I’m not going to try to summarize this well-organized and well-edited book in any detail. The roots of Haidt’s approach go back to the sociologist Durkheim (“social facts”) and the biologist Darwin (“group selection”). Haidt’s descriptive model of human morality draws on the results of many recent empirical researchers (cited and discussed in the text) as well as Haidt’s own research program.

In Part 1, Haidt establishes this simple proposition: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. He agrees with Hume’s view that reason is the slave of the passions. In Part 2, Haidt defends this claim: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. Besides care/harm and fairness/cheating, concepts that in the individualistic West generally define our sense of justice or a just society, his research identifies four other moral axes that inform human moral convictions more generally: liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. [See Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory website for descriptions of each moral axis.] In Part 3, Haidt investigates why humans are so inclined to form groups, and finds that morality (and religion) play a functional role that he summarizes in this phrase: Morality binds and blinds.

Religion Is a Team Sport

That’s the title to Chapter 11, which is not necessarily a central chapter for the book as a whole but offers the best material for a T&S blog discussion. Haidt first reviews what the New Atheists (Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens) have said about religion over the last ten years: It is an irrational system of beliefs about supernatural agents that is bad because it impels believers to do harmful things. The New Atheists employ an evolutionary psychology model to explain why all societies and most individuals embrace religion of one form or another, but see religion’s effect as an unfortunate and maladaptive by-product of our mental apparatus that, unlike most evolutionary products, makes us worse off, not better off.

Haidt critiques that view as overly simplistic and as simply irreconcilable with emerging empirical data. Group selection is the key concept: Religion enhances bonding or belonging in communities and societies, and regulates social life. Religious communities and societies (so the theory goes) are more efficient and outcompete communities without a religion. So religion is a positive force in society, not a negative or harmful feature as argued by the New Atheists. Among other studies, Haidt discusses the Putnam and Campbell data showing that religious people are more generous and more charitable, and not only toward their fellow-believers:

By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans — they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.

[The quotation is from Putnam and Cambell's American Grace, p. 461.] While not an endorsement of the truth claims of any or all religions or denominations, Haidt’s chapter is at least an effective critique of the New Atheists. Here is Haidt’s pithy commentary and prognosis about the social effects of widespread unbelief; it almost sounds like something you’d hear in General Conference.

Societies that forego the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

A Mormon Summary

Here are a couple of Mo apps that pop out of Haidt’s discussion of religion. First, religion is much more than simply a set of beliefs about God (or gods) and the world. There are nontheistic religions. There are nonmoralistic religions. [See this prior post for discussion of the experiential, mythic, ritual, and ethical dimensions of religion.] Mormonism seems to offer a much thicker religious experience than its Protestant cousins — there’s just more meat in the Mormon religious sandwich. Haidt’s discussion helps remind us that religion is about a lot more than just a set of beliefs about God and the world. This might be a clue why Mormonism has been, on the whole, so successful since its inception in 1830, despite having an underdeveloped and sometimes simply incoherent theology.

Second, there is a tension in the Mormon psyche between seeing religion in general as a good thing, which leads us to cooperate with other denominations and say nice things about other religions, and seeing other religions and denominations as false and apostate institutions and belief systems, which comes from the One True Church doctrine. Seems like over the last twenty years we’ve been moving from the One True Church end of the spectrum toward the All Religions Are Good side. Some people advocate religious cooperation from strictly political motives, but Haidt’s analysis gives a broader social rationale for that approach. We’re not just on Team Mormon, we’re on Team Christianity and maybe even on Team Religion. Go team.

One hears from time to time the complaint that the three-hour block of LDS Sunday meetings is too long and that talks in LDS sacrament meetings are somehow deficient, although there are various views on how exactly the typical LDS talk is falling short. Until an LDS President gets a revelation ending Sunday School, we’re stuck with the three-hour block, but we don’t need a revelation to do a better job from the pulpit. It’s worth reflecting on the strange fact that the youth talks are often the most rewarding five minutes of the meeting: they generally quote three or four scriptures in a five minute talk (which is often more than adults include in a ten or fifteen minute talk) and usually stay close to their topic. Plainly, adults ought to be able to do at least as well as the teenagers, and probably better. We’re missing something. Are things any better across the street?

The standard Christian sermon typically focuses on a text, not a topic. Those with more direct experience in other denominations can add their observations, but my sense is that the traditional sermon is one part close reading of a biblical text, one part scriptural context, commentary, and exposition related to that text, and one part application and exhortation to the congregation. It’s the close reading and exposition that gives me a case of holy envy. We’ve got plenty of exhortation. We could use more close reading.

I know, easier said than done. It would be easy to argue that because we have opted out of a professional clergy we simply lack the skills and education to do scriptural analysis and exposition from the pulpit. But there are places, such as BYU, where those skills are available in abundance, yet analysis and exposition are not pursued. (I’m thinking of Religious Education, which, like sacrament meeting, devotes most of its work to exhortation rather than education, despite having PhD level faculty with all the tools to bring analysis and exposition into the undergraduate curriculum.) General Conference is another example, where speakers have months to prepare and can draw on the considerable scholarly resources of the Church (CES, BYU, or really anyone in the Church they want to consult with), yet there is little exposition but lots of exhortation and storytelling. And the Ensign — which once offered multi-part features by LDS scholars, content by LDS professionals in various fields, and interesting speeches by apostles at BYU forums or other public events — has been correlated to death. Just kill the thing and start sending out BYU Studies instead, bundled with the New Era.

So I have two questions. First, is anyone else surprised there is so little institutional interest in this issue? The few times it does come up, the message is always that the problem is with the listeners, not the speakers or the meeting or the format. It’s like the simple question “Can we do a better job preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ from the pulpit on Sundays?” is not on anyone’s agenda. Inactivity is certainly an item of interest, and it’s hard to deny that whatever is missing from LDS meetings is part of that problem, at least for some people. A lot of institutional energy goes into designing and regularly updating a curriculum for LDS missionaries to learn and to teach. Why no similar concern for preaching the gospel from the pulpit on Sunday?

