“I’m mad at Jacob,” I snarl to my husband. “Jacob who?” he asks. “Jacob in the Book of Mormon!” He backs away slowly, as if from a dangerous, wounded animal.
Category: Cornucopia
Exploring Mormon Thought: The Homogeneous?
In chapter 8 of The Attributes of God, Ostler continues grappling with the question of human agency in relation to God’s foreknowledge. The professional literature generated by this kind of theological question is wide and deep and the field is no particular speciality of mine. On these kinds of questions, Ostler is much better read than I am. The basic problem is this: “If there is anything in [an agent’s] circumstances which precludes a person from exercising a power, then the power cannot be exercised under those circumstances” (249). Blake argues that God’s strong foreknowledge is just the kind of causally implicated circumstance that compromises a person’s freedom to exercise their agency. As a result, the power to choose in this instance is no real power and agency is compromised. I recommend a close reading of the chapter’s details. As a non-specialist, though, I’m wondering about the larger context that frames these really difficult questions.
BMGD #13: Jacob 5-7
Your help needed: naming Mormon ice cream
Not too long ago, Ben and Jerry’s opened a new front in the culture wars by temporarily renaming its “Chubby Hubby” flavor as “Hubby Hubby” and highlighting this chilling act on their website. And now they’re at it again. I’m guessing that at some point the Church will respond with its own renamed flavor, which is where your collective wisdom is required. Here is a list of Ben and Jerry’s flavors. The best I could come up with is renaming Triple Caramel Chunk as Triple Temple Dunk. But I’m sure you can do better.
What Happened Last Thursday at Institute: l’Affair Botte Goes Local
(I’m jumping because of the Bott stuff, but will still put up my 2 posts on Genesis 2-4 and Creation/temples post.) Instead of beginning on the Flood on Thursday as planned, I decided to take 5 minutes to talk about the mark of Cain in Genesis 4, and the curse on Canaan in Genesis 9. We never got to the flood, but ended up having a wonderful (I think) 2.5+ hour conversation about the priesthood ban, the eisegesis and various theories it engendered, the role and fuzzy definitions of tradition, policy, and doctrine in the Church. We also covered related issues like the context for Wilford Woodruff’s statement about “leading the Church astray”, the tension inherent in living in a dynamic Church based on revelation that sometimes goes through upheavals (see polygamy, priesthood ban, etc.), and that we need to be careful not to get caught on either extreme. We talked about the nature of the writing of Church manuals and history, Institute and potentially RelEd at BYU as the two places where one can find depth and nuance in semi-official venues, obviously dependent upon the teaching philosophy and knowledge of the instructor and the degree of freedom they’re given. At 10:30 PM, there were still seven students, and three missed calls from my wife. It was a good conversation, fairly spontaneous. Here are the books/articles mentioned (a lot of things came up along the way, and no coherent narrative…
Mormons, Increase, and Gifts
BMGD #12: Jacob 1-4
Exploring Mormon Thought: Agency
I will intentionally ignore the larger context in which chapter 7 of The Attributes of God appears—namely, an attempt to nail down the nature, according to the Mormon conception, of divine omniscience. I’ll focus more narrowly on just what Ostler has to say about agency. I think the larger concerns here are important, but we have some weeks yet in which to take up his conclusions. Late in chapter 7, Ostler begins to speak of emergence. I think this is the right term, but not, I think, in the way Ostler uses it. I want to talk about agency itself—in more classically philosophical terms: subjectivity—as emergent, but he, if I understand him right, wants to talk about choice-events as emergent. What’s the difference? Ostler, following the basic framework of analytic discussions of freedom of the will, provides us with two broad approaches to the will’s freedom—the compatibilist thesis, according to which the idea of the freedom of the will is argued to be compatible with causal determinism, and the incompatibilist thesis, according to which the idea of the freedom of the will is argued to be incompatable with causal determinism. The adherent of the former position has no need to question the conclusions of the determinist, but only to justify a minimalist conception of freedom (to be free is to follow one’s causally determined desires); the adherent of the latter position does have to combat determinism, but does so by…
Institute Report: Genesis Week 5 (corrected)
