Back to all topics

Christ

Recommended

Practicing Divinity

Buildings

May Many Phoenixes Rise

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Move Back in a Heartbeat

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Not Different from My Home

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

All Content

Gethsemane and Atonement Again

In his 2022 Dialogue article “The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo,” Jeremy Christiansen adds to a fuller understanding of LDS reception history of the Lukan account of “Gethsemane,” namely Jesus’ agony and sweat/blood…

Correlating Orthodoxy and Style: Institutionally “Approved” Christ-Centered Art in LDS Visual Resources and Meetinghouses, 1990–2021

Religious images have long been used in Latter-day Saint worship and instruction. Paintings, illustrations, and graphic works served a devotional function among the early Church members. Not only did the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo use…

Racial Innocence and the Christus-Based Latter-day Saints Symbol

On April 4, 2020, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) formally adopted an institutional symbol that is now prominently displayed on the Church logo and is imprinted on Church publications, websites, videos,…

Judging Israel

Listen to an interview about this piece here. We sat around a long rectangular table in the local church building. It was tapered at one end, almost trapezoidal. Five men lined each of the long…

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. Michael Reed’s 2012 book Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo sets out an excellent account of the uncomfortable relationship between the Church…

BODIES OF CHRIST WRITING CONTEST

Editor’s Note: In 2021, Dialogue hosted a writing contest titled Bodies of Christ with the following parameters: Dialogue seeks submissions of poetry (up to 100 lines), short fiction (3500–6000 words), and personal voice (nonfiction, narrative…

Jesus and the Father. The Book of Mormon and the Early Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Trinity

Note: This article one of the special web-only series and not printed in a physical issue.

Jesus Christ, Esq.

I begin in the New Testament, in the book of 1 John, a text written by someone presumed to be John the Beloved: My dear children, I write this to you so that you will…

I Was a Stranger . . .

One hundred seventy-two years ago this coming Wednesday, July 24, the first company of Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, which was to be their new home. Being mostly a desert, it didn’t look…

Review: Embraced in Love Eric D. Huntsman. Becoming the Beloved Disciple: Coming unto Christ through the Gospel of John.

Jesus Christ

Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater- than-Average Joy Grant Hardy, ed. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition.

Resurrection

Since he was a child, he’d dreamed of himself in one form and woken up, always disappointed, always jolted by the reality and by the way that others looked at him. In the first years,…

On Solace

From the Pulpit: I’m Trying to Get to Know Jesus

What Does It Mean to Be Truly Christian?

Do We Have to Believe That? Canon and Extra-Canonical Sources of LDS Belief

“All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism

Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul

Reimagining the Restoration: Why Liberalism is the Ultimate Flowering of Mormonism

The Elegance of Belief

Christ Without the Church: The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On August 24, 1932, Dietrich Bonhoeffer began an address at the International Youth Conference in Glad, Switzerland, with the words, “The Church is Dead.”[1] Today, 1966, Bonhoeffer is dead, yet the church lives. However, a…

The Mormon Doctrine of Baptism as Reflected in Early Christian Baptisteries

The ordinance of baptism was known and practiced in all ages that knew the Gospel of Jesus Christ, both before and after His lifetime on earth. We find accounts of baptisms in the Pearl of…

Worship and Architecture | Verena Ursenbach Hatch, Worship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The irreverence in the Church today “is not irreverence of disdain for spiritual things, but rather the irreverence of undeveloped spirituality.” So writes the author of Worship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…

Worship and Music | Verena Ursenbach Hatch, Worship and Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Worship and Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be had as a single volume or in two separate bindings. One volume (separately reviewed) includes the first seven chapters of the…

In Memory of P.A. Christensen

Sister Ruth, family, in-laws, friends and relatives, Brothers and Sisters, it is an honor, but a humbling experience, to be invited to speak at the funeral of a great man, a great soul. I appreciate…

Another View of the Mormons | Kathleen Elgin, The Mormons: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Mormons is the second in the Freedom to Worship series designed to tell stories of “outstanding Americans of the nineteenth century and their different religious beliefs.” The series is intended to fit into the…

Dramatic Christianity | Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

Thus begins Father Daniel Berrigan’s poem, “The Passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” which in some ways is also a poem about his own passion. On 17 May 1968, prompted by conscience and a courage similar to that of Bonhoeffer, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Jesuit priests, went with seven of their friends into draft board number 33 at Catonsville, Maryland, where they confiscated 378 individual draft files.

