If you haven’t heard the story in Sunday School yet, you will shortly (Jonah 1). Surprisingly, the combination of God and bad weather is still a potent force in the modern era — my stake was praying for rain earlier this year. But here is a more colorful Jonah-like account with sailors, storms, and witches from the 17th century.
Category: Cornucopia
The Icarians
While browsing the Wikipedia entry on Nauvoo, I saw this: Nauvoo attracts large numbers of visitors for its historic importance and its religious significance to members of…groups such as the Icarians. I’d never heard of the Icarians before. So, continuing down the Wikipedia path, I found this: The Icarians were a French utopian movement, founded by Étienne Cabet, who led his followers to America where they established a group of egalitarian communes during the period from 1848 through 1898. followed by: After the failure of the Texas colony, the Icarians decided to head north to Nauvoo, Illinois, a city on the Mississippi River that had recently been vacated by the Mormons after having surpassed Chicago in population to become Illinois’ largest city in 1844. Nauvoo became the first permanent Icarian Community in the early 1850s. In the census of 1850, 505 family names are listed in Icarian Nauvoo; by 1854, there were 405 members of the colony. Most of these were from France, though some had come from Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Sweden, Holland, England, and the United States. Two periodical papers were published, the Real Icarienne in French and Der Communist in German. A charter created by the Society in 1853 specified that residents of the Nauvoo colony were required to donate all their worldly goods to the community, which had to include a minimum of $60. Those who passed a probationary period of four months would be…
Those Oh-So-Temporary Golden Ages
I started teaching seminary three weeks ago. We’re off to a great start. I don’t have any goofballs in my class, so that helps. As I started preparing before the semester began, I tried to figure out how to present the Doctrine and Covenants in a way that could be compelling to high school students. The strongest memories I have of my own seminary years are the rides to and from the seminary building. I’m not sure whether the fact that I remember the transit more than the classes themselves says something about the quality of the instruction or just the nature of the teenage mind. Regardless, I hope to present the material in a way that it will stick with the students, so I’ve chosen to teach the book in reverse. We started with the martyrdom in Section 135, and then spent the last three weeks covering the Nauvoo period from 124 to 132. What hit me for the first time while teaching these was that Nauvoo under Joseph Smith only existed for about four years — about 2% of our church history! Yet those four years so heavily influence our identity today. My own parallel to Nauvoo was the two months right before my mission. This “golden age” in my life was spent enjoying the magic of friendship, summer romance, sunrises, night skies, and hiking through the golden grass (or dead brown stickers, depending on who you ask)…
Conference Announcement: “Embracing the Law: A Scholarly Conference on Doctrine & Covenants 42”
Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42 September 10, 2010 • Free Admission Session 1 9:00 – 10:45 a.m., Stonemetz Conference Room Jeremiah John, Southern Virginia University Law and Church in Section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants Nate Oman, William and Mary Law School “I Give Unto You My Law”: Section 42 as a Legal Text and the Paradoxes of Divine Law Discussant: President Rodney K. Smith, Southern Virginia University 1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Main Hall 337 Russell Fox, Friends University “Thou Wilt Remember the Poor”: Liberation Theology and a Radical Interpretation of “The Laws of the Church of Christ” Robert Couch, Willamette University Consecration and the End of the Poor Discussant: TBA 3:30 – 5:15 p.m., Main Hall Ballroom Karen Spencer, independent scholar “To Teach or Not to Teach”: Three Possible Interpretations of D&C 42:12-14 Kristine Haglund, editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought “The Beauty of the Work of Thine Own Hands”: On the Possibility of an Aesthetic for Zion Joe Spencer, University of New Mexico “Remnants of Revelation”: On the Canonical Reading of D&C 42 Discussant: Scott Dransfield, Southern Virginia UniversityFortFor those who For those who are going to be in Virginia next week, Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia is going to be hosing a conference on September 10th entitled “Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42.” The conferences is being sponsored by the Richard…
The Limits of Orthodoxy
Apparently, you can’t say polygamy was not God’s will. But you can say that a male-only priesthood is not God’s will. Go figure.
