Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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What You Should Talk About in the Foyer (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 7/12
Originally, the meaning of the French word ‘foyer’ was the center or focus of the home, its heart and hearth. While today we define it as the entry of the building, in practice the less-formal and more intimate conversations in the foyer of our buildings feel a bit more like what you would say at…
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CFM 7/20-7/26: Thoughts and Poetry for “Our Eyes Are upon Thee”
The difficult reality of peace is that we often seek it only when we are under threat. This week’s Old Testament lesson emphasizes this idea, observing that at the time of this lesson, Israel was surrounded by three different enemies. But the idea of peace has a very different idea and context in the gospel.…
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Church in Contrast: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 7/5?
Have you ever compared two different Church meetings? Maybe Sunday School lessons in two different wards on the same day? I did yesterday, and the two Sunday School lessons were very different. But I learned something in each case. One lesson was much more to my preference—discussion based, less dogmatic, exploring. The other was more…
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CFM 7/13-7/19: Thoughts and Poetry for “He Trusted in the Lord God of Israel”
We talk a lot about faith in our classes and sermons. It’s not hard to see why—faith is at once one of the crucial elements of our spiritual lives and one of the most difficult elements to practice. Add to that it’s tendency to conflict with “common sense” (which is in reality simply our understanding…
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Simplifying in Church: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/28?
Often today we are urged to simplify things. We boil down our tasks or our conceptions to the essential, to the “elevator pitch” —something that can be explained in a few words. There’s almost an industry teaching us how to make our businesses simpler, our tasks simpler, our lives simpler. But what do we loose…
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CFM 7/6-7/12: Thoughts and Poetry for “There Is a Prophet in Israel”
One difference between LDS practice and almost all other religions is our belief that the leader of our Church is a prophet. While the leaders of other sects may function similarly to how the LDS Church does in terms of leadership, they don’t use the term prophet and adopt the meaning that term carries with…
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“Offer Your Whole Souls” (Gold from the Plates: Greatest Hits Sermons from the Book of Mormon)
Guest post by Mike Winder As a Times and Seasons exclusive, author Mike Winder is sharing a couple chapters of his new book Gold from the Plates: Greatest Hits Sermons from the Book of Mormon, published this summer from Cedar Fort Publishing & Media. Winder took 25 sermons from the book and gives a fresh look at each. Enjoy…
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The Chinese Communist Party, The Dalai Lama, The Church, and Live-and-Let-Live
Latter-day Saint Book Review: Freedom in Exile, The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama is the coolest of the cool for a certain progressive type that pines for an authentically spiritual alternative to what they see as the problems of western organized religion. E.g. Peggy Fletcher-Stack’s public Facebook profile picture is of…
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Seeing Transparently in Church: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/21?
In his 1836 essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously described the “transparent eyeball”, a metaphor for seeing without ego, that is for observing the world without our personal biases and assumptions. He says “… we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity,…
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CFM 6/29-7/5: Thoughts and Poetry for “If the Lord Be God, Follow Him”
“If the Lord be God, follow him” seems obvious, doesn’t it? We assume we have the answers to the questions behind this statement. We assume we know whether the Lord is God or not, and we assume that what we are doing is following the Lord. Yet it’s so easy to be wrong on these…
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From the Archives: Letters to a Mormon Pioneer
Whenever you produce a book, you will inevitably reach a point where you have to edit out something dear to you, but which isn’t going to be as important to someone else or the book as a whole. Sometimes referred to as “kill your darlings,” it’s a difficult process. I faced it while writing A…
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Finding Meaning in Sacrament Meeting: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/14?
Perhaps the only true freedom that we have is the freedom of thought. We can choose how to react and what to think every day of our lives. I remembered the other day that this idea comes from Victor Frankl’s classic work, Man’s Search for Meaning. During the height of the holocaust, while trying to…
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CFM 6/22-6/28: Thoughts and Poetry for “Hear Thou in Heaven Their Prayer”
Prayer is basically communication. We think of it as more than that, but the whole idea of prayer is to talk — specifically to talk to God and through it put ourselves in a state where we can hear Him. The whole point is to make contact and hear what we need to know. We…
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15 Thoughts on The Thing This Week
1—As many people noted, the government really shouldn’t be involved in deciding who is or isn’t a Christian.
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Mimicry or New Religious Hotspot: Jesus-Figures and Joseph Smith-Figures in 1st Century Palestine and 19th-Century New York
A common point made by History Channel New Atheist types is that Jesus was one of many miracle-worker/holy-man types in Palestine, and just happened to hit at the right time with the right circumstances to explode into a global religion. Hanina ben Dosa: Pious Galilean healer around the time of Christ, although reports of him…
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Accepting Others Expression: How Did You Participate in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/7?
