Category: Cornucopia

Participants in Richard Bushman’s and Terryl Givens’ Summer Seminar on the Gold Plates will be presenting papers tomorrow, Thursday, August 18th, at BYU. Here are the details: The Mormon Scholars Foundation Annual Summer Symposium on Mormon Culture The Cultural History of the Gold Plates Thursday, August 18, 2011 B037 Joseph F. Smith Building Brigham Young…

In On the Road with Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary, we get a fascinating peek into Richard Bushman’s psyche during the time immediately after the publication of his monumental work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.

I know a lot of people swear by it, but I’ve never found “belief” to be a reliable way of describing what is (or isn’t) happening when I plant myself in a pew.

It’s ward conference for us today. Ward conference is kind of a let-down for me. It doesn’t offer the short church session that we get from stake conference, and I can’t watch it on my laptop while eating not-Cap’n-Crunch in my pajamas. It’s pretty much just business-as-usual. But it’s not like the two-hour session of…

Times & Seasons is happy to announce that Sam Brunson has agreed to join our happy blogging family as a permanent contributor. For those unfamiliar with Sam, the introductory post on him can be found here and his posts to-date are available here.

There’s a sidebar called “The Poetic Language of the King James Bible” in the August 2011 Ensign.

I just saw Stephen M (Ethesis)’s post on complaints about EFY and I liked his list of reasons people complain (particularly about church stuff). For those of you who aren’t clicking the link to his article, here’s the quick summary of his list: Legitimate — Complaining about a demonstrable problem with a demonstrable solution. Compulsive…

Quoting from Monty Python. Sorry, it’s just not funny when I hear you do it. This applies double to anything about being turned into a newt and getting better. Same goes for Princess Bride. Yes, it’s quite possibly the greatest movie ever made, but I don’t care that you can recite the whole thing word for…

Say that you want to pray. Say that you want to make prayer the center of your life rather than just an aid to it. Say that you want to take up prayer as an end in itself. Say that you understand prayer to be the formal practice of submitting your will to God’s. And…

So I haven’t exactly been a fan of Meridian, but lately they have been running some very innovative stuff from Grant Hardy; see here and here. And I suppose you can discuss his essays in the comments here, if you play nice.

One goal in computer programming is to build “loosely coupled” systems. A loosely coupled system isn’t tied down to a specific platform. It makes it easy to take a program written for Macintosh and turn it into a program that can run on Windows or Linux or whatever other system you want. When a new…

NPR did a piece yesterday evening on a speech school for Brooklyners (Brooklynites? Brookies?) who want to get rid of their accent. These are people who feel that speaking with a Brooklyn accent makes people perceive them poorly, and that it’s holding them back socially or professionally. Predictably, this leads to a kickback from the…

I know I’m totally late to The Book of Mormon: The Musical party. The media has done it to death, the Bloggernacle has discussed it to death, and the Tonys awarded it to death. It’s provide huge amounts of press to the Church and at least one great interview on The Daily Show. I read…

Over at BCC, Kristine opined last week on the subject of Mormon “intellectuals.” After admitting that knowing stuff can, in fact, be helpful, she concluded the following: “But this is the suspicion that was nagging at me during our conversation, and has not left me: intellectual gifts, like most of what we bring to the altar,…

What is the name of the church? (Pick up to three options). Try not to google it first. [poll id=”4″]

The CNN blog just ran a lengthy interview with Tricia Erickson, who makes a variety of arguments that no believing Mormon should ever be elected President. (Link here; note that in her interview she cites language from the endowment ceremony). Erickson’s arguments are predictably bad. She repeats the old evangelical anti-Mormon reasoning that Mormons are…

What exactly is it that you are trying to practice when you practice prayer? In particular, what exactly is it that you are trying to practice when you practice prayer as an end in itself rather than as a means to some other end? I take two things as axiomatic with respect to the practice of prayer.

A strain of popular Mormon thought appears to hold that a significant message derived from the story of King Noah is that taxes in excess of 20% are per se immoral, and drawing whatever inevitable conclusion follows from the current U.S. marginal tax rates. [fn1] It’s a fair application, I guess, of Nephi’s apply-the-scriptures-to-ourselves philosophy.…

Prayer can be approached as a means or as an end. You’re tired of using God as a crutch to get wherever else you want to go and finally decide, throwing it all over, to just make God your explicit destination. Consecration it is. The kingdom of God or nothing.

Sometime while I was in the MTC, I started a list of things that were cool and that I didn’t want my mission to make me forget or turn my back on. I wrote things down on a loose sheet of paper that I kept, folded, in my journal. I’d love to see it now,…

Michelle Stone’s “Celestial Education” philosophy is seriously misguided and theologically dangerous.

You know the feeling: you’re hungry for God. Your soul, restless, can find no rest. Your pillow’s warm on both sides.

A religious life is a life of prayer. Don’t skimp on this or, no matter how white your sepulcher, your insides will always just be full of dry bones.