“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives” Proposal Deadline Sept. 1
I recently received an email asking “if the LDS Church has an official (or unofficial) Social Doctrine, similarly to other churches”. In this and many areas, the Church has little in the way of an official position, and this wisely allows for a rich and diverse discussion among Mormons about how the Gospel should shape our participation in society and politics. I am excited to see such a discussion of Mormon perspectives on war and peace is being planned for this spring
Farewell and Thanks from a Bad Blogger
As I mentioned in my first post, I was reluctant to be a guest blogger, mainly because I doubted I’d have anything to add to the conversation. I also didn’t realize then that this blog is as active as it is– the other blog I sometimes contribute to almost never elicits more than a couple of comments, alas– and I’m afraid I haven’t kept up with and answered some comments as I should have. For me, though, it’s been an interesting experience, and has given me a lot to think about. And I’ve been gratified by the friendly, engaged, and welcoming manner of most of the contributors. My week is up (and I’m off on a short, foreign vacation tomorrow– as soon as church is over, of course), but I appreciate having had the privilege of trying to be your guest blogger for the past few days. Keep the faith, and keep up the good fight!
Instruction as Worship
It’s no secret that we Mormons aren’t big on praise worship in our meetings. You won’t hear any “hallelujahs” or “amens” in our sacrament meetings. And that’s fine for us. I think that members of our church tend to believe that worship is best accomplished through living in accordance to God’s commandments — that obedience expresses reverence. And since “righteous living” is difficult to perform in a Sunday meeting (as opposed to, say, praise), we settle for the next best thing: instructing each other toward righteous living. Now the fact that we spend our church meetings in preaching rather than praising isn’t news, but I’ve just come to realize how pervasive instruction-as-worship is our church. In all the places traditionally associated with worship-through-praise, we instead tend to worship through instruction. This is obvious in our Sunday meetings, general conferences, and temples, but it’s also true of our less formal religious gatherings — in our home and visiting teaching, in our family home evenings, and in our youth programs. Back in high school I spent an evening at the home of a Christian friend. After dinner, the father gathered the family together for a family worship service. It was different from the family home evenings I was used to. What I remember most was the father singing “Dust in the Wind” and talking about the greatness of God. I contrast that with the family nights in my home, where we learned…
Faith and Reason as Moral Ideals
The sense of many today that faith is antithetical to reason grows partly out of the Reformation and Enlightenment, in which people on both sides found they could not intellectually reconcile the conclusions of faith and reason. Just as importantly, faith and reason each came to represent a different moral ideal. As I see them, though, the moral ideals of faith and reason only make sense together,
Sunday School Lesson 31: Proverbs and Ecclesiastes
I laughed when I saw what this lesson covers, “only” slightly less than 16,000 words in Proverbs and slightly more than 23,000 words in Ecclesiastes. If we have the full 40 minutes, that means we should try to cover the content of about 1,000 words per minute (assuming that we don’t have opening or closing prayers and that we don’t do any introductions or visiting—and that Sacrament meeting ends as scheduled). Obviously we cannot look at everything in these books in Sunday School class. Equally obvious is that if we spend fifteen minutes to an hour a day studying the assigned material, we will be able to get read both books. But it will be difficult to spend much time actually studying them. Because it is so seldom read and talked about, and because it is such a beautiful book, I am going to focus my study notes on Ecclesiastes. This time, however, my notes will consist primarily of a synopsis of how I read Ecclesiastes rather than questions about it. I hope my notes will help you study that book during the week before the lesson. To use these notes to study the Book of Ecclesiastes, read a chapter and give an explanation of what that chapter means. It will probably help if you write down your explanation, at least in rough form. Only then compare your explanation with mine. Where do we differ? Does that difference help you…
