In the Pentateuch, we find two ways of doing wrong. There is the more familiar sequence where a person sins by violating divine law and must atone for the guilt, but also the sequence where a person becomes unclean through contact with a tabooed person or object and must be ritually cleansed.
Author: Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green has been described as a scholar of German, master of trivia, and academic vagabond. He is an instructor of German in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of North Dakota. His books include Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450– 1550 (2011), and The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess: Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe (2014).
Colligite fragmenta ne pereant
In a manuscript I’m looking at right now, I’m trying to find what verses two or three biblical citations refer to. Before I declare them to be hopeless cases, do any of the three sound familiar to you?
The problem with “liberal Mormon”
The problem with “liberal Mormon” is not the liberal Mormons, whoever they might be, but rather the term used to classify them. It seems to me that the term is used as a catch-all for at least five mostly unrelated things.
The King and Us
Today my wife visited a ward conference in Grafenwöhr, representing the stake YW presidency. As of today, Grafenwöhr is a US servicemen’s ward; until now it’s been a branch. For a meetinghouse, the ward rents a local hall. Before it was used as a church, the building was a bar, and then a strip club. Also, Elvis once performed there, approximately where the young women now have their classroom. Some LDS meetinghouses have longer and nobler histories, but I would guess few have had such close brushes with fame.
Cars, Buses, and Suicide Bombing
Going without a car means giving up some control over the safety of yourself and your family, or the illusion of control.
Cars, Buses, and the Von Trapp Family Singers
Public transportation is a wonderful thing.
Orthoglossy
The people of Zion were of one heart and one mind and dwelt in righteousness. Our goal is to be like them. Are we? It’s hard to be sure, since we can’t easily know what’s in another person’s heart.
Mitt, the Mormons, and the Democrats’ Mountain West Strategy
The Democratic electoral strategy for 2008 and Mitt Romney’s candidacy might just give Mormons more political influence than they will ever have again in a presidential election. The combination of the two will certainly give the McCain campaign a bad case of indigestion.
When bad things happen to good music
You purists can scoff, but I think Christmas with the Cambridge Singers is a great Christmas album. “What sweeter music” never fails to bring me back to the first time I heard it: December, fifteen years ago, when I was broke and desperately unhappy
Never look at the trombones
I largely agree with Kaimi’s thoughts on how the Church is usually content to let teachings and statements of earlier authorities fade into obsolescence through silence, rather than through any kind of formal pronouncement. But I think that the opposite, that the silent treatment is intended as an informal repudiation, might not be true in all cases. I don’t think that any general authority will provide a clear answer on nineteenth-century polygamy any time soon, but I don’t think their silence will provide any guidance, either.
Wave theory
Family trees are familiar and similarly dissatisfying models in historical linguistics and in the history of religion.
Bill Shrives
For forty years, Bill Shrives was a train signal supervisor for Southern Pacific Railroad. Every day, the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people depended on his doing his job conscientiously and correctly. As with nearly everyone who plays an important part in keeping the economy humming, it is safe to say that nearly no one thought about Bill Shrives when their train sailed safely past the signals he inspected.
I am thankful for my appendectomy
One night last March, I went to bed feeling fine but woke up four hours later with abdominal pain that wouldn’t go away. I finished the ensuing day in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy, for which I am very grateful.
Slovakia!
The government of Slovakia granted the Church official recognition on October 18.
St. Martin’s Day
Or, Notes from a modern theocracy Continuing the periodic series on Holiday Envy, November 11 is St. Martin’s Day.
The Shape of Things to Come
For many years, northern Bavaria had a duplicate Church geography, with a stake for American servicemen sharing the boundaries of a German district.
Relic area
Once when I was a missionary district leader, one call to my zone leader went particularly badly. I was trying to get permission for my district to take a hike in the woods, essentially. (The difference between a hike in the woods, and essentially a hike in the woods, was the sticking point
Wal-Mart, McDonalds
How do you transplant an American institution to Europe and make it work?
Isogloss
One way to think about religious difference is with isoglosses.
Why study old books?
Most German classes taught by most German professors have little to do with the professor’s academic specialty and a lot to do with teaching college students to speak and write better German.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
This post is not two months early. It’s two weeks late. Around here, Christmas cookies and candy and multiple varieties of Stollen have been available in grocery stores since the last week of September, and the local hypermarket has a whole aisle devoted to Christmas decorations.
Substrate : Superstrate
Contact between religions is a lot like contact between languages. One way for two language communities to interact is through invasion.
Second-language acquisition in children; or, This life is a school
I’ve enrolled my two oldest children in a German elementary school. They have until Christmas to learn German and catch up to the rest of their first- or third-grade classes before the risk of flunking out gets to be too high.
Hypercorrection
In linguistics, hypercorrection is the kind of mistake you make when you’re trying too hard to speak correctly.
The road to Oblivion
If you want to write the great Mormon novel, or the great Mormon dissertation, don’t play video games.
Religion class
I registered my two oldest children for school on Friday. The principal needed to know which church they belonged to so that he could assign them to the proper religion class. For a first and third grader attending public school in Bavaria, there is a class for Catholics, a class for Lutherans, or a course on ethics. Actually, we’re Mormons, I said, prepared to explain that I have only one wife and that we do use electricity.
Language and Belief
Linguistics, the study of language’s inner workings, is a source for concepts and technical vocabulary that are also useful for thinking about religion, because language and religion are both, among other things, mental constructs for making sense of the world around us. Each provides categories with which to organize the way we think about life: singulars and plurals, nouns and verbs, sinners and the saved.
Moving up, moving out
Since getting married eleven years ago, my wife and I have moved eight times.
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed
Up until about a year ago, if you had asked me why I had studied German, I would have said that I started in the ninth grade and just didn’t know when to stop. At BYU, my major in mechanical engineering lasted about 20 minutes into the first orientation meeting, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to study after that, but I didn’t worry too much about finding another major at the time. I thought I would figure out what I wanted to study on my mission.
I was a Benson Scholar
Towards the end of my time at BYU, a friend mentioned to me that he knew some Benson scholars (today we would say Hinckley scholars, or more generically, presidential scholars), and that they were all stuck up and full of themselves. I told him, to his surprise, that I too was a Benson scholar, which goes to show that I can deceive even friends into thinking I’m a down-to-earth, non-snooty person. The Presidential Scholarship is the most prestigious academic scholarship granted by BYU to incoming freshmen. When I was a senior in high school, I spent many hours researching, writing, and formatting the written application. In the spring of 1989, BYU flew me and 29 other male finalists to campus (and 30 women the next week) for three days of interviews and evaluations.