For the second time, I read this chapter in an airport and on an airplane returning home. With that as my full preface, let’s jump into this chapter:
The Approaching Zion Project: Zeal Without Knowledge
Month: May 2013
Science as Friend or Foe
On a recent long drive, I listened to all 12 lectures of a Science and Religion audio book by Professor Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins. A topic of personal interest (see my earlier T&S series here, here, here , and here), the science-religion issue should also be more of an interest to LDS scholars and apologists in general, given the role that science, scientism, or a mixture of the two often seems to play in the thinking of young Mormons who choose to exit the Church. My sense is that most people pick up from the media or general education a rather naive view of the relation between religion and science, and that nothing taught in the LDS curriculum does anything to remedy the situation. It is certainly a topic that deserves more attention and better coverage. On this topic, we are failing our youth.
Damnable Defaults
A great deal of the discussion on women in the priesthood that I see happening right now[1] concerns our efforts to control and propagate various narratives. Personally, I find our current default narratives even more upsetting than our current practices.
Literary DCGD #21: Ere long the vail will rend in twain
When we think of the second coming of Christ and the things that will happen in the last days, frequently our focus is on the prophesied destruction and the “signs of the times.” But as the focus of D&C Gospel Doctrine lesson 21 shows, we need not put our focus there, but instead we can focus on what will happen to the righteous and the millennium that will be ushered in by the second coming. That same kind of focus can be seen in the following hymn by W. W. Phelps:
“Opposition in All Things: Perspectives on the Fall”
The Mormon Theology Seminar will host a two-day conference, “Opposition in All Things: Mormon Perspectives on the Fall,” at Utah Valley University on June 7-8, 2013.
Theoscatology
We need bodies to become like God. But bodies are organs of passing.
To LDS Seminary Teachers Everywhere
My husband and I are both graduates of LDS seminary. I, by the skin of my teeth after a lingering bout with mononucleosis and a pile of home study booklets. Sam, after being on seminary council and a master seminary bowler. So far our children have attended 18 total years of seminary instruction in two states, at church buildings and seven different released-time facilities, and with at least 37 different teachers. We have three daughters who are seminary graduates, one daughter who is a current enrollee, and two sons who will be joining the ranks in the next few years. I am a true seminary lover. By and large I have been thrilled with the instruction given. And that is no hyperbole. The teachers are dedicated, knowledgable, interesting, and have an inimitable ability to gain rapport with even the most bullheaded teenagers. (I know. I was one.) Yes, I’ve known non-paid, early morning seminary teachers who managed to go the entire year without any of the kids figuring out which work of scripture was being studied and paid full-time teachers who were more about style than substance, but our personal experience has been exceptionally good. So I’d like to preface…
Review: The Fading Flower & Swallow the Sun
Mahonri Stewart recently released two of his plays–The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun–together in a single volume. I found both of them to be so compelling, that I’m truly sad that no productions have been put on or are scheduled within 1,000 miles of where I live on the East Coast. More than just enjoyable, however, I found that they presented a strong and compellingly Mormon artistic perspective. While there is no doubt that the subject matter of both plays is Mormon, what really struck me was less the viewed and more the viewpoint. The Fading Flower centers around the faith struggles of Joseph Smith’s youngest son David, who was born after his father’s death. As he grows older, he is caught between the rival factions of the RLDS Church (with whom he was raised and with his brother serving as President) and the Brighamites (the objects of his missionary endeavors). So the setting is clearly Mormon, but what is really Mormon is David’s tortured journey to pursue the truth about his father’s practice of polygamy. Anyone can write about the subject of Mormon polygamy (just ask HBO), but looking at the issue through the lens of David becomes…
Revelation
My previous post on the upcoming BYU New Testament Commentary series was so well received I have decided to do some follow-up posts discussing individual books. I’ll start with Revelation, partly because that will be the first volume in the BYU series but also because I happen to have a copy of Elaine Pagels’ Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation sitting on my desk for one more week. While a fairly informed reader of the New Testament, I’m no scholar and navigate Greek only with the help of a good interlinear New Testament and various supplements, so my discussion is mainly drawn from the secondary literature and the English text I read in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New International Version (NIV), and of course the trusty King James Version (KJV). But that’s enough to author helpful blog posts. Enough throat clearing: So who wrote Revelation, what is it talking about, and why is it included in the New Testament rather than just buried at Nag Hammadi along with other early Christian apocalyptic literature?
