Author: Jim F.
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12 Answers from Royal Skousen
Professor Royal Skousen has gone far beyond what we asked of him and provided a full and fascinating response to our twelve questions.
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Cheapening Ourselves by Cheapening Our Arguments
I’m wondering why I am being so defensive of Derrida on the thread on my post about his death and on Russell’s—and in the hallway at BYU today when I accosted a poor student who was going on about deconstruction and Derrida in a remarkably uninformed way.
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Sunday School Lesson 40
Lesson 40: 3 Nephi 16, 20-21 Chapter 16 Verses 8-10, especially 10: Who are the Gentiles? Look at each condition for when these things will happen. What does each mean?
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Be Patient!
Fans of Brandie Siegfried, please be patient. She intended to start blogging last Monday or Tuesday, but as sometimes happens even to professors and bloggers, life got in the way. You can expect her any day now.
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Derrida is dead
Perhaps no philosopher of the 20th century caused more of an uproar in the U.S. than Jacques Derrida. Though he was not religious in any standard sense, he understood a great deal about what it means to be religious. Though he was often described in the English-speaking press as arrogant, he was in fact quiet…
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An additional guest
Professor Brandie Siegfried has agreed to take time from her busy writing schedule to guest blog for a couple of weeks. She is a professor in the English Department at BYU, teaching Renaissance literature, early modern women writers, gender studies, and Irish literary history. She did her Ph.D. work at Brandies University and has been…
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Sister Manners
Someone needs to write an etiquette book for members of the Church. I’m not up to writing it, but I’m willing to make some of the first contributions.
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Spirit and Body
I cleaned the church building the other day, with the other High Priests. My job was to vacuum the chapel. As I was doing so, the organist came in to practice. She plays well, and she played hymns that I like, so it was pleasant. But as she began to play “Jesus, Lover of my…
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Sunday School Lesson 39
Lesson 39: 3 Nephi 17-19 Chapter 17 Verses 1-3: Does the Savior think what he has said is easy to understand? Are the things he has taught “plain and simpleâ€?? Why haven’t the Nephites understood him well? In what ways are they weak? What does it mean to ponder something? What does it mean to…
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12 Questions for Royal Skousen
Royal Skousen, Professor of Linguistics at BYU, is important for at least two reasons. First, he has developed a unique theory of language learning and use based on analogy (see his Analogical Modeling of Language, Analogy and Structure, and Analogical Modeling: An exemplar-based approach to language). Skousen’s work is important because it gives us a…
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Comfort Music
I am not a connoisseur of music, I am an omnivore, and I think I recall Nietzsche pointing out that a person who will eat anything is a person who has no taste. That’s me. There are few kinds of music that I don’t enjoy.
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Sunday School Lesson 38
Lesson 38: 3 Nephi 12-15 This will be one of the longer sets of notes. I would apologize for their length, but even at this length I have left a great deal unexplored. Though I will continue to post following lessons, I will spend more than one week on this material in my class. There…
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Sunday School Lesson 37
Lesson 37: 3 Nephi 8-11 Chapter 8 Verses 1-23: Why might there have been so much destruction in this hemisphere at the time of the crucifixion and so little destruction in the other?
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Fishing
It seems to me that there are academic issues that saints sometimes have difficulties with and that they might be helped if they had “answersâ€? to those questions from LDS academics who have thought about the problems. I can imagine a student in university who hears about a particular hot topic in the academy and…
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Difference, Disagreement, and Contention
If I were a self-disciplined person, I would be preparing my lessons right now and preparing the presentation I’m supposed to give to new faculty tomorrow afternoon. But when we were courting, my wife, then a graduate student in educational testing, made me take a personality test. She was shocked at how low I scored…
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Some Random European (mostly French) Thoughts
A week and a few days ago, I returned from a trip to Europe, mostly in France. I was at a conference center in a chateau in Normandy, Cerisy-la-salle. The conference was good; its only drawback, for me, was that it was an interdisciplinary conference. I think my presentation and the discussion afterward went well,…
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Sunday School Lesson 35
Lesson 35: Helaman 13-16 Chapter 13 Verses 1,ff: Does the Lord threaten the Nephites through Samuel, telling them to “repent or elseâ€?? If so, how do we understand such a threat? How does it differ from bullying? If not, how are we to understand this kind of prophecy? Verse 5: What does Samuel mean by…
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Sunday School Lesson 34
Lesson 34: Helaman 6-12 Chapter 6 Verse 3: How does the attitude of the members of the Church compare here with Moroni’s attitude? Verse 9: As soon as we read that the Nephites and Lamanites “became exceedingly richâ€? what do we expect to read about soon? Verse 17: Why do they want gain? What does…
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Sunday School Lesson 33
I’m back from a couple of weeks during which the internet wasn’t accessible–altogether, a very nice experience. This is the lesson that I will be teaching tomorrow, and I will try to get next week’s lesson out early in the week. Lesson 33: Helaman 1-5 Chapter 1 Verses 7-8: How do we understand a righteous…
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Sunday School Lesson 32
Lesson 32: Alma 53-63 Many people find it difficult to read the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon. Though I certainly understand why they have difficulty, for me the most difficult chapters are those on war at the end of Alma. I understand that they show us what happened to the Nephites, an important…
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Nice people
Today I had to repair our sprinkler system–something unneeded by those in large cities living in apartments, or those in places with rainfall, but something absolutely essential living in Utah, especially if you’re leaving for two weeks and would like the tomatoes to be alive when you return.
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Are we less righteous?
We often speak about the unrighteousness of our generation and nation, but what do we mean by that? (See here and here.)
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We are Weird
About a week ago I went to the wedding of one of my nieces. As I sat waiting for the wedding to begin and watching people arrive, I suddenly had a glimpse of how we look to many who either are not attending church with us or are completely outside our community. In short, we…
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Sunday School Lesson 31
Lesson 31: Alma 43-52 The manual gives this overview of the material in the lesson: a. Alma 43–44. Led by Zerahemnah, the Lamanites come to battle against the Nephites, seeking to bring them into bondage. The Nephites, led by Moroni, fight to defend their families and their liberty. The Nephites prevail because they are “inspired…
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Sunday School Lesson 30
Lesson 30: Alma 39-42 Why is the lengthy discussion of resurrection in chapters 40-31 addressed to Corianton? Why does that part of Alma’s sermon come before his discussion of the punishment of sin (chapter 42)?
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Sunday School Lesson 29
Lesson 29: Alma 36-39 Alma 35:15-16 explains why Alma says the things in these chapters to his sons, Helaman, Shiblon, and Corianton: because he grieved for the hardness of the hearts of the people to whom he and others had been sent as missionaries. (See Alma 31:6-7.) How does that explain what he says, especially…
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My Pioneer Ancestors
I joined the Church in February of 1962, as a teenager living in San Antonio, Texas, where my father was stationed at the time. (He was in the Army, studying hospital administration at Fort Sam Houston, in a Baylor extension program.) My parents and my younger brother joined at the same time. My parents were…
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Sunday School Lesson 28
Lesson 28: Alma 32-35 Warning: this set of study questions is long, probably the longest I’ve done so far. If you bother to go through them, I think you’ll see why. If you don’t, it probably doesn’t matter why, but this should give you some idea: In the first edition of the Book of Mormon,…
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Unexamined Life and Faith
Kaimi refers us to a well-written and interesting piece by Chris Walton. In that piece Chris refers to one of his favorite Unitarian sayings, “An unexamined faith is not worth having.” That is an obvious re-writing of Socrates’s claim, “An unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a). Few sayings are as well-known as the…