by Guest poster Amira
- The Astonishment of Redemption by Jacob
- If We’re Gonna Do This…by Brad
- General Conference Infographic in Pink and Blue by Cynthia L
Review: The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus
May 29, 2012
Title: The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus
Author: John Dominic Crossan
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: New Testament
Year: 2012
Pages: 259
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-06-187569-4
Price: $25.99
By Blair Hodges
Jesus was so meta. In his famed parable of the Sower “the word” is compared to seed being cast onto the ground where it might grow or perish. And the word “parable” itself comes from the Greek—para (“with” or “alongside”) and ballein (“to put” or “to throw”). As popular biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan observes in his latest book: “Jesus was not trying to improve the agricultural yield of lower Galilee.” The activity of sowing is “cast alongside and compared with” the dissemination of the word; this is essentially a parable using parable as parable (10).
Crossan explores this manner of teaching in his provocatively-titled The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.
Review of Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism
June 20, 2012
Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism (Series Editor Kathleen Mulhern), available in e-book formats for $2.99. For details, see this website.
Reviewed by Kevin Barney
Remember when you were in high school, and you were assigned a five-page paper? Oh, how you struggled to reach that goal of five pages! If you got desperate enough, perhaps you played with fonts, margins and line spacing in an effort to cross the finish line with some hopefully-not-too-obvious space padding techniques made possible by the computer age. What a relief it was when you finally achieved the assigned length. Maybe you would even add an extra paragraph, so it wouldn’t look too obvious how much you were straining to get to five pages of text.
What Alcoholics Anonymous Taught Me About Repentance
November 19, 2012Besides the songs, the one lesson I remember well from my Primary teachers is the one about the 4 R steps of repentance. That lesson has served me well over the years, even though I am still not very good at repenting. Usually my efforts go like this: I take the first step (Recognize) and acknowledge that I need to make a change in my life. I start to explore ways I can change and in that process I realize that the problem goes far deeper than I had first assumed, and that it will be much harder to change than I thought. At this point I take my own personal R step — Rationalize — and decide that the character attribute I started out to change really is a feature, not a bug, and go merrily on with my mediocre efforts at gospel living. As I sit in the back of the room at the AA meeting, back by the folding table with the big coffee urn, and observe the people who are there for help, I have been impressed, over and over again, by the way they don’t allow themselves any rationalization. They stand up in front of everybody and acknowledge that they are a complete mess, at rock bottom and there are no excuses.
Review: Jane Barnes, “Falling in Love with Joseph Smith: My Search for the Real Prophet”
May 9, 2013
Title: Falling in Love with Joseph Smith: My Search for the Real Prophet
In this quirky autobiographical biography of Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet, writer Jane Barnes offers an overview of Smith’s life intertwined with her own life experiences of love, loss and death.
Barnes became acquainted with Mormonism largely through her work on the PBS documentary, The Mormons. Hearing stories about Joseph Smith, researching the works of Fawn Brodie and Richard Bushman, meeting with the LDS missionaries, all of these things drew out Barnes’s deeply felt religious need (261). She interweaves her interpretation of Smith with her own life experiences—leaving her family to pursue a lesbian relationship gives her a different view of Smith’s socially deviant polygamy, for example. She is struck to discover her own Mormon roots, ancestors who were present at key turning points in the Mormon story.
Review: Jacob T. Baker, “Mormonism at the Crossroads of Philosophy and Theology”
May 21, 2013
Title: Mormonism at the Crossroads of Philosophy and Theology: Essays in Honor of David L. Paulsen When it comes to academic engagement with philosophy and theology, Mormonism largely lacks two things: People and place. Mormons who are interested in making a comfortable living typically don’t seek higher education in these areas. The Church’s schools, seminaries and institute’s focus more on devotional approaches to the faith. Such circumstances help explain why some of the most sustained work in recent Mormon theologizing and philosophizing has occurred in interfaith settings, which can provide interlocutors and institutions for participation and publication. When the topic of Mormon/Christian interreligious dialog arises, people are likely to think of Stephen E. Robinson’s How Wide the Divide, or Robert Millet’s books attempting rapprochement with various Evangelical scholars, books published mostly by non-Mormon presses. David L. Paulsen’s name is less likely to be recognized by the average Mormon than Robinson or Millet, but it is arguable that Paulsen has done more than any currently-living Mormon scholar in advancing sustained and rigorous interfaith exchanges. The scary and valuable thing about exchanges is that everyone usually departs changed in some sense.
Review: James E. Faulconer's The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder
June 10, 2013
The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder: Scripture Study Questions
James E. Faulconer, Richard L. Evans Chair for Religious Understanding and professor of Philosophy at BYU, has recently published what is essentially a study aid for this years’ Sunday School course in the Doctrine and Covenants. The book can be considered a supplement and companion to his earlier, Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions (the full text is available at the link). Like Scripture Study, Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder is more properly a tool or a guide than a book (a similar volume on the Book of Mormon is forthcoming). Consisting almost entirely of questions about key passages in the scriptural text (though with occasional commentary in order to clarify a particular question), the book is designed to stimulate discussion about the scriptures.