Literary DCGD #20: From The Arcana of the Infinite
It seems like a few verses in the D&C are all we know about the life after this. Lesson 20 of the Gospel Doctrine manual covers D&C 76, 131, 137, and part of 132, and in these scriptures we discover a structure for the hereafter, a segregation of the children of God into groups based on the lives they live here on earth. But the descriptions in scripture are far from specific—after all, how much information can be provided in a few hundred words? I don’t know if the poem below adds much or not. Written by Orson F. Whitney, named an apostle just two years after this was published, this poem is dense, employing sophisticated language and imagery to portray what is in the scriptures. Does it give additional insight? You tell me.
The Approaching Zion Project: What is Zion? A Distant View
Another confession: I had a really hard time with this chapter. And it’s not just because I read it sitting in an airport waiting for a plane that was delayed for an hour and a half. Rather, it’s because of the way Nibley speaks of the wealthy. Certain of his descriptions feel, to me, so laughably one-dimensional—so moustache-twirling, tying-the-heroine-to-the-tracks—that I find myself fighting both his prose and my instincts to not just dismiss his entire piece out of hand.
Why I’m glad Heavenly Mother is as yet uncorrelated
There is something creative about getting to know God: to recognize the infinite attributes of God and to express that ineffability in testimony and story, art and song. Sometimes, one person’s vision of God becomes codified, set in stone as the truth for all people. It may be a beautiful, profound view of God, one that answers the yearning of the time. But God is greater than even the most perceptive one’s capacity to behold, much less fully communicate. Man’s best description of God is still a description of man, not of God. And so I am glad that we haven’t been told as much about our Heavenly Mother as our Heavenly Father. (Honestly, I expect we know much less about Him than we assume we know, and that assumption, sadly, may hinder some from deeper seeking.) We are not limited in seeking Her, the feminine divine, by constraints set out by the visions of men. She is the dark side of the moon, the substantial half of God as yet hidden from the searchlight of institutional revelation and the strictures of correlated curriculum. Don’t tell me who my Mother in Heaven is. Let me seek Her for myself. And…
Giving lectures in Paris on “The Bible from Yesterday to Today”- Help me narrow my topics.
I’ve been asked to give a series of three 1-hr lectures on the Bible in French, to be held at three different LDS chapels in Paris, beginning in mid-June. (Yes, we’re currently in Paris, where man can live on bread alone. Quite happily, too.) These lectures will be open and advertised to the public, as a kind of open-door/public education thing. They’re still to be finalized and scheduled, but I’m trying to narrow down my topics, which will not be Mormon-centric. Each lecture must be freestanding, because we’re not going to get the exact same group each time, though presumably some will attend all three. I have five general areas that need to be reduced to three, either combining, condensing, or just eliminating. Old Testament Period between the OT and NT, sometimes called the Inter-testamental period, or 2nd temple period (term which also includes the New Testament time under that term) New Testament Transmission/translation process Reading/interpreting the Bible today My general thought is to talk about the contextual world of the Bible and perhaps major events that shaped it, contrasting the OT and NT. I wrote elsewhere that roughly speaking, the New Testament involves less than 100 years of history,…
Rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany
I never re-read books, but I decided to read this one, twenty-two years after I first read it, because “he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” That’s a quote from the first sentence of the book, but it is true, literally true, for me, too. I feel somewhat guilty that this book triggered my conversion, because it is not G-rated; in fact, it is a little crass. It isn’t sweet and it isn’t fluffy and it criticizes religion and miracles and believers just as much as it celebrates them. But I don’t think I read this book by accident. I have a vivid recollection of standing in the aisle of a used book store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with this book in my hands. I think someone knew I needed Owen Meany to save my life. Rereading it was scary; what if it was stupid this time? The thought gave me, as Owen Meany would have said, THE SHIVERS. But I was flattened by how . . . perfect . . . it was. Two decades later, I was stunned to see the ways in which this was exactly the book…
Literary Lorenzo Snow #10: The Temple of God at Nauvoo
We tend to talk about the benefits of the temple more than the obligations. In the temple we may gain knowledge, revelation, be sealed to our families, and give our relatives who have passed on the opportunity to accept necessary earthly ordinances—all important elements described in the Lorenzo Snow manual lesson 10. But these benefits come with some obligations (beyond those required to qualify for a recommend), such as the obligation to attend the temple periodically, support temple work, do genealogical work, and even work in the temple when called. On a practical level, these obligations are quite different from the expectations experienced by the Saints in Nauvoo and understood by them before the Nauvoo Temple was built, as can be seen by the following poem.
