Author: David Evans

Inside the mind of the Book of Mormon’s first antagonist — A review of Mette Harrison’s The Book of Laman

by David Evans • October 21, 2017 • 7 Comments

In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel often come across more as comic book villains more than fully fleshed out characters. As Grant Hardy put it, “In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel are stock characters, even caricatures.” In her new novel, The Book of Laman (with its cover art a stroke of brilliance), Mette Harrison implicitly poses the question: What might have been going through Laman’s head through all this? What might have led him to act the way he acted? To be clear, this is a work of fiction. Harrison makes no pretense to be doing textual inference; rather, she takes the broad events of First and Second Nephi as given and searches for a credible Laman. Her endeavor reminds me of Geraldine Brooks’s brilliant effort to flesh out David from the Old Testament in The Secret Chord. The Laman that Harrison draws for us is deeply human and relatable. He mostly wants to do right, but he repeatedly fails not in small ways but in disastrous ways (he beat up or tried to kill his brother). She constructs a back story that explains Laman and Lemuel’s ongoing reluctance to trust their father even in the face of Sam and Nephi unwavering confidence. And she plays out what might have happened to Laman and his people after Nephi and his followers left. That time that Laman and Lemuel start beating Nephi in the process of seeking the…

What’s in a name? A historical note on the title of the Mission President’s Wife

by David Evans • September 7, 2017 • 26 Comments

Last year, Cassler and McBaine published results of their survey on “the Naming of Women’s Positions and Organizations in the LDS Church.” Around 400 survey respondents who self-identified as LDS women answered questions about whether or not they would change the names of various women’s roles and groups, including the Young Women’s groups (Beehives, Mia Maids, and Laurels), the term “auxiliaries” (used for Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary), bishops’ wives, and mission presidents’ wives. It’s an interesting survey, with lots of expressed desire for change. (And yes, I’m aware that the people who participate in an online poll are likely not representative of the Church as a whole. Still interesting, I’d propose.) The title on which there was most consensus for change was “Mission President’s Wife,” with 96 percent preferring a change in name. As the authors put it, “The urgency for this to be changed seems to stem from the understanding that the wife is as actively engaged with mission life, if in different ways, as her husband, and is equally required to sacrifice, endure physically and emotionally challenging situations, and become intertwined in the missionaries’ lives as her partner. Furthermore, she is called and set apart, just as her husband is.” I agree in principle and in practice. The wife of my mission president gave me counsel that shaped the course of my post-mission life. So I was interested to see — in a footnote of Jennifer…

Fiction and Culture: Mette Ivie Harrison’s The Bishop’s Wife

by David Evans • August 30, 2017 • 9 Comments

A good Mormon mystery Novels — particularly good ones — convey a sense of place. This is absolutely true of mystery novels, from Kwei Quartey’s police detective in Ghana to Alexander McCall Smith’s private detective in Botswana. But how much do we really about a place or a culture from a work of fiction? I recently listened to the audiobook of Mette Ivie Harrison’s first mystery novel, The Bishop’s Wife. (There are currently three mysteries in the series.) Here’s the quick: I couldn’t stop listening. Harrison has crafted a page-turner. Early one morning, a man turns up at the home of the bishop, reporting that his wife has gone missing. The bishop’s wife, Linda Wallheim, uses her neighborly kindness to get to the bottom of the case. Linda is a rich, complicated character, with faith and doubt and caring and curiosity all boiled into one. I look forward to reading of her further adventures. I had a few critiques — a few plot twists towards the end struck me as implausible and Harrison really doubles down on a theme — but the other virtues make up for them. If you enjoy mysteries, then I recommend this one.