Second, can holy envy help us out at all? Would assigning texts work better than assigning topics? Sometimes close reading of a text and careful contextual analysis will conflict with traditional LDS readings, but that’s what happens when you start paying close attention to the scriptures: you learn something. As Elder Christofferson recently stated in General Conference:

We have seen of late a growing public interest in the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is something we welcome because, after all, our fundamental commission is to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ, His doctrine, in all the world. But we must admit there has been and still persists some confusion about our doctrine and how it is established.

What better place than sacrament meeting to teach the doctrine and remove doctrinal confusion?

Any other suggestions for improvement? And I’m not foreclosing opposing viewpoints. Anyone who thinks there is no problem is welcome to weigh in as well.

No, not that Jersey, the one famous for Bruce and the MTV show. Its namesake, the one in the English Channel.

Through my clicking, I learned that my great-great-great-grandmother was born in Jersey in 1838 and died in West Bountiful in 1912.

For most, this probably wouldn’t be remarkably meaningful. I didn’t do the work to get back these generations, and I have absolutely no knowledge of these ancestors’ lives.[fn2] But . . .

. . . but Jersey is a tax haven.[fn3] And I’m a professor of tax law, a researcher of tax law, and, frankly, pretty darn interested in most things tax. And so, learning that I’m descended from residents of what has now become a tax haven is just cool. Way cooler than pretend being descended from royalty.

And now I’m curious. I’m curious about when and how the Church moved into Jersey. I’m curious what life was like in Jersey (which, I assume, wasn’t a tax haven in the 19th century). And I’m curious what the Church was like in Jersey. My relationship to Jersey is more attenuated than the relationship that Ardis suggests careful family history research can develop, but, for one of the first times, I’ve found something fascinating about my family history.

And that’s a cool feeling.

—

[fn1] I suspect this is accurate, notwithstanding my run-in with royalty documented in my earlier post.

[fn2] Ardis pointed out on my earlier post that, through carefully learning about earlier generations, starting with our parents and moving back, we learn details about their lives that, in turn, help bind us closer to them (a paraphrase that hopefully does little damage to Ardis’s point). I found that paradigm-shifting in my view of the purpose behind genealogy and our current participation in proxy ordinances. That said, as I’ll explain shortly, this Jersey connection also piques my personal and historical curiosity.

[fn3] Albeit a tax haven about which I know very little. In the U.S., we generally use Bermuda or the Cayman Islands or maybe Ireland or Switzerland (though the latter two would dispute the label). Jersey is mostly a tax haven for London, from what I understand.

To my surprise, after I was ushered into the room, the bishop’s counselor extended a calling to me. He explained that it was church policy to obtain the husband’s permission before his wife even found out about the calling.

When my husband remarked dubiously that this is the first time he’d ever encountered such a policy, the counselor said (somewhat defensively) that they had been instructed to do it that way by the stake president. According to him, it’s part of an ongoing effort to “help the brethren step up to their responsibility to preside in their homes.”

He didn’t go into the details of how exactly being given control over whether their wives get the opportunity to serve at church helps men to be better husbands and fathers.

Needless to say, I found the exchange depressing, not to mention insulting. To my later chagrin, I didn’t say a whole lot other than accepting the call, partially because I was just floored by it happening in the first place, and partially because I wasn’t sure what TO say.

I found it embarrassingly awkward to be treated like a child who needs permission. Because, um, last time I looked at our relationship, my husband was not my parental authority figure. But how childishly petulant does it sound to stamp your foot at the bishop’s counselor and say, “don’t treat me like a child!” It was obvious to me that at least to this particular man, I would sound like a power hungry insubordinate and a bad wife if I objected to what he evidently considered a divinely sanctioned policy.

My husband and I had a lengthy discussion about it afterward, during which I was eventually able to roll my eyes and laugh ruefully at what had happened, and pass it off as a relatively minor annoyance.

Until this morning, that is, when I was sitting in the pew after Sacrament Meeting, and a brother in the ward came up to our row. He said hello to me, and then promptly turned to my husband, to ask if it was all right if I substituted in his primary class next week. I just stared. To his everlasting credit, my husband simply responded, “she’s her own person. Ask her.”

You’d think I would have come up with some kind of appropriate response myself after my experience a few weeks earlier, but again, I merely said I would do it (once the good brother’s attention had finally wandered back to me, that is, of course).

After I finished crying on my husband’s shoulder in the hallway over the whole indignity of it all, I started contemplating what would be the best/most appropriate response to a situation like this (since it appears that at least in this ward, it happens frequently).

Should I just grin and bear it? Is there some kind of church policy that might actually somehow be construed to mean that a wife needs her husband’s permission before she undertakes to do any sort of positive action? To what ridiculous ends will this lead us? When I call a Relief Society sister to ask if she’ll take dinner to someone in the ward, should I really be speaking with her husband first to see if it’s OK with him?

I should add that the second story did actually have a happy ending. My husband had a lengthy discussion with the offending primary teacher, who said he had only been trying to be respectful (of whom? The “man of the house,” I suppose). He said it was just like when he had asked his wife’s father for her hand in marriage. Sigh. Just like.

I’m not sure if he was convinced by my husband’s energetic explanations, or just thought we were weird, but I was very touched when this same brother came up to me after church and apologized for offending me. He said that he was sorry he had made me feel bad, and grateful he had now been educated so he wouldn’t do it again. He was really humble and sincere, and it made me feel so much better to have my feelings acknowledged. It also made me feel a little hopeful that change might actually sometimes happen, at least on the individual level, if we approach it in a constructive way.

So with that said, what is the most constructive way? What would you say if your husband were asked to speak for you (or you were asked to speak for your wife)? What have you said in situations like these? Do you think it’s more effective when speaking to an intentional or oblivious chauvinist for my husband to point out that he thinks it’s inappropriate to be treated like he owns me? Or should I say it myself?