Are Mormons Christian?

One day last fall as I was getting acquainted with a student who was particularly interested in my Mormon background, the student told of being informed by a religion professor that Mormons weren’t Christians. This…

The Christian Break

Christianity is a program for revolution. That’s what I tell my more liberal, anarchic friends in and out of the Church. They never believe me, of course, because they stereotype religious orthodoxy as something rigid,…

Three Christmas Hymns: A Christmas Hymn; The Babe of Bethlehem; Away in a Manger

A Child’s Christmas in Utah

It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes. 

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Treasures In the Heavens: Some Early Christian Insights into the Organizing of Worlds

The canonical writings and the apocrypha have a good deal to say about “treasures in the heavens.” If we compare the “treasures” passages in a wide sampling of these writings, including those of Qumran, Nag…

Choral Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Church music is that music which serves a worshipful purpose in a religious meeting. The Random House Dictionary defines worship as “reverent honor or regard paid to God or a sacred personage. . . .…

The Eliza Enigma

Common Beginnings, Divergent Beliefs

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1979): 19–31
Within two years of his assasination, however, the Church was torn by succession struggles that led to dispersion. Almost a century and a half later, the whereabouts of many of these saints is still unknown.

The Coniunctio in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

From at least the seventeenth century and perhaps from as early as the writings of the pre-Socratics, Western thought has been plagued with a radical dualism which has severed one area of activity and experience…

A Modern Evangelist | Bruce R. McConkie, The Mortal Messiah: From Bethlehem to Calvary

One is hopeful, upon reading Elder McConkie’s preface to his latest volume on the dealings of Christ with mankind, that new ground may be broken for Mormons in the recognition of modern findings and scholarship—the…

Christ as Center | Bruce R. McConkie, The Mortal Messiah

The Mortal Messiah, book two, is part of a multiple-volume work on Christ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie. This massive project is referred to by McConkie as “The Messianic Trilogy.” The first work in this…

Mormon Arts — A Contradiction: A Review Essay | Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives

Bernard Shaw once quipped that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms. And one would think that it is likewise a contradiction in terms to refer to Mormon arts. To prove that this is…

Cultural Reflections | Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

The Culture of Narcissism is the product of an American historian who has borrowed a psychiatric syndrome to examine issues and to synthesize a picture of our culture. Narcissism, an ancient term with roots in…

Marxism and Mormonism | Arthur F. McGovern, Marxism: An American Christian Perspective

Most Mormons, in fact Christians in general, would avoid reading a book on Marx ism. Any mutually acceptable alliance has always been scuttled by equally mutual suspicion between Marxists and Christians. Carrying on the tradition…

Saints You Can Sink Your Teeth Into | William G. Hartley, Kindred Saints: The Mormon Immigrant Heritage of Alvin and Kathryn Christensen

With us, someone else’s genealogy ranks right up there with reading the tele phone directory or watching someone else’s home movies. Most Mormon family histories are about as much fun as funerals. Thus, it was…

Career of a Counter-Prophet | C. LeRoy Anderson, For Christ Will Come Tomorrow: The Saga of The Morrisites

This handsome volume immediately establishes itself as the definitive work on the Morrisite movement within Mormonism. A complete study of Joseph Morris and his followers has long been needed and LeRoy Anderson has filled the…

“The Same Organization?” | Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians

In an 1842 description of Latter-day Saint beliefs written for John Wentworth of the Chicago Democrat, Joseph Smith said: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive church, viz. apostles, prophets, pastors,…

Elohim and Jehovah in Mormonism and the Bible

Currently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defines the Godhead as consisting of three separate and distinct personages or Gods: Elohim, or God the Father; Jehovah, or Jesus Christ, the Son of God both…