Mormon Doctrine for Grown-ups: A Review of Terryl Givens’s Wrestling the Angel

by David Evans • July 16, 2017 • 15 Comments

When I was young, I discovered C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and enjoyed every volume. Then one day, at my neighborhood library, I discovered Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia, essentially an encyclopedia of Narnia, and I fell in love. The entries were arranged alphabetically, and there were more topics than I had ever imagined. It was well-ordered and — at least to my child’s mind — exhaustive. Encyclopedias hold that promise. Around the same time, I discovered Bruce R. McConkie’s book Mormon Doctrine. With short, clear entries, Mormon Doctrine provided definitive answers to a wide range of gospel questions. Only later in life did I learn that Mormon doctrine is not so simple. Enter Terryl L. Givens’s book, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. In some ways, Wrestling the Angel (WTA) seems similar to Mormon Doctrine. Although not alphabetical, it has entries such as “The Godhead,” “Holy Ghost,” “The Fall,” and “Salvation.” But rather than a short, definitive declaration, Givens takes the opposite approach. For each topic, he first situates Mormon thought within a brief history of religious thought on the topic, and he then goes on to give a history of Mormon thinking on the topic. Consider the Holy Ghost. Givens begins with the early Christian church: “Christian doctrine on the Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit, was relatively late in developing. One of the earliest Christian creeds, perhaps dating to the second century, is…

Which are the most influential General Conference talks?

by David Evans • May 19, 2017 • 18 Comments

After most General Conferences, there are one or two talks that really stay with me. Some of those talks enter the language of many members, such as Elder Oaks’s framing of choices that are “good, better, best.” Is there any way to identify the most influential talks? We could begin with who influences the influencers. A simple way to measure that would be to count how often a talk is quoted by other leaders of the Church in their own conference talks. (Obviously this is just one indicator of influence. I’ll talk about limitations and alternatives at the end of the post.) I went through every conference talk from the last 5 years (October 2012 – April 2017) and identified those conference talks that were quoted most frequently by other speakers. Below are the 12 talks that were most frequently quoted. Are there talks that you would have expected to be there but aren’t? How do you think the list would change if we extended the sample to the last 20 years? How would you measure influence differently? The 12 Most Influential General Conference Talks (as measured by quotes in the last 5 years) Who? What? Sample quotes President Thomas S. Monson “The Holy Temple – A Beacon to the World” April 2011 Quoted 6 times “The world can be a challenging and difficult place in which to live. … As you and I go to the holy houses of God,…

Three big things (and some little things) this lifelong Mormon learned from Matt Bowman’s history of the Church

by David Evans • March 23, 2017 • 7 Comments

How do you tell the story of a 200-year-old movement in a single volume? In the summer of 2011, Matthew Bowman received a call inviting him to write such a volume in under three months. The result — The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith — is an accessible, even-handed volume that uncommonly gives as much attention to the modern church as it does to the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Here are three things that I learned from the book: The power of the primary during the correlation reorganization of the 1960s: “The reorganization drained some power from the First Presidency itself and undeniably from the various departments and auxiliaries of the church. Some resisted as best they could; LaVern Parmley, president of the Primary since 1951, retained her position and through sheer force of personality a good deal of independent authority until she stepped down in 1974.” You can read more about President Parmley generally in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. You can read about how she led a movement toward the modern conception of reverence in primary in Kristine Haglund Harris’s Dialogue article. Acceptance of Mormonism in American culture has not proceeded obviously in one direction: George Romney and Mitt Romney both ran for president, father in 1968 and son in 2008 and 2012. With George: “His faith was rarely mentioned in any of his political campaigns, for Mormonism by the 1960s had become unexceptional to most Americans.”…

Loosening the iron grip of the King James Version of the Bible?

by David Evans • March 13, 2017 • 44 Comments

A couple of years ago, Elder Richard Maynes (of the Presidency of the Seventy) quoted Matthew 13:44 in his conference talk: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” But wait a second! The King James Version of that verse reads differently: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” Elder Maynes has quoted, instead, the Revised Standard Version. This surprised me because the official version of the Bible used by the Church in English is the King James Version. From the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the KVJ has been preferred (despite Joseph Smith’s corrections). When the Revised Standard Version was released in 1952, an editorial in the Church News stated, “For the Latter-day Saints there can be but one version of the Bible” — the King James Version. J. Reuben Clark published a book in 1956 entitled Why the King James Version. (This is all laid out in Philip Barlow’s Dialogue article.) In 1992, the First Presidency released a statement saying the following, “While other Bible versions may be easier to read than the King James Version, in doctrinal matters latter-day revelation supports…

