So here’s the plan: each week that the gospels are covered in Sunday School, I will post one question from my book along with a brief discussion of the issues that it raises. In what ways is a wedding celebration a good metaphor for the coming of the kingdom (see Matthew 25:1-13)? (adapted from Search, Ponder, and Pray: A Guide to the Gospels)
Category: News and Politics
Politics – Current Events – Media
Guest Post- Taking Six Years to Teach the Book of Mormon
This post comes from Mom S. Over the last six years, we’ve had many conversations about the relevant books she was reading, questions that arose, and teaching ideas. I asked her to share some thoughts on this class and its effects. Some time ago, I was asked to teach an adult scripture class in our ward. It was originally an extra activity for the Relief Society sisters but was expanded by the bishop to include any brothers who wanted to attend. I picked the Book of Mormon for the curriculum having learned from personal experience (16 years early morning seminary teacher, 4 years Institute teacher, 3 years stake adult scripture class, etc.), that a serious study of that book changes people.
On Conflation; or, Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater in 1911
Oftentimes, we’re presented with what appears to be a package deal: If you accept A, you accept B-G as well. If you reject A, you reject B-G as well. Just as often, however, what appears as a package can and should be unpacked, critically and carefully examined to see if it really is so. In 1911 Provo, a controversy erupted over some teachers at BYU. Horace Cummings, the education commissioner, was sent down to investigate and make a report. Telling the entire story is beyond the length and attention span of the average blog, so I’ll just link to it here though it has been written about elsewhere. Cummings’ report is of interest to me because of the packaging of tradition, Old Testament interpretation and issues of miracles, science, and rationality.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #21
Review: Adam Miller’s Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan
Whether you are a student of the scriptures who reads 3-4 versions of the Bible simultaneously (at least one of which is in Hebrew or Greek) or you are so lackadaisical that scripture “study” means learning where the book of Romans is (hint: New Testament), you will want to read Adam Miller’s insightful, thought-provoking and beautifully written “paraphrase” of Romans, Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan.
Writ & Vision: Roundtable on Grace
At 7pm on Thursday, May 21, Writ & Vision will host a roundtable discussion on grace. Participants include Adam Miller, Joseph Spencer, and Jenny Webb. The discussion will focus on President Uchtdorf’s April 2015 General Conference address, “The Gift of Grace,” Adam Miller’s Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and a close reading of 2 Nephi 25:23 (“for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do”). The event is open to the public. Writ & Vision is located at 274 West Center Street in Provo, Utah.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #20
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #19
The Package Deal
If families couldn’t be together forever, the church could likely avoid many of the controversies concerning its history and contemporary practices.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #18
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #17
The Only True and Living Opinion
So this week, the Salt Lake Tribune sponsored a live “Trib Talk;” the topic was “what Mormon women want.” You can watch it here. Afterwards, there was criticism that there wasn’t a traditional or a conservative or a happy-with-the-status-quo (or whatever term you’d prefer) position represented. (There was also criticism that, at least initially, it was planned as an all-white panel, but that’s a topic for a different post.) I have heard that more-traditional women were invited, but either refused or later backed out. There is also this dialogue you can watch, featuring Melissa Inouye, who identifies as an egalitarian feminist, and Caroline Allen, who identifies as a maternal feminist. I have a few thoughts about all of this:
A Mormon in the Disenchanted Forest
In a few minutes I’ll be leaving to travel to California, where I’ll be speaking this weekend at the conference of the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. I’ll be speaking Friday morning on Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Saturday on Nibley + Terryl & Fiona Givens on atonement theory. Sunday evening at 7:00 pm, I’ll be speaking to the Bay Area Mormon Studies Council on the topic of “Disenchanted Mormonism: How (and Why) to Be Religious but not Spiritual.” The talk will be at the Berkeley Institute, located at 2368 LeConte Avenue. This event is open to the public — please come and invite others, or share the invitation. I’ve posted an excerpt of my talk below. For a sojourner in the disenchanted forest, then, what language might better serve that experience than the trio of doubt, freedom and choice? It would be difficult to match the elegance and appeal of that formulation, and I freely concede that I will fail to do so here. Nevertheless, I an alternative sequence of keywords that I hope will begin to describe another route through a disenchanted Mormonism. My experience has not been one of conventional religious doubt, an agonizing knife-edge demanding resolution through insight or decision, but rather one of puzzlement. Puzzlement is a gentler and more sustainable state of mind. It entails patience, an internal stillness, and an acknowledgement of my own failure to wring answers from an inscrutable world. Puzzlement implies…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #16
