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22 responses
I admit that when approaching William Lobdell’s Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace (HarperCollins, 2009), I expected the standard debunking treatment that is so familiar in news and entertainment media these days. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a balanced and engaging narrative that mixes accounts of the stories Lobell covered while a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times with details of his own journey into, then out of, faith. Lobdell’s journey and reporting Lobdell’s journey began in his late twenties, when he first attended the… Read More
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11 responses
Next Friday and Saturday, May 21st and 22nd, John Hamer will be at Miller Eccles in southern California to discuss the history of the Community of Christ. John’s work is fascinating, and if you’re in the area, I’d encourage you to attend one of the two events, either on Friday the 21st in Orange County, or Saturday the 22nd in Los Angeles. The event announcement (with lots of information about why you should attend) is this: Dear Friends: We are pleased to announce the next meeting of the Miller Eccles Group will be on Friday, May 21, 2010 (Villa Park)… Read More
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3 responses
Searchable archives. Free access to the entire vault of past articles. Helpful starting points in a Classics section. No more one-page-at-a-time clicking through the wacky — lovable in a quirky way, but definitely *not* user-friendly — old pdf-image page-by-page e-archives at the U library website. Did I mention, we’re talking about searchable archives and free access to the vault? What are you still doing here? Go check out Dialogue’s new website — or discuss in comments what you like about it best. Take advantage of the free access. (Starting in summer, the most recent two years will be subscription-only, but the… Read More
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18 responses
Photo of Noel Robinson by Todd Glaser My cousin died this week. He was a surfer, Noel Robinson. All the surfing sites have pieces on him (this one is my favorite — what a great picture!), and there’s been a huge response from the surfing community. Noel and I got along well, but we only saw each other rarely. I had no idea that he was a celebrity in his sphere. Now that he’s gone, I really wish I had put in the effort to know him better. ***** I participated with Mormon Helping Hands yesterday. What an amazing gathering.… Read More
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13 responses
A friend of mine came to visit a couple weeks ago, and he had me take the “Color Code” personality test. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. It divides people into red (control-oriented), blue (intimacy-oriented), yellow (socially-oriented), and white (peace-oriented) personalities. There are plenty of tests like this — Myers-Briggs, enneagrams, etc. — that result in classifying the taker into some class or archetype. I think they’re fun, and even useful. They provide frameworks for looking at oneself and one’s relationships. I don’t expect that any of them are The One True Truth, but insofar as they offer guidance and understanding… Read More
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35 responses
What if you knew her and / Found her dead on the ground? / How can you run when you know? Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. Have we learned what we should have from the tragedy? Read More
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7 responses
In honor of my grandfather, who passed away yesterday at the tender age of 93, I thought I’d post a few photographs. He was a kind and generous man who was always upright in his dealings and loved to surround himself with family. He was not a member of the Church (my mother is a convert), but he led a moderate and principled life that will continue to serve as an example to me. His memory will be carried by his children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This last fall, my wife and I were lucky enough to sneak away… Read More
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The notes this time are shorter than usual, for which you may well be grateful. I’ve had much more difficulty thinking of verse-by-verse study questions for these chapters. Judges The translation “judge” is misleading, for it suggests that the person it describes had judgment as his or her primary duty. However, the judges of Israel lived in a time before the powers of government had been separated into anything like legislative, executive, or judicial functions. As a result, “leader” or perhaps even “chief” would be a more accurate translation, for the people that the King James translation calls the judges… Read More
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25 responses
“…wickedness never was happiness.” — Alma 41:10 I’ve only ever heard this phrase from the scriptures used as an encouragement toward righteousness — “if you are wicked, then you won’t be happy, so be righteous!” But reducing the scripture to a causal relationship like “if ( wicked ) then { not happy }” necessarily implies the contrapositive: “if ( happy ) then { not wicked }”. Both of these readings reduce the rich context of the passage to a logical proposition, and these sorts of shallow reductions don’t often translate well to the complexity of real life. Even so, I… Read More
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19 responses