Literary DCGD #19: Spirit Memories
How thin is the veil? Might we remember bits of our experience there? Could a melody we heard there be familiar to us here? (assuming we even heard melodies there). The idea of the pre-existence and of the other elements of the plan of salvation, discussed in D&C Gospel Doctrine lesson 19, are a source of endless wonder and speculation. We just don’t know much about what our existence before and after this life was and will be like. But, perhaps nothing says more about our belief in the plan of salvation than our fascination with speculating about what the life before this one was like, and what the life after this one will be like.
Chastity and Virginity
I have been trying to think through Elizabeth Smart’s remarks about chewed up gum and the way that we teach chastity to our youth. I have never heard the chewed up gum analogy, but I remember stories about cupcakes passed around and similar visual aids. I always thought there was something ugly about these lessons. It seems to me that the fundamental problem with all of these analogies is that they equate chastity with virginity. Virginity by definition is something that once lost is never regained. Historically, it has also been associated with a whole bunch of disturbing male attitudes towards women. In some contexts female virginity is literally a piece of property that can be sold to men titillated by the prospect of deflowering a virgin. There has never been a comparable treatment of male virginity. For example, historically a lot of legal systems have allowed parties to a marriage contract to back out of the deal if the bride was not a virgin. I know of no legal system that created a similar escape clause for men. Not surprisingly, feminists have long pointed out that reducing sexual morality to the idea of female virginity has a host of…
How Things That Were Never Going to Change Have Sometimes Changed Anyway
In March at BYU I gave a talk, or more accurately for a guy who can barely use Power-Point, a multi-media extravaganza, involving at least 10 non-fancy slides with absolutely nothing moving around on them. The topic was the title above. For those who want to skip the movie and just read the book, I thought I’d post here a (believe it or not) condensed version of that talk, focusing on the main points, without all the low-tech effects. Of course, the post won’t be nearly as exciting, but some of the clips used at the live talk didn’t make it to the youtube version anyway because of copyright issues (you’ll still see some phenomenal pictures of phenomenal 1970s bellbottoms, however, which certainly I thought would never change; the talk is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-o23SurnGA. I start talking at about 9 minutes.) POINT 1. When you study Really Old history in Really Distant Places, like I do, you have to explain a little more than usual what in the world your study is good for. Contrary to popular opinion among friends and family members, studying Really Old History is not just good for becoming a whiz at Jeopardy or other parlor games that make you the life of any party. It’s…
Stewards of Prudence and Altruism
Prudence and altruism combined allow us to delay personal gratification or even make sacrifices for the benefit of future people who have not yet been born. The hearts of the fathers must turn to their children
The Approaching Zion Project: Our Glory or Our Condemnation
Now that I’ve read my first chapter of Approaching Zion, a couple more caveats before we get started. First, I’m not going to bother summarizing what Nibley said. Instead, I’m going to try to engage it, responding to ideas that engaged me, whether I agree or disagree. Second, I’m not going to try to engage with the full text; in Chapter 1, there were two things that really spoke to me, and one more that I’m going to mention and defer until a later installment. Feel free, in the comments, to engage with what I’ve engaged with, what I’ve said, or something else in the chapter that you feel needs to be responded to. With that, let’s go!
A Canning Statement from the Church
Given the rumors circulating about closing canneries and the reasons for doing so, Times and Seasons asked the Church’s PR department for a statement and received the following: The Church is not closing canneries and is not limiting the variety of goods available to Church members. Over time, we will be reducing the number of facilities where the packaging of dry goods occurs. Instead, Church home storage centers will offer the same or additional commodities in pre-packaged form, at no additional cost.