The Restoration and History: New Testament Christianity

The Restoration movements have tended to elevate historical claims to the level of theological dogma. But in our defense of historical beliefs we have often denied the reality of historical process by asserting that ideas,…

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Christmas Sonnets from Other Years

1937 | 1940 | 1944

Christ’s World Government: An End of Nationalism and War

The tenth Article of Faith states the Mormon belief that “Christ will reign personally upon the earth.” This is usually taken to mean that Christ will literally return to the earth at the Second Coming…

Balance and Faith | William E. Berrett, The Latter-day Saints: A Contemporary History of the Church of Jesus Christ

Thousands of Latter-day Saints were first introduced to William E. Berrett and the Church’s history when they were assigned in seminary to read his book The Restored Church (1940). Initially written in the late 1930s,…

Livre d’Artiste: The Book of Abraham by Day Christensen and Wulf Barsch

Mormon Christianity: A Critical Appreciation by a Christian Pluralist

I recently had an unexpected opportunity to analyze the ideas and experience the worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Following four months of intense dialogue with a Mormon intellectual and former…

Humanity or Divinity? | Martin Scorsese, dir., The Last Temptation of Christ

Outside the San Francisco theater where we saw The Last Temptation of Christ, Christians paraded with guitars, bullhorns, sandwich boards, and placards (some in Cantonese) protesting the blasphemous portrayal of their Lord and Savior. Anti-semitic…

Christ and the Constitution: Toward a Mormon Jurisprudence

In 1987 Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution. Topics previously confined to legal and philosophical journals became the subject of more common discourse. Nowhere was this development more evident than in…

Christmas Morning—1906

By now the Christmases of my life—all but one—have escaped re strictions of time and place and have arranged themselves, undated, in an intricate mosaic of memories, which can be instantly evoked by such small…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Just Enough Truth for Christmastime

In a couple of weeks, I’ll pack up my truck and with my roommate head for Utah. We’ll be there the week before Christmas, skiing and visiting friends and family. We both bought new skis…

The Concept of Grace in Christian Thought

The concept of grace and its relation to individual salvation is prob ably the most debated issue in the history of Christian thought. The list of combatants is virtually a Who’s Who in Christian thought:…

Comments on the Theological and Philosophical Foundations of Christianity

Historical Christianity is a remarkable composite of diverse religious cultures, a mixture that even today, after two millennia, is still mixing, blending things that often will not blend and fusing the unfusible. Sometimes severe, chaste,…

Anti-Christian Fundamentalism: Casting the First Stone: The Hypocrisy of Religious Fundamentalism by R. A. Gilbert

Non-Traditional Christianity: Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints

Did Jesus Heal Simon’s Mother-in-law of a Fever?

The Sabbath Day: To Heal or Not to Heal

The Continuing Quest for the Historical Jesus

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

Sanctified, In the Flesh

The Miracles of Jesus: Three Basic Questions for the Historian

Jesus Christ in the New Testament: Part One: The Historical Jesus Behind the Gospels

Jesus Christ in the New Testament: Part Two: Various Images of Jesus in the Books of the New Testament

The First Christmas Eve at Home

“Easy to be Entreated:” Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent and Christian Communication

Did Christ Pay for Our Sins?

One Well-Wrought Side of the Story: Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887 by Scott R. Christensen

Philosophical Christian Apology Meets “Rational” Mormon Theology

Taking Up the Cross

Bring Them Unto Christ

Eugene England: Our Brother in Christ

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

No Other Way?: Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity

Christian Spinning

The Woman of Christlike Love

Sunday Morning — Eight Days Before Christmas, 2001

The LDS Church and Community of Christ: Clearer Differences, Closer Friends

Dialogue 36.4 (Winter 2003): 177–192
In this paper I will briefly discuss what I see as the six major differences between the two churches during the first century of their existence, and then I will look at eight new differences that have emerged over the past forty years or so. I make no claim that either is a complete list.