At 394 pages with 12-point font (not the tiny print one sometimes finds in reference volumes) it might seem a little light for the genre, but that adds to what you might call the readability of the book. The first of four major sections presents six 10-page essays covering the entire span of the Mormon experience, essentially a short but dense course in LDS history:

• Foundation: 1820-1830, by James B. Allen
• Development: 1831-1844, by Stephen C. Taysom
• Exodus and Settlement: 1845-1869, by Ardis E. Parshall
• Conflict: 1869-1890, by W. Paul Reeve
• Transition: 1890-1941, by Thomas G. Alexander
• Expansion: 1941-Present, by Jessie L. Embry

As this list illustrates, the authors for essays and articles in the book include seasoned scholars, younger scholars, and independent scholars (those without a present academic affiliation). Bloggers are well represented: Julie Smith (Mormon Scripture), Nate Oman (Mormonism and Secular Government), Brad Kramer (Local Worship), J. Stapley (Mormon Missiology), Samuel Brown (Mormonism as Restoration), Blair Dee Hodges (Correlation), Bruce A. Crow (Mormon Battalion), just about everyone on the perm roster at Juvenile Instructor, and of course Ardis, who like her co-editor wrote about a dozen short entries as well as the longer historical essay listed above.

I am not so bold as to try to critique any particular entry or even the selection of topics — I’m sure there were dozens of potential entries that weren’t included simply because you can’t include everything in a single volume. A full table of contents for the book is available at the book’s Amazon page. The fourth section of the book, Issues, is really outstanding: 23 short articles of about five pages each on such topics as Mormonism and Blacks (by Margaret Blair Young and Darius Aidan Gray), Mormonism and Race (Armand Mauss), Mormonism as a World Religion (David Clark Knowlton), and Non-Mormon Views of Mormonism (Jan Shipps).

I hate to spend the whole review speaking in generalities without sharing a little bit of the content of this enlightening volume, so I will end with a second list giving one surprising fact or statement drawn from the biographical articles on each President of the LDS Church. I guess I’m hoping to show that these aren’t just Sunday School summaries — there really is a lot of information in the book that many readers, even well-read ones, will not have encountered before. For all presidents except Joseph Smith, I will note the years served as President of an organized First Presidency, along with the author of each article.

1. Joseph Smith, 1830-1844 (Jed Woodworth) – Joseph Smith “is not known to have preached a sermon before he organized the Church of Christ, in April 1830.”
2. Brigham Young, 1847-1877 (John G. Turner) – When Brigham moved to reorganize a First Presidency in 1847, several of the Twelve, including Orson Pratt, opposed the action.
3. John Taylor, 1880-1887 (Ardis E. Parshall) – John Taylor’s last public address was on February 1, 1884; after than, he was “on the underground” (in hiding, at various locations) until his death in 1887.
4. Wilford Woodruff, 1889-1898 (Thomas G. Alexander) – While serving as the president of the St. George temple, Woodruff introduced “vicarious temple ordinances for deceased men and women not related to Mormons — particularly national and international political, literary, and scientific leaders.”
5. Lorenzo Snow, 1898-1901 (Alan L. Morrell) – The Church was almost bankrupt when Snow took over leadership in 1898; he issued Church bonds and set the expectation that every Latter-day Saint would pay a full tithing. Church finances turned around within a few short years.
6. Joseph F. Smith, 1901-1918 (Christopher C. Jones) – The man who really ended polygamy with the Second Manifesto of 1904, part of a successful transition from the confrontational stance of the 19th-century Church to the accommodationist stance (my term) of the 20th-century Church.
7. Heber J. Grant, 1918-1945 (W. Paul Reeve) – Grant served as President almost 27 years and oversaw the emergence of two defining features of modern Mormonism: during Prohibition, “a more stringent implementation of the Word of Wisdom”; and during the Great Depression, the Church Welfare Program.
8. George Albert Smith, 1945-1951 (Gary James Bergera) – Married just after his 22nd birthday, he and his wife together served an LDS mission to the southern states from 1892 to 1894.
9. David O. McKay, 1951-1970 (Gregory A. Prince) – A clean-shaven monogamist and “the first college graduate to serve as president.” Along with Ernest Wilkinson, “transform[ed] BYU from a small, bucolic college into the largest private university in the United States.”
10. Joseph Fielding Smith, 1970-1972 (Matthew Bowman) – Church Historian from 1921 to 1970, his 1938 publication of The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith made many of Joseph’s teachings “available to the general public for the first time.”
11. Harold B. Lee, 1972-1973 (J. B. Haws) – Mr. Correlation.
12. Spencer W. Kimball, 1973-1985 (Jacob W. Olmstead) – Kimball successfully opposed “efforts to deploy the MX missle in the Great Basin in 1981.” And there was that revelation in 1978.
13. Ezra Taft Benson, 1985-1994 (J. B. Haws) – To the surprise of some, “the preeminent focus of his ministry [as President of the Church] was the Book of Mormon,” not anti-Communism. See the 1988 Conference talk Flooding the Earth With the Book of Mormon.
14. Howard W. Hunter, 1994-1995 (W. Paul Reeve) – The first LDS President born in the 20th century; also the shortest tenure (8 months, 26 days) of any LDS President.
15. Gordon B. Hinckley, 1995-2008 (Gary James Bergera) – Called as an additional counselor to President Kimball in 1981, “Hinckley guided the Church as de facto president” during Kimball’s last years in the mid-1980s, then again acted as de facto president during President Benson’s decline in the early 1990s.
16. Thomas S. Monson, 2010-present (Gary James Bergera) – President Monson spearheaded efforts to build an LDS temple in East Germany (completed 1985) and to secure permission for LDS missionaries to proselyte there (1988). At the time, these were stunning developments, coming several years before the Berlin Wall came down (1989) and Germany reunified (1990).

My advice: beg, borrow, or buy this book. You will enjoy it.

I keep my visions to myself.
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?

Mormons tend not to keep their visions to themselves. In his recent General Conference talk “How to Obtain Revelation and Inspiration for Your Personal Life,” Elder Richard G. Scott seems to be inviting Mormons to do the same with their dreams.