Mormonism within Christianity; Christianity within Mormonism
Every so often the question “Are Mormons Christians?” gets batted around; the question has probably grown tedious for many. The discussions I’ve heard or read, though, usually leave me dissatisfied, in part because they treat Mormonism as if it were some unitary thing of definite and agreed upon content, and then argue about whether that unitary thing should be placed in the general category of “Christianity.” To me this approach seems false to the more complicated reality, and it misses the ways in which the question of Mormonism within Christianity is not just an abstract theological issue, or a polemical point (one that gets made in connection with Mitt Romney, for example, or Prop 8) but a live and important personal issue– at least for some of us. Here I venture, with trepidation, onto ground that some contributors to this blog have certainly traveled and charted more carefully than I have. But my own judgment has long been that Mormonism has elements and teachings that fit well with historic Christianity, and it has other elements that are more distinctively or even uniquely “Mormon” and that are pretty hard to square with historic Christianity. I think of the Book of Mormon– its teachings– as a source and locus of the more “Christian” ideas and teachings (if I can call them that). And I might take the King Follett discourse as representative of the more uniquely “Mormon” ideas that are harder to…
Antichrist to an Antichrist
I’m currently through the beginning of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. I like what I’ve read, and I’ve identified a few possible Nietzschean approaches to Mormonism. Joseph and Neitzsche as two men whose respective philosophies are fundamentally similar. Latter-Day-Saintism as Nietzsche’s “Revaluation of All Values”. Joseph as a realization of Neitzsche’s ubermensch. Now I’m no educated philosopher, and I’m only basically familiar with Nietzsche’s work. That said, here we go. 1. Joseph and Neitzsche as two men whose respective philosophies are fundamentally similar. Nietzsche’s states that “it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted” (1.1), and that “the sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history” (1.2). Joseph expresses similar feelings in his youthful response to Christianity, saying, “[N]otwithstanding the great love which the converts to these different faiths [Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist] expressed at the time of their conversion, and the great zeal manifested by the respective clergy…it was seen that the seemingly good feelings of both the priests and the converts were more pretended than real…that all their good feelings one for another, if they ever had any, were entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions” (JS-H 1:6). More powerfully, Joseph relates the words of God Himself, saying, “the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in…
How to Integrate Faith and Scholarship– and How Not To
My title here makes a false promise, obviously, on which I can’t deliver. But comments on my earlier post suggest I ought to try to say something on the subject (which may be of interest, I admit, mostly to religiously-oriented academics). And it’s a subject about which I’ve wondered from time to time. In fact, though I hadn’t thought of this in years, it occurred to me as I began to write this post that I did an essay as a BYU undergraduate, for the Orson F. Whitney essay contest, on a related subject– something about how BYU could fulfill its prophetic destiny. Maybe the essay is moldering in some old issue of the Daily Universe. The only part I remember is that I thought BYU shouldn’t compromise its religious identity in order to achieve scholarly eminence. Seemed worth saying at the time; I don’t know if it is now. But I still believe it. I think the same thing about Notre Dame, where I used to teach, and where this remains a live issue. In fact, I moved to dreary South Bend from beautiful Colorado in part because I thought Notre Dame had the potential to be a distinctive and world-class university by integrating its faith and rich intellectual tradition with its academic mission, and I liked the idea of being part of that. And I sometimes found myself in the peculiar position, as a Mormon, of urging Catholic…
Brother, can you spare a symposium?
Mormon Studies could be headed for a rough patch, because the career paths that make professional study of Mormon topics at least occasionally possible are disappearing.
