I was always somewhat bookish, even before my mission.
Category: Cornucopia
BYU-Idaho: the next ten years (I)
BYU-Idaho is much different today than it was in 2001, when it changed its name from Ricks College and started to offer bachelor’s degrees. It shouldn’t detract from the accomplishments of the last decade to say that the university is still a work in progress; institutional change takes a generation. There are more changes in store, challenges that soon need to be faced, and pitfalls that have to be avoided.
8 & Up
The Church has announced that starting in 2014, there will be a General Women’s Meeting twice per year, with women, young women, and girls ages 8 and up invited to attend.
Conference Announcement
The 2013 Conference of the European Mormon Studies Association, in cooperation with the Brigham Young University London Centre, will take place on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th of December in London.
Beware Instrumental Beliefs
Back in 2009, Pew Research released a research package on public opinions about evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Just last month, a friend on Facebook posted the headlining chart from that package, and a lively debate ensued. The tone of the folks posting this chart (I saw it on several walls) was one of exaggerated dismay, e.g. “A depressing — but unsurprising — revelation about Mormons.” The fact that the result fit so neatly alongside myriad preexisting cultural skirmishes should have been a major indicator that the results were unreliable, however. Lots of people argued that the question was poorly worded, primarily because it seemed to set up an unnecessary dichotomy between evolution-without-God and creationism-with-God, thus precluding the middle ground of evolution-with-God. This criticism is legitimate, but it also serves as another big, red, warning indicator. If the responses to a survey question ostensibly about a scientific theory fall neatly within established cultural narratives, then we have good reason to be very skeptical that the survey illuminates the topic it purports to cast light upon. In this case, the superficial narrative is that the survey reflects attitudes about evolution as the origin of human life. The first thing to note is that there is essentially no cost to affirming or denying this belief. If the truth is that evolution really is the best explanation for the origins of human life here on earth, what’s at…
Book Review: The Mormon Image in the American Mind
J. B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception, Oxford University Press.
Intellectual Disaffection and “The Biggest Tax Cut in History”
There are lots of stories on the Internet about people who have discovered things about Mormon history and left the Church. Indeed, these kinds of exit narratives have reached the point of cultural saliency that the New York Times and other media outlets have picked up on the story. I have repeatedly read or heard people claim that we are in the midst of an unprecedented wave of intellectual apostasy. I am skeptical. Before I explain why, I hasten to add that I have absolutely no doubt that many people learn things about Mormon history that they did not know and have a crisis of faith. I think that the Church as an institution and Mormon culture in general could do a much better job of talking and teaching about the Mormon past. I have great sympathy toward those that have such faith crises and to a certain extent I have been through something like them myself. That said, I am skeptical that we are actually seeing something unprecedented. To understand why, think of debates over taxes. Every time Congress considers tax increases or tax cuts critics and proponents will start insisting that “This is the largest tax increase in history!” or “This is the biggest tax cut in history!” Generally speaking, these guys will be right. The tax cut or increase is, in nominal terms, the largest of its kind in history. This fact, however, tells you almost nothing…
SMPT at UVU: “The Atonement”
Abstracts are now available for the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology conference this Thursday, October 31st-Saturday November 2nd. Almost two dozen presentations will directly address the theme of “The Atonement,” alongside related principles such as sin, repentance, freedom, and redemption. A number of other presentations by both Mormons and non-Mormons will address other aspects of Mormon belief including orthodoxy/heterodoxy, business ethics, and the theological importance of gender. Notable sessions include: “Works,” by Daniel W. Graham (Brigham Young University) “Mormonism and the Problem of Heterodoxy,” by Dennis Potter (Utah Valley University) “Rethinking Penal Substitution,” by Paul Owen (Montreat College) “The Structure of the Book of Mormon,” by J. Christopher Thomas, Clarence J. Abbott Professor of Biblical Studies (Pentecostal Theological Seminary) “Narrative Atonement Theology in the Gospel of Mark,” by Julie Smith (Independent Scholar) “The Gospel According to Mormon,” by Noel Reynolds (Emeritus, Brigham Young University) “Joseph Smith and the Restoration of the Atonement,” by Lynn Wardle, Bruce C. Hafen Professor of Law (J. Reuben Clark Law School) “What Becoming Mortal Empowered God to Do,” by Blake Ostler (Attorney & Independent Scholar) Also this year, there are an unprecedented five T&S permabloggers and an emeritus on the program! Come join us at the UVU Student Center, rooms 206a-c, starting Thursday at 7:30pm. For a detailed conference schedule, consult the SMPT website.
