Category: News and Politics
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Whispering from the dust
As comments go this is a rather belated one, but PA decisions are not up to warp speed either; anyway, the decision is there, timely and adequate. The issue? Some years ago I wrote about the absences in Mormon weddings, zooming in on the visual image of weeping moms at the temple steps. Just picture…
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Bread and Water
In my previous two posts, I discussed questions relating to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Another question my friend asked was: “If you miss the bread do you take the water? … Obviously the best answer for the first is to make sure to take both but what is proper procedure?” I think many…
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Cut Off From the Prophets
One interesting thing about most scripture is the gap between the texts we have the the prophets themselves. The Old Testament was heavily redacted and edited during the Hellenistic period to give us the texts we now have. As Nephi was taught, “when [the scriptures] proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained…
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10 questions with Thomas Alexander
We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring with 10 questions with Thomas Alexander. Thomas Alexander was the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor of Western American History at BYU. Alexander has had an illustrious career teaching at Berkeley, University of Nebraska, University of Utah and more along with 40 years at…
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Battle for the Public Square
While it seems too soon to say the US is moving towards a more fully secular society like most of Europe, the tensions of the recent changes are playing out in interesting ways. The most recent kerfuffle is between the Catholic journal First Things and more traditional conservative outlets like National Review. Much of the…
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10 Questions with Matt Godfrey
We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring. This is 10 questions with Matt Godfrey. Matt Godfrey is the editor of Zion’s Camp: 1834 March of Faith and is also a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. He has a doctorate in American history from Washington State University. Before working…
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Some Abortion Thoughts
Abortion has been in the news of late. Given the polarized times we live in, particularly those of us in the United States, it’s perhaps unsurprising that states are pushing extreme bills. New York’s passed a very liberal law at the beginning of the year making it purely a health care issue. Georgia, Alabama and…
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Updates on the New Hymnbook
It’s been nearly a year since the new core hymnbook was announced. While there have been a few rumors about the book (like a smaller size and getting rid of hymns with problematic copyrights), very little actual news has come up. Recently, however, the Church published an updated set of guidelines for the hymns and…
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An International Church in an Isolationist Age
The most paranoid fantasies your persecution complex can dream up will probably come true eventually, although not where you live, but somewhere else in the world. It’s an unavoidable risk of establishing local branches of the church in places that can go from welcoming to hostile within a few years or decades.
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God and Being
One of the big differences between our faith and traditional Christianity is over the question of Being. Being is one of those weird terms that confuses people studying philosophy. The idea is that “to be” whether within our conscious perception or out in the world has to have an origin. Within our materialist way of…
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Revelation by the rooster
It is a week after Easter now, and surely Petrus (Peter, the English call him, but I prefer his more apostolic sounding Latin name) has come back from his great shock, delivered by the rooster; that early morning crowing did put him back with his feet on the ground: he had showed weak when confronted…
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10 Questions with Quincy Newell
We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring. This is 10 questions with Quincy Newell. Newell is an associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. She’s also the author of Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James from Oxford Press. James has been a focus of…
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On the Honor Code
Let me state my priors on the honor code. I think it’s an important set of rules that really sets BYU apart from most other top universities. Yet simultaneously I worry the honor code office has been poorly run for decades. At least it sure seems that way from many reports I’ve heard over the…
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Don’t Reform the Honor Code
The current round of dissatisfaction with the BYU honor code will hopefully result in some tinkering around the edges and perhaps a few personnel changes, and then quickly be forgotten before it has a chance to undermine the university’s educational and religious missions, which might roughly be summarized as producing graduates who are educated, productive,…
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Easter
I’m not big on religious holidays. I know some look at all the holy days of Catholicism or similar faiths with envy. I don’t. I’m definitely a minimalist when it comes to religious days. Yet since the first day I arrived in Utah it has struck me as odd how minor a day Easter is.…
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Some tips for your obituary
For some time, I’ve been writing obituaries for a secular educational institution (which, for the sake of the failing hearts of its remaining alumni, will remain anonymous).
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When God Changes Address
One of the many striking episodes in the life of the prophet Elijah is his nearly-missed encounter with God atop Mt Sinai. Discouraged by the failure of his prophetic zeal to reform the Israelites, Elijah is instructed by the word of the Lord to go forth and stand on the mountaintop. It is not…
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Church Statistics 2019
Now that the latest Church statistics are out everyone is putting up their analysis.[1] I’ve not written a lot on statistics of late so I thought I’d retouch some of the topics I’ve discussed in the past.[2] The short summary is that missionary effectiveness is up slightly but overall growth is decreasing, partially driven by…
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10 questions with Philip Barlow
We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring. This is 10 questions with Philip Barlow . Barlow is the Associate Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU. He’s written or edited a large number of books including Mormons and the Bible, The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism,…
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Global Mormonism: decentered and decentering
One central question in Mormon Studies, from its inception, is in what measure preaching and practice in the Church is interwoven with American culture. Of course the American stamp on the Church is pervasive and evident, with its origin in upstate New York, its movement westwards with the 19th frontier, its establishment as the Deseret…
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Of early modern English and the Book of Mormon
I don’t think the language usage patterns of the Book of Mormon require the participation of anyone besides Joseph Smith.
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On Early Modern English and the Book of Mormon
In some ways new discoveries about our modern scriptures have become much rarer of late. There was a burst of information and discoveries when I was young but that has definitely tapered off the past decade or so. Recent work that has pushed our knowledge forward includes discoveries about some of the content on the…
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Muslim-Mormon Dialogue at Georgetown: The Perks of Being Peculiar
I know that I am a better Mormon on account of Muslim friends and hope that they will be able to say the same of me.
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Come Follow Me for Individuals and Families: A progress report
We still don’t know what to call our family meeting. “Home church” seems to be winning.
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Interesting times for linguists
These are interesting times for linguists. Church leaders and administrators are working to change names in order to emphasize the correct name of the Church of Jesus Christ, as asked by the First Presidency. A main question is semantic: to what extent will the overuse of Jesus Christ lead to a devaluation of its meaning…
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To Be Childlike or Childish
Innumerable blog posts and not a few books have been written in the last few years about faith crises and doubt as the Church and our Secular Age collide. The Church understands that facts on the ground are changing and that–in order to accomplish eternal objectives–tactics need to shift to accommodate the new reality. The…
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SMPT at U of U next week: “More Nations Than One: Theology, Culture, and Pluralism”
The Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology will hold a conference at the University of Utah, March 14-16, on the theme, “More Nations Than One: Theology, Culture, and Pluralism.” The Book of Mormon presents a highly inclusive vision of God’s love and his work to redeem all humankind, affirming that “the Lord esteemeth all flesh…
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Some Moral Considerations of Wealth and Growth
The chart above estimates the per-capita GDP of the entire world over the last 2,000 years. There are all kinds of problems with estimating GDP over such a long time-horizon, but the only thing that matters for the purposes of this post is the general shape of the graph. At the time of Christ, there…
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On the Church Masonry Essay
As some of you may have seen, the Church recently released two new doctrinal and historical essays. One is on Masonry and the other on Book of Mormon Geography.[1] Both have a prominent “beta” in the upper left so they may be revised over the following months. LDS Living wrote up a bit on the…