Category: Cornucopia

General Conference is the central forum for official instruction in Mormon doctrine. Conference has very wide viewership among church members, and its influence is magnified by the widespread reach of Conference talks in the Ensign. The last General Conference in which Kolob was mentioned — the star where God lives — was in 1969. In 1969, President McKay briefly alluded to the idea of Kolob as an actual belief: Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints always have known through revelation of the numberless creations of God. They are taught that somewhere out in that great expanse of space is the great star Kolob that we sing about in the hymn “If You Could Hie to Kolob.” Abraham of old was shown in vision these kingdoms, and he said: “And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it; “And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest” (Abr. 3:2-3). The idea shows up in a few other conference talks from the 1960s. For instance, Church Patriarch Eldred G.…

Read more →

If you are a Bloggernacle regular, probably not you. You most likely have little sympathy for their fluffy books and a whole heap of disdain for their other kitschy products.

Read more →

In her talk “The Evolutionary Roots of Religious Adaptation” for the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Chelsea Strayer hit on one of the fundamental sources of tension between devout and academic perspectives on faith: the distinction between process and purpose. She gave the example of evolution, emphasizing that when she teaches evolution it is fundamentally a discussion of process rather than purpose. Despite this, however, she recounts that: Every time I teach an evolution class… I have one student walk away and say, “Hey, you just told me that God doesn’t exist. You just proved that.” And I’ll have [another] student say, “You just proved that God is the smartest person ever.” I’ll have two students, same lecture, walk away with both of those [impressions]. The whole talk is fascinating—and definitely worth watching in its entirety—but it’s the tension between process and purpose that I want to focus on. Let me give another example of this. Walter van Beek’s excellent piece A temple, a temple, we already have a temple has been persistently on my mind since he posted it a few weeks ago. The meat of the post is this comparison of the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple with the Book of Leviticus: The Second Temple would have the same dimensions. It is this structure that, on close reading, does inform the book of Leviticus. The rules and prescriptions fall into three unequal categories: the chapters 1 – 17 pertain to all…

Read more →

The Temple and Observatory Group, which has sponsored other events in Utah, Virginia and New York, is offering a seminar for those in the midst of a faith transition or crisis in the Minnesota area. The event features Terryl and Fiona Givens and Spencer Fluhman. Come listen to the three speak about negotiating LDS history, faith challenges and transitions on Saturday, September 27th from 10:30am – 3:30pm at 6125 Shingle Creek Pkwy, Brooklyn Center, MN 55430 (library). Lunch will be provided. Please sign up on the Facebook page as seating is limited. Note: there are no tickets for this event and registering on the Facebook page is not required to attend. It just helps the organizers estimate the number of people who will be attending.

Read more →

So a dear friend of mine[1] just got called to a new bishopric and wants to know the known knowns, the known unknowns, and, of course, the unknown unknowns[2].

Read more →

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been setting a timer every time I say my evening prayers. This might sound like an absolutely terrible idea and, in some ways I guess it is. So before I tell you how that has worked out for me, let me explain why I would even consider such an idea in the first place. It starts with the idea of the curse of success. I first encountered this concept in Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. They wrote that when a policy or technology becomes successful, it can be known more for the hardships it illuminates by contrast rather than for the good it accomplishes. When everyone’s situation is universally awful, no one complains. When an imperfect solution makes the situation better for most but not all, it risks being vilified for the resulting disparity. In some sense, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suffers from the curse of success today. The success comes from the way that the Church is able to transmit the basics of its doctrine and moral code to our youth. Relative to other religions in the United States, at least, Mormons are the experts at this. I draw this conclusion primarily from a the well-known study conducted by UNC researchers from 2001-2005 involving over a hundred researchers interviewing thousands of American teenagers. (The results of the study were published in a book: Soul Searching: The…

Read more →

So I wrote another book. At first I thought that I was writing a short article to explain why two different Reformation-era prophecies share the same title, but the project kept expanding. Along the way, I changed the way I think about biblical textual criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis.

