Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 2/1
While we claim that Church is worship, I think Church members often talk about Church like it is entertainment. I hear things like “I got bored”, “I didn’t like that talk,” “What they said was wrong,” etc. If you are worshiping God at Church, why do these questions matter? Is the presentation, good or bad,…
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CFM 2/9-2/15: Poetry for “Noah Found Grace in the Eyes of the Lord”
The story of Noah and the flood has often led to difficulties, especially between those who take the story literally and those who see it more metaphorically. For those who are trying to decide between a literal interpretation and a metaphorical interpretation (as if this were a binary question that has to be decided one…
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What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2
Mystery seeking is an essential part of Mormonism’s founding narratives. Part 2 of a three-part series beginning with What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Speculating about the afterlife is integral to who we are as Latter-day Saints. The Church’s proselytizing program puts questions about “our Heavenly Father’s plan” in the center of its…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/25
Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how…
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CFM 2/2-2/8: Poetry for “The Lord Called His People Zion”
For me, this lesson (to be taught February 8th — I work 2 weeks ahead) might be one of the most important lessons of the whole Come Follow Me cycle. The example of Enoch and the idea of Zion, our utopian ideal, lead to important questions about what we do today and how we organize…
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The Church Doesn’t Need Your Panic: A Response to Jonathan Green
Guest post by Morgan Deane. I read Jonathan Green’s post and because the underlying flaws have been repeated at least three times over the past year, I thought it was worth a substantive response, and it was too long for comments. There’s a lot of heat, hyperbole, and moral posturing in his post, but very…
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Ark Steadiers and the Priesthood Ban
So a while back I tossed out the idea of faithful LDS who pushed back on some church policies and proposed the label of “ark steadiers.” I thought about these issues while reading and reflecting on Matthew Harris’s Second Class Saints. The big issue for me was that some members did push back on the…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/18
Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how…
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CFM 1/26-2/1: Poetry for “Teach These Things Freely unto Your Children”
I’m old enough that when thinking about teaching children my mind quickly goes to the wonderful and insightful Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, “Teach Your Children Well”. Most of all, the song points out an often overlooked element of teaching, that we really don’t know and can’t completely understand what our children have gone…
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What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory?
Kendall Buchanan is a Provo business owner with a wife and six kids, and a passion for religious scholarship, especially Mormonism. Visions of Glory is a side-effect of our spiritually vibrant Mormon culture. Part 1 of a three-part series discussing the book and its significance. Ever since Visions of Glory was spotted in a photo…
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17 Thoughts About Resistance
1—To get this out of the way: There was no good answer to the question of how the Church should have responded to Nazism. There was no safe middle ground between complicit engagement, impotent resistance, and needless death. If letting missionaries train the German basketball team had a .01% chance of making war less likely,…
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Conviction Without Conflict: The Power of a Gentle Answer
Guest post by David Metcalfe I recently saw a post on social media of two missionaries in Africa playing soccer with some local teenagers, and under the video were some normal comments like “that’s so cool!”, but then some inevitable, bizarre diatribes about how evil the church is. If you use social media, you’ve…
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How Much of a Testimony is Reason? How Much is Emotion?
