So…stay-at-home moms. Utah’s got lots of them. And I bet you’re a market demographic excitedly waiting to hear what I (an admittedly non-stay-at-home dad) am about to propose to bring joy, peace, time, and every other wonderful thing to your day. Well, wait no more, the first of the Great Mormon Business Ideas is here for you today! So far as I can tell, the three banes of the SAHM are: (1) laundry, (2) cleaning, and (3) taking care of kids. But none of these are really so bad on its own; it’s the fact that all three simultaneously demand attention that makes them a drag. So what I suggest is…<drum roll>…the Family Home Drudgery Sharing Program! Okay, so naming things isn’t one of my strong points. But wait! It’s still a great idea. Here’s how it works: four moms organize in a group. One is in charge of laundry, one is in charge of cleaning, and two are in charge of kids. The group picks a two- or three-hour block, say, 9:00 to 12:00. The two Kids moms split the kids between them during that time while the Laundry and Cleaning moms rotate from house to house taking care of…cleaning and laundry. So where’s the business idea part of this? Just helping people organize. Set up a website that helps moms find a group. I know I’m stereotyping the SAHM role (really, Dane? Laundry, kids, and cleaning? Is this…
Category: Cornucopia
Resigning
I started this semester as a seminary teacher. Two months in, I realized that it wasn’t going to work. I was tired and miserable, useless to my family, and unproductive at work. So, for the first time in my life, I asked to be released from a calling. No, that’s not quite accurate. I didn’t really ask; I informed them that I could manage for about two more weeks and then I’d be done. Now it’s been a week since I stopped teaching, and I have no doubt it was the right choice. The entire experience of teaching seminary was humbling. It’s a calling I had wanted — in fact, when we moved into this ward, the bishopric asked me what calling I’d like to serve in, and I told them that it’s always been my dream to teach seminary. (Contrary to popular belief, I’ve found that telling your leaders what calling you want to serve in is usually a good way to get that calling.) A long time ago my mom served as Relief Society president in her ward. After three or four years of service, she told me that she was going to ask to be released. My sister was a teenager, and my mom wanted to be able to be present in her life. At the time, I was a recently returned missionary who believed that every church calling represented the will of God in the most…
Sunday School Lesson 44: Ezekiel 43-44, 47
Ezekiel’s book goes back and forth between telling of the literal return from Babylon to Jerusalem in ways that we can also read to refer to the last days to speaking directly of the last days. (But when he thinks of the last days, is he thinking of the same event or events that we are thinking of?) Beginning in chapter 40, he has a vision of the temple in Jerusalem and of the order of temple worship there. What kind of vision do you think this is? In Ezekiel 37:26-28, the Lord promised the temple as part of the covenant of peace that he will make with Israel. You may wish to review those verses to prepare for this lesson. What is the covenant of peace and why does the Lord call it specifically a covenant of peace? What kind of peace? Peace with whom? For whom? How is the temple relevant to that covenant? What do the end of verse 26 and the end of verse 28 suggest about the purpose of the temple? The temple worship that Ezekiel describes in these chapters speaks of different sacrifices and different numbers of sacrifices than are mentioned in the Mosaic law. (Because of this, at one time the Jews considered excluding the book of Ezekiel from the Bible.) What do you think this shows? Chapter 43 2-4: In Ezekiel 10:19, the Spirit of the Lord abandoned the temple by way…
New Handbook Online
Well, this will keep bloggers busy for a good long time.
Church Statement on Immigration
This is interesting stuff.
Performance and Worship
I once almost joined the ward choir. What’s surprising about this is that I don’t actually sing.
Standing Firmly on Dubious Truths
I recently watched The Crucible, a movie about the Salem witch trials. The core issue of the story is, how do you track down the criminal in an untraceable crime? The people of Salem believed that witchcraft could be performed by anyone, anywhere, with no outwardly visible evidence. Convinced of the reality of witchcraft, and unwilling to accept that nothing could be done about it, the Salemites’ solution to the issue was to allow “spectral evidence” — testimony based on dreams. A person who had dreams of his or her neighbor as a witch could prosecute the neighbor solely on the evidence of the dream. Of course spectral evidence requires two great leaps of faith: first, that dreams are reliable indicators of witchcraft, and second, that the people who claimed to have these dreams were being honest. The people of Salem recognized these risks, but ultimately had to ignore them. Regardless of whether or not spectral evidence was true, they needed it to be true. Otherwise their society would be defenseless prey to the perceived threat of witchcraft. What are some similar “truths” we use today? Principles that, while perhaps dubious, we need to have be true in order to keep our society functioning? One example I can think of is the concept of “jail fixes criminals”. In my youth, I was taught that crimes are caused by criminals, and that criminals need to be incarcerated in order to learn…
Mormon Identity: Men and Women in the Church
Go here and either listen to or read (I love transcripts! Thank you!) this episode and then return and report.