Earth Stewardship: Doctrine, Principle, or Heritage?
I was recently told that earth stewardship is not a doctrine nor a principle of the gospel; rather, it is a heritage.
Why same sex marriage is not an attack on the institution of marriage: experiences from Europe
A Dutch Mormon non-same-sex marriage: a proud father with his daughter The involvement of the LDS church in the issue of same sex marriage in the United States runs very deep and is highly emotional. The battle for proposition 8 was intense, highly visible and centrally directed and seemed at the time to result in a repeal of the liberty for same sex partners to formally and legally marry in California. At the time it drew a lot of attention in Europe as well, reflected in major articles in journals, newspapers and magazines. One of these was Time Magazine, the European version, reporting on the massive investment the Church did in California to further the cause of proposition 8. Also church members in the Netherlands became aware of it, and some joined in. Ironically, quite a few of them thought that the Church had ordained that prop 8 should be defeated, so prayers were sent to heaven to block that evil proposition 8. It seems the Lord listened to them in the end … During the prop 8 debates, apostle Ballard addressed a meeting of European church leaders. He asked whether representatives of the Dutch stakes were present. Two were there; one of them, hardened in Church administrative debates, immediately ducked away behind a large neighbor, but the other one happily raised his arm: ‘Present!’ He then was severely rebuked by elder Ballard, because the Netherlands were the first to…
Children Like Ender
As a friend of mine living in Germany informed me, Ender’s Game has already started to play in some markets, and the United States release is coming up this week. With that in mind, I thought I’d return to the novel once more. In the days before The Hunger Games and Battle Royale made the idea of children murdering each other part of mainstream entertainment, the combination of very young characters and serious violence was one of the more provocative and controversial elements of Ender’s Game. Young Ender Wiggin is only six years old when he beats another child to death, and he subsequently kills another kid with his bare hands while in Battle School. Orson Scott Card described one reader who criticized the book for unrealistic depiction of children by noting that “it was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.” He went on to write that the simplest explanation for why the children in the book don’t think and act the way (some) adults expect children to think and act is that they don’t think of themselves as children. As Card put it, “Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along.” The concept of childhood is a common theme for the child soldiers in the book. One of Ender’s earliest friends at the Battle School,…
Happy Young-Earth-Creationist New Year!
According to Bishop Ussher and his famous calendrical calculations, on Oct.23 4004BC, God said “let there be light” and created the Earth. That makes today the Earth’s 4004+2013=6017th birthday, and a new year.
Upcoming Conferences
There is an embarrassment of riches on the Mormon Studies scene in the next few weeks.
