#hugo olaiz

[nerdygaymormon]

Addendum to Jacob Sorensen’s Patriarchal Blessing

I don’t know, Jake, why Dad asked me to drive you there, but I did hear every word Brother Allen said, and here’s a few he skipped:

Our Heavenly Father is pleased with your social media presence— the Instagram pics, the YouTube skits, and that new app with the name I can’t remember.

God saw your TikToks, Jake, you doing the Dolphin Dance with the drama crew— how you shook your butt and laughed. And God laughed, too.

Jake, there are some things the patriarch promised that will never come to pass: no mission, no bride kneeling across the altar, no children born under the covenant, and it will be exactly as God intended it.

For you, Jake, not slacks but tights, not prayers but yoga, not the Book of Mormon but a Sondheim score.

And even though the patriarch said “Ephraim,” the Spirit moves me, Jake, to declare your true tribe: the one that, when Charlton Heston climbed Mount Sinai, was hired to choreograph the dance.

They say that when God closes a door a window is opened, but I’m telling you, brother, with my gift of prophecy: For you, a limo, a red carpet, a golden gate waiting, and no gatekeeper.

[dialoguejournal]

Summer 2022 Issue is now live!

Summer 2022 is now live online in PDF format, and if you ordered a hard copy, expect it in your mail any day now!

This issue starts off with Clyde Ford’s “The Sidney Sperry/Heber Snell Debates: Critical Biblical Scholarship and Mormon Tradition,” looking at two 20th-century thinkers who went to the University of Chicago Divinity School and returned to Utah changed men. Loren Pankratz then engages with Blake Ostler’s theological positions on the nature of God with the rousing, “Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist?�� Jill Mulvay Derr returns to the pages of Dialogue with “Missing and Restoring Meaning,” followed by Heather J. Longhurst considering her relationships to others, herself, and her god as she climbs Mt. Rainier in “Mt. Rainier Sanctification.” Our articles and essays are then rounded off with Ryan D. Ward’s engagement with truth, detailing how Joseph Smith’s thoughts engage with declarations of absolute and relativist truth, in “A Reflection on Joseph Smith’s Restorationist Vision of Truth,” and Alene Wecker considers her talent for music in relation to her worship, her life, and her life’s worship in “Developing Talents.”

This issue also contains short fiction from Robert Bennett, “The New Calling,” in which a man grapples with a faith crisis, and Ryan Shoemaker, “The Private Investigator,” in which a son and father deal with their relationship. Poetry from Estée Arts Crenshaw, Lisa Ottesen Fillerup, Hugo Olaiz, Elizabeth Pinborough, and Scott Stenson.

Reviews include a review roundtable on Kristine L. Haglund’s Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal and Terryl L. Givens’s “Stretching Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism,” along with individuals reviews of Patrick Q. Mason’s “Mormonism and Violence,” Kenneth L. Alford’s “Saints At War: The Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq,” Samuel M. Brown’s “Where the Soul Hungers: One Doctor’s Journey from Atheism to Faith,” and Levi S. Peterson’s “Losing a Bit of Eden: Recent Stories.” 

The issue concludes with a sermon from Tyler Johnson called “World Without Masks.”

We hope you enjoy our very full summer issue. HTML should be online within the week, but for now, you can read it in PDF or ePub, and, if you enjoy hard copy, subscribe to our print version to receive Fall 2022 in the mail in a few months!