Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy
Christopher James Blythe. Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-019-7695159. Terrible Revolution traces the central place of apocalypticism in LDS history and belief along multiple axes. Chronologically, the book traces the varieties of apocalypticism from the American religious context of Joseph Smith’s earliest activity through the Church’s Utah period and into the 21st century.
Latter-day Saint homeschooling families living outside the Mormon belt face a conundrum. For the uninitiated, many if not most homeschoolers actually do quite a bit of organized educational activities with other homeschoolers in what are called “homeschool co-ops.” Sometimes this is limited to activities while in other cases one of the parents will volunteer to teach. (So yes, contrary to popular stereotypes, homeschool kids do actually get quite a bit of socialization.) However, again outside of the Mormon Belt it seems that homeschool families basically fall into two camps: purple haired, hippie, atheist types or super religious, often fundamentalist protestant types who don’t want their kids to learn about evolution. (And yes, there are others, but I’m slightly exaggerating for effect here). In some areas there aren’t enough homeschoolers to allow differentiation, and people simply can’t afford to be picky; this was the case when we lived in Texas, and it leads to some fun circumstances where the purple haired atheist kids play with the fundamentalists. However, in places where there is a critical mass of homeschoolers they tend to differentiate. And in these cases the Latter-day Saint families tend to join the secular homeschoolers, because the religious ones often require one of those faith statements that we Latter-day Saints are adept at legalistically parsing to see if we can in fact sign them in good faith. Of course, often the faith statement has some kind of trinitarian, creedal formula,…
When I was 14 c. 1990, my teachers’ quorum instructor was giving a lesson (hard to remember what the particular topic was) when he went into a diatribe about what a horrible injustice the creation of the state of Israel was. I’d never heard anybody say that before, but I’ve come to agree whole heartedly with that adviser. In 1947, the UN under pressure from the US and Soviet Union, passed Resolution 181, giving Israelis 56% of the land of Palestine even though Israelis only owned 7% of Palestine [this number is apparently overly simplistic; see DSC’s maps below] prior to that. There’s no other word for such an act than theft. Religiously motivated theft is even worse, I’d argue.
Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here. Occasionally in Latter-day Saint discourse people that have lost their testimonies of the Church’s truth claims float the idea that perhaps they could salvage their belief in the Church if it was made to be more allegorical and less literal. At the outset we admit our own perspective that, while we respect people’s different beliefs and ways of making the Church work for them, this wouldn’t really work at scale, and that for the Church to actual continuing functioning as a living, breathing, growing faith, and not just a cultural relic of a bygone sociocultural movement of a kind of “descendents of the Mormon pioneers” lineage-based service organization, it has to not only hold to its literal truth claims, but to actively promote and defend them. The Community of Christ, for example, does not have a position on the historicity of the Book of Mormon (or of many historical questions in general). The ambivalence of leadership towards actively promoting literal truth claims is undoubtedly sensed by the membership, who follow suit. (And as an aside, contrary to widespread missionary folklore, they did not “renounce” the Book of Mormon to be accepted by mainstream Protestants.) Of course, how common the…
Sorrell, Sydney A., G. Tyler Lefevor, Samuel J. Skidmore, Rachel M. Golightly, and Kyrstin NL Searle. “Understanding How Religiousness Shapes Perceptions of Compulsive Sexual Behavior.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (2024): 1-16.