The talk starts out along predictable lines for a talk on personal revelation, describing revelation as important information communicated by the Holy Ghost that is “crisp and clear and essential,” whereas inspiration is merely a “series of promptings” that “guide[s] us step by step to a worthy objective.” Elder Scott describes his own approach to obtaining personal revelation: fast, pray to find helpful scriptures, then read and ponder and pray and read and ponder. Anger, hurt, defensiveness, loud and inappropriate laughter, and exaggeration “drive away the Holy Ghost”; exercise, a good night’s sleep, and “good eating habits” enhance spiritual communication. He then gives this interesting counsel on dreams:

Revelation can also be given in a dream when there is an almost imperceptible transition from sleep to wakefulness. If you strive to capture the content immediately, you can record great detail, but otherwise it fades rapidly. Inspired communication in the night is generally accompanied by a sacred feeling for the entire experience. The Lord uses individuals for whom we have great respect to teach us truths in a dream because we trust them and will listen to their counsel. It is the Lord doing the teaching through the Holy Ghost. However, He may in a dream make it both easier to understand and more likely to touch our hearts by teaching us through someone we love and respect.

As he uses the previously defined terms revelation and inspiration in that passage, it seems reasonable to think that a dream that is “crisp and clear and essential” would be a form of revelation.

What’s Doctrinal

What is LDS doctrine when it comes to dreams? The LDS Bible Dictionary offers half a sentence, stating that dreams are “one of the means by which God communicates with men.” (Sorry, ladies.) Brent L. Top offers a bit more in the entry “Revelation” in LDS Beliefs: A Doctrinal Reference (Deseret Book, 2011), giving scripture, the light of Christ, and the Spirit of God as revelatory conduits that induce revelatory thoughts (quoting Joseph Smith, “when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you” as “sudden strokes of ideas”) and revelatory feelings (quoting D&C 9:8, “your bosom shall burn within you” and “you shall feel that it is right”). He then adds, “Divine messages from God can also come in the form of visions, visitations, inspired dreams, and other direct and miraculous means.”

What’s Troubling

One pitfall that Elder Scott tries to avoid is the question of who is doing the communicating. In the paragraph quoted above, Elder Scott was careful to clarify the source: “It is the Lord doing the teaching through the Holy Ghost.” But earlier in the talk he acknowledged strength and support from “the other side of the veil,” suggesting that some sort of communication or influence comes to us directly from individual spirits. On the first reading, if dear departed Uncle Orville appears to you in a revelatory dream — one that is “crisp and clear and essential” and that you write down quickly upon awakening so you don’t forget the details — it’s not really a message from Uncle Orville, it’s a message from God via the Holy Ghost. But I suspect many recipients of such a dream would run with the second option and accept the dream as a communication direct from Uncle Orville.

Another wrong turn I can see would be if this talk spurs increased sharing of what are held to be personal revelatory dreams. Testimony meeting would, I suppose, be the natural venue for this sort of sharing, although I could see it happening in lessons as well. The title of Elder Scott’s talk seems to counsel against this practice by limiting the application to “your personal life,” but he didn’t really emphasize that limitation in the body of the talk. Besides, the line between personal life and public life is quickly disappearing. Once upon a time, “your personal life” implied private matters; nowadays, “your personal life” means your last ten Facebook posts and your Twitter feed. If a bishop were to be so bold as to quietly counsel a bit more discretion by someone who recounted a personal dream in some detail at the pulpit, I suspect the response might be: “I know it’s my personal life; that’s why I’m telling everyone about it.”

But the biggest trouble I have with recommending dream analysis as a form of personal revelation is there are no real boundaries. At least visions are relatively rare phenomena; dreams come to almost all people on almost any night. And there is nothing uniquely Mormon or even Christian about dreams or about claims that God communicates through dreams. Dreams (and visions too, for that matter) contain an array of symbols that tend to be, well, symbolic, and therefore susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations. Seven fat cows, seven lean; a large stone rolling down a hill; God on his throne surrounded by numberless concourses of angels. Dream analysis is tricky business. People who interpret their dreams tend to read meaning into them rather than out of them. It’s a form of projection, not the deciphering of an intentional message encoded in the recollected dream. I’m not sure the “crisp and clear and essential” test will permit objective discrimination between personal dreams (where people read meaning into their dreams) and revelatory dreams (where people receive messages from God).

There’s a third option of course: demonic communication, a message from the wrong source. Satanic influence and temptation is the flip side to divine inspiration, and it is held to operate by Satan or one of his fellow demons implanting tempting or misleading thoughts in your mind. Recall the experience Hiram Page who, following the example of Joseph Smith, started “receiving revelations” through “a certain stone” concerning “the upbuilding of Zion.” Seems like a worthy goal, and nothing suggests Brother Page had anything but good intentions. But Joseph was directed to tell Hiram Page that “those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me and that Satan deceiveth him.” Instead, “all things must be done in order, and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” (D&C 28 heading; verses 11 and 13.) That statement, like Elder Scott’s “crisp and clear and essential,” appears to be giving a method for discriminating between divine communication and not-so-divine communication, whether that be demonic communication or just introspective thoughts, such as spontaneously generated dreams. I’m not sure either formula really delivers on its promise. And if you can’t discriminate between divine, demonic, and autonomous dreams, what’s the point?

The simpler solution, in line with the traditional reading of D&C 28, is to say that only Joseph or his successors in office can get revelation through the appointed medium of communication, whether it be seer stones, dreams, tea leaves, or the entrails of sacrificed animals (recall the “other direct and miraculous means” referred to by Brent Top). That’s a simple, objective approach. “Keep your visions and your dreams to yourself” might be the better rule.

Note: Epigraph by Stevie Nicks, “Dreams,” on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977).

[Disclaimer: In what follows I offer a brief phenomenological sketch of human intimacy. Read on at your own peril.]

In chapter 12 on “Immutability and Impassibility” in The Attributes of God, Ostler claims that: “In the view I am proposing here, the ultimate moral criteria is the intrinsic value of creativity exemplified in its highest form in personality realized in full personhood” (386). Or again, taking Martin Buber’s phenomenological analysis of “I/Thou” versus “I/It” ways of relating to other people as a frame, Ostler says:

The highest good consists precisely in the relationship that is created between two persons who fully and properly value each other through entering into relation with one another. This relationship is accomplished precisely in entering into the emotional life of the other so that the “other” enters into the shared life of the lover. God enters into this relation constituted as a Thou by taking our very experience and value into his life. God penetrates our being and envelops us in his being. He allows us to enter into him and become a part of his experience just as he enters and induces, to the extent we value him and accept his love, sublime unity and joy.

