During this particularly awful political moment, I allow myself a sigh of relief when I read news articles about Evangelical leaders and institutions embracing the current president.
Neutrality
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).
Adiaphora
Adiaphora is a term that has played an important role in Lutheran history but not much in our own, although perhaps it should.
Your apocalyptic hymnbook
Hymns are useful evidence of religious practice. Hymns are a basic element of personal devotion, but at the same time the compilation of the hymnbook is carefully monitored by church leaders and the performance of hymns is modeled during the sessions of General Conference and other broadcasts, so hymns lie somewhere between high theology and lived religion. Our hymnbook provides an insight not quite like any other source on what Latter-day Saints believe.
If this goes on—
If we wanted to hazard a guess at what the upcoming years and decades hold in store for the church in the United States, the decisive factors will likely be to what extent the country as a whole becomes more secular (or more religious), and how the church correspondingly arrives at a place of higher or lower tension with the rest of society.
An International Church in an Isolationist Age
The most paranoid fantasies your persecution complex can dream up will probably come true eventually, although not where you live, but somewhere else in the world. It’s an unavoidable risk of establishing local branches of the church in places that can go from welcoming to hostile within a few years or decades.
Don’t Reform the Honor Code
The current round of dissatisfaction with the BYU honor code will hopefully result in some tinkering around the edges and perhaps a few personnel changes, and then quickly be forgotten before it has a chance to undermine the university’s educational and religious missions, which might roughly be summarized as producing graduates who are educated, productive, and committed to the church.
Some tips for your obituary
For some time, I’ve been writing obituaries for a secular educational institution (which, for the sake of the failing hearts of its remaining alumni, will remain anonymous).
Of early modern English and the Book of Mormon
I don’t think the language usage patterns of the Book of Mormon require the participation of anyone besides Joseph Smith.
Come Follow Me for Individuals and Families: A progress report
Why I Wrote a Sex Manual for Mormons
Earthly Parents is the pen name of the author of And It Was Very Good: A Latter-day Saint’s Guide to Lovemaking. He agreed to share some of the book’s background here. * * * On the top of my parent’s bookshelf, far above the white-spined World Book Encyclopedias I read as a child, sat a thick, black book. That book wasn’t the World Book Encyclopedia. That book was called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.
This is how you do it
If you want to reach an audience of church members on a sensitive topic, watch and learn from Earthly Parents.
Satan’s troll farm
If Satan hired a Russian troll farm, what would the Mormon corner of the Internet be like?
Interfaces of modernity: proselytizing, universities, politics
Avoiding controversy would make our lives easier, but it would not be good for the church.
Uto-Aztecan and Semitic: Too much of a good thing
Brian Stubbs’s argument for extensive ancient contact between Semitic and Proto-Uto-Aztecan has received some attention recently in Mormon apologetics, but I don’t think Stubbs’s proposal is going to pan out. First, though, a few important messages.
Church is not boring
To correct one misconception, our Sunday meetings are not boring.
Notes on faculty gender balance at BYU
Michael Austin reported in a 2016 post that women constitute just 11.7% of BYU-Idaho faculty members. This appears to be an error, although the error isn’t Michael’s fault.
This is what it looks like when the prophet speaks as a prophet
It is a mistake to apply the heuristics of edge cases to central and paradigmatic examples.
Bonsai
In one of the most profound scenes in The Karate Kid—a movie that fortunately has had no sequels or modern remakes, la la la la I can’t hear you—Daniel LaRusso comes upon Mr. Miyagi pruning his bonsai trees.
I know this church is true
This statement is not nonsensical or trite. It is the essence of our belief in six words. It is, in its own way, even lyrical. One occasionally hears objections to the effect that statements can be true, or friends can be true, but how can an organization be true? I started writing this post some time ago, before Michael Austin’s recent post and not in response to it, but his post can serve as a thoughtful and well-written example of the genre. Michael writes: I simply can’t comprehend what it might mean for a group of 15 million people or so to “be true”—or, for that matter, to be untrue. Statements can be true. Ideas can be true. Accounts of specific events can be true. But a Church, it seems to me, needs to have some relationship to truth other than just being it. In his post, Michael expresses his concern about the danger of asserting that the church is true. I think Michael is responding not to “I know this church is true,” but to another statement he may hear in those words: “I know this church is truth.” That would indeed be a much different claim, but it is not our claim. Fortunately our prophets have been quite open to truth wherever it may be found—“If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine,” as Brigham Young put it. In other…
The Last 4,000 Years
The last 4,000 years of religious history, up to and resulting in us, can be described as a series of questions and answers, with each new question arising out of the previous answer over generations or centuries as the full implications of each answer become understood.
In the world
Is the world a generally wonderful place that is constantly improving and generally better today than it ever has been? Or, to restate the obvious, do we live at peril every hour in a world we must avoid becoming part of, and is this alienation from the world a fundamental part of the message of Jesus? As is usually the case with such things, the answer to both questions is: yes. And this is perhaps nowhere more clear than in Yellowstone National Park.
Lutheran Prophets and Mormon Studies
If you spend time browsing a medium-size collection of early modern pamphlets, you’re likely to come across printed reports of a prophet receiving visions, or preaching in one town or another.
Loving my Prosperity Gospel
The term “prosperity gospel” describes an execrable set of ideas in American Christianity, chiefly that wealth is a marker of righteousness, and that believers can ensure material wealth and prosperity through spiritual practices. But “prosperity gospel” is often applied to a much broader set of beliefs
Fusion
Meeting with my ward high priests group has been one of my favorite parts of the week for several years.
Easter Conference
Based on a talk given this Sunday in sacrament meeting. This year, Easter and General Conference are on the same day, which illustrates how we measure time in multiple ways.
Stating the Obvious: The World
In the current unhappy state of online Mormon discourse, stating the obvious is sometimes controversial, and for that reason all the more necessary.
Moral calculus in the gig economy
What will you do the next time your client drops you into a real-world instance of the prisoner’s dilemma?
Journalistic Malpractice and BYU-Idaho
First the journalistic malpractice, then BYU-Idaho.
The two fundamentals of Mormon scripture reading
There are, I think, only two fundamental requirements that a Mormon reading of scripture must fulfill.
Onward, Mormon Soldier
Usually I reveal my ignorance gradually over the course of a blog post, perhaps saving the big reveal for the end. This time I’ll get it out of the way up front. I know how spiritual growth and progress toward engagement with the church at an adult level works in lives more or less like my own: high school graduation and transition to elders quorum or Relief Society, starting college and going on a mission (in roughly that order), finishing college and getting married (in roughly that order), and starting a career and accepting adult church callings. What I don’t understand well, despite a need to do so, is how typical milestones of spiritual growth fit into the lives of those who opt for military service.