Author: Adam Miller

Call For Applications: 2017 Mormon Theology Seminar

by Adam Miller • November 7, 2016 • 1 Comment

The Fourth Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology “God Himself Shall Come Down: Reading Mosiah 15” College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia June 5–June 17, 2017 Sponsored by the Mormon Theology Seminar in partnership with The Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship In the summer of 2017, the Mormon Theology Seminar, in partnership with the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University, will sponsor a summer seminar for graduate students and faculty devoted to reading Mosiah 15. The seminar will be hosted by the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from June 5 through June 17, 2016. Travel arrangements, housing, and a $1000 stipend will be provided for admitted participants. The seminar will be led by Adam Miller and Joseph Spencer, directors of the Mormon Theology Seminar, with assistance from Brian Hauglid, director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies.

“A Preparatory Redemption,” June 15, Berkeley CA

by Adam Miller • June 8, 2016 • 4 Comments

“A Preparatory Redemption: Reading Alma 13” The Third Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology Conference is free and open to the public Wednesday, June 15, 9am-5pm The Chapel of the Great Commission The Graduate Theological Union 1798 Scenic Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709 Sponsored by the Mormon Theology Seminar in partnership with The Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and the Wheatley Institution Hosted by the Graduate Theological Union Speakers include: Kristeen Black Matthew Bowman Rosemary Demos David Gore Bridget Jeffries Adam Miller Bob Rees Joseph Spencer Sheila Taylor

Nothing New Under the Sun: An Excerpt

by Adam Miller • May 13, 2016 • 3 Comments

An excerpt from the first chapter of my recently released book, Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes: Chapter One Privileged, loved, educated, wealthy, this is what I saw: emptiness, futility, vanity. Everything is ephemeral. Everything crumbles to dust in your hands. Everything passes away. There is no escape. What good does it do to work hard and get ahead? Whole generations are born, suffer, work themselves to exhaustion, and die with nothing to show for it—all while the world spins in place, unmoved by their coming or going. The sun rises, the sun sets, and then it rises again. The winds, indifferent, rush past. Rivers empty endlessly into a sea that will never be full. All of this, relentless, repeats again and again. It uses me up. No matter how many stories I’m told or how much beauty I see, it’s never enough. I’m still left wanting more.

Call for Applications: Summer Seminar in Mormon Theology

by Adam Miller • November 3, 2015 • 1 Comment

The Third Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology “A Preparatory Redemption: Reading Alma 12–13” Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California June 1–June 15, 2016 Sponsored by the Mormon Theology Seminar in partnership with The Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship In the summer of 2016, the Mormon Theology Seminar, in partnership with the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University, will sponsor a seminar for graduate students and faculty devoted to reading Alma 12–13. The seminar will be hosted by Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, from June 1 through June 15, 2016. Travel arrangements, housing, and a $1000 stipend will be provided for admitted participants. The seminar will be led by Adam Miller and Joseph Spencer, directors of the Mormon Theology Seminar, with assistance from Brian Hauglid, director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies.

“Christ & Antichrist” Conference Program, NYC 6/20

by Adam Miller • June 19, 2015 • 1 Comment

“Christ & Antichrist: Reading Jacob 7″ The Second Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology Conference Program

“Christ & Antichrist,” June 20, New York City

by Adam Miller • June 4, 2015 • 2 Comments

“Christ & Antichrist: Reading Jacob 7” The Second Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology Conference is free and open to the public Saturday, June 20, 9am-5pm The Refectory Union Theological Seminary 3041 Broadway New York, NY 10027

Writ & Vision: Roundtable on Grace

by Adam Miller • May 15, 2015 • 2 Comments

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.

Sin: You’re Doing it Wrong

by Adam Miller • April 2, 2015 • 13 Comments

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.

For Zion – Part 10

by Adam Miller • March 24, 2015 • 2 Comments

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.