Confession of a Primary Pianist
When my friend Craig Harline suggested a few months ago that I do some guest blogging on Times and Seasons, I was initially enthusiastic; but on second thought my enthusiasm waned. It became clear to me that I probably wouldn’t have much to contribute to this conversation. And the main reason I wouldn’t have much to contribute is that I’m largely ignorant in matters of Mormon thinking. So I would be like the naive newcomer to a conversation who says things that other people have already thoroughly hashed over. And why should I be ignorant about this part of Mormonism? After all, I was “raised in the Church,” went on a mission, and graduated from BYU. Since then I’ve rarely missed a Sacrament Meeting, have made substantial monetary contributions, and have usually watched at least one session of general conference. But in recent years I’ve missed out on the no doubt scintillating discussions in Gospel Doctrine or priesthood meeting, in part because for about nine of the last ten years my ward calling (in two different wards) has been Primary pianist. (That may tell you something.) And I long ago left off reading LDS-type publications, whether general and official, meaning The Ensign, or more academic, such as Sunstone and Dialogue– which I assume are still in business? Or (sorry!) Times and Seasons. Nor can I sincerely say that this lapse is among the many things in my life that I…
Times and Seasons Welcomes Steve Smith
Times and Seasons is happy to welcome as a guest blogger Steve Smith, who teaches and writes mainly about religious freedom, constitutional law, and jurisprudence. His most recent book is The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard University Press, 2010). Steve graduated from BYU in 1976 before studying law at Yale, and he has taught at various law schools including Notre Dame, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan (as a visiting professor), Virginia (as a visitor), and the University of San Diego, where he is currently employed. Steve’s wife Merina also attended BYU, and they have five children. An accomplished musician by most standards (not his), Steve’s biggest ambition, I happen to know, is to quit the rat race and rather than cultivate his garden become a bluegrass banjo player.
Just because they can’t see you doesn’t mean you’re not there
The call for papers for the Third Biannual Faith and Knowledge Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion contains a sentence that is, I think, wrong in three different ways.
The Dictation of the Holy Ghost to Us: A Pioneer Day Sermon
I spoke in church today. The youth in our stake just completed a four-day handcart pioneer re-enactment, and my remarks followed upon several youth speakers testimonies about their experience. Below is the text of my sermon:
Your opportunity to WIN. FABULOUS. PRIZES.
You’ve always dreamed of starting a handsome Mormon studies collection — who hasn’t? This week, you have an unprecedented opportunity to start your collection in style. As we’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, Sunstone 2010 is just around the corner. It will take place from August 4th through August 8th in Salt Lake City. Online pre-registration is available up through 5:00 p.m. on Friday, July 30th. And about those prizes? Here goes. — RAFFLE ANNOUNCEMENT All persons who pre-register for Sunstone 2010 between July 26th and July 30th will be automatically entered into the inaugural Fabulous Pre-Registration Prize Raffle. This year’s prizes include signed copies of: Richard Lyman Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling Carol Lynn Pearson, Mother Wove the Morning Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes Margaret Young and Darius Gray, Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons Kathryn Lynard Soper, The Year My Son and I were Born Each one-day registration, stand-alone workshop, or stand-alone banquet registration gets you one entry into the raffle. Each full registration, student registration, or first time registration gets you three entries in the raffle. The deluxe registration with MP3 gets you five entries into the raffle. Winners will be announced on August 2st, and prizes will be distributed at the symposium. What are you waiting for? Register now online or by calling in to 801.355-5926. Good luck, everyone! And if you have any questions, please send them to mary.ellen (at) sunstonemagazine.com.