It’s That Time Again
The time when it feels like I spend most of Gospel Doctrine translating the scriptures into modern English instead of actually teaching them.
MR: “Pan’s Labyrinth and the Sanctity of Disobedience”
A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with Davey Morrison Dillard’s review of Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Guillermo del Toro. The article is available at: Davey Morrison Dillard, “Pan’s Labyrinth and the Sanctity of Disobedience,” The Mormon Review, vol.2 no. 4 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, please consider submitting an article to MR.
Once upon a time on earth: the Church in a changing world
In debates over controversial religious issues, one often encounters a certain kind of argument from history, a sort of “once upon a time” argument. Once upon a time, it’s argued, the Church considered a given practice or belief, from witchcraft to usury to the heliocentric cosmos, to be immoral, unbiblical or otherwise forbidden. The particular practice or belief in question varies, but the structure of the argument and its implication are nearly always the same: the Church once considered such-and-such to be evil, but now it doesn’t; thus by means of a progressive trope of enlightenment, the argument proceeds, the Church should also de-stigmatize and embrace the controversial topic at hand. (Often, it should be noted, these arguments are made with a great deal of care and nuance and insight.) In one sense, I’m sympathetic to this argument. I share the view that knowledge of and from God is a profoundly historical and historicized knowledge—and it that sense, it is a profoundly christological knowledge as well, as Christ is God embedded in human history. And I agree with the suggestion that any human understanding of the cosmic order, including our own, is biased and provisional. Doctrines, even doctrines that seem to be central, can change, have changed, will change. But the argument from history can’t do much more conceptual work than that. And it raises its own questions about the relationship of the Church (speaking broadly, as Christianity, or narrowly,…
Created Truth vs. Discovered Truth
Can truth be created? In the church, we tend to privilege truth that is discovered, and we dismiss creative doctrine-making attempts as the “philosophies of men”. Our common discourse places the identification of truth as solely within the purview of God’s authority, to be dispensed only through His designated prophet. In this paradigm, discovered truth is the only solid truth, and the only reliable mechanism for discovering truth is authorized revelation through priesthood channels. This worldview that privileges discovered truth is what anti-Mormons attack when they point out how Joseph Smith’s environment influenced his revelations, translations, and doctrinal innovations. Masonry, Ethan Smith, and kabbalah are threats to the “discovered truth is the only truth that matters” paradigm. The same is true of the observations that Joseph’s later doctrinal innovations came more often in observations and treatises than through explicit revelations. The attackers suppose that if they can demonstrate that Joseph’s work was influenced by his environment then he was not a true prophet, since a true prophet would obviously reveal supernal truths, unbounded by time and culture (which is how Amos revealed antibiotics and vaccinations and how Isaiah was inspired to draw up plans for the world’s first internal combustion engine). Obviously, my bias is away from objective, discovered truth and toward intentional, created truth. James Olson’s recent post on Heavenly Mother received a lot of criticism for promoting or exploring a doctrine that is poorly grounded, authoritatively speaking. That…
My Testimony
I thought I would ape this post.
Goodbye Satan, Hello World
I don’t have any statistics for you, just a hunch that we now usually say “the world” where twenty or more years ago we would have said “Satan” or “the devil.”
An Open Letter to the Deseret News
Your latest editorial shows a disturbing lack of integrity.
I thought he asked a really good question, actually.