The most analogous human experience is the intimate agape united with eros of husband and wife in sexual union. The spouse who is properly valued in the relationship is a source of greatest value and the most extreme pleasure and satisfaction known to mortals; but a spouse who is used as a mere thing in such an intimate relationship is a whore. (386)

I think Ostler is on to something here, but I wonder if, in general, we’re not still too Platonic (in all applicable senses of the word) and/or too German-Romantic, in our discussions of sex.

Does sex – in all its raw emotional, material, and spiritual intimacy – really involve bodies as vanishing points for the reciprocal interpenetration of two free subjects? If I am clearly both a subject (a “Thou”) and an object (an “It”), does sex unfold as the union of two increasingly transparent Thou’s?

I wonder if we’d be better off inverting the frame.

Granted the profound intimacy of sacred sex, what is the character of this intimacy? What is the most obvious thing we can say about sex?

Sex (especially sex as sacrament) is about bodies and aspects of bodies.

Take pornography as a counterpoint. From the perspective of consumption, the problem with pornography is not that it involves too much flesh, too much objectification, too much materiality. The problem with pornography is that it disconnects sex from the difficulty and demands of real bodies and substitutes air-brushed spectacle instead. Pornography is spectral and it is consumed by ghosts.

Being a body, being human is not simple. We are objects, not just subjects. And our bodies, as objects, vastly exceed the grasp of our subjectivity. A defining phenomenological feature of my lived experience of my own flesh is its strangeness, its opacity, its willfulness, its quasi-autonomy.

What’s to be done?

Sex, it seems to me, is that one place where we jointly confront, negotiate, and celebrate precisely this being-body, this being-more-than-a-subject. The intimacy of sex hinges on the intimacy of a shared confession that we both are bodies and that these bodies we share are, even to ourselves, a mystery.

In sex, we are smack at the intersection of divine purposes we don’t quite understand and a blind animal drive 3.5 billion years in the making. In sex, we are two Thou’s joined in the intimacy of a shared It.

Practicing intimacy, do you find the other person’s thoughts and desires and feelings growing increasingly transparent, obvious, accessible? Or do you find instead that the intimacy spreads from a common willingness to trust in both the opaque mystery of the other’s body and your own?

Is sex an emptying of the body’s opacity? Or a joint emptying of selves into the opacity of these bodies?

Sacred sex is sacred because, in all material tenderness, it allows our It-ness to actually take center stage.

Or so it seems to me.

With respect to theology, we might then ask two related questions:

1. If Ostler is right that sacred sex is as close as mortals analogously get to divine union, then is the centrality of our intertwined but opaque bodies an accidental feature of this sexual intimacy, a feature that will eventually be purified and rendered translucent in divine light? Or is this dark matter essential to sex being what it is?

2. Further, on what basis should we decide what’s accidental and what’s essential to this intimacy? Scripture? Metaphysics? Phenomenology? Biology? All of the above? Which in light of which?

With any luck this will help call attention to the international nature of Mormonism today and to the study of Mormonism outside of the U.S. The list includes any work that talks about Mormonism more than just in passing (as far as I can tell without actually having the work in hand) and that is set or discusses areas outside of the U.S. It also includes every work about Mormonism I could find that is not in English.

Particularly interesting is the number of academic works written in German and French — apparently from non-Mormon researchers. It is also fascinating to see self-published books in both German and Spanish.

As I did last year, I’ve translated titles and added notes where possible. I think I’ve also improved the categories a bit, separating out books for the popular market and self-published works. I have not distinguished between ebooks and print books — both are included. Comments, criticisms and additions are welcome.

.

Books

• Alandete, David. Los últimos extremistas mormones. (The Last Mormon Extremists) El País, 2012. [The publisher is the principle Spanish newspaper, so I assume this is either a compilation of news items or heavily influenced by news -- possibly about the FLDS Church.]
• Conrad, Penne D. Out of the Killing Fields–Into the Light: Interviews with Mormon Converts from Cambodia. Bonneville, 2011.
• Fluckiger, Jay D. Surviving the Taliban: The Incredible, True Story of a Convert. Cedar Fort, Inc., 2011.
• Hilton, Lynn M. El Teorema de Kólob, Una visión Mormona del universo estelar de Dios (Spanish Edition). (Spanish: The Kolob Theorem: a Mormon vision of God’s starry universe) Translated by Enrique Pulido. HiltonBooks LLC, 2011.
• Leather, Stephen. Le mormon et la lycéenne. (French: The Mormon and the schoolgirl) Bamboo Sinfonia, 2011. [While I'm not sure, the sense I have is that this book may be risqué.]
• Mclean, Julia Dalton. Der grosse Tag des Herrn. (German: The Great Day of the Lord) Bad Reichenhall: LDS Books, 2011.
• Ojeda-Mari, Victor. La Semaine Sainte. (French: The Holy Week) Syllabaire éditions, 2011.
• Roth, Eva Maria. 365 Vorlesegeschichten aus dem Buch Mormon. (German: 365 read-aloud stories from the Book of Mormon) Bad Reichenhall: LDS Books, 2011.
• Schuster, Eric. Katholische Wurzeln – mormonische Ernte. (German: Catholic Roots — Mormon Harvest) Bad Reichenhall: LDS Books, 2011.
• Stewart, George. Latter-day Pioneers. North Highland Publishing, 2011.
• Walker, Ronaldo J. Mejores Amigos (Spanish Edition). (Spanish: Best Friends) Nauvoo Libros, 2011.

Self-Published Works

• Andreadakis, John. From Pythagoras To Salt Lake City. AuthorHouse, 2011.
• Harmer, S. Dean. My Mission to French Polynesia. S. Dean Harmer, 2011.
• Skibbe, Gerd. Vom Fisch Zum Kreuz: Was Roms Kaiser Konstantin Aus Der Lehre Christi Machte. (German: From fish to cross: What the Roman Emperor Constantine did with the teachings of Christ) Books On Demand, 2011.
• Warr, James. Claves De Mormon. (Spanish: Keys to Mormon) lulu.com, 2011.