In the course of an interesting email exchange today, I learned that a good friend and I had had similar experiences in trying to track down our priesthood lines of authority. After being ordained Elders, we both asked our fathers if they had copies of their lines of authority, both said they thought they did somewhere, but both ultimately could never come up with them. My friend then approached his uncle, figuring that he might have the same line as my friend’s father, but without success. Fast forward ten years. His uncle randomly found his line of authority and remembered… Read More
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44 responses
This week the presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled the first solar-powered LDS meetinghouse in Farmington, Utah. The building is one of five green prototypes being developed for LDS chapels in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—and the building program will eventually expand across the US and around the world. The official press release cites other environmentally-friendly building innovations in the Farmington facility, including high efficiency heating and cooling system that can interface with the solar power equipment, xeriscaped grounds, plumbing fixtures that cut water use by more than 50 percent, and Low-E Solarban 70 windows… Read More
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Joshua 1 Verse 1: Why is Moses referred to as the Lord’s servant, but Joshua as Moses’ minister, official, or aide? Why not call Joshua Moses’ servant or, even better, the Lord’s servant? Compare Exodus 24:13 and 33:11, as well as Numbers 11:28, but notice that in the latter two, though the King James translation uses the word “servant,” it translates the same word translated “minister” here and in Exodus 24. According to the Word Biblical Commentary, the word translated “minister” refers to someone like a young page who attends a king. Why do these texts always use language that… Read More
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Background Feel free to skip this background discussion if you aren’t interested in it. You can skip to the study questions without losing anything. Before taking up two points, however, let me say that I am not generally in favor of bringing much scholarly discussion into Sunday School lessons or our study for them, I don’t think those discussions have much relevance to our understanding of the Bible as a religious text or our application of its teachings to our lives. Scholarly information and ideas have an important place in our studies and in my experience they can sometimes add… Read More
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4 responses
I’ve asked several of my friends from different religious backgrounds to share the stories of their spiritual paths through life — what they believe, and why. This is the response of my friend Luke. Despite having looked into many religious movements as part of my graduate studies, I find writing about my own spiritual journey remains a challenge. I don’t profess a faith, though I remain sympathetic and responsive to the efforts people make to introduce me to their beliefs and/or attempt to convert me. This suggests a curiosity on my part about things like spirituality, faith, and religion generally.… Read More
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17 responses
Several weeks ago the NPR program This American Life aired a stunning segment on Gordon Gee, the Latter-day Saint President of Ohio State University, and his daughter Rebecca. The segment revolved around a series of letters Gordon’s late wife Elizabeth wrote to their daughter as she was dying of cancer. Rebecca was 16 at the time of her mother’s death, and the letters were to be given to her each year on her birthday for thirteen years. Rebecca, however, gradually drifted from the Church, while the letters from her devout mother focused heavily on the deep yearnings she had for… Read More
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7 responses
I posted this on Civil Religion as an introduction to Earth and environmentalism in Mormon teaching and experience. Thought it might be of interest here, as well. Earth played a prominent role in Joseph Smith’s vision of the cosmos, beginning with the importance of Creation in what we call “the plan of salvation”. The Genesis creation account is central to LDS temple liturgy, and our latter-day scriptures reiterate and elaborate that account in several key theological passages. In Joseph’s understanding, the creation of the earth was collaborative and artisanal: Earth was not created ex nihilo, but organized from existing elements… Read More
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32 responses
Beliefs are complicated and sometimes strangely resistant to facts. I don’t mean religious beliefs in particular, but everyday beliefs about how the world works and how it is that we come to hold them. That’s what I took away from a recent reading of Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (W. W. Norton, 2006). Here’s an example from the chapter on paranormal beliefs. A stage magician performed fake psychic phenomena in front of two groups of university students. One group was told that he was a magician, while the other group was told he… Read More
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22 responses
We T&S bloggers are pretty impersonal. Our posts tell about the kinds of things we think about, but we don’t share much about who we are or what we do. So here’s a bit about me. Read More
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13 responses
[Editors: As the San Diego Union-Tribune takes a look at the current temple renovation, this image seemed fitting.] Early morning at the San Diego Temple (just 1 of over 100 photos I took of the Temple that morning!). Read More
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12 responses
