Category: Cornucopia
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Forgetting Kolob
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…
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The Crucible of Doubt – A Review
Fiona and Terryl Givens’ The Crucible of Doubt is a nearly perfect book. I hope that a million Mormons read it. Crucible manages to do what all great religious writing must: it sacrifices the impulse to prove its religion and, instead, takes up the yoke of living it.
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Five Things I Liked from General Conference
Note that I did a separate post on the General Women’s Meeting here and posted notes from the Saturday afternoon session here. Some things I liked from conference:
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Isaiah 29:21
A friend recently said she needs a “new approach” to studying the Book of Mormon. I’m not sure what her old approach was,
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Who Likes Deseret Book?
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.
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Magic and Mechanisms
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…
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Temple and Observatory Group Event in Minnesota
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,…
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What to Expect When You Are Expecting . . . A Bishopric Call
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].
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My Experiment with Five Minute Prayers
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…
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In Your Heart and Mind
My son came stomping into the house from the garden a month ago, demanding I punish his sister,
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Elder Ballard: “Don’t Talk Too Much”
Today Elder Ballard spoke at the Europe Area Sisters’ Meeting. (Yes, the same meeting with the poster flap.) You can see the video here.
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A self-guided walking tour of Higher Criticism
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.
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A temple, a temple, we already have a temple
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;…
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Truth and Contradiction in Religious Communities
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…
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Book Review: The Crucible of Doubt
Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt, Deseret Book, 145 pages.
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The Problem with Local Change
Imagine that everything in the church is precisely the way that it is now with two exceptions:
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Book Review: The Miracles of Jesus
Eric D. Huntsman, The Miracles of Jesus, Deseret Book, 164 pages.
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Women and the Church – Constructively Engaging the Arguments
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.
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We Are Made to Suffer
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…
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12 Questions for Miranda Wilcox and John Young, Editors of Standing Apart—Part II
Here are the six remaining questions in our series with Miranda Wilcox and John Young, continued from Part I. 7. How much of what you do in this book should we understand as theology, as opposed to, say, history? Miranda: Religious communities perform theological work when they tell historical narratives. Remembering and memorializing their divine…
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The Hypothetical “Missionary Library”
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…
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Book Review: Way Below the Angels
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.
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Book Review: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray
How much did I like this book? So much that I do not regret the night of sleep that I lost to my inability to put it down. (That has literally never happened to me before. I always hate myself in the morning.)
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12 Questions for Miranda Wilcox and John Young, editors of Standing Apart—Part I
Miranda Wilcox (BYU) and John Young (Flagler College) have recently published Standing Apart: Mormon Historical Consciousness and the Concept of Apostasy, a collection of essays examining the Mormon narrative of apostasy and restoration in light of the history of Christianity. It is published by Oxford University Press, in both hardcover and paperback. They have kindly…
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FairConference, Thursday Afternoon Sessions
Bob Rees A review of Earl Wunderli’s Imperfect Book Started with this Card Colour changing trick video (http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/colour-changing-card-trick-outtakes/) to illustrate that too much focus on one thing can cause you miss the many other things that are going on. What aren’t you noticing? Emerson said, “Tell me your sect, and I’ll tell you your…
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FairMormon Conference Thursday Morning Sessions
I’m not quite up to live blogging, so my coverage of FAIR will lag slightly behind the fact. I will be posting summaries of talks posted after completion rather than subjecting you to my sloppy notes in real time. Kerry Muehlstein, Ph. D. Brigham Young University Unnoticed assumptions about The Book of Abraham While the…
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Performing Mark
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.
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Summertime Notes of a Liturgical Junkie
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…