Varieties of Grace
I’m not susceptible to guilt. I’m sensitive to social pressure, for sure, and can be “guilted into” doing or saying things I don’t really mean. I feel terrible when I’ve failed to meet an obligation or hurt another person. But I don’t really feel that I’ve sinned — I don’t have the inner sense that God is unhappy with me, that I’m unworthy, or that I need divine forgiveness. I just want to repair my mistakes, or feel frustrated if I can’t. I sat in an Episcopal Easter vigil a few days ago, and the liturgy dwelled for a time on human sinfulness. I thought for a moment about my sins, and I actually couldn’t name anything specific at first. After a few minutes I lit on a relationship with one of my children that I have been been damaging with my actions, and I began to think of that as real sin, not just my being emotionally inadequate to the task of mothering. But that way of thinking — I’ve sinned, I’m guilty, I need God’s forgiveness and rescue — is not my first reflex. That’s just not the way my psyche works, for whatever reason: maybe my upbringing, or my brain structure, or my life experiences.
I’m not proud of this, but I’m not ashamed of it, either: it’s just how I am. I think it probably hinders my ability to empathize with others in some situations and veils a central part of human experience from me; it probably also makes me less scrupulous about private religious observances. Of course, maybe I’m a horrible sociopath and just don’t see it — I guess you’d have to ask my friends and family about that. On the other hand, my missing guilt receptors have probably saved me some needless anguish and kept me on a pretty even emotional keel that allows me to serve others and contribute in the community.
All this to say that I listened to Elder Uchtdorf’s Sunday morning talk, “The Gift of Grace,” with great interest and respect, but without the overwhelming emotional response that many people experienced. I felt happy for their sakes, happy that their burdens were lifted and their souls watered. But the talk didn’t really re-frame my own felt relationship to God in a deep way, because sin and forgiveness just aren’t the channels through which that connection flows. William James distinguished between “healthy-minded” and “sick” souls, without attaching moral judgment to either one: the healthy are those who feel fundamentally at home and right with the world, and the sick those who feel fundamentally broken and out of place. I’m a healthy-minded soul.* I would imagine that James’s “sick souls” are those who most fervently respond to Elder Uchtdorf’s talk.
While sin and guilt have scant purchase my soul, death stalks my imagination. I am terrified of death — my own death, the death of those I love, the death of the sun and the scattering of a cold universe. I’m afraid too of the death-seeking drives of human nature, our indenture to fleshly instinct and our lust for status, Lear’s “poor, bare, forked animal” and the Preacher’s lament that all is vanity and striving after wind. All flesh is grass. This fear should be assuaged by a robust sense of Christian grace — after all, in the resurrection Christ vanquished hell and death. But this witness has not yet been given to me, or I have not yet allowed it to penetrate my hard heart. I live in hope that it may someday, but for now the veil over my mind is lead.
Maybe my mostly sunny nature seems like a contradiction, then. But it doesn’t feel that way to me: I fear death as I do because life is so fine. I want a thousand miraculous April 7ths, when everything improbably blooms overnight and the air is sweet and velvet. I want to plant a thousand seeds, raise a thousand children, learn a thousand piano concertos. I want a thousand years of mud under my fingernails and fat earthworms slipping through invisible tunnels in the rotting leaves. I want to hike every dry canyon, shovel snow for days, nurse every baby. I want to read every book to my children under every shockingly spring-green tree, and together memorize the exact pattern of the leaves against the sky. I want to fly for miles with the wind in my hair and my son in my arms. The turning of the seasons, the passage of the holidays and the marking of that passage with my children fills me with belonging, at-homeness, connection to past and future and every leaf and stone. I feel that the world was given to me — no, that I was given to the world. I can only interpret this feeling as divine. As grace, in fact.