Sunday evening I attended a screening of a preliminary cut of the documentary “The Soul of Kalaupapa.” The film examines the ecumenical legacy of the leper’s colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Kalaupapa was brought to recent prominence by last year’s canonization of Saint Damien of Molokai, the key figure in the community’s history. Fred Woods, a producer of the film and an historian whose research focuses on Kalaupapa, presented the film and followed it with a lecture on the topic. The history of the place is compelling, and heartbreaking. Founded in 1865 on an isolated peninsula of Molokai,… Read More
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39 responses
The text for today’s blog post is brought to you by BYU Speeches, specifically, “Weightier Matters“, by Dallin H. Oaks (does anyone here know if speeches are quoted, underlined, or italicized?). In part of his talk, Elder Oaks discusses diversity in terms of means vs. ends. Specifically, he says, “Since diversity is a condition, a method, or a short-term objective — not an ultimate goal — whenever diversity is urged it is appropriate to ask, “What kind of diversity?” or “Diversity in what circumstance or condition?” or “Diversity in furtherance of what goal?” This is especially important in our policy… Read More
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Who is Balaam? All of a sudden a non-Israelite prophet appears. Who is he? Based on Numbers 23:7, Word Biblical Commentary: Numbers, page 263) suggests that he is a Syrian. Is he really a prophet? If no, why not? If yes, in what sense of the word? (Archaeologists have discovered an inscription mentioning Balaam in a probable temple complex in Transjordan. The inscription comes from the 8th or 7th century BC—Ashley, The Book of Numbers 437.) New Testament writers took Balaam as a negative object lesson. Peter, speaking of those who left the church because of lust, refers to Balaam… Read More
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27 responses
My wife and her friends chat together in the quad while the kids play outside. This last week, one of her friends said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all just buy some land and move out there together?” This kind of sentiment is what I’m all about. We just need some place, some facility, to do it. How about a monastery? I mean, who doesn’t like monasteries? They’re peaceful, worshipful, and beautiful. In fact, I could become a monk. Except that I’m married. And have kids. And am Mormon…and we Mormons don’t have monasteries. But if we did… Read More
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3 responses
Elder Spencer W. Kimball holding a grandchild, circa 1972 (Courtesy of Ed Kimball) Read More
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Besides the chapters of Numbers assigned for this lesson, I also recommend chapters 16, 17, and 20. It is unfortunate that we have no lessons from Leviticus. Though it is not immediately obvious how we should understand those scriptures and apply them to ourselves, the exercise of doing so can be very beneficial. I have depended on study notes prepared by my friend, Art Bassett, several years ago. But I’ve edited and expanded them since then—more than once—so I am no longer sure who wrote what. So I take responsibility for what you see here, though I’m not sure how… Read More
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57 responses
It’s a story we’ve all heard, and it’s still in wide circulation. For instance, from the current YW manual: President Spencer W. Kimball told the following true story: “A few years ago a young couple who lived in northern Utah came to Salt Lake City for their marriage. They did not want to bother with a temple marriage, or perhaps they did not feel worthy. At any rate, they had a civil marriage. After the marriage they got into their automobile and drove north to their home for a wedding reception. On their way home they had an accident, and… Read More
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185 responses
The Church Newsroom’s blog has a link to a post by Michael Otterson, Head of Public Affairs, on the recent social justice issue. Read More
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7 responses
BYU philosophy professor David Paulsen presented a paper titled “‘I’ve a Mother There’: A Historiographical Study of Portrayals of Heavenly Mother in Mormon Discourse” at the recent BYU Studies Symposium. Read More
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12 responses
A friend of mine told a story from when she was a seminary student. As I recall it, one student, let’s call him Eusebius, had had perfect attendance for three years. The attendance policy allowed a fifteen-minute late window. The teacher would shut the door fifteen minutes after class started, and any students who came it after the door was shut weren’t counted in attendance for the day. Eusebius had been prompt to class for the first three years, but during his fourth year he showed up closer and closer to the fifteen-minute mark, until he finally missed it. This… Read More
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108 responses
Currently I serve as the Primary chorister in my ward. (Call it the curse of anyone who can sing and direct music.) The assigned song for March was “Follow the Prophet.” In case you’re not familiar with the song, it was written so that children around the world can mumble through the 400 verses, followed by yelling out the chorus at the top of their lungs. One verse is about Jonah, as in the guy with the great fish problem. It has this line in it: When we really try the Lord won’t let us fail. I had long forgotten… Read More