(We’re a few weeks behind here on the blog. I hope to catch up. Most important for my students: We WILL have Institute this week, contrary to what I said last Thursday.) Tonight we finished off Genesis 1 and introduced the second creation account in Gen 2. Had a few more people, so I started by recapping Walton’s theory of functional creation (references in previous post.) Seven days It’s long been noticed that days 1-3 parallel days 4-6. Walton argues that days 1-3 create three primary and basic functions, while 4-6 create functionaries that either carry out those functions, or carry out their own within the parallel sphere. Day 1 creates the basis of Time, the cycle of night/day. This is simply the function; the functionaries who carry it out are designated on day 4. Day 2 creates the basis of Weather, which mostly means precipitation. That is, Israelite cosmology held as per Genesis that there were waters below which were connected to the sea, and waters above, with the waters above held back by a solid dome, the firmament or raqiya. Rivers, springs, and flooding (the regular inundations of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates) came from the waters below, and the raqiya was the control sluice of the waters above. If too little water was allowed through, drought and destruction. Too much, and you get Noah’s flood (which specifically mentions the cosmic waters above and below and the raqiya).…
Tomorrow’s folklore (Updated)
Recent and highly public events have focused attention on the prevalence of “folklore” — church members, sometimes in positions of authority, “freelancing” beyond church doctrine. Of course, there are a variety of complicated issues in trying to sort out doctrine from folklore, which l’affaire Bott cast into sharp relief. There have been recriminations and hurt feelings, and the community will likely be dealing with the fallout for some time to come. But we do have a few silver linings. For instance, the church newsroom’s prompt and unequivocal condemnation of Bott’s statements likely means that highly-visible BYU professors will think twice before making inflammatory, sweeping, extra-doctrinal claims to the national media. Oh, wait. Maybe not.
BMGD #11: 2 Nephi 31-33
Notes from the ApostaCon
Following “Exploring Mormon Conceptions of the Apostasy,” a conference organized by Miranda Wilcox and held this last Thursday and Friday at BYU, I heard several people say that it was the best conference of any kind they had ever participated in. I don’t think that was merely a polite exaggeration.
The Un-Christian Juror
I finished up my month of jury duty last fall. Yes, you read that right: a month of jury duty. As things settled back to my usual craziness, I decided that I was rather disturbed by my behavior.
Exploring Mormon Thought: The Multitude
Is there a set of all sets? This is one way of asking that most basic of all metaphysical questions: is the world “one” or “many”? For traditional Christian thinking, the difference between the world being one or many was simply the difference between Christianity and paganism. Joseph Smith’s assertion that we are uncreated and coeternal with God hits the metaphysical reset button and forces us to look at this question again.
Mormon Intellectuals Part III: My Postscript
(See here for Jim’s original post, here for part I, and here for part II) In my original response to Jim, I wrote the following: While I’ve tried to be fair and accurate, it may be that I’m misreading [Toscano or Faulconer], that I’m mistaken in my analysis of their position. Even if that turns out to be the case, I believe that explicitly laying out this Toscano-Faulconer spectrum is a very useful tool, one that helps us all to orient ourselves to the various possibilities that exist for intellectuals, and allows me to argue in favor of a third position. In the wake of Jim’s comments it seems clear that I did misunderstand some of what he had to say, and that we’re closer together than I originally thought – if nothing else, I’m happy to help clarify and advertise his position. I still think there’s a difference between what we’re advocating (as do a number of the commenters) – but it’s hard to get at that difference, and I’ll be happy if it turns out I’m wrong. Nevertheless, I’m going to take one more stab at it before ending. It seems to me that the crux of the matter is in how we understand useless activities and agendas. They’re obviously related, but I’ll start with the notion of useless. Jim notes that “a painting by a Renaissance master is good in itself. But it can also be useful for…
BMGD #10 2 Nephi 26-30
Mormon Intellectuals Part II: Jim’s Comments