Rooted in Christian Hope: The Case for Pacifism

Christmas Conflict 2001

The First Piece in the Puzzle: Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana by Emmanuel Abu Kissi

Garden Tomb

The water was black around our knees. Bamboo surrounded and overlooked us. It was so quiet in the mist and the dark green stalks that the sound of our legs moving was an intrusion.  Water…

Carterville

I wanted to lift the glass-framed lid and hold the big German brown trout. He was smooth, beautiful, all shining gold—darker gold on top and lighter gold underneath. The gold had black, orange, and red…

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

Is Joseph Smith Relevant to the Community of Christ?

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 58–67
I spoke as a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints/Community of Christ. As a result, I had a decidedly different perspective on Joseph Smith than my co-panelists.

Grant McMurray and the Succession Crisis in the Community of Christ

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 67–90
Members of the Community of Christ were shocked when our president, W. Grant McMurray, announced that he had resigned on November 29, 2004 , effective immediately.

Colonizing the Frontier between Faith and Doubt: A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography by Levi S. Peterson

Dining with the Devil: A Long Spoon: Poems by R. A. Christmas

Accusation

Nathan hears the accusation during bishopric meeting. “Helen Sheeney is convinced,” the bishop says. “She pulled my wife aside after homemaking meeting. Once she started in, it took nearly an hour to calm her down.…

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…

“The Grandest Principle of the Gospel”: Christian Nihilis Sanctified Activism and Eternal Progression

Modernism and Mormonism: James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and Early Twentieth-Century Mormon Responses to Biblical Criticism

Practicing Divinity

Buildings

May Many Phoenixes Rise

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Move Back in a Heartbeat

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Not Different from My Home

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

Not the Building

An Anchor for Me

Matzoh for Sacrament

Narnia’s Aslan, Earth’s Darwin, and Heaven’s God

Divine Darwinism, Comprehensible Christianity, and the Atheist’s Wager: Richard Rorty on Mormonism—an Interview with Mary V. Rorty and Patricia Rorty

“All Find What They Truly Seek”: C.S. Lewis and the ‘Virtuous Unbeliever’

The Great Vigil of Easter

“There Is Always a Struggle”: An Interview with Chieko N. Okazaki

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

An Imperfect Brightness of Hope

Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Review: Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Communicating Jesus: The Encoding and Decoding Practices of Re-Presenting Jesus for LDS (Mormon) Audiences at a BYU Art Museum

“The Highest Class of Adulterers and Whoremongers”: Plural Marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite), and the Construction of Memory

Dialogue 46.2 (Spring 2016): 1–39
Blythe shows the denial among Culterites followers that the founder was involved in plural marriage.

Review: Adam S. Miller. Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Woman: Joint Heiress With Christ

Review: Adam S. Miller. Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology

Review: Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith. Lost Legacy: The Mormon Office of the Presiding Patriarch H. Michael Marquardt, ed. Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints H. Michael Marquardt, ed. Later Patriarchal Blessi

Review: Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens. The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life

Two-Dog Dose

Jarring bang. Wheels leap up, rattling the heavy load of black piping destined for the oilrig. The truck rolls on. Oblivious to what it left behind.  On the macadam, a coyote. From its sacrum back…

Review: Stephen H. Webb. Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints

Jesus Enough

1886  When Darby turned fifteen, his mother Cora said if he didn’t make up his mind to accept Jesus pretty soon, it would be too late. She said he had to make the choice either…

Stella Nova

Putting Up the Blue Light

Awakening

Broken Vessels: A Series

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl

Jesus Sakura

From the Pulpit: Trajectory and Momentum

Gethsemane and Atonement Again

In his 2022 Dialogue article “The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo,” Jeremy Christiansen adds to a fuller understanding of LDS reception history of the Lukan account of “Gethsemane,” namely Jesus’ agony and sweat/blood…

Correlating Orthodoxy and Style: Institutionally “Approved” Christ-Centered Art in LDS Visual Resources and Meetinghouses, 1990–2021

Religious images have long been used in Latter-day Saint worship and instruction. Paintings, illustrations, and graphic works served a devotional function among the early Church members. Not only did the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo use…

