A T&S reader has a question about daily family scripture study. How have you made it work in your home? To what extent do the words “daily,” “family,” “scripture,” and “study” apply?
Author: Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green has been described as a scholar of German, master of trivia, and academic vagabond. He is an instructor of German in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of North Dakota. His books include Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450– 1550 (2011), and The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess: Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe (2014).
Only in the Mormon Church
When we first moved to our current ward, for an initial stay of only a year, I was asked to serve as a counselor in the elders quorum presidency before I had attended a single sacrament meeting here. A year ago, we returned to the same ward, and yesterday we discovered that that previous elders quorum president and my wife are eighth cousins. And all this time we had assumed we were the exceptions in a ward and stake where everyone seems to be related to each other.
Cosmos: a personal view
In 1980, when I was nine, for thirteen weeks running, I watched Cosmos on Sunday nights with my father.
We’re number 68!
BYU shot up over 50 places in the university rankings that were just released this week. Not in the US News and World Report rankings, where BYU continues to bounce around the 70s, but in the Washington Monthly rankings of universities’ based on their contributions to society, where BYU went from 124 to 68, right between Loyola Chicago and Brown.
Suggestions for expatriate Mormons
I don’t know of any Americans planning to move into my ward soon. If there were any, I wish they would understand a few things from the outset. (If you’re contemplating a foreign assignment in an industrial nation, some of this might apply to your situation as well.)
Brigham Young and the history of reading in the West
Brigham Young’s condemnation of novel reading during the last two decades of his life is a perfect example of a much-studied moment in the history of reading, the hypothesized “reading revolution” of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the peculiar trajectory of Brigham Young’s attitude, from wary tolerance of novel reading to blanket combination of it,[1] is unusual.
Mormon literature: the horror, the horror?
One of the frequent laments about Mormon literature is that so much of the Mormon experience is tied to spiritual experience, which is very difficult to describe in prose. Mormon authors facing that problem could learn a trick or two from Stephen King.
Before the cradle
There are songs that make me feel that God is all and I am nothing, and that God has given me everything and I deserve none of it, although that is far too precise and theological a description for an experience that is almost entirely pre-rational.
A German mirror on Mormons in American religion and politics
Gerhard Spörl, reporter for Der Spiegel, surely did not have an easy task. After his editors at the finest German-language news weekly on the planet took notice of a German Mormon apostle and a Mormon candidate for the U.S. presidency, they gave Spörl the responsibility for interviewing Dieter Uchtdorf, visiting the church offices in Frankfurt, and trying to explain Mormons and their religion to a million German readers (article in English translation here).
Laie and statistics
If you’re applying to BYU-Hawaii, should Dartmouth be your safety school?
Living in the limelight
Sometime on or before November 4, 2008, the Romney campaign is going to tank. (Dwelling too long on the possibility that he won’t tank is not good for the cardiac health of both his supporters and his opponents, so we’ll ignore that possibility for now.) After the Romney candidacy is no more, how are we Mormons going to make people notice us?
The wisdom of one-room schools
I think Kaimi’s metaphor is apt, maybe in more ways than he intended. Every few weeks, or every few days, there’s another discussion of polygamy, and some country hick who’s new to the big city suggests in breathless wide-eyed wonder that plural marriage was a way to care for widows and other women without families. Thereupon much merriment ensues among those who are wise to the ways of the world. Who could be so naive? But then I read what Richard Bushman told the Pew Forum a few weeks ago:
The reader in Mormon literature
What I dislike most about discussing Mormon literature is the all but inevitable moment when someone disparages the low artistic taste and congenital stinginess of Mormon readers. So let me set out the foundation for any discussion of Mormon literature and its readers: Readers owe authors nothing. Not a single copper-plated cent. Not a second of their time. Nothing.
The recycled image
Does source study make us better readers? I, Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, [attest that] we now have in our city of Ferrara several nuns miraculously redolent of holiness, and above all the worthy sister Lucy of Narnia
The Mormon reader in the national market
Writing for a Mormon audience may be wasting the potential influence of Mormon readers.
Golden plates, prophesying of Christ
Part of medieval Christianity’s reworking of its inheritance from Classical Antiquity included turning the Greek Sibyls from local oracles into foretellers of Christ’s birth. After the christianized Sibyls’ prophecies had spent a thousand years or so on the medieval equivalent of the bestseller list, meddling philologists started asking just how the pre-Christian Sibyls came to know Jerome’s Vulgate so well.
Why I am biased against Mormon students[1][2]
[1] Now updated with footnotes!
The Church of Latter-day Global Nomads
“Global nomads” is apparently how marketing demographers refer to people who make a practice of living outside their native country. I imagine it’s supposed to make the expatriate experience sound adventurous, upscale, and fashion-forward, but mostly the phrase strikes me as a bit silly and pretentious. That being said, it’s remarkable how perfectly suited Mormonism is as a church for global nomads.
Essential texts in Mormon Studies by non-Mormon authors
I haven’t a clue.
The Man Nephi
Is Nephi an eponymous ancestor? Well, clearly, yes.
Kurt Vonnegut
There was a time, during my senior year in high school, when I listened to the Doors and Pink Floyd for the sake of their lyrics, and memorized modern poetry, and read Kurt Vonnegut.
Mitt Romney, commencement speaker
Misinformation about Mormonism is nothing new, so the bloopers in Kenneth Woodward’s editorial about Mitt Romney’s upcoming speech at Regents University in today’s New York Times don’t disturb me much. What annoys me is Woodward’s argument about how Mormons should talk about themselves.
The Revelation of Reymund
At the moment, I’m looking at prognostications and popular prophetic tracts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and last week I came across the following
Your Mormon problem
Do all job seekers, academic or otherwise, share Mitt Romney’s “Mormon problem?” Where do you list your religion on your CV? Nowhere. Everywhere.
To the ABD fathers in Zion
Over the last several years, I’ve gotten to know a good number of Mormon men whose life goal is to land an academic job in order to provide for their family.
Humility in the academic job market (or, why you shouldn’t forget about BYU)
In a job interview, the rhetorical approach you are looking for is “I can solve all your problems for you”: increase enrollments, raise the department’s research profile, advise the student club, pull in outside funding, the whole enchilada. (Can you really do all this? Of course you can! You now have a Ph.D., right?) Now is not the time for false modesty. Humility, however, is an essential part of your job search.
Especially for Mormon graduate students (or, why you should forget about BYU)
One of the most difficult stages of graduate school comes near the end, when the massive effort required to complete a dissertation collides with the existential crisis of finding a job
Fireside notes
What does an apostle, who himself had spent a long time away from his young family for military service, who has himself experienced grief and loss, say to a congregation of American servicemen and -women and their families in a distant country, many of whom have been to Iraq or have lost friends there or will soon be in Iraq for an unknowable duration, and who have traveled in many cases for hours to hear an apostle speak? What Elder Ballard said last night was:
Talk like a Pirate Day
September 19 is Talk like a Pirate Day. But every day is Talk like a Pirate Day for me. Arrrr!
Linguistic answers to theological questions
The southern German and Austrian greeting Grüß Gott! ‘may God greet [you]’ is perceived by many local members and American missionaries as a too-frequent or otherwise inappropriate use of a divine title.