If I felt the spirit telling me that there was a Loch Ness Monster, I probably still wouldn’t believe, simply because I’d a priori expect some hard evidence to have shown up by now if a plesiosaur was surviving in the Scottish Highlands. Reason and science provide epistemological boundary markers for religious claims, and I’m…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/11
Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how…
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CFM 1/19-1/25: Poetry for The Fall of Adam and Eve
Few stories in human history have the impact of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. In the traditions of most of the world, the story suggests answers to issues like the existence of evil, the role of men and women, the purpose of life and the nature of God. Of course, the…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/4
Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how…
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CFM 1/12-1/18: Poetry for “In the Beginning God Created the Heaven and the Earth”
Creation is a crucial idea in LDS thought — we have shifted its meaning to suit a different cosmology, and its meaning remains in flux between the implications of our theology and what the rest of humanity understands. In LDS thought, not only is creation about using pre-existing materials (including us!) to create something new…
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Spiritual Experiences Going off the Rails
So I’m thinking about this issue after having watched Netflix’s documentary on Jodi Hildebrandt, “Evil Influencer”: what’s up with Mormons doing criminal and immoral things under the belief they are inspired by God? Such acts, of course, are pretty rare, but at this point it’s feeling a little disconcerting for it to appear that a…
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“As Far as It Is Translated Correctly”: The Bible and the Fulness of the Gospel
There’s been lots of talk about the church granting more allowance additional biblical translations beyond the KJV, but I’m arguing in this post that I don’t think that’s what Joseph Smith meant by the eighth article of faith “as far as it is translated correctly.” JS of course did a revision of the Bible, but…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/28
How did you react to Church yesterday? What did you notice? Did you end up thinking differently? [In case you missed this last week, I was ill and didn’t post.] Do you think your reactions were what they should be? Were they ethical? This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the…
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CFM 1/5-1/11: Poetry for “This Is My Work and My Glory”
I’ve left off any image to represent Gods “work and glory”; since we teach that His work is “to bring to pass the Immortality and Eternal Life of Man,” I am not at all sure how to represent that. Images of what ‘heaven’ looks like all seem to me to be either unlikely or based…
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Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
Now that I’m trying to avoid creating AI depictions of deity I feel like a Muslim. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” is a scholarly endeavor to try to suss out details about Jesus’ life from a naturalistic worldview without any religious priors. Given the extreme scarcity of hard data you have to think deep…
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A Christmas Gift for the Restoration: A Beginner’s Guide to B. H. Roberts
As we settle into the Christmas season, our thoughts often turn to the gifts we can offer our community. In the spirit of the season—and as a small token of appreciation for the vibrant intellectual and spiritual discussions that take place here at Times and Seasons—I want to share a project I’ve been working on:…
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The Restored Gospel, the Great Apostasy, and the Didache
About a year ago I read and wrote a post on 1st Clement, arguably the earliest Christian document outside of the New Testament. I finally got around to reading the Didache, a Christian treatise that is also in the running for oldest authentic Christian document after the apostles (the confidence intervals for the documents coming…
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Beyond the King James Version: The Church’s New Handbook Policy on Bible Translations
Earlier this week, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints updated its General Handbook, most notably in the section regarding Bible translations. For those of us following the conversation at From the Desk—including the interview and copost with Joshua Sears last week—the timing feels serendipitous. For the better part of a century, the cultural…
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Sociology of Religion Terms and the Restored Gospel
Sacred Canopy Coined by sociologist of religion Peter Berger, a Sacred Canopy is a religiously-driven common worldview in a community. Where the very literal protective interdiction of St. Christopher on your daily drive, the daily calls to prayer, or a testimony of the Book of Mormon, are all part of a taken-for-granted worldview that seems…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/14
How did you react to Church yesterday? What did you notice? Did you end up thinking differently? [In case you missed this last week, I was ill and didn’t post.] Do you think your reactions were what they should be? Were they ethical? This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the…
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CFM 12/22-12/28: Poetry for “The Matchless Gift of God’s Divine Son”
One advantage to providing the poetry for these lessons early is that it allows teachers and others a little time to adjust the timing of lessons. For example, this coming week’s lesson in Sunday School should be on the Family (see last week’s post), but given that the coming lesson is on the Sunday before…
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Catholic Integralism and the Constitution
So lately I’ve been noticing some rhetoric on the right that seems at odds with what had been more standard claims to a great devotion to the constitution. I’m probably not as linked into these networks as many others, so I’m curious what additional information T&S readers may know.
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Delighting in bloodshed
The first time I showed clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will while teaching about Nazi Germany, I was not expecting to be overwhelmed by grief and anger and revulsion.