When Nibley writes about grace, he sets the scene in Eden. But it’s not the Fall he focuses on, it’s the Lord’s gift of creation, a new world in which Adam, male and female, is placed in every sense of that rich, earthy, growing, dying word. Place, for me, is grace. My deepest spiritual perceptions do not take the form of a cross; this probably makes me a poorer disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. They take the form of a tree. But there is grace there, too.
*With the exception of the months after each of my babies were born, when I suffered from terrible post-partum depression and anxiety. These experiences changed me, not least in bringing into focus the well-being that I am fortunate to experience as normal at other times.
A Metaphor & a Plea
I’m pleased to share a post written by my friend Christian Harrison. I’d like to write a few words about something that was said, during the Saturday morning session of General Conference.I grew up in Spokane, Washington. Living so close to the Canadian border, I frequently came across the random Canadian penny or dime. As a child, I learned that they were easily used to pay at the cashier but they were rejected outright by vending machines.You see, those Canadian coins weren’t counterfeit, they were just foreign. The cashiers knew the difference… but the machines did not. And what separates the cashier from the machine is experience — and the willingness to learn from it. The cashiers knew that the coins were valued the same as their US equivalents by their customers. The foreign coins weren’t part of the official economy, but they were part of mine. I knew that I could use them to get cookies at the grocery store, to pay for a day at the local pool, or to pay my late fines at the library.I’m both an out gay man and a practicing Latter-day Saint… and I’d like to speak to my brothers and sisters: as Latter-day Saints, we know the power of bearing testimony. And as LGBTQ Mormons, I would hope, we understand how vital it is to live our lives out loud. It’s my hope that our lives might be a testimony to our…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #15
Gen Conf: Sat Afternoon Notes
Conducting: Pres Eyring Opening Song: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty[oddly, I have had this song running through my head continuously since yesterday. Maybe I’m inspired?] Music by Young Single Adult Choir from Davis and Weber Counties, Utah [Wearing “Easter egg colored clothing,” according to the people sitting in my front room with me] Prayer: Sister Stevens President Uctdorf: Sustaining
GenConf: Saturday Morning Session Notes
Choir: Guide Us, Oh Thou Great Jehovah President Uchtdorf conducted this opening session. Choir: Glory to God on High Invocation: Timothy J. Dyches President Henry B. Eyring: “Is Not This the Fast that I Have Chosen?” When we offer succor to anyone, the Savior feels it as if we reached out to succor Him. There are more hungry, homeless, and lonely children of Heavenly Father than we can reach. And the numbers grow ever farther from our reach. So the Lord has given us something that we each can do… It is the law of the fast. Your fast offering will do more than help feed and clothe bodies. It will heal and change hearts. The fruit of a free-will offering may be the desire in the heart of the recipient to reach out to others in need. … other storms and tragedies will come across the world to people the Lord loves and whose sorrows He feels. Part of your fast offering and mine this month will be used to help someone, somewhere, whose relief the Lord will feel as if it were His own. Choir: “Have I done any good” President Boyd K. Packer: The Plan of Happiness The door had a frosted glass window, but if I stood close to the glass, she could see my shadow outside. She would slip out with a cookie and a kiss. The rest is history. The end of all activity in…
Sin: You’re Doing it Wrong
Religion isn’t about sin. Thinking that religion is about sinning (or not sinning) is like thinking basketball is about fouls. You should stop fouling but you can’t make the game be about fouls. That’s an impossible way to play basketball. And, more, it’s an impossible way to be religious.