Telling the stories of the Church’s history

by David Evans • January 26, 2017 • 7 Comments

A review of Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, by Gregory A. Prince Telling the history of a church can be tricky. Which elements arose from the culture of the time? Which manifest the direct intervention of the divine? Is that even a sensible distinction? On the one hand, some Church leaders have historically seen the principal role of religious history as being to show “the hand of the Lord in every hour and every moment of the Church from its beginning till now” [1]. With this as one’s end, the appropriate means may be a partial telling of history: “Some things that are true are not very useful” [2]. On the other hand, some fear that this will leave believers vulnerable when uncomfortable truths come out: “I worry about the young Latter-day Saints who learn only about the saintly Joseph and are shocked to discover his failings. The problem is that they may lose faith in the entire teaching system that brought them along. If their teachers covered up Joseph Smith’s flaws, what else are they hiding?” [3] As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich put it succinctly, “History is dangerous.” No character in Mormon history is perhaps better placed to illustrate this lesson than Leonard Arrington. In 1972, Arrington became the first — and to date, the only — professional historian to serve as Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (To be fair, Arrington’s PhD was…

Listen to the stories of those who hurt because of the ghost of eternal polygamy

by David Evans • December 15, 2016 • 39 Comments

a review of Carol Lynn Pearson’s The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men I don’t think about polygamy much. I have no interest in participating in it (in this life or another). It doesn’t come up much in my conversations, except as I discuss my polygamous ancestors from the early Church or the lives of Brother Joseph or Brother Brigham and their contemporaries. I am one of those for whom, as Carol Lynn Pearson writes, “it is not to be taken very seriously.” But Pearson argues that there are others, “a great many, I think,” for whom “it is a blight, rather like the crickets that destroy a crop.” To that I say, but wait, didn’t we — and by we I mean the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — give up polygamy more than a century ago? Well, yes and no. Members of the Church who enter into polygamous relationships today are excommunicated. But the promise of polygamy in the next life lingers, as evidenced by these practices: A widowed Mormon man can be sealed to another wife, and another after that, “secure in the promise that they will be his in eternity.” A widowed Mormon woman cannot be sealed to another man. Wow, that does sound a lot like polygamy, waiting to be lived once we cross to the other side of the veil. And while I hadn’t…

What is Zion and how do we get there? 31 Mormons weigh in: You’ll definitely find your Zion somewhere in here

by David Evans • September 29, 2016 • 13 Comments

A review of A Book of Mormons: Latter-day Saints on a Modern-Day Zion In this useful collection of brief essays, an impressively wide array of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints describe what Zion means to them. As the editors write in their introduction, “Forget about glossy Mormon-produced documentaries. Forget about funny Broadway musicals. … Here you will find a potent mixture of everyday and extraordinary Mormons speaking in their own voice about tough issues and hard-won testimonies.” The range of approaches is wonderfully expansive. Some of the authors speak of how Zion means better inclusion of groups that have historically been under-empowered. Neylan McBain, whose book Women at Church I can’t say enough good things about, writes, “As we stretch toward a new identity of Mormon womanhood, our community craves a vision of how we can honor our priorities without being slaves to their former trappings.” Julie Smith explores the question “does Mormonism oppress women–or liberate them?”, providing a typology for how different women approach their relationship to the Church (the Sariahs, the Abishes, and the Morianton’s maids), useful in thinking of how women with different views can still “all pull together,” as the old hymn suggests. Kalani Tonga invites readers to bring members who feel marginalized (or — for whatever reason — are “not at the table”) into an active embrace, particularly highlighting the challenges of women of color. Ignacio García uses the history…

Whom say ye that I am? A review of John Turner’s Mormon Jesus

by David Evans • June 29, 2016 • 3 Comments

This is the first in a series on John Turner’s The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. John Turner’s latest book — The Mormon Jesus: A Biography — is wonderful. The book opens with Jesus’ question to his apostles, as recorded in Mark 8:29, “But whom say ye that I am?” Over the succeeding nine chapters, Turner explores how members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have answered that question over time. By themes, Turner constructs a rich historical narrative of the evolution of Mormon belief. Along the way, he places Mormon views in the context of broader Christianity: Joseph Smith revised the Bible? So did Thomas Jefferson and others, but in very different ways. This anchoring of Latter-day Saint views in their time and place doesn’t make Mormonism’s brand of Christianity the same as other groups; rather, it serves to highlight what is actually distinctive. Furthermore, Turner illustrates each theme with well-told illustrations, such as ordinary members of the Church who saw visions and reacted to revelations. Turner weaves a lush tapestry of a faith that has learned and evolved over the last 200 years. I highly recommend you take it in. Here is his conclusion: “Mormonism is a vibrant new branch of Christianity, one in which temples, ordinances, and prophets have taken their place alongside a Jesus who is both utterly Christian and distinctively Mormon.” In case you need more to draw you in, here’s a little…