Periodical Articles

• Bartholomew, Ronald E. “Nineteenth-Century Missiology of the LDS Bedfordshire Conference.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 206–245.
• Beatriz, Hernández, Graciela. “Conversiones Religiosas e Historia Oral: Pentecostales y Mormones En Contextos Migratorios, En Bahía Blanca y Área De Influencia.” (Spanish: Religious Conversion and Oral History: Pentecostals and Mormons in migration contexts, in Bahia Blanca and surrounding area.) Revista Cultura y Religión 5, no. 1 (2011): 135–155.
• Chan, Michelle. “Beyond Bountiful: Toward an Intersectional and Postcolonial Feminist Intervention in the British Columbia Polygamy Reference.” Appeal: Review of Current Law and Law Reform 16 (2011): 15–30.
• Clark, Anna. “James Hinton and Victorian Individuality: Polygamy and the Sacrifice of the Self.” Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (October 2011): 35–61.
• Clark, David L., and Bart J. Kowallis. “The Fate of the Davao Penal Colony #502 ‘Branch’ of the LDS Church, 1944.” BYU Studies 50, no. 4 (2011): 108–135.
• Cope, Rachel. “‘With God’s Assistance I Will Someday Be an Artist’: John B. Fairbanks’s Account of the Paris Art Mission.” BYU Studies 50, no. 3 (2011): 133–159.
• Davis, Norma S. “Review of: Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945–1990.” BYU Studies 50, no. 3 (2011): 183–190.
• DeVan, Benjamin B. “Religious Tolerance in World Religions.” Journal of Religion in Europe 4, no. 3 (October 1, 2011): 512–515.
• Dursteler, Eric R. “One-Hundred Years of Solitude: Mormonism in Italy, 1867–1964.” International Journal of Mormon Studies 4, no. 1 (2011): 119–148.
• Van Dyke, Blair G. “Review of Mark L. Grover, A Land of Promise and Prophecy: Elder A. Theodore Tuttle in South America, 1960–1965.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 263–.
• Esplin, Scott C. “Closing the Church College of New Zealand: A Case Study in Church Education Policy.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 86–114.
• Featherstone, Guy. “The Millennial Voice in Victoria to 1914.” Journal of Religious History 35, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 233–263.
• Fer, Yannick. “Religion, Pluralism, and Conflicts in the Pacific Islands.” In The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, edited by Andrew R. Murphy, 461–472. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
• Gavin, Sherrie L. M. “An Independent Companion: Ethel Parton and the Australian Relief Society.” Journal of Mormon History 36, no. 1 (2011): 145–178.
• Gessel, Van C. “Coming to Terms: The Challenge of Creating Christian Vocabulary in a Non-Christian Land.” BYU Studies 50, no. 4 (2011): 33–59.
• Hall, Andrew R. “Review of: Reid L. Neilson, Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan, 1901–1924.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 221–226.
• Hardy, Jeffrey S. “Review of: E. N. Mel’nikova, O. G. Moiseenko, and M. I. Odintsov, Eds., Svoboda Sovesti v Rossii: Istoricheskii i Sovremennyi Aspekty, Vol. 6. Moscow and St. Petersburg: Rossiiskoe Ob’edinenie Issledovatelei Religii, 2008. Softcover.” International Journal of Mormon Studies 4, no. 2011 (2011): 181–184.
• Head, Ronan J. “‘An American Enterprise’: An Interview with Massimo Introvigne.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 162–170.
• Hogge, Robert M. “Review of Roger P. Minert, In Harm’s Way: East German Latter-day Saints in World War II.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 250–254.
• Jones, Zachary Ray. “‘War and Confusion in Babylon’: Mormon Reaction to German Unification, 1864–80.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 115–150.
• Keele, Alan. “Review of Raymond Kuehne, Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945–1990.” Journal of Mormon History 38, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 235–239.
• Knowlton, David Clark. “Parley Pratt and the Problem of Separating Latin and Anglo America.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 194–199.
• Minert, Roger P. “Review of: Mormons As Citizens of a Communist State: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany: Raymond Kuehne.” Mormon Historical Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011).
• Rasmussen, Matthew Lyman. “A Home for the Saints: Developments in LDS Worship Accommodation in Lancashire, England.” International Journal of Mormon Studies 4, no. 1 (2011): 66–107.
• Sherlock-Taselaar, Ingrid. “Review of: Raymond Kuehne, Mormonen Und Staatsbürger: Eine Dokumentierte Geschichte Der Kirche Jesu Christi Der Heiligen Der Letzten Tage in Der DDR.” International Journal of Mormon Studies 4, no. 2011 (2011): 169–172.
• Silva, Silva Antônio. “O pecado chamado prazer: análise do paradigma sexual entre os adolescentes membros da Igreja de Jesus Cristo dos Santos dos Últimos Dias a partir da ótica de Michel Foucault.” (Portuguese: The Sin Called Pleasure: An analysis of the sexual paradigm among adolescents in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the perspective of Michel Foucault.) Anais dos Simpósios da ABHR 12, no. 1 (May 25, 2011).
• Tamez, Jared. “Indians, Mestizos, and Parley P. Pratt’s Chilean Mission.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 200–205.
• Tamez, Jared. “Review of Kevin L. Mortensen, Comp. and Ed. Witnessing the Hand of the Lord in the Dominican Republic.” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 234–237.
• Timothy, Dallen J., and Kevin R. Schmidt. “Personal Heritage and Return Visits to American Colonies in Mexico.” Tourism Review International 14, no. 4 (2011): 179–188.
• Vousden, Peter. “‘We Do Not Make Fun of Any Religion in My Newspapers’: The Beaverbrook Press Coverage of Mormon Stories in Britain, 1912–1964.” International Journal of Mormon Studies 4, no. 2011 (2011): 108–118.
• Woods, Fred E. “Making Friends Down Under: The Beginnings of LDS Missionary Work on Thursday Island, Queensland, Australia, 1961.” Mormon Historical Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011).