Most of the commentary that I have read on Elder Packer’s talk (and I have not read widely) treats the decamped rhetorical question as an emotional and political flashpoint. But I think it’s more productively understood as a confounding question of theology, even theodicy. The removal of those nine words from the published version does nothing to resolve the underlying doctrinal problem. First let me say that I understood Elder Packer’s talk to take up implicitly but very clearly the question of the origins of homosexual desire. Others interpret it differently, but that was how I heard it at delivery, and that is still how I understand the published version. Elder Packer suggests that the provenance of homosexuality matters, very much, and that sexual identity matters, very much, in the Mormon understanding of human nature and destiny. In this sense, Elder Packer’s real challenge is not directed at gay men and women, or even at gay rights activists, but at the proponents of the newer, apparently softer compromise position on gay issues that we have seen emerging, slowly, in official church discourse. I’m referring here to statements like Elder Oaks’s and Elder Wickman’s interview with Public Affairs, in which there is an acceptance of the possibility that some gay men and women have an inborn orientation toward the same sex, but an assertion that the origin of that orientation is irrelevant to the moral question. There is also an assurance…
Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?
It’s a vexing question, asked frequently and nearly always plaintively. President Boyd K. Packer asked it rhetorically this week, supporting and strongly affirming the church’s stance on sexuality and marriage. He stated: We teach the standard of moral conduct that will protect us from Satan’s many substitutes and counterfeits for marriage. We must understand that any persuasion to enter into any relationship that is not in harmony with the principles of the gospel must be wrong. From The Book of Mormon we learn that wickedness never was happiness. Some suppose that they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! And then the question: Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our father.1 But what if we all stepped back for a bit and genuinely asked that question? What if, instead of using it as a rhetorical device to support our position (and make no mistake, we all do it, no matter which side of the gay marriage debate we stand), we sincerely pondered and sought guidance? Perhaps we should consider the most vexing questions to be gifts. Perhaps they are opportunities for us to come together and really wrestle, to deepen our grasps on what we hold dear and not retreat into comfortable, shallow rhetorical positions. Consider that this question can be just as easily asked about us. Why, in His creation, is sexuality manifested…
A Call For Papers: “Mormonism in Cultural Context”
The friends and former students of Professor Richard Lyman Bushman invite submissions for a conference, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, to be held June 18, 2011, at the Springville Art Museum in Springville, Utah. The summer seminars led by Professor Bushman beginning in 1997 pursued the theme of “Joseph Smith and His Times.” Participants were asked to connect the Mormon prophet to the religions, philosophies, and cultural formations of his period. More recently the seminars have posed the same question for Mormonism as a whole. How is Mormon thought to be situated in its broad cultural environment? For the conference, participants are invited to make comparisons to large cultural systems such as democracy, capitalism, evangelism, or science, or to specific thinkers and movements. The aim is to highlight aspects of Mormon thought or praxis that emerge more sharply when juxtaposed against other cultural formations or intellectual perspectives. Brief analytical reflections of about twenty minutes duration will be most suitable for the conference format. Friends and students of Professor Bushman are invited to submit. Send a short (1-2 pp) abstract of the proposed paper, along with a short (1 p) C.V., to Spencer Fluhman at [email protected] by November 1, 2010.
Halloween plays a trick on Sabbath observance
In October a young kid’s fancy swiftly turns to thoughts of treats. With four young kids in our home, you can guess what’s on our minds lately. At our house we celebrate a thoroughly domesticated Halloween, with no concerns about satanism or sugar, just plenty of candy corn and friendly ghosts and homely, homemade costumes. And trick-or-treating. But this year the calendar plays a trick on us: Halloween falls on a Sunday. We observe the Sabbath in a fairly rigorous but, I hope, joyful and worshipful way: we commune at Church, and we rest, read, play, walk, bike, share food and music, and make occasional family expeditions during the rest of the day. We don’t shop, swim, sport, party, or work (beyond the necessities) on Sundays. This is a fairly arbitrary regimen, and other Christians surely draw their lines in different places, but that’s how the Sabbath visits our home. We want Sunday to be a day of joy for our children, but we also want it to arrive with a reverent presence. So how does trick-or-treating fit in? On the one hand, it’s a lot like a party with costumes and candy and lots of raucous, secular fun. Some families in our ward have decided that they won’t trick-or-treat on the 31st, and are planning a substitute costume-and-candy activity on Saturday night. That’s a sabbatarian position I can respect. But I think there’s a communitarian argument to be made…
Kids, Conference
I used to worry that my kids weren’t listening to a word of General Conference. Now I worry that my kids are listening to every single word of General Conference.
Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise
I got that familiar little thrill we all feel when one of our favorite hymns is sung in General Conference, as our first session this morning opened with “Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise.” (I was especially happy to have caught it since we experienced significant technical difficulties getting the conference to stream, causing us to miss both the intro and Pres. Monson’s subsequent talk – in eight years of internet streaming conference, I’ve never not had technical troubles, except one time, in the middle of the night, in a smoke filled internet cafe in Alexandria, Egypt). This is one of the great hymns of the restoration, written by Edward Partridge and included in Emma’s hymnal. Sadly, as with many of our hymns, we only get a few (slightly sanitized) verses of this hymn today. I thought I’d put it up with all of it’s millenarial gusto for all to enjoy. Here’s how it read in our first hymnal: 1. Let Zion in her beauty rise; Her light begins to shine, Ere long her King will rend the skies, Majestic and divine. The gospel’s spreading through the land, A people to prepare, To meet the Lord and Enoch’s band, Triumphant in the air. 2. Ye heralds sound the gospel trump, To earth’s remotest bound; Go spread the news from pole to pole, In all the nations round, That Jesus in the clouds above, With hosts of angels too, Will soon…
MR: “Recovering truth: A review of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method”
A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with James E. Faulconer’s review of Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The article is available at: James E. Faulconer, “Recovering truth: A review of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method,” The Mormon Review, vol.2 no. 3. [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (”Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, please consider submitting an article to MR.
Thoughts on the Deseret News, Immigration, and a Mormon Voice
Consider this editorial in the Deseret News. (I mean it. Follow the link, read the article, and come back.) Intellectually there is quite a bit going on in these paragraphs. First, it is addressing the immigration debate arguing in effect that the rule of law is undermined by both widespread flouting of the laws and attempts to relentlessly enforce laws that are unfair. Both points are well taken in my opinion and in my mind they point toward a policy of better enforcement of considerably more liberal immigration laws, something I would certainly support. The interesting stuff, however, comes in the way that the editorial uses nineteenth-century Mormon experience. All the talk of pioneers, of course, is just a polite way of saying Mormons in public, and the point that it makes is correct: The Mormon pioneers in Utah were squatters. There is a certain amount of tetchiness on this point in the comments at the DN site, but there isn’t any serious debate about this. Granted, after the ceding of northern Mexico to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American war, Mormon immigration to Utah didn’t necessarily involve illegally crossing an international boarder (although there was some of that later in the 19th century), but the settlements up and down the Mormon corridor were settled by people who did not possess legal title to the land that they occupied. Indeed, the editorial understates this, implying that after 1869…
A Loving critique of Elder Oaks
Elder Dallin H. Oaks spoke recently at Utah’s Constitution Day celebration. His talk, titled “Fundamentals of Our Constitutions,” discussed the role of the constitution, as well as a variety of other topics relating to law, religion, and the public sphere. The talk is well-articulated, as Elder Oaks’ talks tend to be, and sets out some specific ideas about politics which bear further discussion. For the moment, I wanted to focus on one particular portion of the talk. Elder Oaks writes that: Another great fundamental of the United States Constitution is its federal system, which divides government powers between the nation and the various states. This principle of federalism is at the heart of our Constitution. Unlike the next two fundamentals I will discuss, which were adaptations of earlier developments in English law, this division of sovereignty between two government levels was unprecedented in theory or practice. In a day when it is fashionable to assume that the national government has the power and means to right every perceived injustice, we should remember that the United States Constitution limits the national government to the exercise of powers expressly granted to it. The Tenth Amendment provides: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” This principle of limited national powers, with all residuary powers reserved to the people or to the state…
How Much Does a Mormon Wedding Cost?