The General Conference Mirth Index – Take 2

by David Evans • September 25, 2015 • 7 Comments

I always enjoy the opportunity to laugh a little bit in general conference. In January, I introduced the General Conference Mirth Index (for the October 2014 conference), which sums up the number of laughs for each talk. As we enter into the next General Conference this weekend, let’s see how much laughing we did last April. A quick recap. To calculate this, I listen to each conference talk and record the number of instances of laughter that I hear. (Note that I’m not counting jokes or judging what is a joke; I’m only counting what induces laughter.) I listen to each talk in the language in which it was delivered, since the English voiceover often covers the laughter. I then adjust by the length of the talk. This has limitations – it weighs equally Elder Gibson’s chuckle from not eating dinner with Elder Pearson’s medium-sized laugh from #spaciousbuilding. Big picture. More than half the talks had at least one laugh (57%, to be precise). There was one joke that landed brilliantly during the conducting, when President Uchtdorf started speaking in German on Sunday afternoon: “Sorry, President Monson. … I went into my German native language.” Last October, Sunday morning had the fewest laughs. In April, the Women’s Session had the fewest. This confirms my previously expressed hypothesis: “Which is the least mirthful session of General Conference?” is “The session in which President Uchtdorf isn’t speaking.” Last fall, President Uchtdorf spoke…

They Spoke in General Conference as Ones That Had Authority

by David Evans • February 23, 2015 • 9 Comments

“And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.” –Mark 1:22 (see also Matthew 7:29) This scripture is often read to mean that Jesus expounded doctrine directly, rather than citing repeatedly what others had taught before (see some detailed discussion here). As Ellicott puts it, “It is the prophet, or rather, perhaps, the king, who speaks, and not the scribe.” This scripture led me to wonder how leaders in the modern Church refer to different types of authority in their teaching. So I went through a single General Conference – the most recent, from October 2014 – and tallied up quotes of authority of different kinds. I separated the quotes into four categories: Scriptures: This includes only the four canonical books of LDS scripture. High LDS Authority: This includes General Conference talks (by General Authorities or auxiliaries), other recorded talks or Ensign articles by General Authorities or auxiliaries, books by General Authorities, unrecorded quotes from General Authorities (e.g., “President Boyd K. Packer surprised me with this puzzling question”), and non-canonical resources that are often regarded as authoritative, like the Church Handbook, the Bible Dictionary, or the Proclamation on the Family. Medium LDS Authority: This includes books by LDS people who are not General Authorities (e.g., Harriet Uchtdorf’s book The Light We Share) and unrecorded quotes from members of the Church (e.g., “a sister missionary said this”, or “my…

Laughing through General Conference

by David Evans • January 8, 2015 • 22 Comments

No one comes to General Conference for the jokes. And yet, some of the conference moments I remember most clearly involve laughter. In 1997, after Elder Nelson gave a laudatory talk about President Hinckley, President Hinckley took the stand and said, “I thought we were conducting General Conference. It’s turned out to be a funeral.” He went on to challenge Elder Nelson to a duel in the basement of the Tabernacle. Later in the session, he postponed the duel. It was a fabulous moment in conference history. What does humor in General Conference do? First, the spiritual tide of General Conference can feel overwhelming at times and humor can break it up, making it easier to be attentive to the rest of the counsel we’re receiving. Second, it can teach a subtle lesson, as with the humility implicit in President Hinckley’s embarrassment at being praised. Third, it can make a story that teaches a lesson more memorable, as when President Tad Callister, at the most recent conference, recounted [and all the links in this post go straight to the laugh-inducing moment, so click with caution] the time his aged mother told him she was delivering food to the elderly, to which Brother Callister thought, “Mother, you are the elderly.” The joke makes the story – fundamentally about lifelong service – stand out more. With that (limited) justification, I propose the General Conference Mirth Index (yes, it’s the GCMI). To construct…

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