The Metaphysics of Sealing
As Mormons, we practice a faith full of ritual ordinances. We are taught in scripture that some of these ordinances, like baptism, are necessary for salvation. We are also given very specific instructions for performing these ordinances, and failure to execute them properly seems to nullify their efficacy. Taken together, the precise instructions for carrying out ordinances and their eternal significance seem dischordant. When we are immersed during baptism, does the water actually do something? If not, why is it so strictly required? I know of three three conventional attitudes to this problem. The most straight-forward is to believe that our actions in conducting ordinances actually work to bring about the effect of the ordinance. So, when the sacrament is blessed, the words themselves (in the presence of the proper priesthood as a catalyst) bring about the effect of sanctifying the bread and water. They are changed in some metaphysical sense. This, in all seriousness and gravity, is the magical view of ordinances. They work exactly like spells in Harry Potter. You have to have the power (wizarding blood in Harry Potter or the priesthood in real life) and then you have to say the right words and if both conditions are met: something happens. There are clearly problems with this view, however. It requires some very speculative metaphysics to explain, for example, what role water has in the baptism that allows sins to be washed away. It’s also strange to…
Everybody Ought to Have a Body
A distinctive Mormon doctrine related to creation and stewardship is the idea that embodiment is a necessary prerequisite for god-like exaltation. This doctrine includes within it the ideas we can be exalted to become like God, and that God himself has a physical body. The soul of man is the spirit and the body. Although we believe we had a premortal existence as spirit children of God, we were not completely created until we were born into our physical bodies. Our mortal parents acted as co-creators with God in having us. Our bodies are the temples in which our spirits dwell, and which the Holy Ghost may visit. So in a Mormon view, having a body is necessary for the development of our spirits. The traditional Christian view that holds that God embodied himself as Christ in order to make himself approachable to us. While we believe in the condescension of God, we believe our embodiment has the potential to bring us closer to God, to make us more like Him. There are great pleasures to be experienced through our bodies. The body is our vehicle for experiencing the whole of creation, our means of developing an aesthetic sense which God already has. He wants us to find that things please our eyes and gladden our hearts. We are meant to experience the pleasures of the flesh, within the bounds that the Lord has set. Those lines of moderation and…
Does God Help Find Car Keys?
I remember reading a story in the Ensign while I was on my mission. The story was about a police officer who had been searching for a toddler who had been lost when his mother’s car was stolen while the child was still in the back. The mother was desperate to be reunited with her child, and time was running out. The police officer prayed, he followed a hunch, and the child was found and returned to his parents safe and sound. The story bothered me. It wasn’t the story itself. I have had miraculous experiences in my own life, and they are an important part of my faith. The problem is that emphasizing stories at all sets an impossible expectation. A narrative is a very artificial thing. They are human creations. A narrative is not what happens. A narrative is the result of a person processing what happens. It is what you get when a person is able to take a series of events and organize them in way that makes sense. Narratives have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have meaning and closure. Life, all too often, does not. That’s not the only sense in which the story sets high expectations, of course. What about the prayers that go unanswered? For every story of a person having a prayer answered or being miraculously prompted to be alert to danger there are stories of prayers unanswered and of senseless…
A Series of Announcements; or, Be Excited, Be Very Excited
Forgive the personal indulgence. I realized that I had been participating in the online LDS world for 10 years, and I had some things to say of a personal and public nature.
International Day of the Girl
Today is the International Day of the Girl. Yesterday, the Deseret News devoted an article to it but 24 hours later, no one had yet commented. Another article appeared today, but as of now, no comments yet. Perhaps there is no need to voice support for something everyone agrees on? Still, worldwide, tens of thousands of children have been conducting activities to support education for girls, following the lead of Malala Yousafzai. Anything to report from Utah? Other themes of the Day deal with forced girl marriages and teen pregnancies due to poverty and lack of sexual education. In my home country, Belgium, teen pregnancy is very rare. So, for the campaign a short film was made about a 14-year old pregnant girl who comes to a Belgian school. I thought it would be interesting to share it on this International Day of the Girl.
New Summer Seminar in Mormon Theology
The Mormon Theology Seminar and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship are pleased to announce the First Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology, “A Dream, a Rock, and a Pillar of Fire: Reading 1 Nephi 1.”
