Dialogue 4.2 (Summer 1971): 82–85
Secular scholarship and L.D.S. studies of archaeology and the Book of Mormon have had a discordant dialogue for some time. The scripture asserts, for example, that the civilizations it describes in ancient America had their fundamental inspiration in migrations from the Near East.
Terryl Givens will wax eloquently on early LDS apostle Parley P. Pratt as the featured speaker at the Miller-Eccles Study Group this weekend.
DATES: November 11 (Villa Park) and November 12 (La Canada – Flintridge).
TIME: 7:30 p.m.
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.
Various blogs are discussing this new book from Terryl and Fiona Givens: The God Who Weeps has been hailed as one of “most welcome serious theological engagement with some of the more resonant ideas Mormonism has promulgated in its 180 year history.”
Other blog reactions:
“…I will just say that this is the single best book of Mormon Studies that I have ever read” – Julie M. Smith at Times and Seasons
Dear Friend of Dialogue:
The past year has been an outstanding one for Dialogue. I hope you have found articles that speak to you. I must admit that I often turn first to the book reviews—it is a way for me to obtain thoughtful insight into the best of the new Mormon-themed books that are published each year….
Dialogue is more than just a print journal. If you haven’t visited our website lately, please do. You can find all the past Dialogue articles there, as well as pieces on selected Mormon current affairs. You might want to take a moment to click on the “Contact Us” link and skim the biographies and photos of our Board of Directors to see who’s working behind the scenes.
Dialogue and the Dangerous, Beautiful Possibilities of Mormon Literature by Michael Austin
Cross-posted at the Association of Mormon Letters blog.
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. This is important for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with Mormon literature. But some of the reasons have a lot to do with Mormon literature, perhaps the most important being that the advent of Dialogue fifty years ago fundamentally altered the possibility space in which Mormon literature could occur.
This happened in two ways. In the first place, Dialogue was the first venue that regularly discussed Mormon literature as an academic discipline. During its first twelve years, Dialogue published four special issues devoted to Mormon literature (here, here, here, and here), the last one being the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters—an organization that was created largely by Dialogue’s earliest contributors.
To understand the significance of this, we have to imagine a world without blogs, e-mail, comment sections, Amazon, or Wikipedia.
Cross posted at By Common Consent
Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought turns 50 this year. So do I, and the similarities don’t end there. Both of us were both polite and orthodox in our youth and reasonably well behaved in our adolescence, but we both started to push up against institutional boundaries in our early adulthood. We tried hard to walk the line between scholarly inquiry and faithful discourse, but it was a tough line to walk, and sometimes we ended up too much on one side or the other. A lot of our friends left the Church, but we both knew we never could. Mormonism was too much a part of our core identity for us to ever give it up.
Quiet Stories, Complex EmotionDarin Cozzens. The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2016. 202 pp. Paper: $14.95.
Reviewed by Braden Hepner
Julie J. Nichols. Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2016. 148 pp.
Reviewed by Emily Shelton Poole
In her full-length debut, Pigs When They Straddle the Air: A Novel in Seven Stories, Julie J. Nichols presents the interconnected lives of various women living in Salt Lake City over a span of thirty years, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the seven stories focuses on a different main character until their lives become so entangled that the narratives converge in tragedy, heartache, and eventual healing. Some of these stories appeared previously in other publications, including Dialogue.
Shawn Vestal. Daredevils. New York: Penguin Press, 2016. 308 pp.
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols
It’s a hard truth: you have to be damn smart to be a writer of good fiction. If you’re dumb, forget it. You have to hear words in your head—and who doesn’t? But you also have to know how to put them together in a sentence that’s not only grammatical but original in its context, truer than any other sentence could possibly be. Then you have to do that with paragraphs and chapters in the service of a whole whose shape knocks readers right out of unconsciousness, makes them alive, blasts their eyes open so they see the world new.