This week marked the ignition of the new online journal Religion & Politics with some familiar Dialogue faces participating. Board Member Max Mueller serves as associate editor and Dialogue Associate Editor Matt Bowman contributes a thought-provoking essay.
Within this inaugural issue, there are two Mormon-related pieces.
You’re sure to hear a few such discordant notes as Brooks’s fingers glide up and down the scale, but to focus on such slips overlooks the book’s overall melody, the song of a Mormon girl whose nascent faith is challenged, lost, found, and refined by fire throughout. She’s the prodigal daughter telling only a little about years of riotous living, more about the faith of her youth and the re-visioned faith of her adulthood. Memoirs aren’t intended to tell a disconnected story of one’s life, but to invite readers into an intensely subjective world. The best memoirs aren’t written as how-to manuals (like the Marie Osmond brand beauty and fashion instructions Brooks read as an awkward, body-conscious young girl. You’re sure to laugh out loud as she spends a chapter pillorying such fluff). Instead, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, good memoirs awaken “a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, and they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”2 American publisher William Sloan says readers of such works are not so much saying to the author “Tell me about you,” but rather “Tell me about me; as I use your book and life as a mirror.”
Blair Ho
dges brings his years of reviewing experience to Dialogue in a new section devoted to Book Reviews of interest to Dialogue readers. He shares insights and opinions about recent Mormon-flavored books ranging from theology to history to memoir to biography and more.
Click in to explore some of his recent ones including a look at Joanna Brooks’ new memoir (“This brings me to what I understand to be the heart of the matter, especially for Mormon readers of Brooks’s book: the tension between personal and institutional revelation; or, questions of authority.”) as well as two offerings from the new Salt Press (…we all come to the text with various preconceptions, hopes, fears, and experiences which help determine what we get out of our reading. These particular (peculiar?) volumes encourage us as readers, above all, to pay close attention to what we bring to the text.)
And that’s just a taste of what’s to come so bookmark Dialogue’s new Book Reviews (found in the menu above) and check back often.
What’s that you say, Joseph M. Spencer, graduate student of philosophy at San Jose State? You’re just out offering a radical new textually-based interpretation of the entire Book of Mormon in your spare time, hmm? Radical and new. Sounds like a nice little project you got there, yes. Wait, what?!
We’ve had the BoM for over a century now, what can we possibly have missed in all this time? Keep in mind that the assumptions which we readers bring to the text help determine the meaning we receive from the text. Spencer’s two broad guiding assumptions to his new approach to the BoM are (1) That the theological ideas of the BoM have been carefully arranged by the prophets within larger narrative textual structures. Thus, “Embedded in these larger structures, many of the Book of Mormon’s ideas draw meaning and especially nuance from their context” (xi). (2) That “ideas change with time and circumstance.” And because the BoM’s ideas are “woven into a real—and therefore anything but tidy—history,” readers may mistakenly gloss over some of the complexity of ideas within the text, missing out on the complexity within the book (xii). He seems to be saying “we need to quit reading the BoM in such a univocal fashion.” Spencer assumes we have a book sort of like the Bible—an edited compilation with a variety of voices. With this in mind, very interesting things begin to emerge from the text. Not a voice, but voices from the dust.
[…] a painful and difficult life made whole and glorious by the love of a family, and a community, and Christ. One of the most profound ways that I believe Roene fulfilled her calling is […]
[…] to “root” Mormonism overlooks the immediate relevance of the actual location, the immediate circumstances, of the frontier community in which plural marriage arose, a point noted by the former essay and even within Compton’s […]
[…] in Daily Life: Sacrament, Family, and Temple Symbolism: Signs of Hope and Promise CHAPTER FIVE: ETHICS AND COMMUNITY Community Organization: Wards and Common Care Leadership: Presidency, Quorums, and Bishops Principles of Moral Thought and […]
Editor Kristine Haglund joins fellow panelists Jordan Kimball and Katie Davis Henderson in a new Mormon Matters podcast on “Growing Up Mormon–and Fearless.” They discuss how their intellectual and spiritual minds were groomed while growing up in faithful homes where questions were encouraged and discussed. Haglund explains how this helps her now with her own children: “I like the idea of letting my kids ask their own questions, that’s definitely the way it went in my family. It wasn’t that my father was assigning us questions to think about or asking us the hard questions…it happened more organically. It was more about our questions than his. So I try to do that with my own family, I try not to force my own questions on them…I mostly try to model fearlessness to them. They know that I ask questions and that things aren’t scary, even the hard things.”
[…] of the fifteen chapters deal with Mormonism after the presidency of David O. McKay: Martha Bradley-Evans’s “Building Community: The Fundamentalist Mormon Concept of Space” (51-72), Stephen C. Taysom, “A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph […]
[…] and heirs. The joy of heaven comes from communion with God, but also from our participation in God’s work and our communion with each other in a perfect community. Heaven is other people.” 220px-LDS_church_office_building