Standing as Witnesses
Ronan’s post this morning reminded me of something I had written but hadn’t gotten around to posting:
Men, Women, and Priesthood Session
In case you haven’t heard, members of the Ordain Women movement tried to attend the priesthood session of general conference and were turned away. I think that turning them away was a mistake, but I also think that it would be a bad idea for women to begin attending the priesthood session of conference. First, why I think excluding Ordain Women was a mistake. I can understand why Church authorities would turn away the Ordain Women activists. The rationale, it seems to me, would be something along the lines of, “This is an attempt to turn a sacred meeting into an organized media event designed to embarrass the Church into changing its doctrine. We don’t want to encourage this group or other groups to use Church meetings in this way.” I understand and appreciate that reasoning, but I think in this case it was mistaken. As a threshold matter, regardless the meeting was going to be used as a media event. Allowing the Ordain Women activists to attend the meeting would have largely defused interest in the story and in any case would have given journalists a less hard-edged narrative. More importantly, however, the number of women seeking entrance to the meeting was very small, there is no reason to suppose that their participation would have been anything other than decorous and respectful, and it would have signaled generosity and goodwill toward these sisters. I don’t think that there would…
Why is climate change not popular in Deseret?
The weather comes and goes, the climate stays. At least, that is what we were taught in our youth, but nowadays the stability of climate is in heavy weather, for the climate is changing. In windy and rainy Holland the weather is an obvious conversation starter; a Nepalese anthropologist who did his fieldwork in the Netherlands in the ‘80s was struck by our constant speaking about the obvious, the weather; he thought the reason was that everything else in this country was under control, man-made or well-regulated, so the weather was about the only variable item we could mention This discourse, by now, is supplemented by one on climate change, as today any mention of the weather is almost routinely accompanied by a referral to the threat-from-outside, the warming of the earth, the rise of the sea level, the more erratic weather. Not only Holland is threatened by rising water, also the most beautiful city in the world is, Venice The Netherlands have incorporated the notion of climate change lock, stock and barrel, as have most European countries, also those much higher above sea level, such as Norway. Climate change has grown into a political as well as popular discourse in a decade, very rapidly. In the US things are different, and also in Deseret climate change never became popular. Why the difference? Why is climate change so ‘alien’ in Deseret, and comes it so ‘natural’ in most of Europe?…
Peter Wiggin as Lucifer
(This post is the second in a series on Ender’s Game. Read the first here.) Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a Third. This means that he is the third child in a family which–in the strictly population controlled United States described in Ender’s Game violates both the law and social taboo. Ender’s oldest sibling is Peter, a sociopathic genius who takes to torturing small animals when his favorite target, Ender, is shipped to Battle School. Peter himself was rejected because the military concluded he “had the soul of a jackal.” After Peter, his parents had Valentine. Although just as intelligent as Peter, she was also rejected from the Battle School because “she was too pacific, too conciliatory, and above all too empathic.” And so Ender’s parents were granted a rare exception to the two-children policy and Ender was born. There’s no doubt from the earliest pages that Peter is an evil character. His maliciousness comes across not just in his physical abuse of his younger brother, but in the mind games he plays with Ender and Valentine. When Valentine stops him from attacking, and possibly killing, Ender early in the book, Peter promises to kill Ender at a future time, saying: There’ll come a day when you aren’t there with him, when you forget. And suddenly you’ll remember, and you’ll rush to him, and there he’ll be, perfectly all right. And the next time you won’t worry so much, and you won’t come as…
Climate and gospel
About a year ago I took the liberty of asking the Brethren what their opinion was on climate change. My reason was that we as Dutch have a temple below sea level, probably the only one in the world. How did the Brethren envisage the future of the Dutch temple, considering sea level rise due to perceived and expected climate change? As LDS temples are destined for eternity, what are the long-term perspectives of this particular House of the Lord? Is it going to be flooded when the waters rise, inundated when the ‘inconvenient truth’ hits Holland? We as Dutch Saints are concerned about “our” temple, as in the long run the slow sinking of the Netherlands and the rising sea levels due to climate change might well form a threat for us, and thus for our temple. The Dutch and Belgians are quite climate conscious, and follow with great interest the global debates about climate change. Last week the new IPCC report on climate change came out and again we learned that climate change is real and that Homo sapiens is for a major part responsible for it. For those in the scientific community this is not very surprising, but the level of certainty has increased since the last report and the long term trends seem to be incontrovertible, despite short term seeming reversals. But especially the crucial role of human interference is spelled out clearer than before, though…
