Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought

The independent scholarly journal that Eugene England co-founded, and the institution around which much of Stretching The Heavens turns. Its launch prospectus framed it as a “medium in which to consider [Latter-day Saints’] historical and religious heritage in relation to contemporary experience and learning” — a forum for those who would otherwise “feel forced to choose between their heritage and the larger world.” England insisted the first issue was published “for the express purpose of helping young LDS students … build and preserve their testimonies,” embodying his conviction that doubt should be seen “not as a sin — or as a virtue — but … as a condition, a condition that can be productive.”

In England’s story, Dialogue became both his great contribution and the source of his deepest conflict with institutional authority. It published Lester Bush’s paradigm-shattering 1973 article on the priesthood ban — a historic, “paradigm-shattering” overview that Spencer W. Kimball reportedly studied before revoking the ban in 1978 — and the book traces “the roots of the Joseph Smith Papers project” back to those first willing-to-publish issues. But association with the journal also got England effectively blacklisted: Church Historian Leonard Arrington recorded that England “is not permitted to publish … just because he was a founding editor of Dialogue.” Under counsel from Boyd K. Packer, England ultimately resigned his position — doing “precisely what he had so roundly condemned” to stay within the institution he loved. By the book’s close, Dialogue “continues to thrive as a journal,” as does Sunstone, though both retain a reputation as “alternative voices” to orthodoxy.

Context: Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is an independent quarterly founded in 1966 (its first editors included Eugene England and G. Wesley Johnson) devoted to scholarly and personal writing on Mormonism. It operates outside the official correlation of the LDS Church and remains a flagship venue of independent Mormon studies.

Where this appears

• Stretching The Heavens — the journal England founded; its launch, the Lester Bush priesthood-ban article, and England’s forced resignation under Packer’s counsel form a spine of the biography