For Zion – Part 9

by Adam Miller • March 18, 2015 • Comments Off

From the pen of Jim Faulconer: Joseph M. Spencer’s most recent book (unless he has done another in the few weeks since this one was published) is For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope (Kofford Books, 2015; 157 pages, with index). I go back a long way with Joe, back to when he was still a recently-returned Mormon missionary and still an undergraduate at Brigham Young University.

Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan

by Adam Miller • March 6, 2015 • 31 Comments

I’ve published a new little book, Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It’s an experiment both in reading Paul and in self-publishing. My family and I were reading N. T. Wright’s “Kingdom Translation” of Romans and the kids were having a blast. Paul’s a great read in contemporary English. They loved, especially, Paul’s rhetorical questions (“Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Certainly not!”) and I loved, especially, the force of the letter when read out loud.

A Mormon Maximalism

by Adam Miller • March 5, 2015 • 15 Comments

I’ve been practicing a kind of Mormon maximalism for a long time now. This impulse toward maximalism is itself religious in spirit. More, the impulse is aesthetic. It’s driven by a kind of wild hunger for the feel (literally, the aesthesis) of words, facts, theories, things, and people. I’m roaming the earth, eating everything in sight.

A Mormon Minimalism

by Adam Miller • March 4, 2015 • 23 Comments

I’ve been practicing a kind of theological minimalism for a long time now. This impulse toward minimalism is itself religious. And it’s aesthetic. It doesn’t have to do with whether particular things are true or false (though, rest assured, such judgments must also be made), it has to do with the feel (literally, the aesthesis) of Mormonism as it’s lived.

For Zion – Part 6

by Adam Miller • March 3, 2015 • 10 Comments

One more time, from the pen of Ben Peters: One of the most tempting yet misplaced complaints lodged against Joseph Spencer’s For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope might be that, for all its talk about Zion, For Zion does nothing to suggest actionable proposals or bullet points for how to build Zion.

Seafloor Spreading, or Why I’m Mormon

by Adam Miller • March 1, 2015 • 45 Comments

Let’s acknowledge that beginnings are important. This is one reason why we care so much about history. So let’s go back to beginning. Let’s go back to the origin, to the source, to what the Greeks called the arche. But how? Where is the origin?

For Zion – Part 5

by Adam Miller • February 27, 2015 • 2 Comments

From the pen of Ben Peters (see previous post): Chapter five in Joseph Spencer’s For Zion turns to what he calls “the space of hope.” Here his discussion focuses on the space of “what remains to be seen” and to a similar effect as chapter four on the time of hope.

For Zion – Part 4

by Adam Miller • February 25, 2015 • 2 Comments

From the pen of Ben Peters: I’m thrilled and humbled to take part in this roundtable. By way of introduction, I’m Ben Peters, a husband, a father of four, a media historian and information technology theorist (more on my work here), a lifelong member, a long-time T&S reader, and first-time poster. My family has lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma since 2011, following an education trek stretching from Provo and Stanford to New York and Jerusalem. A disciplinary mutt, I have no real business commenting on the work of professional philosophers, especially chapters likely to trip up readers more careful than I am. Those wanting a scholarly review of his argument will have to look elsewhere. With that warning, read on as I think out loud in three installments about the central proposition of the second quarter of For Zion (chapters four through seven): all we have to hope for and consecrate, even that which remains to be seen, is already present. —————————————————— “The Time of Hope” Let us begin with the general problem. Hope, viewed critically, risks utter foolishness. Only those who hope can be disappointed. As Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche have made famous, hope for a brighter future can blind us to the concrete press of the present. Marx and Freud—it is worth noting at the beginning—also inspired projects that have mostly since shed, in G.A. Cohen’s phrase, their “empirical carapace” in favor of moral philosophizing. (Marxism, in my view, is at…

For Zion – Part 2

by Adam Miller • February 13, 2015 • 12 Comments

The first chapter of For Zion lays the groundwork for Spencer’s reading of Paul’s theology of hope. It focuses especially on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Understanding the details of this “theology of hope” is crucial to understanding Spencer’s full account of what’s at stake in the law of consecration.