Thinkable priesthoods, usable pasts
What can we gather from last week’s decision from Salt Lake? The content of the Priesthood session will be made accessible in real time to anybody who wants to view it online, but the live venue will be available to men only — even, presumably, non-Priesthood-holding or -worthy men. Priesthood session, in its primary form, will remain a male-only social space. It appears that the purpose of the formerly-restricted Priesthood session was not chiefly to withhold information from women, although that was the effect, but rather to preserve a single-sex social and spiritual space. Does this suggest anything about the nature of priesthood as an institution, beyond the logistical specifics of the conference? What happens if we map the logic of this particular decision onto the larger question of women’s ordination, which is, after all, the real meaning of the Priesthood session controversy? Based on nothing more than amateur extrapolation, I think it unlikely that a uni-sex priesthood is in our future, with boys and girls ordained to the Aaronic priesthood as coed deacons at age twelve and men and women serving together in the Melchizedek priesthood. Gender partition and single-sex spaces are deeply entrenched in LDS history and practice. If the logic of the Priesthood session decision serves — a proposition which is nothing more than inference, I freely acknowledge — the purpose of a male-only priesthood is not chiefly to exclude women from authority, though that is of…
Ender as the Everyman
With very few exceptions, everyone loves the Harry Potter books. (The exceptions consist of people who cannot read and people who have no soul.) The appeal is fairly straightforward, with themes of magical escapism, coming-of-age, and friendship woven directly and beautifully throughout the narrative. Ender’s Game is also a very popular book. Although of course it’s not as widely read as Harry Potter (very little is, after all), it’s one of the best-selling and most-awarded science fiction novels of all time. The most interesting contrast between the two, however, is that whereas everyone seems to be on the same page as to the topics and themes of Harry Potter, Ender’s Game seems to be almost an entirely different book to a wide array of diverse audiences. For example, it’s been rebranded as a young adult story (complete with new cover art) based on the youthfulness of its central protagonists, but it’s also been listed on the United States Marine Corps Professional Reading List since that list’s inception where it is seen alternately as a treatise on leadership and an exposition on tactical innovation. One of my copies of the book, on the other hand, bears Card’s inscription “A survival guide for geniuses.” Accordingly, the book functions as a kind of banner for my generation of geeks, who watched with hope and trepidation as our social circle went from the bottom to the top of the pyramid at the close of…
The JST: A Test Case
Here’s Mark 2:14:
Aspirational Obedience: Obedience is a Process
Our Mormon faith places a great deal of emphasis on obedience, and to great (and mostly positive) effect. It’s quite common, especially in the Bloggernaccle, to fault the Church and its members for being too conformist, and as I’ve written there is some legitimacy to those complaints. But I’ve also been struck in my life–more and more as I get older–that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it exists in practical reality does a pretty darn good job of making decent folk and/or making folk decent. There’s a culture of practical service that is easy to take for granted as it is pervasive. It also invariably fosters a perception of obedience as being defined by outward, practical behavior. So we’ve got ourselves a conundrum. There’s an intrinsic tension between an emphasis on obedience and an emphasis on the atonement. Between an emphasis on following the law and the reality that it’s a doomed endeavor from the start. In terms of scripture, between Matthew 11:38-30: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. And Matthew 5:48: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. In what sense is a command…
Reading the Gospels: A Case Study
Here’s Mark 3:13-14:
Five things you should know about the BYU-Idaho dress code
There are five things you should know about the BYU-Idaho dress code. The first thing—that BYU-Idaho has a dress code—is probably redundant, since that seems to be the only thing that people outside of Rexburg hear about BYU-Idaho.