Leadership and Self-Flagellation: Sharing Your Sins with the World
Nate’s thoughtful post inspired a great discussion. Andrew spoke up to say: …even though Church leaders could and should stress their own imperfection before Church members, they don’t…but instead they play into this paragon of virtue imagery that people put on them. Wm Morris responded with: I have no desire to see more self-flagellation on the part of our leaders. And I don’t see the paragon of virtue imagery — when general authorities to talk about themselves as persons, they are very often self-deprecating and even talk about their imperfections. “Self-flagellation” is is kind of a stretch. Exposing our own imperfections and struggles isn’t akin to beating ourselves silly in the town square. I think Andrew makes a good point. While I’m sure there are examples to support the latter position, I can’t think of many off the top of my head. The most vivid personal example from our general leaders I can remember is the recollection of of one of the general youth auxiliary leaders about lying on the grass in the summer, staring up at the clouds and thinking about Jesus. I remember the story because my thought was, “Wow. I remember doing the same thing at that age — but I was thinking about boys.” I have seen the positive side of our leaders personal experiences so overwhelmingly expressed that I’ve concluded that either: These people really are far more perfect than any people I have ever…
I Cannot Read a Sealed Book – Part I: The Basic Case for Making Public the Handbook
The church handbook is a foundational document for the lived experience of LDS church members. The handbook (actually two specific handbooks at present, but for convenience’s sake we’ll just refer to it as the handbook) sets out rules regarding a variety of important experiences in church member life. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism notes that the handbook contains “instruction on (1) Church administration and meetings; (2) calling members to Church positions and releasing them from such calls; (3) ordaining members to priesthood offices; (4) performing ordinances and giving blessings; (5) doing sacred temple work, and family history; (6) responding to calls for missionary service; (7) keeping records, reports, and accounting for finances; (8) applying Church discipline; and (9) implementing Church policies on such matters as buildings and property, moral issues, and medical and health issues.” The handbook is cited repeatedly in a variety of general member discussions (see, e.g., here or here). However, under current policy, the handbook is not made available to the general church membership. Instead, as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism notes, “Church leaders who receive the handbook include General Authorities, Church department heads, general auxiliary presidencies, temple presidents, and officers in stakes, wards, missions, districts, and branches.” In my observation, there are some potential negative consequences to the current policy. One negative consequence is confusion and inconsistent application. The handbook sets out a number of specific rules and church policies that aren’t available anywhere else. It’s not clear…
Mormon Studies on Your eReader
I got a Kindle a few weeks ago, and my affection for it is quickly approaching idolatry. But we aren’t going to talk about that right now; we’re going to talk about how to Mormon-Studies-geek out your ereader. Here’s what I have found so far; I expect you to add to the fun.
Reforming the Church – A Response to Nate
Nate has written a very articulate and worthwhile post that I think cuts to the heart of a common problem in how we emotionally respond to issues we have with the church. It goes together well with this other post of his which is similarly worth (re-)reading. I’m responding not because I particularly disagree with the things he has said (though I think he has mis-framed the issue a bit), but because there’s so much more to say on the subject that I fear Nate’s characterization may threaten to cover up rather than shed light on the issue.
Reforming the Church, Angst, and the Spirituality of Democratic Liberalism
t seems to me that what is at issue here is less one’s conduct than one’s emotional and intellectual stance. In other words, I suspect that there is relatively little in terms of conduct that would differ between folks here. We’re all interested in remaining faithful, contributing, serving, etc. I suspect that none of us is likely to go along with some great evil perpetrated by the church (such evils being — in my opinion — mainly hypothetical intellectual playthings rather than regular aspects of lived experience). We can all think of changes that we would welcome and that we would be willing to act to bring about. The difference, it seems to me, lies in the presence or absence of a particular kind of angst and how we interpret it. I can’t help but notice the many places in which James invokes analogies to democratic liberalism. There is a desire for participatory self-government, a fear of institutional suppression of rights or other kinds of abuse, a desire for an ever more egalitarian, universal, and inclusive kind of discussion. Seen in these terms “fatalism” looks like an abdication of political responsibility, a failure to behave as virtuous citizens ought. It seems to me that the spiritual angst here is a spiritual angst that is filtered through a set of political ideas, ideas that we would do well to treat with some skepticism. Indeed, one of the intellectual virtues of a…
The “V” Words
This post is brought to you by the letter “V”. (Don’t worry, that’s grape juice in the picture. Really. I’m sure it is.) Vigor. Verdant. Vibrant. Vivacious. AliVe. These are the qualities I expect true religion to inculcate. Does it make me think more? Does it make me love more? Does it make me see more? Does it make me do more? Does it make me be more? “These things are fun and fun is good.” Does it make life awesomer, and does it make me awesomer? Or, as Parley P. Pratt so effectively stated: The gift of the Holy Spirit…quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands and purifies all the natural passions and affections, and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness and charity. It develops beauty of person, form and features. It tends to health, vigor, animation and social feeling. It develops and invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens, invigorates and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being. In the presence of such persons one feels to enjoy the light of their countenances,…
BYU Man Whose Grades Your Grades Could Be Like
This promotional video from BYU’s Harold Lee Library is so well done it deserves it’s own post at Times & Seasons. That’s how good it is.