Academic Books

• Cannon, Hugh J. To The Peripheries of Mormondom: The Apostolic Around-the-World Journey of David O McKay, 1920-1921. Edited by Reid L Neilson. 1st ed. University of Utah Press, 2011.
• Charles, Carter. “Des Mormons Et Des Chiffres: Statistiques Et Conversions Dans l’Église De Jésus-Christ Des Saints Des Derniers Jours”. (French: Mormons and Numbers: Statistics And Conversions In The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints) Chaiers de l’Institut Religioscope, Université Michel de Montaigne, 2011.
• Dennis, Ronald D. Zion’s Trumpet: 1850 Welsh Mormon Periodical. BYU Religious Studies/ Deseret Book Company, 2011.
• Dubois, Guy. La Conquête De L’ouest En Chansons?: Etude Sociohistorique Des Chants De Soldats, De Hors-la-loi, De Chercheurs D’or, De Mineurs, De Mormons Et De Fermiers Américains Du XIXe Siècle. (French: The Conquest of the West in Song?: Socio-historical study of the songs of soldiers, of those outside the law, of gold seekers, miners, Mormons and American farmers of the nineteenth century.) L’Harmattan, 2011.
• Eberle, Edward J. Church and State in Western Society. Ashgate, 2011.
• Gailus, Manfred, and Armin Nolzen. Zerstrittene?»Volksgemeinschaft«: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus. (German: Fractious National Community?: faith, creed and religion in the Third Reich.) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011.
• James, William Closson. God’s Plenty: Religious Diversity in Kingston. Mcgill Queens Univ Pr, 2011.
• Jeier, Thomas. Die ersten Amerikaner: Eine Geschichte der Indianer. (German: The first Americans: A History of the Indians.) Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2011.
• Kuehne, Raymond. Henry Burkhardt and LDS Realpolitik in Communist East Germany. 1st ed. University of Utah Press, 2011.
• Löffler, Beate. Fremd und Eigen: Christlicher Sakralbau in Japan nach 1853. (German: Foreign and Separate: Christian religious construction in Japan since 1853) Frank & Timme, 2011.
• Mardon, Austin. The Mormon Contribution to Alberta Politics. Golden Meteorite Press, 2011.
• Paye-Moissinac, Lucie, Pierre Allorant, Walter Badier, and Collectif. Voyages en Amérique?: La société américaine vue par Marcel Jozon en 1869 et par Alexandre Ribot en 1886-1887. (French: Travels in America?: American society as seen by Marcel Jozon in 1869 and Alexandre Ribot in 1886-1887.) L’Harmattan, 2011.
• Tonk, Moritz. “Die Zähmung des Wilden Westens”: Landerschließung und Raumnutzung in den USA im 19. Jahrhundert. (German: “The Taming of the Wild West”: Land development and land use in the United States in the 19th century.) Grin Verlag, 2011.

Thesis and Dissertations

• Ball, Katie Nichole. “‘When They Called Us Jie Mei (sister)’ An Autoethnographic and Narrative Study of Religious Development in Emerging Adulthood”. M.S., Family, Consumer and Human Development, Utah State University, 2011.
• Beazer, Jaclyn Ann. “Religious Space in Transition: A Comparison of Latter-Day Saint and Nonconformist Worship in Victorian England”. Utah State University, 2011.
• Harthoorn, E.M. “Heiligen Van De Laatste Dagen: Over Groei Van Het Mormonisme”. (Dutch: Latter-day Saints: About the Growth of Mormonism) Bachelor thesis, Universiteit Utrecht, 2011.
• Swanberg, Michael E. “Alberta Federal Politics in an Era of Socioeconomic Realignment 1953–1958”. M.A., University of Calgary (Canada), 2011.

If you know of a work published in 2011 that isn’t listed above, please don’t hesitate to mention it in the comments below.

Overview

The book is dense enough that only a long and thorough review can do it justice. I consider this post to be a discussion of some interesting points raised by the book rather than a full or even a short review. I won’t even attempt a summary of the book (the table of contents and the description of the book from the dust jacket are available at the linked publisher’s page). This paragraph from the Introduction (p. 8) gives something like an overview and also a taste of the author’s approach:

After the Book of Mormon emerged as a distinctive grave artifact in the late 1820s, Joseph Smith continued to explore relics and rituals central to the problem of death. In the late 1830s, after moving to Ohio, Smith acquired and interpreted Egyptian mummies and their funerary papyri. Finally arriving in Illinois, where he founded a biblical-sounding utopia called Nauvoo, Smith elaborated his religious vision, encompassing an afterlife theology that could vanquish death, ensure permanent personal election, and maintain the human family intact forever in a sacerdotal structure. To this end, Smith drew on, adapted, and reformulated rites and doctrines from sources inside and outside normative Protestantism, yielding an intensely biblical system that combined elements of the Radical Reformation, Western esotericism, and Christian perfectionism. By the time of his death, Smith had revealed a polyvalent family system, a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate the afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father. These surprisingly varied themes and innovations of early Mormonism find coherence in Smith’s encounters with, and attempted conquest of, death.

In the book’s favor, it does a better job of relating and synthesizing this material than prior book-length attempts. Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire went too far afield and did not make the case for causal connections between the hermetic material he reviewed and Joseph Smith. Brown stays closer to home with his material. Davies’ The Mormon Culture of Salvation has a thesis that is similar to Brown’s, but employed a variety of models from religious studies and the sociology of religion to guide the analysis. In contrast, Brown bases his discussion on a much larger set of detailed historical facts and employs no social science models (although he does cite the literature from time to time). I found Brown’s fact-based discussion more credible than Davies’ model-driven discussion. To compare favorably with both Brooke and Davies, two well-respected scholars, is certainly an admirable accomplishment.

Issues

At the same time, I have a few issues with the book. First, I’m not convinced foregrounding a “Mormon conquest of death” theme is defensible. First, there is nothing unique about the Mormon view of a “conquest of death.” Every Christian denomination takes the conquest of death as a common point of departure, rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s not like existential dread hangs over most people or other Christians until they convert to a Mormon doctrine of salvation that promises unique access to immortality and the afterlife. Even the Mormon claim of eternal families is hardly unique: while not incorporated in the formal theology of other Christian denominations, most Christians nevertheless assume their families will be around in the next life. No one thinks of heaven as a form of solitary confinement where you would be barred from contact with former family members. “[T]hat same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there” (D&C 130:2).

