Author: Nate Oman

The most recent issue of Dialogue reprinted a post from this blog — “An Open Letter to the Dialogue Board” — noting that the online discussion created by the post generated more than 130 comments. I hope that the mention in Dialogue created some interest in the Bloggernacle among its readers. I am also flagging…

People often get upset with members who sue the Church. Why? As you might expect, I think that the answer lies in contract disputes between commodity traders.

The Third Annual LDS Law Students conference is coming up. The organizers have already put together a very slick looking website with lots of information about the conference. The scheduled speakers include Harry Reid (Senate Minority Leader), Thomas B. Griffith (U.S. Court of Appeals Judge), Robert F. Drinan, S.J. (Professor of Law at Georgetown and…

I don’t think that it is an accident that monotheism first come out of the desert. It is, I think, an issue of scale.

I think that I have discovered Hugh Nibley’s secret identity.

During my second year of law school I met Samuel Alito, who President Bush has nominated to the Supreme Court.

You will be happy to hear that the Oman marriage has weathered a massive marital crisis. It was tough for a while, but we are doing well now. As you might expect, the dispute centered on compost.

Imagine that you and a couple of friends started a group blog — called it Heaven’s Banner — in which you all pretended to be fictional people having really bizarre conversations (OK, so perhaps this wouldn’t take too much pretending). You and your friends work to create a semblance of warped verisimilitude, and then watch…

From time to time Mormons face various forms of legal and political harassment. Sometimes this happens in the United States, but as events in Venezuela dramatically illustrate the legal challenges that the Church faces abroad are generally much more extreme than those that it faces in the U.S. One result is that there is a…

Twenty years ago, there was an interesting debate between two political philosophers at Harvard that ultimately does a lot to explain the inevitability of pain for Mormons who embark on intellectual discussions of their religion.

In many ways, the Doctrine & Covenants is my favorite book of scripture, and as it now stands it is the result of a failure.

It seems to have been a bicoastal weekend for real-world discussions of the bloggernacle. John Dehlin gave a great talk on blogs at the Seattle Sunstone Symposium (pod cast here), and I gave a brief presentation to Naomi Frandsen’s “Saturday Night Discussion Group” (a name that carries all sorts of unfortunate disco connotations for me.)…

Ronan has a thoughtful post about his trip to Gettysburg and the meaning of war. For my part, I will always think of Gettysburg as the sacred soil on which I successfully wooed my wife.

One of the more prominent strands of modern political philosophy is what has been called “luck egalitarianism,” which of course raises basic questions for Mormon theology.

Slate has an interesting photo-essay on the architecture of mega-churches. One of the featured buildings is the Conference Center in Salt Lake City (known among Church Historical Department employees as the “meganacle”). I was struck by the following bit of commentary from the essay: The approach of the architects, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca of Portland, Ore.,…

“Intelligence” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words in the scriptures.

This morning I attended the funeral of a young man, much too young to die.

Deer, as far as I am concerned, are the spawn of Satan.

It is time for the long-anticipated post on the law, Mormonism, and seer stones.

What are the root causes of terrorism? Poverty (problem: most terrorists seem to come from middle class or upper middle class Middle Eastern families). U.S. hegemony (at least in part). Embarrassment and rage at the decline of Islamic civilization (almost certainly). Another recent candidate has emerged: Chastity. (more…)

I am currently reading a book suggested to me by President George Q. Cannon.

Despite what you might think, BYU is not the whitest law school in the country — it is not even in the list of ten whitest schools.

Prometheus would have loved Joseph Smith.

Mormonism rather spectacularly refuses to answer one of the big questions that has kept philosophers and theologians busy for the last couple of millennia.

As some readers of this blog may have guessed, comic operetta is a staple in the Oman home,

I like Kaimi, but I am afraid that he is just wrong.

I wish that we didn’t use white bread for the sacrament.

Natural disasters often lead people to think about the problem of evil and theodicy. This is, I think, probably a bad idea.

Grant me a simple premise: How one thinks about the nature of reality has an impact on how one thinks about art.