Racial Innocence and the Christus-Based Latter-day Saints Symbol

On April 4, 2020, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) formally adopted an institutional symbol that is now prominently displayed on the Church logo and is imprinted on Church publications, websites, videos,…

Judging Israel

Listen to an interview about this piece here. We sat around a long rectangular table in the local church building. It was tapered at one end, almost trapezoidal. Five men lined each of the long…

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. Michael Reed’s 2012 book Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo sets out an excellent account of the uncomfortable relationship between the Church…

BODIES OF CHRIST WRITING CONTEST

Editor’s Note: In 2021, Dialogue hosted a writing contest titled Bodies of Christ with the following parameters: Dialogue seeks submissions of poetry (up to 100 lines), short fiction (3500–6000 words), and personal voice (nonfiction, narrative…

Jesus and the Father. The Book of Mormon and the Early Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Trinity

Note: This article one of the special web-only series and not printed in a physical issue.

Jesus Christ, Esq.

I begin in the New Testament, in the book of 1 John, a text written by someone presumed to be John the Beloved: My dear children, I write this to you so that you will…

I Was a Stranger . . .

One hundred seventy-two years ago this coming Wednesday, July 24, the first company of Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, which was to be their new home. Being mostly a desert, it didn’t look…

Review: Embraced in Love Eric D. Huntsman. Becoming the Beloved Disciple: Coming unto Christ through the Gospel of John.

Jesus Christ

Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater- than-Average Joy Grant Hardy, ed. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition.

Resurrection

Since he was a child, he’d dreamed of himself in one form and woken up, always disappointed, always jolted by the reality and by the way that others looked at him. In the first years,…

On Solace

From the Pulpit: I’m Trying to Get to Know Jesus

What Does It Mean to Be Truly Christian?

Do We Have to Believe That? Canon and Extra-Canonical Sources of LDS Belief

“All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship through Corporeality in Hasidism and Mormonism

Pre-Mortality in Mystical Islam and the Cosmic Journey of the Soul

Reimagining the Restoration: Why Liberalism is the Ultimate Flowering of Mormonism

The Elegance of Belief

Christ Without the Church: The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On August 24, 1932, Dietrich Bonhoeffer began an address at the International Youth Conference in Glad, Switzerland, with the words, “The Church is Dead.”[1] Today, 1966, Bonhoeffer is dead, yet the church lives. However, a…

The Mormon Doctrine of Baptism as Reflected in Early Christian Baptisteries

The ordinance of baptism was known and practiced in all ages that knew the Gospel of Jesus Christ, both before and after His lifetime on earth. We find accounts of baptisms in the Pearl of…

Worship and Architecture | Verena Ursenbach Hatch, Worship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The irreverence in the Church today “is not irreverence of disdain for spiritual things, but rather the irreverence of undeveloped spirituality.” So writes the author of Worship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…

Worship and Music | Verena Ursenbach Hatch, Worship and Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Worship and Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be had as a single volume or in two separate bindings. One volume (separately reviewed) includes the first seven chapters of the…

In Memory of P.A. Christensen

Sister Ruth, family, in-laws, friends and relatives, Brothers and Sisters, it is an honor, but a humbling experience, to be invited to speak at the funeral of a great man, a great soul. I appreciate…

Another View of the Mormons | Kathleen Elgin, The Mormons: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Mormons is the second in the Freedom to Worship series designed to tell stories of “outstanding Americans of the nineteenth century and their different religious beliefs.” The series is intended to fit into the…

Dramatic Christianity | Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

Thus begins Father Daniel Berrigan’s poem, “The Passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” which in some ways is also a poem about his own passion. On 17 May 1968, prompted by conscience and a courage similar to that of Bonhoeffer, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Jesuit priests, went with seven of their friends into draft board number 33 at Catonsville, Maryland, where they confiscated 378 individual draft files.

Are Mormons Christian?

