Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

One of the most frequently published and regarded most highly LDS poets of the 19th century was Emily Hill Woodmansee, who is best remembered for the poem “As Sisters in Zion,” currently #309 in the hymnal. For us today, like almost all 19th century poetry, her work might seem rather conventional—it’s almost all written in…

Regardless of what we think the ideal Church meeting is like, others are there. While our purpose in going to Church is to worship, we seem to believe that others need to be there. I am not aware of anything that says that we can’t worship by ourselves (and many of our worship practices—prayer, scripture…

“A Marvelous Work and a Wonder” is one of the handful of biblical phrases that our religious tradition has given different meaning from what others understand. Where the phrase in Isaiah is often thought by non-LDS scholars to refer to the confounding of those who think they are wise, the similar language found in the…

Today can be painful. It has been painful for me. How it is painful depends on how you see it. Recently I have been taking classes in graduate school. Many of our discussions in class have focused on various ways of looking at the texts we have studied. During most of the past 50 years,…

What are we building in Church, and why? This past week, in one of the Maxwell Institute’s new podcast series “Faith in Every Footnote”, an idea jumped out at me. Observing that in the humanities, students are often given the tools to be critical—to look carefully at a text or an event, and take it…

What is the source of Salvation? We look, of course, to Christ and his atonement for salvation. But when we try to understand how that salvation works, where do we turn? The lesson covers the words of Isaiah, which we are told will all be fulfilled, but Isaiah is sometimes quite obscure to readers today…

I have often found the idea of praise confusing because of what it says about God. Has He told us that we must praise Him? Why would an all-powerful being need us to praise Him? The idea that we are commanded by God to praise the Lord seems more like the actions of arrogant and…

In the past few years, one of the most influential books I have read is Wayne C. Booth’s masterwork, The Company We Keep, his attempt to look at the role of ethics in literature. Booth is one of the most influential literary thinkers of the last half of the 20th century, and is responsible for…

The fact that the Psalms are poetry is more noticeable than other books of the Bible, where the poetry has been obscured by things like translation and changes in culture. In fact, scholars estimate that one-third to one-half of the Old Testament was originally written as poetry. As a result the Come Follow Me manual…

What is important in our meetings? Immediately, most church members will say the sacrament—which implies that the rest of sacrament meeting is just context. It is true that the sacrament represents the most (or perhaps only) important, or truly great, element of our theology and our practice. But we should probably think about what we…

Often today discussions of the book of Job focus on the dilemma of why bad things happen to good people—a philosophical question that is largely not answerable, at least not without significant difficulty. In contrast this lesson focuses on Job’s enduring trust in God in spite of the many sudden tragedies that have afflicted his…

If you don’t stop and think first, how do you react? Is your “second nature” reacting the way you want?  Do you naturally react well? Or poorly? And what about your habitual reactions to what happens in Church? The term “second nature” is a little misleading, since there isn’t any first nature. “Second nature” comes…

”Judge Not” is a kind of cliché — and often a weapon we wield when someone says something we disagree with, or makes an incorrect judgment. Meanwhile, we hypocritically are judging them for what they said. We usually aren’t too concerned with the judgment itself. In addition, Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible doesn’t help…

From guest blogger Kendall Buchanan One of the most popular bloggers on Substack, Scott Alexander, hosts an annual book review competition and posts submissions from finalists he selects. Alexander’s blog targets “rationalists”—a community predominantly made up of atheists, of which he is indisputably king. Last week’s anonymous finalist reviewed , of all things, the Book of Abraham.…

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…

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…

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…

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…