Ecumenicalism
Jeder soll nach seiner Fasson selig werden—everyone may find sacred bliss in their own way, in Frederick the Great of Prussia’s formulation of enlightened commitment to religious tolerance. Nowhere is this sentiment more evident today than at a community health club.
Announcing Auto-Pray!
Are you feeling pressed for time? Just don’t have the energy to remember prayer? Download the new Auto-Pray (TM) app today! You’ll spend about ten minutes in initial setup. Using handy check-the-box options, indicate your prayer preferences, such as the standard package (1 morning, 3 meals, 1 evening) or any of a number of custom packages. You can go with the basic prayer (“we thank Thee for this day,” “we thank Thee for this food”) or add options of your choice. Want to thank God for the missionaries during morning prayer, and the Prophet during evening prayer? It’s as simple as check-the-box! You can build your own linguistic nuances right in, too! Want to make sure to include important terms like “moisture”? We’ve got that option! Want to add lots of extraneous Thees and Thous, passive-voice construction, and archaic verbs? We doth haveth that one, too! You can even customize your prayer to be in Yoda form (“these blessings, we thank Thee for”) or even Pirate talk (“Arr, ye have our thanks”). Once you’ve personalized Auto-Pray to suit your needs, just press the “Pray now” button on your phone, and the prayer of your choice will be delivered at the same speed that people give bank disclosures on the radio (plus auto-compression of long words) allowing even the longest prayers to be recited in less than five seconds. It’s Enos-level blessings with Laman-level effort — and easier than mumbling “bless…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #14
Privilege and the Family
In a post at By Common Consent over the weekend (What has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap about the Family?), Rebecca J writes that “If I’m not currently standing up for the Family, it’s… really just that I don’t care enough about the Family. I don’t think I care at all.” She goes on to write: I’m really not sure what they [Church leaders] mean. I mean, it can’t mean that I’m supposed to be speaking out against divorce or same-sex marriage or unwed parenthood because if it did, they would just come out and say that, right? I mean, I know that church leaders rarely just come out and say anything, but if I were to raise my hand and ask for clarification by saying, “Hey, does this mean I should be speaking out against divorce and/or same-sex marriage and/or unwed parenthood?” they would definitely not respond in the affirmative but would probably say something that had nothing to do with my question and didn’t mean anything, which I think means that there’s some deeper message here that I’m just not getting. So here are some thoughts on the twin questions Rebecca J raises: Why should we care about the family? What does it mean to stand up for the family? As for the first, I can do no better than reference the string of posts my co-blogger Walker Wright has written for Difficult Run over the…
NT Wright on Genre and Reading
One of the themes I’ve explored repeatedly in talking about Genesis and Bible interpretation in general is that of genre, and the necessity of recognizing the genre of the material we’re reading. Today I came across a easy-to-understand analogy for this.
Defending the Family
Those wanting to follow the counsel from the first session of General Conference last night about the importance of defending the family will be very interested in this article (please ignore the click-baity headline and read the actual article). A much shorter version of the article was published in the Deseret News recently, but I think that even for the tl;dr crowd, the longer version is definitely worth the investment of time. This article is also well worth reading.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #13
For Zion – Part 10
From the pen of George Handley: There are those who are infected by nostalgia and yearn for a nineteenth-century Mormonism because, I suppose, they imagine that the prophets then seemed more willing to condemn capitalism or to preach environmental stewardship and that Mormons were more communitarian, less materialistic, and more obligated under the law of consecration to work to eliminate poverty.
Initial Short Speculation on Three Book of Mormon Passages and Ancient Cosmology
Part of writing a book about ancient cosmology and Genesis 1 is… reading lots about ancient cosmology and Genesis 1. In doing so, I’ve had some thoughts about three Book of Mormon passages. I’ve generally set these on the shelf, so these are initial thoughts which upon further investigation may turn out to be highly significant or completely baseless. But I float them here for public interest and as a reminder to myself later.
The historicity window
Book of Mormon historicity is not a unitary entity or a binary concept. It has at least three primary components, each of which offers a spectrum of possibilities