For Zion – Part 1

by Adam Miller • February 12, 2015 • 15 Comments

Whatever happened to Zion? Whatever happened to the law of consecration? Aren’t these things from a long time ago? Or for some time way in the future? No. They are only ever for now. Saying that we’re not ready for Zion is like telling a guy lost in the desert he’s not ready for water.

Messianicity & Historicity

by Adam Miller • January 26, 2015 • 101 Comments

The Book of Mormon is a messianic text. As messianic, it means to interrupt and overwrite our normal experience of time. When this overwriting occurs at the level of the individual, it’s called repentance. When this overwriting occurs collectively, it’s called gathering. Both kinds of overwriting implicate the other.

2014 Mormon Book of the Year

by Adam Miller • January 7, 2015 • 7 Comments

With all the power vested in me (by myself), I hereby declare Joseph Spencer’s book, For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope, the 2014 Mormon Book of the Year.

Q&A with Myself

by Adam Miller • November 4, 2014 • 42 Comments

Q. Are you an apologist or neo-apologist? A. No, I’m just a philosopher. Others have said I’m an apologist, but I’ve never been interested in apologetics. Mormonism can stand on its own two feet and it doesn’t need me to defend it.

Mormon Weakness

by Adam Miller • October 30, 2014 • 20 Comments

My position is a weak one. But the question is: why?

Letter to a CES Student

by Adam Miller • October 28, 2014 • 106 Comments

It’s important to keep our tough questions about Mormonism in perspective. And, especially, we need to keep the genuinely urgent questions front and center. The big problems are straightforward. We’re dying here. You and I. We’re getting sick, we’re getting old, and we’re dying. Our lives are small and our time is short. Our days are filled with suffering of all kinds: distress, worry, boredom, frustration, and loss.

Mormonism Isn’t About Mormonism

by Adam Miller • October 22, 2014 • 6 Comments

It’s a mistake to think that Mormonism is about Mormonism.

The Body of Christ

by Adam Miller • October 16, 2014 • 39 Comments

“Is the church true?” This question is, I think, poorly posed. It seems ill-suited to the kind of existential burn that might compel me to ask it. It seems like a bad fit for what I’m after in a white-knuckled prayer.

The Crucible of Doubt – A Review

by Adam Miller • October 7, 2014 • 6 Comments

Fiona and Terryl Givens’ The Crucible of Doubt is a nearly perfect book. I hope that a million Mormons read it. Crucible manages to do what all great religious writing must: it sacrifices the impulse to prove its religion and, instead, takes up the yoke of living it.

James Faulconer – Making Things Harder

by Adam Miller • July 15, 2014 • 11 Comments

It seems to me that the scriptures offer two types of revelations: (1) they reveal things you didn’t already know, and (2) they reveal that you didn’t know many of the things you thought you knew. Both kinds of revelation are pivotal. And each tends to depend on the other. James Faulconer’s new series of books — The Book of Mormon Made Harder, The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder, The Old Testament Made Harder, and The New Testament Made Harder (forthcoming) — can help on both of these fronts. Though, to be fair, they’re especially good at the latter.

Upcoming Book Events – July 2

by Adam Miller • June 30, 2014 • 2 Comments

If you’re around and interested, Zion’s Books (274 W. Center Street, Provo) will be hosting a roundtable discussion with myself, David Bokovoy, and Joseph Spencer at 6pm on Wednesday, July 2. Janiece Johnson will moderate the discussion. Our topic: “Is Scripture Relevant?”

The Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies

by Adam Miller • June 26, 2014 • 8 Comments

What I tend to lack in quality, I hope to make up for with quantity. And what I lack in training and credentials, I hope to gather and borrow. In many ways, these maxims have guided the time I’ve invested in a project called the Mormon Theology Seminar.

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