I had previously intended to post some of Jim’s comments from an email. Instead, I’m re-posting his response to Part I here in order to further highlight what he has to say. I’ll follow this up with one more post tomorrow. Jim’s comments are as follows: I cannot tell you how touched and flattered I am by your piece, both by the kind things you say in the beginning and by the very fact that you’ve thought something I wrote worthy of such a careful, thoughtful response. My response to your essay is that I disagree with almost nothing. I think there is perhaps a minor difference between us, but most of the difference is occasioned by the difference between a column of restricted length that, therefore, requires a rhetorical stance as much as a philosophical one. I deliberately took a rhetorical stance that I knew would be bothersome because I wanted to raise an issue that I had been thinking about a bit in response to some of what had been going on in the bloggernacle and other media. Our difference comes in how you and I understand what I was up to. You say that I undermine my argument by endorsing the Mormon Theology Seminar for offering only gifts without an agenda because the relevant question is not the agenda but whether the gifts are good. I agree with you that, as an intellectual my question should be whether what…
Mormon Intellectuals: A Response to Jim Faulconer
I disagree with some important parts of Jim’s recent piece on intellectuals in the Church (please read what he said first). By the end, I hope it’s clear that it is (in part) for “Faulconerian” reasons that I disagree with him. To begin, I’m going to indulge in a bit of biographical narcissism in order to make a point about the nature of my disagreement. The semester recently began, and as I do at the beginning of nearly every course, I told the students a story about Jim Faulconer, or rather about my undergraduate self in one of Jim’s classes. Philosophers believe deeply in the intrinsic and instrumental good of criticism, argument, candid evaluation – in the overall value of dialectic. As an outside observer recently put it, “philosophers honor each other by disagreeing with each other.” For new philosophy students, however, the transition can be a bit rough; and I was no exception. One of my formative educational experiences involved getting a paper back two weeks into my first course as a philosophy major. Jim had assigned us to respond to an essay by Paul Ricouer. I’d undergone a manic experience – despairingly trying to read what was initially an utterly opaque text, followed by the thrill of coming to grasp some of what it said, followed by the despair of trying to say something intelligent about it, followed by the thrill of thinking (after several revisions), that what I…
Why one sixth of the 1830 Book of Mormon was set from the original manuscript: Conclusion
Previously appearing on Times and Seasons: Part I: A tentative theory – the copyists for the printer’s manuscript didn’t work quickly enough. Part II: Rejecting the theory. * * * In January of 1830, Abner Cole illegally published three excerpts from the Book of Mormon, printed in three issues of The Palmyra Reflector, including a section from Alma 43, published on 22 January 1830.
The Bootless
Most of what is given is never received. Most of what is possible goes unrealized. And many feet never find a shoe. True, life presses on (except when it doesn’t). But when it moves, it moves in fits and false starts and, just like Darwin said, most of its spendthrift variations end up serving no end in particular. Call this surplus the bootless.
Why was one sixth of the 1830 Book of Mormon set from the original manuscript, Part II
Previously appearing on Times and Seasons: Part I: A tentative theory – the copyists for the printer’s manuscript didn’t work quickly enough * * * One important question for this scenario is: Why did the copyists do that part of P that they supposedly fell behind in producing?
Passenger
Visiting hours ended at 8:30. I hugged my son goodbye and headed out of the adolescent unit, pausing at the locked exit for an attendant to buzz me through. Ben had been at the neuropsychiatric institute for nearly a week, following an acute mental health crisis. We visited him every day—either me or my husband or both of us. Tonight I was alone. Which meant that I was quiet as I took the elevator to the main floor and navigated the maze of hallways toward the main entrance—quiet enough to hear the crying woman before I could see her.
Why was one sixth of the 1830 Book of Mormon set from the original manuscript?
Royal Skousen is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project and professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University. Part I: A tentative theory Physical evidence from the Book of Mormon manuscripts shows that the compositor (that is, the typesetter) for the 1830 edition normally used the printer’s manuscript to set the type for the first edition of the Book of Mormon. The printer’s manuscript (P) was the copy of the dictated or original manuscript (O) that the scribes made and took to E. B. Grandin’s print shop in Palmyra, New York. But for one sixth of the text, from Helaman 13:17 to the end of Mormon (that is, through Mormon 9:37), the 1830 compositor actually used O to set the type. The question is: Why was O used and not P for that part of the text?