Labels
Alright people, here we go…on labels! (apollo, this one’s for you.) Labels of preference These are the labels anyone can just pick for themselves. “Awesome”, “feminist”, and “Abba fan” are all labels of preference. You just pick one, apply it to yourself, and no one can say you’re wrong! These labels aren’t owned by any organization, so they mean whatever you want them to mean. Labels of significance These are labels a person must earn, like “doctor”, “lawyer”, and “cosmetologist”. Labels of significance are “owned” by an organization, like the American Medical Association owns “doctor” (at least in America). In order to acquire a label of significance, a person has to meet the qualifications set by the body that owns that label. Labels of organization These labels are used internally within organizations, like “sergeant”, “project manager”, and “Relief Society President”. These labels don’t signify things a person has done, but rather point at the things that person will be doing. They are labels of convenience, and generally identify roles and responsibilities a person will carry within an organization. Sometimes heated discussions ensue over the proper application of labels, like, say, whether someone really is a “feminist”, a “mother”…or a “Mormon”. Usually these debates are painful and fruitless because the parties are arguing about labels of preference as though they were actually labels of significance. So what kind of label is “Mormon”? It’s easiest to approach as a label of organization…
Scriptural Literacy
I’ve just been called as a seminary teacher. Today I was sustained during sacrament meeting. I’m really excited about it — I enjoy working with youth, I enjoy the scriptures, and I enjoy teaching. Heck, I’m even a morning person. The course of study is the Doctrine & Covenants. It has me thinking about how to help them understand the role that the scriptures play in the church. When I was twelve-or-so years old, I had a teacher who wanted us to understand the importance of the scriptures. He encouraged us to bring our scriptures to class each week, and even took roll on who brought theirs. However, I remember consciously asking myself, “What’s the point? We don’t learn from the scriptures at church. We learn from the lesson manual.” In other words, I hadn’t made the connection that the doctrines in the lesson manual were based on scriptural teachings. Like most Sunday school classes, the teacher would have us read passages from the scriptures, but I didn’t understand that the purpose of those scriptures was to provide a legal basis for the principles in the lesson. (Of course, twelve-year-old boys mumbling quietly through verses of KJV prose doesn’t leave one understanding much of anything at all.) So it was kind of a revolutionary connection for me when I finally realized that church policies and doctrines weren’t true for their own sakes, that they were at some point founded on…
A post-Columbian setting for the Book of Mormon
The result of writing Book of Mormon history from back to front, I think, resembles a cross between The Mission and Last of the Mohicans.
Wanted: Greener Grass
People leave the church because…well, I don’t know. I’ve had a few acquaintances who’ve decided to be done with it, but I’ve never sat down and talked with them about why. If I were to guess, it’s because they discovered things they didn’t like about the church and decided to head out to where things are better. That’s why this article on gender stereotypes and science caught my eye—it’s easy to think that the cultural difficulties we try to navigate in the church are specific to the church. I wonder how many people leave the church thinking, “I’m done with these folks—I’m heading out there where [gays/women/intellectuals/artists] are treated with respect!” only to discover that our cultural biases within the church are largely just reflections of the cultural biases of the world at large. In the ‘80s, China performed an “Anti–Spiritual-Pollution Campaign”. The nation’s leaders were concerned that the world outside of China was having too much influence on the people inside of China. The campaign used the term “spiritual pollution” as a catch-all term for a variety of media and beliefs that were feared to be harmful, including modern views on sexuality, philosophy, modern art, and individualism. As is often the case in these sorts of hysterical cultural retrenchments, accusations were leveled, deviants were executed, and then, after the hysteria had passed, the campaign became a taboo topic, not to be discussed inside China and quickly forgotten outside of…