Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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The Priesthood Ban and Our Leadership Theology
By “Leadership Theology” I mean the common declaration that we make about our leaders, presidents in particular, as the mouthpiece of God, God not allowing them to lead the church astray, etc. For example, over the last few years, our leaders have made a number of structural changes and pointed to the changes as evidence…
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CFM 10/13-10/19 (D&C 115-120): Poetry for “His Sacrifice Shall Be More Sacred unto Me Than His Increase”
Sacrifice is a key gospel concept, and as such is also a key concept for life. Whether the it involves one person giving up something to help others or simply the individual giving up something for his own benefit, sacrifice is always about making decisions that balance one benefit or good against another. So we…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 9/28
A few days ago I posted about how we can take what happens in Church meetings—sermons, lessons and anything else—and enter a conversation with them, magnifying what was said or adding what we think. I’m convinced that even if the speaker or teacher is poorly prepared, we can still find elements in what is said…
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CFM 10/06-10/12 (D&C 111-114): Poetry for “I Will Order All Things for Your Good”
If things have been ordered for our good, do the things look like they have been ordered or arranged? This week’s Come Follow Me lesson title implies that what happens in our lives is meant to help us both now and in the hereafter. The statement “I will order all things for your good” is…
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Conservative pain
An intrinsic problem in liberal and progressive-dominated professions such as academia and journalism is systematically overlooking or diminishing conservative pain. I’m not asking for sympathy for myself here, as I’m not a conservative. Each day I watch in horror as much of what has made my life pleasant or possible is destroyed and generation-spanning work…
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Churchmen and Administrators: An Attempted “Coup” against President Woodruff, 1887-89
Though Mormonism after Joseph Smith isn’t my expertise, I do think that a story that demonstrates conflict in church leaders’ tendency to appoint the church’s best administrators into the first presidency is the attempted “coup” against Wilford Woodruff in 1887. I put coup in quotes since some may object to that term, but it seems…
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The Ethics of Talks and Lessons at Church
When was the last time someone told you how much they liked Church on Sunday? Or what made a Sacrament Meeting really great? Or what in a lesson touched them, made them cry or gave them a new way of thinking? I often hear complaints about Church these days. If it isn’t that the Sacrament…
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CFM 9/29-10/05 (D&C 109-110): Poetry for “It Is Thy House, a Place of Thy Holiness”
I like this photo of the Bangkok Thailand Temple. I know many people will see in it an island of good among a sea of chaos and evil. I can’t disagree more with that view—most of humanity doesn’t live in the stereotypical suburban pastoral nowhere favored by the world, and where they do live is…
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Mental Illness at Church
I had so many plans for this post series, so it is heavy heart and not a little irony that I have had to cut it short due to two mental health crises in our family which have left me depleted. I’ve tried to think of what I should say as a final post on…
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CFM 9/22-9/28 (D&C 106-108): Poetry for “The Order of the Son of God”
Like it or not, our lives are built of structures. We organize our days according to everything from natural events, like the rising and setting of the sun and our own biological rhythms, to the hours of the clock that our society has assigned to the day, to the needs we have to coordinate with…
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The First Three: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor
I want to continue discussing the issue of prophets and administrators by giving a quick overview of some observations of the church’s first three presidents, and will talk about later presidents in future posts.
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CFM 9/15-9/21 (D&C 102-105): Poetry for “After Much Tribulation … Cometh the Blessing”
I noticed this time through the Doctrine and Covenants how the idea of trials is a major theme of this book of scripture. And the sections in this week’s lesson are during one of the most challenging periods of trials in early church history, the first round of persecution in Missouri and the subsequent travel…
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Prophets and Administrators
So I want to continue to put up some posts on some thoughts I have on church leadership. In my last post, I proposed my idea of a caretaker model of our church leadership. I see our hierarchy as an inspired bureaucracy, a very good thing, but different that all or most policies being dictated…
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Monogamy is the Rule, Part 6: Clarifications and Recap
From the comments to this series, Monogamy is the Rule, I have noticed a few points that need clarification. I welcome discussion, and feel like it’s worthwhile to respond to some of those comments in a full post form. Doing so also sets the stage for future posts in the series.
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Was Joseph Smith an Ephebophile? No.