The Gold Coin; or, how we should teach our youth about their worth
Object Lesson: The Gold Coin Supplies: Either a $1 coin (such as the recently issued gold coin) or a half-dollar coin. A small bag of dirt. A few miscellaneous objects, such as a pen or paper clip. Lesson: The teacher holds up the coin and asks the class, “What is this?” (Wait for the class to answer: It’s a coin.) “What is its value?” (Either a dollar or 50 cents, depending on the coin type.) Teacher drops the coin on the ground. Kicks it. Steps on it. Lifts up the coin again. “How much is it worth now?” It’s still worth a dollar, isn’t it? Teacher takes a pen or paper clip, and scratches the side of the coin. Covers it in dirt. Lifts it up. Asks again, “How much is it worth now?” It’s still worth a dollar. You are children of God with infinite value. You are worth an infinity of these coins. Please don’t forget this. Some other people may forget this at times, and they may even tell you that because of things that have happened to you, or decisions you may have made, that you have somehow become of less value than before. Those people…
Post Number 6,000
I just noticed that this is Times and Season’s 6,000th published post. Congratulate us or excoriate us as you wish.
Book Review: L. Tom Perry: An Uncommon Life
L. Tom Perry: An Uncommon Life: Years of Preparation by Lee Tom Perry.
Literary Lorenzo Snow #9: Memento
The sacred and eternal nature of families is regularly taught and believed among Mormons today. But it wasn’t seen as quite as obvious to Church members in the middle of the 19th century. The teaching that our family relationships extend past this life and are modeled on the family relationship we had before this life developed throughout the life of Joseph Smith, culminating with the King Follett discourse (given just before his death) and with the temple ordinances. The teachings of Lorenzo Snow on this subject (seen in the Lorenzo Snow manual chapter 9) thus represent a very developed understanding of how these relationships fit in the plan of salvation. For many earlier Church members, however, it seems to me that these teachings were mostly comfort on the loss of loved ones, especially children. And it is in comforting those who have lost children that the eternal nature of families can be seen. An example is the poem selected for this lesson.
Literary DCGD #18: The Temple of God
We are a temple-building people. Today we are more removed from the process than ever. Where Mormons once donated money, materials, time and effort to building temples in Kirtland, Nauvoo, St. George, Salt Lake and elsewhere, we participate less and less in the process, first no longer providing materials, then over time less and less labor, and more recently we no longer even have fundraising specifically for building temples or any other building. So we might today be excused from understanding completely how much building temples was part of the life of early members of the Church. Doctrine and Covenants Gospel Doctrine lesson 18 addresses the doctrine behind temple building, and the poem I’ve chosen for this lesson adds a millennial tone to the doctrine.
Can we can?
There’s a flurry of facebook posts flying today, based on discussions at right wing survival websites about an alleged decision by the LDS church to stop canning in the Eastern part of the United States, due to excessive government regulation. Has anyone heard about this? Can we still can?
BYU’s New Testament Commentary
A website for the upcoming BYU New Testament Commentary series has popped up. The short announcement on the main page promises “a multi-volume commentary on the New Testament along with a new rendition of the Greek New Testament texts,” which will “combine the best of ancient linguistic and historical scholarship with Latter-day Saint doctrinal perspectives.” A short post at the Interpreter claims that the first volume, covering Revelation, will be available this summer in e-book format. This promises a dramatic upgrade to the quality of LDS interaction with the New Testament. Here are a few issues (offering both opportunities and challenges) raised by the new series.
An Open Letter to Mormon Thinkers
Last week I published something in a prominent series at a first-rate university press. It is, I think, the most rigorous, speculative, and systematic attempt at a professional take on Mormon philosophy, ever.
Joseph Smith’s Study of the Ancient World – Online!
The 2013 Church History Symposium now has most of the videos from the conference online (you can see the lineup for the conference here). I think the conference, it’s organization and execution, was a significant step forward for church-sponsored scholarship (or more precisely, was a continuation of the significant steps the church has been taking recently) – that is, the event itself is worth celebrating. But there were also some really interesting addresses. And now, it’s all online, gratuitement! Click here.