Actually, that’s exactly what just happened. Sixty-three House seats changed hands in November, governors got voted in and out of office, statewide propositions got passed and defeated—without a single post, let alone an old-fashioned righteous flamewar, on the Mormon blogs I read regularly.
I have a Christmas list, for a not-quite-teenager, with a gap that needs to be filled.
A few years ago, I walked half the circuit of a massive town wall. After hauling three kids and pushing a fourth in a stroller for a few hours through the forest, we recognized the wall by the close-packed rubble that stuck out from the crest of the long dirt mound.
I once almost joined the ward choir. What’s surprising about this is that I don’t actually sing.
Mormon Studies could be headed for a rough patch, because the career paths that make professional study of Mormon topics at least occasionally possible are disappearing.
The call for papers for the Third Biannual Faith and Knowledge Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion contains a sentence that is, I think, wrong in three different ways.
The result of writing Book of Mormon history from back to front, I think, resembles a cross between The Mission and Last of the Mohicans.
If you think that the textual history of the Book of Mormon includes historical records, then you can’t avoid the possibility that a lot of Book of Mormon scholarship has been looking for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and reading the wrong verses. The problem is that Book of Mormon chronology is anchored in time only by the fall of Jerusalem and Christ’s appearance to the Nephites. But these events belong to sacral history, and their translation into historical chronology is not necessarily transparent. In the same way, the identification of the Nephites as descendants of pre-Exilic Jews depends on 1 Nephi, which is a literary account of an eponymous ancestor that grafts ethnic origins into sacred history. National theophanies and sacralized accounts of ethnogenesis are not the kinds of writing usually given much weight in historical analysis. And yet Semitic origins and a 600 BC – 421 AD timeline define the current debate about Book of Mormon historicity. I think this is a mistake, and that we needlessly limit what can or must be assumed about where and when the events described in the Book of Mormon could have taken place. It is as if Scandinavian history would focus exclusively on the question of Trojan origins as alleged by Snorri Sturlason, and attempt to date the events described in the Edda with respect to Ragnarök. Over time, histories get re-written and chronologies get…
Despite a unique cosmology that has at times inspired artistic creation for a wider American audience, there is no Mormon astrology. Someone who knew Mormonism only through its scriptural texts might be forgiven for finding this omission curious.
I fell in love almost simultaneously, as a junior in high school, with historical linguistics and Hugh Nibley.
Glenn Beck, the soapbox orator of cable television, has done more, save Sheri Dew only, for the greatness of Mormon literature, than any other person that ever lived.
While the occurrence of a general apostasy is a matter of belief and not observable by historical inquiry, dispensations are born with a burst of documentary evidence.
Each anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is a bit embarrassing for me.
If we accept, at least for the moment, that 1 Nephi has a textual history, that it drew on older sources or underwent expansion at various times, then we might wonder what could be considered the oldest layer of the text
My basic problem with Blake Ostler’s expansion theory is that it approaches via intellectual history what is at heart a problem in textual history
In How to Kill a Dragon, the Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins defines formulas as “set phrases which are the vehicles of themes.”
If you’re interested in an oral-formulaic theory of Mormon prayer, or if you want to observe a formula in its natural habitat, a good place to start would be Sunday dinner
A brotherly reader writes: I recently had a chance to watch the new French film Banlieue 13: Ultimatum, which as far as these things go is a pretty good action flick
If you want to find a unique Mormon tradition of verbal art, you should listen to Mormons pray
With Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker, we have another Mormon writer of speculative fiction with something to say about marriage. Warbreaker manages to capture some ironies that won’t be lost on readers who have noted the discrepancy between the ideal of eternal marriage, and the reality of the dating scene at BYU.
From the air, the German neighborhood where we lived until last year seems decidedly un-American
One of the things people find odd about Mormons is our claim to be led by a prophet.
The Mormon Church does not want even its own members to know how to pronounce Shimnilom
The Book of Mormon is a reliquary in prose. In some extensive sections and at some critical moments, what drives the narrative is the question: how did a set of golden plates, a steel sword, a ball of curious workmanship, a breastplate, and two translucent stones end up inside a stone box buried in a hill in the state of New York? For a religion that attaches little to no significance to relics, it’s striking that large sections of our distinctive book of scripture are concerned with the provenance—the origin and the later cultural significance—of a particular set of holy artifacts.
What will it be like for a marriage to continue past death into the eternities? What does it mean to have a perfected body, or to love an eternal being? Stephenie Meyer has an answer. Breaking Dawn, the last novel in her Twilight series, presents a sustained and vividly imagined view of one of the core elements of Mormon personal salvation. [This post is going to discuss all the details of Breaking Dawn, including how it ends, so please stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]
One of the subterranean threads running throughout the Book of Mormon is the mystery of whose bones are heaped upon the land northward.
On the issues I care about (and therefore not including the topic addressed from various perspectives so eloquently by my esteemed colleagues), I prefer the positions of the Democratic Party platform and candidate. I directly benefited from Barack Obama’s work as a state senator while I lived in Illinois, he seems to know what he’s talking about on important issues, and it looks like he ran a pretty competent campaign. For my taste, McCain and Palin didn’t offer much more than the politics of fear and resentment, and they seemed more likely to stay trapped in the conflicts of the twentieth century than their opponents. I know it’s fashionable to affect hand-wringing uncertainty about choosing between two candidates, but I cast my vote for Obama with unmitigated enthusiasm. Who did you vote for?
Most online discussions of gay marriage are not worth the effort, because no actual discussion takes place
I’m very happy to see this year’s Nobel Prize in economics going to Paul Krugman, whose columns in the New York Times helped me see the importance of the discipline of economics as nothing else ever had. I think Mormon scholarship could use more scholars like Paul Krugman (quite apart from the Nobel and the weekly NYT column)
Every medium has an inherent vice. While any form of media can be misused, there is a flaw lurking in the fundamental nature of each medium. Television exaggerates fear, as it transmits the worst events or most scandalous entertainment from the outside world into our homes. Movies indulge our self-deluding fantasies of escape or celebrity. Radio encourages the presumption, in the secrecy of our private chambers, that we sing and dance every bit as good as Milli Vanilli. The inherent vice of the Internet is shame