For a decade we lived in Boca Raton, Florida — a city with a synagogue on every corner where you were much more likely to be invited to a bris or bar/bat mitzvah than any other religious ceremony. Boca had a single ward that varied between fairly thriving (when IBM had a campus there) to barely surviving (when they moved out) and spots in between. But few in the area seemed well-versed in Mormon culture or doctrine. One day I hosted a meeting for the room mothers for oldest daughter’s kindergarten class. When the women walked into the living room, one saw a picture of a temple on the wall. “What is that?” “That’s the Salt Lake Temple. It’s where Sam and I got married.” That’s when the fussing started. They were all amazed and impressed at the grandeur of it all. It took me a minute to realize that it was the imagined cost of renting such a “castle” that had them all fawning over me. Darn. “Oh, actually, it didn’t cost anything to rent. It was free.” Sam’s response, “Yea. It only costs 10% of our income…for life.” Now, 18 years later, my daughter is engaged to be married. She is amazing. Her fiancé is a wonderful guy. They have chosen the Salt Lake Temple as the venue. And they have kindly given us until April to plan the blessed event. We couldn’t be happier. Except that we…
The First Freak-Out Question
My five-year-old daughter Alanna started kindergarten a few weeks ago. She’s loving it, and I love getting to talk with her about her day when I get home from work. She shares experiences, sings songs that she learned, shows me her artwork, and tells me about her friends. And she’s started asking questions. That’s great for me, because I can usually answer a five year old’s questions. So it was a big surprise to me last night when, while I was lying in bed getting ready to fall asleep, my wife mentioned, “Alanna asked me today, ‘Why don’t girls get the priesthood?’” Gender issues in the church are a tender spot for me. I strongly believe that the church’s current restrictions on women holding the priesthood or on gay marriage are analogous to the early church’s restrictions on blacks holding the priesthood or on interracial marriage — that both are cultural artifacts representing the prejudices of well-meaning individuals. There is no doubt in my mind that God is neither racist nor sexist. What surprised me most is that, at five years old, my daughter has already keyed into this role distinction. It’s not a point that I’ve ever raised in my home. I want my daughters to feel as entitled, capable, and privileged as the boys for as long as they can. It’s not an issue I expect to be leaving the church over — I appreciate the many wonderful…
Measuring Testimony
Perhaps you’re familiar with the Wong-Baker pain chart, used by nurses for assessing pain. It looks like this:
Feminism and Religion
– – – I saw this photo on Reuters. What struck me most was the head scarf she is wearing. Here is a woman who, by joining the fight against the Taliban, is not rejecting her heritage. She is actively pursuing a new world, but not at the expense of her faith. The war in Afghanistan is often depicted as a war between the “backwards religious” and the “enlightened secular”, as though religious devotion cannot coexist with modern liberal democracy. This woman, by wearing the scarf that symbolizes her faith, defies that too-convenient dichotomy. She demonstrates that the definition of a religion is determined by the voices (and actions) of its members. She is reclaiming her heritage. She is choosing what it means to be Afghan, what it means to be Muslim; rather than being defined by the expectations of her people, she is defining the expectations the world will have of her people. And that’s awesome.
MR: “Meanings of Mormon Devotion: Robert Orsi and the Possibilities of Studying Mormon Lived Religion”
A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with Christopher C. Jones’s review of The Madonna of 115th Street by Robert Orsi. The article is available at: Christopher C. Jones, “Meanings of Mormon Devotion: Robert Orsi and the Possibilities of Studying Mormon Lived Religion ,” The Mormon Review, vol.2 no. 2 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, please consider submitting an article to MR.
The Angel and the Internet
A few years ago, the confluence of the Mitt Romney campaign and Proposition 8 (and to some extent Harry Reid) focused sustained national attention on the church and its members. The church’s profile has only continued to grow since then, raising a variety of questions about assimilation, retrenchment, and the future of the flock. Mormonism has long inhabited a liminal state between cultural insider and outsider. Armand Mauss’s pioneering work The Angel and the Beehive charts the church’s uneasy relationship with mainstream status, a cycle of ebb and flow driven by the specific benefits and drawbacks on each side of the spectrum. If the church is too peculiar, it will suffer in its growth prospects and place in society. At worst, disrepute can lead society to treat such a church as a threat to be eradicated (a possibility of which Mormons are quite aware). This creates strong pressure to assimilate in order to avoid social costs and reap the benefits of societal acceptance. However, this raises the question of whether the church community can gain respectability without giving up its distinctive cultural and doctrinal markers — and so, as Mauss notes, the community adopts different strategies at different times. At times the organization and its members may embrace assimilation, while at other times they feel a need to “reach ever more deeply into their bag of cultural peculiarities to find either symbolic or actual traits that will help them mark…