One day last fall as I was getting acquainted with a student who was particularly interested in my Mormon background, the student told of being informed by a religion professor that Mormons weren’t Christians. This…

The Christian Break

Christianity is a program for revolution. That’s what I tell my more liberal, anarchic friends in and out of the Church. They never believe me, of course, because they stereotype religious orthodoxy as something rigid,…

Three Christmas Hymns: A Christmas Hymn; The Babe of Bethlehem; Away in a Manger

A Child’s Christmas in Utah

It isn’t that way now. The quiet fields are broken into building lots and the farmers build jet engines in the city and garden with a roto-tiller after work. The old canal is lined with concrete and in the center of the town the Saturday and-sun-drenched baseball diamond has shrunk to softball under lights, and the county has built a tennis court just off third base for a game the kids are beginning to learn to play in white shoes. 

The Second Coming of Santa Claus: Christmas in a Polygamous Family

Four of my father’s wives lived at Provo during my childhood, a situation particularly fortunate for the swarm of Taylor kids. Santa Claus came twice to us, instead of just the single time he visited…

Treasures In the Heavens: Some Early Christian Insights into the Organizing of Worlds

The canonical writings and the apocrypha have a good deal to say about “treasures in the heavens.” If we compare the “treasures” passages in a wide sampling of these writings, including those of Qumran, Nag…

Choral Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Church music is that music which serves a worshipful purpose in a religious meeting. The Random House Dictionary defines worship as “reverent honor or regard paid to God or a sacred personage. . . .…

The Eliza Enigma

Common Beginnings, Divergent Beliefs

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1979): 19–31
Within two years of his assasination, however, the Church was torn by succession struggles that led to dispersion. Almost a century and a half later, the whereabouts of many of these saints is still unknown.

The Coniunctio in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

From at least the seventeenth century and perhaps from as early as the writings of the pre-Socratics, Western thought has been plagued with a radical dualism which has severed one area of activity and experience…

A Modern Evangelist | Bruce R. McConkie, The Mortal Messiah: From Bethlehem to Calvary

One is hopeful, upon reading Elder McConkie’s preface to his latest volume on the dealings of Christ with mankind, that new ground may be broken for Mormons in the recognition of modern findings and scholarship—the…

Christ as Center | Bruce R. McConkie, The Mortal Messiah

The Mortal Messiah, book two, is part of a multiple-volume work on Christ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie. This massive project is referred to by McConkie as “The Messianic Trilogy.” The first work in this…

Mormon Arts — A Contradiction: A Review Essay | Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives

Bernard Shaw once quipped that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms. And one would think that it is likewise a contradiction in terms to refer to Mormon arts. To prove that this is…

Cultural Reflections | Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

The Culture of Narcissism is the product of an American historian who has borrowed a psychiatric syndrome to examine issues and to synthesize a picture of our culture. Narcissism, an ancient term with roots in…

Marxism and Mormonism | Arthur F. McGovern, Marxism: An American Christian Perspective

Most Mormons, in fact Christians in general, would avoid reading a book on Marx ism. Any mutually acceptable alliance has always been scuttled by equally mutual suspicion between Marxists and Christians. Carrying on the tradition…

Saints You Can Sink Your Teeth Into | William G. Hartley, Kindred Saints: The Mormon Immigrant Heritage of Alvin and Kathryn Christensen

With us, someone else’s genealogy ranks right up there with reading the tele phone directory or watching someone else’s home movies. Most Mormon family histories are about as much fun as funerals. Thus, it was…

Career of a Counter-Prophet | C. LeRoy Anderson, For Christ Will Come Tomorrow: The Saga of The Morrisites

This handsome volume immediately establishes itself as the definitive work on the Morrisite movement within Mormonism. A complete study of Joseph Morris and his followers has long been needed and LeRoy Anderson has filled the…

“The Same Organization?” | Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians

In an 1842 description of Latter-day Saint beliefs written for John Wentworth of the Chicago Democrat, Joseph Smith said: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive church, viz. apostles, prophets, pastors,…

Elohim and Jehovah in Mormonism and the Bible

Currently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defines the Godhead as consisting of three separate and distinct personages or Gods: Elohim, or God the Father; Jehovah, or Jesus Christ, the Son of God both…

The Restoration and History: New Testament Christianity

The Restoration movements have tended to elevate historical claims to the level of theological dogma. But in our defense of historical beliefs we have often denied the reality of historical process by asserting that ideas,…

