DIALOGUE a Journal of Mormon Thought
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DIALOGUE a journal of mormon thought is an independent quarterly established to express Mormon culture and to exam- ine the relevance of religion to secular life. It is edited by Latter-day Saints who wish to bring their faith into dialogue with the larger stream of world religious thought and with human experience as a whole and to foster artistic and schol- arly achievement based on their cul- tural heritage. The journal encourages a variety of viewpoints; although every effort is made to ensure accurate schol- arship and responsible judgment, the views expressed are those of the indi- vidual authors and are not necessarily those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or of the editors. ii Dialogue 53, no. 3, Fall 2020 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is published quarterly by the University of Illinois Press for the Dialogue Foundation. Dialogue has no official connec- tion with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Contents copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Print ISSN 0012-2157; electronic ISSN 1554-9399. Dialogue is available in full text in electronic form at www.dialoguejournal.com and JSTOR.org and is archived by the University of Utah Marriott Library Special Collections, available online at www.lib.utah.edu /portal/site/marriottlibrary. Dialogue is also available on microforms through University Microfilms International, www.umi.com. Dialogue welcomes articles, essays, poetry, notes, fiction, letters to the editor, and art. Submissions should follow the current Chicago Manual of Style, using foot- notes for all citations. All submissions should be in Word and may be submitted electronically at https://dialoguejournal.com/submissions/. For submissions of visual art, please contact [email protected]. Submissions published in the journal, including letters to the editor, are covered by our publications policy, https://dialoguejournal.com/submissions/publication -policy/, under which the author retains the copyright of the work and grants Dialogue permission to publish. See www.dialoguejournal.com. editors emeriti Eugene England and G. Wesley Johnson Robert A. Rees Mary Lythgoe Bradford Linda King Newell and L. Jackson Newell F. Ross Peterson and Mary Kay Peterson Martha Sonntag Bradley and Allen D. Roberts Neal Chandler and Rebecca Worthen Chandler Karen Marguerite Moloney Levi S. Peterson Kristine Haglund Boyd J. Petersen CONTENTS ARTICLES Performative Theology: Not Such a New Thing James E.Faulconer 1 On Care: Performative Theology, Mosiah, Jenny Webb 25 and a Gathered Community Revisiting Joseph Smith and the Availability Colby Townsend 41 of the Book of Enoch The Limits of Naturalistic Criteria for the Book William Davis 73 of Mormon: Comparing Joseph Smith and Andrew Jackson Davis POETRY Born Again Christopher Bissett 105 Genesis Chiasmus Luisa Perkins 106 Daryl Prays, The Snake River, and Insomnia Tamara Pace Thomson 107 The Stars Saw God Chris A. Peck 111 Becky, Not God Henry Landon Miles 112 FICTION Three Dogs in the Afterlife Luisa Perkins 115 ART NOTES A Blessing for Starting Over Joanna Brooks 119 Elegy for the Eaten Madison Daniels 123 REVIEWS The Cunning Man and Fiction of James Goldberg 127 the Mormon Corridor D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey. The Cunning Man As Above, So Below: Mormonism Mattathias Singh in D. J. Butler’s Kaleidoscopic Goldberg Westwood 130 Cosmological Fantasy D. J. Butler. Witchy Eye D. J. Butler. Witchy Winter D. J. Butler. Witchy Kingdom The Things We Make True Susan Meredith Hinckley 136 Michael William Palmer. Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs Karen Anderson’s Excavation of Ghosts Lauren Matthews 140 Karin Anderson. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams History Written in Celluloid Davey Morrison 144 Randy Astle. Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 Latter-Day Screens: Mormonism in Popular Culture Conor Bruce Hilton 148 Brenda R. Weber. Latter-Day Screens: Gender, Sexuality & Mediated Mormonism Beauty in the Irreversible Sarah Nickel Moore 152 Lisa Van Orman Hadley. Irreversible Things Sunni Brown Wilkinson. The Marriage of the Moon and the Field Elizabeth Cranford Garcia 155 Lessons in Scriptural Origami Chad Daniel Curtis 160 James Goldberg. Remember the Revolution. James Goldberg. The First Five Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories Modern Mormonism, Gender, and the Tangled Nature of History Benjamin E. Park 167 Gregory A. Prince. Gay Rights and the Mormon Church Remembering Jane Manning James Charlotte Hansen Terry 173 Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon Mormon Modernity Dmitri Brown 178 David Walker. Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West FROM THE PULPIT Pray Without Ceasing Boyd Jay Peterson 183 ARTICLES PERFORMATIVE THEOLOGY: NOT SUCH A NEW THING James E. Faulconer A movement called “scriptural theology” has been part of academic theology for some time now, since the 1980s or earlier.1 In spite of that, with some exceptions I will note, it has had little impact on Latter-day Saint scholars, much less on Latter-day Saint readers. We see little the- ology among the Saints, but what we do see tends to be dogmatic.2 In other words, most of our theology consists of statements of doctrines (or assumed doctrines)—traditionally called dogmas—accompanied by rational justifications. Scripture has its place in dogmatic theologies as proof texts, or sources for the doctrine, but we seldom do theology by studying scripture. If we engage scripture itself in a scholarly rather than a devotional way, whether we do so as theological liberals or con- servatives (whatever we take those terms to mean), we tend to do so historically, using some version of the canons of history developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to examine the history that the scriptures reflect or portray. The assumption is that understanding 1. For a representative cross-section of those in this movement, see Stephen E. Fowl, ed., The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997); Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publish- ing, 2003); Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2017). 2. See, for example, Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001); Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Problems of Theism and the Love of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books 2006); Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: Of God and Gods (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2008). 1 2 Dialogue 53, no. 3, Fall 2020 the history of or behind the texts will give us an understanding of their meaning. So, when we do theology, we usually do dogmatic theology, and when we engage scripture, we usually do so historically. However, one exception to each of these alternatives, among others, is in the movement represented by the Latter-day Saint Theology Semi- nar.3 It seeks to do non-dogmatic theology, and it doesn’t assume that scriptural scholarship is necessarily historical. The Theology Seminar does theology by reflecting on scripture in a scholarly way that is dif- ferent than what we usually expect. In this paper I give some brief historical background by which I hope to show how the Seminar’s ver- sion of scriptural theology fits into the Christian tradition as theology.4 I also briefly explain why one way to describe what the Seminar does is “performative theology.” Today most Latter-day Saints who read scripture, for whatever reason, do so using implicit assumptions about what scripture is and does and about how it ought to be read that were developed begin- ning in the seventeenth century and culminating in the nineteenth. We read scripture as historical documents that we understand by applying the canons of history, even if we don’t know what those canons are and even when the texts in question are not themselves about history (for example, the Psalms). Devotional reading might be an exception, wherein we proof text beliefs that we already hold and understand, an interpretive practice known as eisegesis. But even that, I believe, is an effect of modernism’s assumptions misused: eisegesis appears to be the only possibility that remains if we harbor modernist assumptions about scripture and, at the same time, think as many do that we can avoid the historical questions. For many, our emotional or psychologi- cal responses seem to be the only source of scriptural meaning if either 3. Formerly, Mormon Theology Seminar. 4. It is important to recognize, however, that though what the Theology Sem- inar is doing is related to scriptural theology in the mainstream Christian tradition, the two are not the same. Faulconer: Performative Theology 3 we don’t know how to deal with scripture as history or we are unable to find meaning in it as scripture using historical methods. The division between exegesis, or finding the meaning of the text from the text itself, and eisegesis, or reading into the text what we believe it says, is not as clean as we might hope. There is no neutral background of truths, untouched by preexisting conceptual frame- works and contemporaneous social and political arrangements, that we can use to determine the meaning of a text. But, equally, the meaning of a text cannot be reduced merely to the meanings that we impute to it because we always interpret out of a historical background and from a social and political situation. As always, things are more complicated than either of those alternatives recognizes.5 The goal of the Theol- ogy Seminar is to recognize that complication and to offer a way of reading that can replace psychological and emotional—in other words Rorschach-like—eisegesis with something that has a stronger claim to truth, something that avoids mere subjectivism.