Read more →

Yes, we do, a lot of temples, more than ever in history. We are, as the leaders never stop telling us, a temple building people, and if anything distinguishes us from our fellow-Christians it is our temples. For us the temple is a crucial religious and ritual focus, the apex of our notion of holiness; it is also somehow a link with a distant past, with the deep salvation history of mankind, through Israel. Indeed, one of the themes running through the Old Testament is exactly that of the temple. But what is temple, and what continuity is there among the temples? What is the ‘third voice’, the one of the author, on the temple tradition in the religion of Israel and Judah? We focus first on Jerusalem. It all starts, as everything in the bible, with Moses, with the Pentateuch. Exodus gives a wonderfully detailed description of the ark and especially of the tabernacle, richly decorated, with lots of gold and silver, rich tapestry, and intricate construction of the ark and a tent made of dugong or badger skins. The description of the tabernacle takes up almost half of Exodus and does raise a lot of questions. Dugong or badger, the skins of which should cover the temple, the discussions on the meaning of tahash (tabernacle, but that is a Latin term for tent) is still raging, but both animals are equally unbelievable inside the Sinai desert, especially in…

Read more →

A couple of weeks ago I listened to the audiobook of Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction. As that was the first thing I’ve read on the topic (other than a multitude of Wikipedia entries) I by no means consider myself some kind of expert, but I was struck by several parallels and differences between Sikhism and Mormonism. The little I have learned has already helped me to see my own faith in new ways. In terms of similarities, Mormonism and Sikhism are both relatively new religions that arguably constitute a culture or a people (in addition to a religion) and that both have fraught historical relationships with larger faith traditions. Sikhs, for their part, have historically worked hard to stress their distinctiveness from Hinduism. Mormons, in contrast, have recently stressed our desire to be included within Christianity. In both cases, however, the exact nature of the relationship is complex and subject to change and controversy. The contrast that stood out that most to me was the ambiguous evolution of Sikh theology and scripture and institutions juxtaposed with the rigorous organization of the correlated Mormonism that I grew up with. Obviously this is apples-to-oranges, since I was comparing a snapshot of a relatively mature Mormonism with the historical origins of earliest Sikhism. Mormonism didn’t start out correlated and our own history is full of ambiguity as well. But it was illuminating to study the history of another faith’s development precisely because…

Read more →

I’m going to describe the dialectical geography as I see it, in order to try and help readers at T&S do better at constructively engaging the arguments in what I consider to be an issue of absolutely fundamental importance.

Read more →

In centuries gone by the best you could hope for in the case of an aching tooth would be that someone would yank it out, but thanks to modern medicine we can detect cavities and fill them before they start to cause any pain at all. Of course, the drilling of the tooth itself is painful, so you can have your tooth numbed with an injection. Someone jabbing a sharp needle into your gums isn’t a walk in the park either, so you can have some topical gel applied before the shot. Just to recap: you get a numbing gel to take away the pain of the injection which in turn numbs the tooth to avoid the pain of the drill which in turn fixes the tooth before it can start to seriously ache. That’s a triple-layer pain-mitigation strategy. Of course I took the topical gel and the shot. All else being equal, I’m definitely a fan of less pain rather than more pain. But I also wondered if we’ve reached a point in our society where we are so good at avoiding pain and suffering that we’ve come to view them as exotic. As defects than can be eliminated. As aberrant rather than as uncomfortable but necessary aspects of a meaningful existence. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he? (D&C 122:8) Health officials assure Americans that the terrifying Ebola outbreak in West Africa…

Read more →

As a companion piece to Dave’s post on missionaries, let’s talk about the approved missionary library. I have concerns about what missionaries study, know, and teach. The typical missionary develops far more motivation to read and study “the literature of the Church” than before the mission, but is far more restricted, although mission presidents have leeway to relax this. Certainly the primary content of missionary study should be scripture and the doctrine, but I think by narrowing the library too much, we miss real opportunities both for the missionaries themselves and the people they teach.

Read more →

Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary This may be the most painful book I have ever read.  

Read more →

It would seem that when a text is nearly two thousand years old, there might not be a whole lot new to say about it. But this isn’t the case for the Gospel of Mark.

Read more →

Four Services Worth Writing Home About. Mormon Service: An “International Ward” in Western Europe. (No, this picture to the left is not of a Mormon chapel, alas. It’s just an action shot to suggest what being a LJ might involve.) Up on the podium, the bishop is a Wasatch-Front-origined temporary-resident white Anglonavian Mormon, as is one of the councilors, while the other is a recently-immigrated black African Mormon. The main congregational constituents not represented in the bishopric are the old-time local converts, who now occupy a mere quarter of the pews they used to dominate, and whose once unchallenged language is now only sometimes heard and then always translated into English.

Read more →