Exploring Mormon Thought: Analysis and Synthesis
In the fourth chapter of The Attributes of God, Ostler does both a nice bit of analysis and a nice bit of synthesis. Ostler’s Analytic Gesture Through engagements with a handful of potential philosophical pitfalls, Ostler constructs a very nice analytic definition of omnipotence, stated thus on page 116: A is omnipotent at [time] t if A is able unilaterally to bring any logically possible state of affairs SA after t which (i) does not entail that “A does not bring about SA at t,” and (ii) is compossible with all events which preceded t in time in the actual world. Ostler has worked into a single definition here all the caveats that have to be noted in any conception of omnipotence that hopes to avoid certain contradictions or paradoxes. It works, I think, and does an excellent job of skirting a whole series of difficulties. Ostler’s Synthetic Gesture Drawing on the Pratts, a bit of Mormon folk theology, a handful of texts from the Doctrine and Covenants, and a bit of genius, Ostler produces a brilliant theological concept of divine “concurrence,” described in the following terms on page 126: Mormonism maintains that intelligences and natural substances have power too, although in order for them to exercise this power God must cooperate by lending his power to bring about the effect desired by these actualities. When God cooperates with the independent power exercised by intelligences or natural substances, he acts…
BMGD #9: 2 Nephi 11-25
The Lost Books of the Bible (1609 Catholic edition)
In 1609, Johannes Uber published the first part of his Very Useful and Necessary Disputation Concerning the Holy Bible (Von der heiligen Bibel sehr nützliche und nötige Disputation, VD17 1:050537Y) in which he argued for two points. First, that the Bible was no longer whole “because of the many lost holy books that the holy prophets and apostles wrote and referred to in their writings”; and second, that therefore those who leave the Catholic Church and rely only on the Bible cannot find salvation.
Reassessing the theological side of the Compromise
Terryl Givens’ recently wrote about the American compromise with Mormonism, whereby Mormons agreed not to be so radical as to entirely alienate themselves from American society (i.e., ditch polygamy and our lovely Deseret) in exchange for the U.S. ceasing its explicit campaign to eradicate us. He describes the unwritten contours of that compromise as consisting in a willingness to accept and even promote the various cultural achievements of Mormonism (e.g., our choir, football, family focus), while agreeing to shelve any serious engagement with our theology. One can hear the variation on a popular General Conference theme when he writes: “In opting to emphasize Mormon culture over Mormon theology, Mormons have too often left the media and ministers free to select the most esoteric and idiosyncratic for ridicule. . . . But members of a faith community should recognize themselves in any fair depiction.” The upshot is that Mormons themselves need to help define their public image now that Presidential politics have disturbed our great Compromise and open season’s been declared on our theology. According to Givens, here are the theological starting point for any serious engagement: 1. God is a personal entity, having a heart that beats in sympathy with human hearts, feeling our joy and sorrowing over our pain. 2. Men and women existed as spiritual beings in the presence of God before progressing to this mortal life. 3. Adam and Eve were noble progenitors of the human family, and their fall…
Exploring Mormon Thought: Second Principles
In House of Prayer No. 2, Mark Richard relates the hip surgery he had in the sixties as a boy. He didn’t understand much about what was happening. His parents checked him into the hospital and then he was pretty much on his own.
BMGD #8: 2 Nephi 6-10
Brief notes on Laman, Lemuel and Cursing
(Corrected!) I hope it’s not too late to post this, and equally that it will still be useful in this quick and dirty form. Though long, I’ve included the scriptural passages for quick skimming, since I doubt they’re familiar. We’re familiar with blessings in the Church- patriarchal blessings, blessings on the food, blessings of health, etc. But blessings have a counter-part that Israelites were just as familiar with and we have no background for: cursings. I wanted to write a typology of curses for my dissertation, but it turned out my advisor’s advisor (three generations of UChicago!) had already done that for his dissertation. What we’re describing here is a very small portion of curse usage. Since many people find the cursing (or at least their interpretive history within the Church) in the Book of Mormon problematic, I want to provide a tiny bit of background. Curses were an inherent and important part of covenants, most relevantly the law of Moses. Just as a contract stipulates what you get if you follow through (blessing), it often stipulates what will happen if you don’t (cursing). Some of these are explicit, some symbolized and implicit through ritual action. Though the Book of Mormon has some atypical elements, I don’t think Lehi is doing anything unusual. He’s simply reminding his children of the consequences of their choices as covenant Israelites; we’re just not used to that being described as a “curse.” Other common elements,…