More generally, there’s an odd connotation to the term “conquest of death.” It brings up images of familiar movie plots where some 19th-century eccentric is hacking his way through the African rain forest in search of the fountain of youth or the golden elixir of life. And there is a secular view, often enough reflected in media stories on religion these days, that all religious beliefs are in some sense strange, not much different from the jungle eccentric on a misguided quest for a technology of eternal life. To confirm that bias journalists are drawn to stories that accentuate strange and bizarre religious beliefs or practices. I don’t know what Brown’s own perspective is (the author reveals very little in the book), but making “the Mormon conquest of death” the central theme of the book perhaps unwittingly plays the same game, suggesting it is also the central theme of Joseph’s life and the central concern of modern Latter-day Saints. As noted in the book, Joseph lost several family members during his life, which understandably intensified his feelings on the subject (see D&C 137, for example). But the implicit suggestion that Latter-day Saints in general have a strange preoccupation with death is an idea that will not survive actual attendance at a Mormon funeral, which is more likely to give the impression that Mormons do not take the idea of death seriously enough.

Brown does attempt to define the term “conquest of death” in broader terms:

When … I refer to death “conquest,” I mean a set of approaches to the meaning of life, a framing of aspirations for the afterlife, and controversies about the security of stability of salvation, as expressed in human struggles with mortality. When and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death are problems that can be distinguished from salvation per se. Framing Mormonism as an attempted conquest of death illuminates its theology and enriches the texture of the lived experience of believers. (p. 5)

I’m not sure that broad definition was really carried forward through the balance of the book. I don’t think a balanced discussion of an LDS view of the meaning of life or an LDS view of the stability of salvation would focus on the themes discussed in the book. My sense is that such a discussion would reflect what we used to call the Plan of Salvation (now known as the Plan of Happiness), essentially “salvation per se.” So my impression was that the book’s discussion of the “Mormon conquest of death” was rather narrower than the definition given by Brown implies.

Conclusion

So what’s the right perspective or balance for a book about Joseph Smith or early Mormonism? The topics and themes treated in Brown’s book are part of the story, of course. A very good discussion can be had over how much weight to accord those themes as opposed to others that generally get more coverage in a biography of Joseph Smith or a history of early Mormonism. I think the book would be stronger if a chapter were devoted to that discussion and an effort was made to place the themes discussed in the book within the fuller context of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormonism.

That is a discussion that could easily apply to present-day Mormonism as well. So a case can be made that the book is more than just a discussion of (what I consider to be) marginal themes and practices in early Mormonism. Consider the rise of “temple Mormonism” in just the last generation: a vastly expanded temple construction program, coupled with a redefinition of normative Mormonism in which holding a temple recommend is now essentially a requirement of being a Mormon in good standing (rather than simply being a baptized, attending, believing member of the Church), even extending to the use of the temple recommend as a requirement for teaching at BYU or for confirming one’s son or daughter a member of the Church.

Both esoteric doctrine and temple Mormonism fall on the retrenchment side of Armand Mauss’s assimilation/retrenchment spectrum, emphasizing Mormon distinctiveness rather than community with other Christians. It may be that the direction of current LDS organizational and doctrinal change implies that the themes discussed by Brown, which I view as being largely marginal to present LDS belief and practice, are in fact becoming the new Mormon mainstream, but I hope not. I won’t give up without a fight.

Let’s start with Elder Christofferson’s recent Conference talk titled “The Doctrine of Christ,” which was both an admission that we have a problem and a bold step toward a solution. Here’s the admission:

We have seen of late a growing public interest in the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is something we welcome because, after all, our fundamental commission is to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ, His doctrine, in all the world (see Matthew 28:19–20; D&C 112:28). But we must admit there has been and still persists some confusion about our doctrine and how it is established.

As the Bott Affair made clear last month, the confusion is not restricted to journalists or outsiders but extends to insiders, Mormons, us. If a BYU religion professor can’t get the doctrine straight, we have a serious institutional problem.

Moving toward a solution, Elder Christofferson first noted that only apostles can announce doctrine: “[E]stablishing the doctrine of Christ or correcting doctrinal deviations is a matter of divine revelation to those the Lord endows with apostolic authority.” The recent LDS press release is a rare (at least up until now) example of a definitive official apostolic doctrinal statement. It said the statements made by Professor Bott “do not represent the teachings and doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Elder Christofferson continued:

At the same time it should be remembered that not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine. It is commonly understood in the Church that a statement made by one leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, not meant to be official or binding for the whole Church.

Of course, as helpful as that statement is in providing a rationale for dismissing opinion (even well-considered opinion) rather than automatically elevating every statement of every leader to doctrinal status, that statement is itself just a well-considered opinion made by a single leader on a single occasion. Let’s hope it gets repeated by other apostolic speakers in coming months and years.

I’m certainly not the only one to sense that the confusing state of Mormon doctrine is suddenly a problem. At Peculiar People, the newest LDS group blog on the block, Matt Bowman discussed “Why Is It So Hard to Figure Out What Mormons Believe?” While noting the advantages of a pragmatic rather than a formal approach to theology, he nevertheless observed its key failing:

But there is no creed, catechism, or systematic theology to hold Mormonism to any fixed point, and therefore, the cluster of ideas that make up Mormon doctrine, all of which at some time or another seemed the unvarnished truth to some group of saints or another, is in a constant state of evolution.

Joanna Brooks weighed in as well:

Mormonism has no professional clergy, no theological-scholarly corps. There is no regularly recited doctrinal creed. For well over a hundred years the tradition has been conveyed by word-of-mouth in thousands of lay-taught Sunday School classes and around kitchen tables and campfires. A correlated, cradle-to-grave curriculum was developed in the 1950s, but beyond central tenets of what Mormons might call “the gospel” — faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism; the inspired origins of the LDS Church and Mormon scripture; the eternal significance of families — Mormonism remains a theological “jungle,” as one eminent LDS scholar put it.

So welcome to the jungle. But we don’t want a doctrinal jungle, we want Paradise City. How are we going to get there?