Our concepts of literature and writing are directly connected to the formats that have become natural to us. It used to be that books (with few or no pictures) were a baseline kind of literacy. That is less the case now. Not only are books filled with pictures, but they tend to exist in a thickly mediated environment, much of which is electronic or at least highly influenced by things digital. Even my son's math book interrupts itself and sends him to go check out an online tutorial before resuming his paper-and-pencil problem set. Now that electronic means of both producing and consuming writing are competing with traditional paper modes, how will this affect Mormon literary habits? More...

I was glad to read Margaret Young's post encouraging international Mormon art and literature. I'm all for it -- the needed diversity, the enriching that happens as subcultures and individuals of deeply varied experience find ways of expressing their lives and their religious faith. Like so many, I look forward to an improving and expanding scope for Mormon arts and letters. But I also want to critique certain assumptions about cultural progress that I think are at work among us Mormons looking for those Miltons and Shakespeares (or Gabriel Gracia Marquezes or Stephen Spielbergs) of our own.

There is the growth of the kingdom of God and then there is the growth of Mormon culture. I'm personally very committed to one and very wary of the other. I worry that we may be looking at these as going hand in hand, following a very 19th century, unilineal approach to cultural progress that may have little relationship to God's influence spreading in the world. More...