Kieth Merrill, who created the Great American Cowboy, has done it again. This time the movie is Indian, a beautiful, kaleidoscopic montage dramatized through the odyssey of a young Navajo (Raymond Tracey), who has left…
Social scientists have frequently remarked on the proliferation of religious denominations, sects and cults in the United States. Since its early history, Mormonism has spawned a large number of sects directly or indirectly. At least…
Following the phenomenal success of his book-turned-TV mini-series, Alex Haley described his work Roots as “faction,” a careful combination of history and fiction. Using what names, dates and places he could find in the records as a skeleton, he proceeded…
Of course, when anyone asks me what my husband does for a living, I never say, “He builds nuclear weapons.” No one in Richland builds bombs. People here only teach school, fight fires, design containment…
Title: Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader
Author: Stephen C. Taysom
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Religious Studies
Year: 2011
Pages: 500
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-1-56085-212-4
Price: $28.95
Back when he was a doctoral student in religious studies, Stephen C. Taysom wished he had a collection of “fine scholarship” he could use to show professors and others “who expressed skepticism about the fitness of Mormonism as an object of serious academic study” what they were missing (vii). Now Taysom is a professor of religious studies at Cleveland State University. His reworked dissertation, Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries, was published in 2011 by Indiana University Press. Enough has changed within the academy (and within Taysom’s own circles) over the past few years to turn his professors’ skepticism into inquiry: “I have received requests from colleagues for a selection of readings that might be used profitably in courses dealing with Mormonism,” Taysom reports in Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader (xi). The reader is a collection of fifteen essays analyzing Mormonism through literary, ritual, film, gender, folklore, and other studies. Taysom argues that the collection’s very existence bears witness that “Mormonism is a rich field of inquiry into which theories and methods of a vast array of disciplines are being widely and skillfully integrated” (viii). Rather than describing a few of the papers Taysom selected and giving them a thumbs up or down, I’d like to use the book as a way to examine a few key issues being debated—or not—in discussions of Mormon studies today.
Title: Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theolog
I watched Groundhog Day the other night. I’ve owned the DVD for years but never tore the plastic wrapping until Adam Miller put a bug in my ear via one of his theological essays. (It was just as good as I remembered it!) Miller, the theological film critic. I laughed when Phil, Bill Murray’s character, punched Ned Ryerson in the face at a busy intersection and I teared up as he fruitlessly pummeled the chest of a dying homeless man in a freezing alleyway. “Come on, pops, come on pops, don’t die on me.” Watching Phil struggle through incomprehension, laugh at absurdity, and find joy in relationships, reminded me a lot of reading Miller’s book. I’d already read great reviews of it, I couldn’t wait to get a copy. But I hit many more brick walls than I anticipated. This deceptively thin volume will take much more of your time than you might think. It felt at times like the alarm clock kept hitting 6:00 AM, February 2, and I was in for another round of difficulty. Not that all the essays were the same, but that they were each difficult in their own way. It’s way above my level to feel confident in doing this, but my review is an attempt to help readers like me have a better chance at making it through the book.
Dialogue 49.2 (Summer 2016): 61–80
The photographs and essays featured in this issue of Dialogue come from Kimberly Anderson’s Mama Dragon Story Project: A Collection of Portraits and Essays from Mothers Who Love Their LGBT+ Children
Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 45–81
Brooks explains that “Mormons will have to choose to acknowledge the pivotal and pervasive role of white supremacy in the founding of LDS institutions and the growth of the Mormon movement.”
I Friday morning. June sky like denim through the bus windows. The last day before the weekend, Marc repeated to himself, like a gypsy muttering a chant. He swung off the bus four blocks before his…