Author: Jonathan Green
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Shame
Every medium has an inherent vice. While any form of media can be misused, there is a flaw lurking in the fundamental nature of each medium. Television exaggerates fear, as it transmits the worst events or most scandalous entertainment from the outside world into our homes. Movies indulge our self-deluding fantasies of escape or celebrity.…
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Missions, art, and surveillance
One unique aspect of the missionary experience, quite distinct from life before and after, is the feeling that someone is always watching you. It’s probably the one aspect of my mission that I could have done without, although I wouldn’t say that it was entirely unproductive.
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Foundation and Apostasy
What if the historical evidence for the foundation of the early Christian church is indistinguishable from evidence for its apostasy? What if the early church and its scriptures only arose through processes of decay?
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Resurrection B.C.
According to an article in the New York Times today, evidence of Jewish belief in a resurrected Messiah decades before Christ’s birth may have been discovered.
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The Temple in European Mormon Sociality
The temple plays a role in the social life of European Mormons that is significantly different in a couple of ways from the usual American experience.
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In Praise of the Elders Quorum Moving Service
Unless I’m carrying boxes, I’m probably not actually helping anybody.
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Mormonism for me, but not for thee
Comments are now open Is a Mormon universalism possible? Or in other words, is it possible for Mormons to envision their faith as one of many efficacious paths to God? I have my doubts, but maybe there is an argument to be made
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You can’t leave home again
At the end of my junior year of high school, I caught a glimpse of my graduating student body president one last time
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Our patchwork ward family
There are advantages to attending a ward too small for fixed wooden benches in the chapel
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Eurovision’s Mormon Moment
From the international annals of overachieving singing and dancing Mormons The Mormon moment for the Eurovision Song Contest came in 1984
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Heimskringla and historicity
There’s a reasonable chance that all efforts to situate the Book of Mormon over the last 180 years, geographically, culturally, and chronologically, are based on the Nephite version of the Donation of Constantine. But first, let’s talk about Odin.
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Gertrud Specht
Gertrud Specht had been a searcher her whole life before she found what she was looking for
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Prophets and textual criticism
The Book of Mormon poses a thorny problem for assumptions about the history of scriptural texts, especially if it isn’t true
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What’s Wrong with Ancient Research in Mormon Studies
Mormon Studies has become a relic area for outdated ideas about texts and their transmission. That becomes clear in reading a number of contributions to Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (FARMS, 2005)
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History, apostasy, and faith-promoting rumors
Mormon belief in an early Christian apostasy suggests a couple of historiographic projects that are, I think, doomed to failure, but there might be an alternative
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BYU: The Crimson or the Crimson Tide of the West?
Actually, it’s more like the Intermountain Cornhuskers, or the Mormon Maccabees
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Is priesthood authority a historical category?
No, it isn’t. Which means that defining an early Christian apostasy as the loss of priesthood authority doesn’t tell us anything, even in a Mormon framework, about the apostasy as a historical event
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Kosovo
When we arrived at church two weeks ago, everything looked normal. The building was clean and not a chair was out of place.
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Literacy, Literalism, and the Isaiah Chapters of the Book of Mormon
One of the distinctive features of the Book of Mormon is its pervasive anxiety about literacy
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Samson
Regina Spektor’s contribution to the underrepresented lyrical genre of speculative historical romance suggests, from the perspective of Delilah, that the story could have ended differently:
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Did revelation cease?
It seems to me that Mormon discourse has two mutually contradictory ways of talking about revelation during the Middle Ages, and that neither view takes much notice of actual medieval views on the matter.
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Dear Brandon Sanderson
A few months ago, Kaimi asked you a few questions about your experience as a Mormon author. You not only responded, but your answers were interesting and thoughtful. In fact, your answers suggested that you might just be the kind of author whose books I would enjoy. So I bought Mistborn.
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Prayer and parascripture
‘Parascripture’ was the term Hugh Nibley used to refer to popular statements of religious sentiment that weren’t actually found in scripture, and that can sometimes be the vehicle for foreign ideas to find a home in a Mormon setting. An example in recent circulation is, “If you want to talk to God, pray; if you…
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HIHO
That stands for “Historian In, Historian Out”–Times and Seasons bids farewell to one historian, Paul Reeve, and welcomes another, David Grua.
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Orality, Literacy, Apostasy and Restoration
In the historiography of communication, orality refers to reliance on the spoken word as well as to the corresponding institutions and habits of mind, while literacy means not just the ability to read, but also the mental habits and social institutions that attend the use of writing, or more specifically the use of an alphabetic…
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Sorting voices from the dust
When we read the Book of Mormon, whose voice do we think we are hearing? Trying to answer that question, I think, is one of the essential moves in a Mormon mode of interpretation. Consider, for example, 2 Nephi 2:17, where Lehi pauses to speculate on Lucifer’s origins:
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Romantics and their Fragments
Reading the Book of Mormon is a lot like reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
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Notes on Halloween
1. I don’t like Halloween. When we moved to Germany, I was looking forward to spending a couple years without interference from the least export-worthy American holiday celebration I can imagine. 2. Since I was last here, Halloween has been exported to Germany.