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Christmas Sonnets from Other Years

1937 | 1940 | 1944

Christ’s World Government: An End of Nationalism and War

The tenth Article of Faith states the Mormon belief that “Christ will reign personally upon the earth.” This is usually taken to mean that Christ will literally return to the earth at the Second Coming…

Balance and Faith | William E. Berrett, The Latter-day Saints: A Contemporary History of the Church of Jesus Christ

Thousands of Latter-day Saints were first introduced to William E. Berrett and the Church’s history when they were assigned in seminary to read his book The Restored Church (1940). Initially written in the late 1930s,…

Livre d’Artiste: The Book of Abraham by Day Christensen and Wulf Barsch

Mormon Christianity: A Critical Appreciation by a Christian Pluralist

I recently had an unexpected opportunity to analyze the ideas and experience the worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Following four months of intense dialogue with a Mormon intellectual and former…

Humanity or Divinity? | Martin Scorsese, dir., The Last Temptation of Christ

Outside the San Francisco theater where we saw The Last Temptation of Christ, Christians paraded with guitars, bullhorns, sandwich boards, and placards (some in Cantonese) protesting the blasphemous portrayal of their Lord and Savior. Anti-semitic…

Christ and the Constitution: Toward a Mormon Jurisprudence

In 1987 Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution. Topics previously confined to legal and philosophical journals became the subject of more common discourse. Nowhere was this development more evident than in…

Christmas Morning—1906

By now the Christmases of my life—all but one—have escaped re strictions of time and place and have arranged themselves, undated, in an intricate mosaic of memories, which can be instantly evoked by such small…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Just Enough Truth for Christmastime

In a couple of weeks, I’ll pack up my truck and with my roommate head for Utah. We’ll be there the week before Christmas, skiing and visiting friends and family. We both bought new skis…

The Concept of Grace in Christian Thought

The concept of grace and its relation to individual salvation is prob ably the most debated issue in the history of Christian thought. The list of combatants is virtually a Who’s Who in Christian thought:…

Comments on the Theological and Philosophical Foundations of Christianity

Historical Christianity is a remarkable composite of diverse religious cultures, a mixture that even today, after two millennia, is still mixing, blending things that often will not blend and fusing the unfusible. Sometimes severe, chaste,…

Anti-Christian Fundamentalism: Casting the First Stone: The Hypocrisy of Religious Fundamentalism by R. A. Gilbert

Non-Traditional Christianity: Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints

Did Jesus Heal Simon’s Mother-in-law of a Fever?

The Sabbath Day: To Heal or Not to Heal

The Continuing Quest for the Historical Jesus

Coming of Age? The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1960s

Dialogue 28.4 (Winter 1995): 31–55
In many respects the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of the 1960s mirrored the general tumult, if not the details, of the larger American society.

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

Sanctified, In the Flesh

The Miracles of Jesus: Three Basic Questions for the Historian

Jesus Christ in the New Testament: Part One: The Historical Jesus Behind the Gospels

Jesus Christ in the New Testament: Part Two: Various Images of Jesus in the Books of the New Testament

The First Christmas Eve at Home

“Easy to be Entreated:” Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent and Christian Communication

Did Christ Pay for Our Sins?

One Well-Wrought Side of the Story: Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftain, Mormon Elder, 1822-1887 by Scott R. Christensen

Philosophical Christian Apology Meets “Rational” Mormon Theology

Taking Up the Cross

Bring Them Unto Christ

Eugene England: Our Brother in Christ

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

No Other Way?: Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity

Christian Spinning

The Woman of Christlike Love

Sunday Morning — Eight Days Before Christmas, 2001

The LDS Church and Community of Christ: Clearer Differences, Closer Friends

Dialogue 36.4 (Winter 2003): 177–192
In this paper I will briefly discuss what I see as the six major differences between the two churches during the first century of their existence, and then I will look at eight new differences that have emerged over the past forty years or so. I make no claim that either is a complete list.

