Category: Cornucopia
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Who is Israel?
When teaching Institute recently to a class of LDS students in our ward, I used the term ‘Latter-day Israel’ and met with a surprised silence: they had never heard the term. Yet, all of them were second generation members, born and raised in the church and thoroughly schooled in whatever the church had thrown at…
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Times and Seasons has finished moving
We have moved servers this weekend, and during the move the site was temporarily not able to accept any comments, nor did we have any new posts until after the move was finished. If you can see this post, then the move is complete and you can make comments normally. New posts should start appearing shortly.
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Elliot Rodger, Sex, the Good Life, and the Peril of Rights
There are certain things that we need and desire. Among these is love and sex. I conjoin two words, but I mean it to refer to a single whole, the embodied connection of affection, commitment, and pleasure that comes in the mutual giving of two people of themselves to each other. That. It’s a longing…
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Sustained Criticism
While it is possible that some Church leaders in the past may have been fallible, it falls to us now to follow our current Church leaders unfailingly.
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False Choices and Fence Holes
It is very common in the Bloggernaccle to talk about an exodus of members from the Church. These members are usually described as a cohesive demographic. The two examples I’ve seen most frequently are (1) young Millennials who are disillusioned by the discrepancy between real history and CES whitewashing and (2) good women whose contributions…
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Another (Partial) Response to Brother Otterson
As I indicated in my last post, I am very, very happy with this response from Brother Otterson, for two reasons:
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The three voices of the Scriptures
I love the Old Testament, both as an anthropologist and as a Mormon. None of our other Standard Works has as many wonderful stories as the OT, and none raises as many questions as this longest and most complex of all Scriptures. Now that we plough our way through it in Sunday School, we noticed…
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The Prophetic World War Z
When reading the Old Testament, the essential thing to keep in mind is not This is what happened but This is what someone thought was important for later readers to remember.
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A (Partial) Response to Brother Otterson
There is a lot that could be said about Michael Otterson’s recent open letter. I think it does a lot to heal the immense pain and anger that many people—especially those who do not support Ordain Women–have felt in recent weeks as a result of how Church PR has (mis)handled Ordain Women. So thank you, Brother…
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Otterson: Context Missing from Discussion about Women
Below is a letter from Michael Otterson, Managing Director of Public Affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that the Mormon Newsroom asked Times & Seasons to consider publishing. Comments on various blogs over recent months about what Church leaders should or should not think and do about women’s roles in The Church…
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A Brief Note on History, Angels, and Such
Let’s say that the historicity of the Book of Mormon could be demonstrated irrefutably. (Say that Nephi returned in a cloud of glory, held a press conference, and pointed us to incontrovertible archeological proof.) Would I tune in to watch? Yes. Would this convince me to join or stay in the church?
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Reading Bileam: an embarrassing prophet and us
The Gospel Doctrine class gives quite some attention to one of the strangest stories in the Old Testament, the one of the prophet Bileam, or Balaam; I just taught it in our ward in the Netherlands. The story is strange in many ways, and with a personage that is surrounded by miracles one easily assumes…
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Literary Worship: The Lost Sheep
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East, where in many places shepherds still live with their sheep, sleeping with them at night and following them around all day to keep them out of trouble. It’s a common enough sight to see a weather-beaten man walking among a dozen or more sheep…
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Literary Worship: Living Waters
A few weeks ago I shared with you the first of my Sacrament poems, Bread of Life. For some reason, just the act of sharing it made me feel closer to my faith than I’ve felt in a long time. So I’ll take the liberty of sharing a second poem, in the hope that it might…
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Practical Apologetics: Keeping the Faith
Another installment in my occasional series (see here, here), this one prompted by a fine little two-page article titled “Keeping the Faith” in, of all places, the BYU Magazine. The Church, both the membership and leaders, finally seems to be waking up to the fact that the Church is losing its youngest adult cohort, the…
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Understanding Anger against Mormon Missionaries
We sometimes hear stories about Mormon missionaries who are confronted with angry people. We praise the missionaries for suffering for Christ like the apostles of old. We condemn the iniquity of those who loathe the messengers of the Lord. I am going to take up some perspectives of those angry people—because of my mother and…
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What You Hear
A friend of mine shared the following with me. With her permission (and with some details scrambled for privacy) I share it with you; I thought her insights into the practical reality and consequences of being single in the Church are profound.
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Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
This post is a follow up to my two previous posts As Much As I Know Anything and What It Would Take To Not Believe. I have to start out by clarifying something that I didn’t define well enough in a previous post. I made the statement that we cannot not believe, but that depends…
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A (Funny) Ghost Story
Jesus walks on the water and intends to “pass by” his disciples. What’s going on here?
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A house with a gun is not a home
Everybody was shocked by the news that on April 19 in Utah a three year old girl killed her two year old brother with a shotgun. Poor boy, poorer girl and still poorer parents, what a tragedy, also for the wider family, the ward, the community, the church, in fact for everyone. This is exactly…
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The Message of Mormonism (pt. 2): Angels, Visions, Prophets, and Gifts of the Spirit
In my last post I talked about Mormonism as an answer to the question, “Which church is true?” and suggested that this question has only been compelling on a large scale in fairly limited circumstances. I ought to note here that I am not trying to come up with some kind of general explanation for…
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Thinking about Miracle Stories
Should the stories of miracles that Jesus performed be considered historically accurate? Did he walk on water, or was there a conveniently placed sandbar that made his disciples think he was walking on water, or did Mark just make this story up?
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What It Would Take to Not Believe
There was one question in response to my last post that I particularly wanted to answer, but wasn’t able to at the time. This is the question, which was posed by Sebastian Dick: “What would it take to convince you that (in as much as you know anything) propositions such as God exists or the…
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Sexism and Ordination
I recently participated in a TribTalk about Ordain Women. Pretty much the first words out of Neylan McBaine’s mouth were something along the lines of “ordaining women won’t end sexism.”
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The Message of Mormonism (pt. 1): Which Church is True?
This is the first in a series of posts in which I lay out some of my thoughts on what Mormonism’s message to the world has been and what it might become in the next generation or two. It’s a big topic, and I’m likely to yammer on at some length. You have been warned.…
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Martha’s Sacrament
Times & Seasons used to post, from time to time, something “From the archives”. So is this one. *** Martha was one of the older sisters in our branch. We counted a scant dozen of them, singles and widows, making more than half of the congregation and being its very backbone. When I got to…
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Elder Oaks on Women, Priesthood, and the Temple
There is a lot that could be said about Elder Oaks’ conference talk about the relationship of women to the priesthood. In this post, I’m going to look at just one issue: the relationship of women, priesthood, and the temple.
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