One of those occasional words thrown about in Joseph Smith-critical discourse is that Joseph Smith was a pedophile or, if they are trying to be fancy, a ephebophile or hebephile, so I thought it was worth going into detail about the literature on these terms and what they actually are. Pedophilia is an attraction to…
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CFM 9/1-9/7: Poetry for “For the Salvation of Zion” (D&C 94-97)
We focus on the temple, and we have from the beginning of the Church. The temple plays a crucial role in our theology, but also a role that demonstrates tensions between principles. While the ordinances of the temple are done individually, those ordinances are often performed in groups, and the purpose of these ordinances generally…
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Nazis and Latter-day Saints
I’ve seen that the Church sometimes gets a bad reputation for how it navigated Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. One thing that tends to get overlooked, however, was the amount of pressure the Church felt from the Nazi regime. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Stephen O. Smoot discussed…
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CFM 8/25-8/31: Poetry for “Receive of His Fulness”
What do we mean when we talk about ‘Fulness’? The Come Follow Me lesson for this week, covering D&C 93, suggests that it’s related to exaltation—but I’m not sure that we know exactly what exaltation is either. ‘Fulness’ suggests some kind of completeness or satiation—we will have everything we need, and maybe everything we should…
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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, a Review
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, edited by R. Gordon Shepherd, A. Gary Shepherd, and Ryan T. Cragun, is a landmark anthology that shifts the center of gravity in Latter-day Saint scholarship from a nineteenth-century, Utah-centric narrative to a nuanced, data-rich exploration of Mormonism as a global religious tradition. With 31 chapters contributed by 42…
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A Differing View of Church Leadership: A “Caretaker” Model
I mentioned in some comments in previous posts about having a different view of church leadership that I called a “caretaker model,” or seeing the leaders more as caretakers of Joseph Smith’s program and revelations. There’s a lot to this, so I thought I’d give a little overview of bullet points, and perhaps I’ll blog…
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CFM 8/18-8/24: Poetry for “A Principle with Promise”
Most of the time when we hear the phrase “A Principle with Promise,” we think of D&C Section 89 and the promise that we can “run and not be weary.” However, some kind of promise is associated with every gospel principle—there is at least one consequence that accompanies every principle, and the accompanying consequences follow…
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Gold-Star Converts and the Parable of the Wedding Feast
On our missions a lot of us gave lessons to some professor or such and were excited at the prospect of a well-thought out, high powered intellectual convert. And we’re not the only ones, I suspect Catholics love to talk about John Henry Newman for this reason. The idea, especially for them, is that you…
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Canonization, Part 3: Reasons to Avoid Canonization
Returning to the series I was working on earlier this year about canonization, I wanted to discuss why it sometimes isn’t the best idea to canonize documents. Part 1 of the series discussed the process by which canonization occurs in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while Part 2 discussed some documents that…
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CFM 8/11-8/17: Poetry for “Establish … a House of God”
Perhaps the most memorable verse in D&C 88 is 119, which establishes the ‘School of the Prophets’ and encourages our cultural orientation towards education: “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory,…
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Plausibility Structures, Intellectuals, and the Church’s Truth Claims
Since I was young an impromptu thought experiment has intermittently popped up in the back of my head that’s made me think deeply about the nature of (my) modern faith. Assume that the Church was not restored in 1830, we don’t know anything about the Book of Mormon, and in 2025 somebody knocks on your…
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Trailer for the Movie ETERNITY
Has anyone else seen the trailer for this movie? Couple Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen die and go to the afterlife and then have a problem when Olsen ALSO meets the husband who died before she married Teller. Quite the Mormon sounding dilemma! Who would have thought this Mormon conundrum was good fodder for a…
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10 Thoughts on Dietrich Bonhöffer’s Discipleship
If you’re interested in quotable mid-century Protestant theologians, Dietrich Bonhöffer may be more directly relevant for us today than C.S. Lewis. Bonhöffer’s 1937 book, Nachfolge, is best known for its discussion of “cheap grace,” but there’s a lot more going on.
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Differing from Church Leaders: A Personal Experience
In this post at the Juvenile Instructor, I shared some of the spiritual prompting I felt I had in grad school, but a really big one was the persistent prompting I felt to vote no on Proposition 8 in 2007. Throughout that year, 2007, I had this nagging spiritual feeling: “You need to understand the…
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CFM 8/4-8/10: Poetry for “Stand Ye in Holy Places”
What are ‘Holy Places’? What makes them holy? Are there different kinds of ‘Holy Places’? Has our understanding of ‘Holy Places’ changed over time? I suspect that most LDS Church members think of the Temple when we think of a holy place, but when pushed we might agree that the Sacred Grove is also a…
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Other Impulses: Intuition, Imagination, Deception, Mental Illness, Who Knows?
“Ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally … doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving, that ye may not be seduced by evil spirits, or doctrines of devils, or the commandments of men; for some are of men, and others of devils.” (DC 46:7).