If we think about the basic model of communication, the inherent conflict in motivations is obvious. When any speaker tries to communicate an idea to a listener, the speaker is providing information from his/her perspective, while the listener is hearing the information from his/her own perspective. These can easily be in conflict and lead to…
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CFM 6/15-6/21: Thoughts and Poetry for “The Battle Is the Lord’s”
It’s not a fair fight. Thinking about the fight between David and Goliath, author Malcolm Gladwell famously came to the conclusion that it was not a fair fight — because Goliath was the underdog. Goliath only had an advantage, Gladwell claimed, in close fighting. In addition, Goliath may have had a genetic condition that left him…
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Freedom of Reaction: How Did You Participate in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 5/31?
Like it or not, the vast majority of those attending Church have no control over what happens there. We don’t control the speakers, or the music, or who teaches the classes, and certainly not what anyone says. This past week I frequently heard fears about the 5th Sunday lesson on the Constitution — fears that…
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CFM 6/8-6/15: Thoughts and Poetry for “The Lord Looketh on the Heart”
What does it mean exactly to look on the heart? I think we often assume this is about two things—our intentions and how we will be judged. Often the errors we make in life aren’t what we intended to happen, and we then assume that the Lord will excuse us because we weren’t trying to…
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Thoughts on Future Projects
With my Zerah Pulsipher biography being published last week, and my next book manuscript off for some review and feedback, I’m turning my thoughts towards what to work on next. I have no shortage of ideas, but I also want to make sure I’m tapping into things that people are interested in. So, I would…
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Overcoming Inattention: How Did You Participate in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 5/24?
Is inattention a kind of addiction? If we can’t focus on what we want to, is it because we can’t help focusing on something else? Can we substitute an “addiction” to something positive — maybe actually thinking about what’s happening through the lens of the gospel? Addictions are sometimes physical, leading to urges that show…
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CFM 6/1-6/7: Thoughts and Poetry for “My Heart Rejoiceth in the Lord”
What makes the heart rejoice? We might ask ourselves, as a way of checking ourselves, this question. What in life makes us happy? What leads us to celebrate? How much of our celebration comes from the role of God in our lives? I’m afraid that the distractions of every-day life, and the often troubling news…
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Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball
Stephen C.’s most recent research roundup led to some discussion of Michelle Brady Stone’s article in the Journal of Mormon Polygamy (JMP), “Constructing Helen: Absences, Ambiguities, and Adjustments in the Historiography of Helen Mar Kimball.” Whatever status is conferred by peer review, and whatever reservations one might have about the journal, research publications ultimately have…
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History from the Middle: The Enchanted World of the Man Who Baptized Wilford Woodruff
In the winter of 1833, a fierce snowstorm swept through upstate New York. Most farmers hunkered down, but Zerah Pulsipher felt a nagging, inexplicable impression to head north. He didn’t know why, and he certainly didn’t know who he was looking for. He simply felt that there was a grain of “wheat” buried under the…
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Phoning it in: How Did You Participate in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 5/17?
Are you distracted in Church? I look around and often it seems like distraction is a significant problem. If its not kids (yours or someone else’s), its your phone, which might well be called a portable distraction machine — if, like most people, you can’t get through a meal without picking up your phone, why…
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CFM 5/25-5/31: Thoughts and Poetry for “The Lord Raised Up a Deliverer”
Is a deliverer a hero? A hero might be the concept in the popular thinking that is closest to a deliverer, someone who frees us from oppression or danger. In fact, popular culture isn’t satisfied with mere heroes, and moves on to superheroes, characters who are endowed with abilities that make them perpetual heroes, always…
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Salsa Edition: How Did You Participate in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 5/10?
Saturday night I attended a joint performance of the New York Philharmonic along with the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. If you don’t know, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra plays Latin music, mostly salsa. As a result, the concert was not classical music. The concert was all salsa, played to a sold-out 3,500 seat 1920s era movie palace.…
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CFM 5/18-5/24: Thoughts and Poetry for “Be Strong and of a Good Courage”
Trying to find images that go with the poetry I collect for these lessons is often frustrating. It seems like all the images I find in image searches have text written across the image, as if the image itself can’t communicate what needs to be said. In addition, many images consist of hikers or climbers…
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A widow’s mite of chastity
One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic took from me was the chance to see the concerts and performances that my daughters would have had at the end of their freshman and senior years. One of the things I was given in their place was a chance to argue with vaccine skeptics online.
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What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday, 5/3?
Over the past year I have read several parts of Rita Felski’s book, The Limits of Critique, a fascinating look at how the western world has constructed our form of critique. She argues, in part, that we assume that a critical distance is necessary from our subject, and that an adversarial and negative approach is…