Rooted in Christian Hope: The Case for Pacifism

Christmas Conflict 2001

The First Piece in the Puzzle: Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana by Emmanuel Abu Kissi

Garden Tomb

The water was black around our knees. Bamboo surrounded and overlooked us. It was so quiet in the mist and the dark green stalks that the sound of our legs moving was an intrusion.  Water…

Carterville

I wanted to lift the glass-framed lid and hold the big German brown trout. He was smooth, beautiful, all shining gold—darker gold on top and lighter gold underneath. The gold had black, orange, and red…

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

Is Joseph Smith Relevant to the Community of Christ?

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 58–67
I spoke as a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints/Community of Christ. As a result, I had a decidedly different perspective on Joseph Smith than my co-panelists.

Grant McMurray and the Succession Crisis in the Community of Christ

Dialogue 39.4 (Winter 2006): 67–90
Members of the Community of Christ were shocked when our president, W. Grant McMurray, announced that he had resigned on November 29, 2004 , effective immediately.

Colonizing the Frontier between Faith and Doubt: A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning: A Mormon Autobiography by Levi S. Peterson

Dining with the Devil: A Long Spoon: Poems by R. A. Christmas

Accusation

Nathan hears the accusation during bishopric meeting. “Helen Sheeney is convinced,” the bishop says. “She pulled my wife aside after homemaking meeting. Once she started in, it took nearly an hour to calm her down.…

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…

“The Grandest Principle of the Gospel”: Christian Nihilis Sanctified Activism and Eternal Progression

Modernism and Mormonism: James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and Early Twentieth-Century Mormon Responses to Biblical Criticism

Practicing Divinity

Buildings

May Many Phoenixes Rise

A Deep Reverence in My Heart; Part of Our Family

Looked like a Church, Sounded like a Church; How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

Move Back in a Heartbeat

The Bonds Endure; Freudian Analysis of Lehi’s Dream

Tribute to a Building; Giving Church a Try

Not Different from My Home

Equally Warm, Whether Empty or Full

Not the Building

An Anchor for Me

Matzoh for Sacrament

Narnia’s Aslan, Earth’s Darwin, and Heaven’s God

Divine Darwinism, Comprehensible Christianity, and the Atheist’s Wager: Richard Rorty on Mormonism—an Interview with Mary V. Rorty and Patricia Rorty

“All Find What They Truly Seek”: C.S. Lewis and the ‘Virtuous Unbeliever’

The Great Vigil of Easter

“There Is Always a Struggle”: An Interview with Chieko N. Okazaki

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

An Imperfect Brightness of Hope

Why the True Church Cannot Be Perfect

Bones Heal Faster: Spousal Abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Review: Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Communicating Jesus: The Encoding and Decoding Practices of Re-Presenting Jesus for LDS (Mormon) Audiences at a BYU Art Museum

“The Highest Class of Adulterers and Whoremongers”: Plural Marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite), and the Construction of Memory

Dialogue 46.2 (Spring 2016): 1–39
Blythe shows the denial among Culterites followers that the founder was involved in plural marriage.

Review: Adam S. Miller. Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Woman: Joint Heiress With Christ

Review: Adam S. Miller. Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology

Review: Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith. Lost Legacy: The Mormon Office of the Presiding Patriarch H. Michael Marquardt, ed. Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints H. Michael Marquardt, ed. Later Patriarchal Blessi

Review: Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens. The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life

Two-Dog Dose

Jarring bang. Wheels leap up, rattling the heavy load of black piping destined for the oilrig. The truck rolls on. Oblivious to what it left behind.  On the macadam, a coyote. From its sacrum back…

Review: Stephen H. Webb. Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints

Jesus Enough

1886  When Darby turned fifteen, his mother Cora said if he didn’t make up his mind to accept Jesus pretty soon, it would be too late. She said he had to make the choice either…

Stella Nova

Putting Up the Blue Light

Awakening

Broken Vessels: A Series

Review: Liberalism and the American Mormon: Three Takes David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics Richard Davis. The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics Terryl

Jesus Sakura

From the Pulpit: Trajectory and Momentum