Blind leading the blind I’m not saying that religious studies folks are blind to things that matter, I just thought it was a good depiction of the religious studies treadmill in general, and I kind of just like the picture. I have one of those Facebook friends who I’ve only met briefly once in real life (at Sunstone), but with whom I’ve had enough Facebook interactions with that it’s like we know each other in person. I’ve been privy to a tragic trajectory of his career that I’m seeing as becoming all too typical. He enjoys researching and talking about religion, so he bought the “pursue your passion” line that was ubiquitous in our generation, got a PhD in Mormon Studies (more or less, I don’t know the exact degree title) at Claremont (not afraid to say it out loud, they’re one of the worst offenders), and then gradually realized after the umpteenth rejection that, when people make it sound like the Mormon Studies academic job market is “tough,” as if with a little positive thinking and grit you can still get that job, what they should have said is that it is “non-existent.” He has since had to restart his professional life and seek retraining in middle age. Outside of BYU or the Church Office Building, I can only think of a handful of people who are full-time “Mormon Studies” scholars: Deidre Green at Berkeley, Patrick Mason at Utah…
Despite keeping the name-title of the Nephite founder in their royal name, the outsized positive influence of that prophet-king and founder of the Nephites was clearly quickly missed. “The people of Nephi, under the reign of the second king, began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices,” Jacob lamented (Jacob 1:15). They began to be preoccupied with obtaining riches and indulging in immoralities. Realizing that the Jewish immigrants were just a fraction of the People of Nephi helps many more things make sense. After all, the multiple wives and girlfriends of the wicked Nephites were not just Jacob’s grandkids and nieces and nephews sinning with each other.
“Mensaje de paz” by Joel Morales is notable as being the song that was sung when Elder Melvin J. Ballard and then-ambassador J. Reuben Clark, Jr. visited with the Latter-day Saints in Mexico in 1932. Morales is also the author of “La Proclamación” and “Final.”
Temples in the Tops of the Mountains: Sacred Houses of the Lord in Utah by Richard O. Cowan and Clinton D. Christensen (BYU RSC and Deseret Book Company, 2023) helped me solve a long-time mystery about my life. You see, when I was six years old, I went to the Vernal, Utah Temple open house. For some reason, I walked away believing that there was only one temple baptismal font for the whole church that they just moved between temples. I even told my Primary that is what I learned at the open house when they asked me about it. Obviously, that’s not the case—each temple has its own baptismal font (and the book also informed me that there are some temples that will soon have two baptismal fonts)—but I have always wondered what led me to that conclusion.
An Anonymous Account of an Experience with the Honor Code Office at BYU and its Aftermath that was Submitted to T&S as a Guest Post. Surprisingly, after the initial rush of dread the first feeling after seeing the pop-up message on the screen was one of relief. I had been caught, would be reported to the honor code office, and was told to log off immediately. It started very subtly. As a newlywed I had a basic curiosity about this new world of sexuality that I had just entered into, and that was the hook which led to me watching YouTube videos that I should not have been watching. I could typically find a little corner in the BYU computer lab against a wall. At first I tried to find some plausible deniability in what I was typing in the search bar, but as the hunger and risk taking grew there was little of that left. And besides, I had been doing it for a while now, if they were actively monitoring me, surely I would have been caught by now? (Many years later I found myself on BYU campus for the first time in a long time, and noticed that the computer labs had signs warning users that they were being monitored. “Now you tell me,” I thought). We had just moved wards so my initial introduction to my new bishop was a little awkward. (Hi, I’m emailing…
It was a coup (or divine providence) that Nephi and his brothers Jacob and Joseph were able to assert themselves as religious leaders in this new land, spiritually guiding thousands who were already in the Americas. Emerging as the political leaders of this large, mostly non-Jewish People of Nephi was trickier. Nephi’s inspired leadership, however, was a tour de force.
“Sacred Envy” is the well-known idea (at least in Latter-day Saint circles) of having the humility to recognize some positive attributes of other faiths, so I thought I would make my “sacred envy” list. To be clear, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is my faith because I think it is the best and it is what it claims to be, to speak rather bluntly. It’s not my faith because of inertia or because I feel some kind of sociocultural connection. Still, I’m open to recognizing places where other faiths get it right, even if in recognizing these points I’m not necessarily saying that I think we should adapt the same. Buddhism, Jainism, or other religions based around ahimsa or non-violence: While most Western faiths have some history of religious/ethnic entrepreneurs using religion as a justification for violence, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that’s quite rare in faiths based on ahimsa, or non-violence towards living things. If you’re part of a faith that covers your drinking water in a cloth so that you don’t inadvertently hurt insects, or who doesn’t engage in farming because it might hurt some worms, you’re probably not going to be burning people alive in the name of your faith, no matter how creative the exegesis. They simply don’t have the seeds for religious violence in their theology. Of course, combined with other things (e.g. Buddhism in militaristic,…
