Introduction to this series is here. I only prepared three this month in order to leave time for an Easter FHE (one of my favorites is here).
A tool for Conference analysis
While we know that gospel principles are eternal, we must also admit that the language used to describe them changes over time. And now we have a tool for discovering and analyzing how Church leaders have changed their descriptions of the gospel over the past 160 years.
Book Review: God So Loved the World: The Final Days of the Savior’s Life
Eric D. Huntsman, God So Loved the World: The Final Days of the Savior’s Life, Deseret Book, 2011.
Faith, Philosophy, Scripture: Apocalyptic Theology
Imagine I’ve just been made supreme chancellor of a graduate program in Mormon theology. Thousands of students throng. We need a syllabus. What’s our first reading assignment? We’re going to start with Jim Faulconer’s dramatically subtitled essay “Rethinking Theology: The Shadow of the Apocalypse” from Faith, Philosophy, Scripture (Maxwell Institute, 2010). On my reading, Jim’s essay lays out a couple of basic principles for engaging in theology as quasi-academic meta-reflection on Mormonism: 1. Theology should be “apocalyptic.” Apocalypse does not so much refer to the end of the world . . . as it refers to the moment when the nearness of the kingdom of God is revealed to the believer and the believer’s life is oriented by that kingdom rather than by the world. To hear the gospel preached is to experience a type or shadow of the Apocalypse” (110) Our theology must be a figure of the Apocalypse, a theology that reveals God himself, even if only as a figure, rather than revealing only our understanding of him. (113) In an “apocalyptic” theology, the challenge is not to think another world or to think other than the world. It is not to create a Platonic metaphysics. The challenge is to think our being-in-the-world differently, to think it as directed toward God by his self-revelation in the world. (119) 2. Theology should confess its foolishness before God. If our theology is to be apocalyptic, it must demonstrate its foolishness…
Balancing Political Positions with the Church and the Gospel
My earliest memory of conflict over Church decisions came because of a local stake division and boundary changes.I remember my mother venting about how one high councilor in one stake prevented the boundary change from following local political boundaries, which would have, in my mother’s view, give Church members a more unified voice in local politics.
Gospels
Imagine your four favorite meals. Now imagine them cut into bite-sized pieces and combined into one dish.
Parables
The Greek word translated as “parable” means, basically, a comparison. A parable compares one thing with another.
Major League Mormons
Last year was major for Major League Mormons—or at least for one of them. This makes the third year that I have looked at what those of us who follow these Mormons want to know each April, and I’m wondering if I should look at this information more often.
Hypocrites
As every tween knows, a hypocrite is someone who says one thing but does another.
The Mormon Twitternacle
After years of ignoring/making fun of it, I’ve finally gotten into Twitter. It lets me keep up with the people that I’m not close enough to to friend on Facebook. It also has cool feeds for things I’m interested in, but wouldn’t follow otherwise (like the new MESSENGER probe to Mercury and Cassini on Saturn. I love getting updates from our exploratory spacecraft! ). Once I got into it, I started looking for my bloggernacle friends and idols. I discovered (a) that it’s not easy to find people on Twitter, and (b) that in spite of the great Mormon blog presence, I’m not seeing a Mormon Twitter presence. So I’m putting this post up as a “bloggernacle Twitter directory”. If you have a Twitter account and you want to let people know about it, put it in the comments below.
Sharing the Gospel with Human Beings
(These are the notes for the talk I gave in sacrament yesterday.) Amanda When I returned from my mission in Japan, I was fired up about sharing the gospel. I wanted to be an effective member missionary. Back then, us missionaries had these big blue sheets of paper that we would use to plan our weeks. One side had a weekly schedule — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday… The other side had spaces for keeping track of the people you were teaching. On that side of the blue planner, you would keep a record of your progress in teaching each person — which lessons you had taught, whether they had attended church, that sort of thing. I mention these blue planners, because, like I said, when I got home from my mission I wanted to continue sharing the gospel, and I decided it would be a good idea to keep using these blue planners. So each Sunday night I would get together with my brother and sister (who were 10 and 12 years old at the time) and we’d hold these little mission meetings, where we’d talk about people we’d met that week and how we could share the gospel with them. Then we’d keep track of their names on the blue planners, set goals, and head off to share the gospel. At this time I had a friend at UC Davis. We enjoyed attending cultural events at the university together. One…
NT Sunday School Lesson 14: Matthew 18; Luke 10
Matthew 18 Verses 1-4: Why do the disciples ask the question that they pose in verse 1? What does it suggest about their understanding of Jesus’ message? What do you make of the fact that they are arguing about who shall be first so shortly after Jesus has talked about his coming death (Matthew 17:22)? In verse 3, the verb “be converted” translates a Greek verb that means “turn.” To be converted, to repent, is to turn back, to return. In what sense is repentance a return? Christ says that no one can even enter the kingdom (or reign) of heaven without becoming like a child. Then in verse 4 he says that if a person humbles himself and becomes as a child, then he or she is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. A logical conclusion from the two claims (though rhetoric may trump logic here) is that everyone who enters the kingdom of heaven is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. How do you make sense of that conclusion? In Israel and Rome at this time, the child was not a legal person. Children were the property of their parents. Is that relevant to understanding what Jesus meant when he said that we must become as children to take part in the reign of heaven? How is what Jesus says an answer to the disciples’ question? Verses 5-6: Having answered the disciples’ question very briefly, Jesus…
Tribute to Richard Daines: Health, Sugar & Taxes
When I learned that Richard Daines, a fellow New York City Mormon, passed away last month, I knew I wanted to write something about him for several reasons. First, I like writing about Mormons outside of the Wasatch-front bias of Mormon culture. Second, I have my own bias towards New York City, and third, I admire his political achievements.
Measures of Excellence, Gospel Hobbies, and Civilization 3
A “measure of excellence” is a metric of comparison. Measures of excellence are what we use to say that one person is “better” than another. Money is another measure of excellence. In fact, beauty (for women) and money (for men) are the two historically dominant measures of excellence (at least, that’s the case in the history we tell each other today). In ancient times (1991, that is) there was a popular computer game called Civilization. You, the player, guided a civilization from 4000 BC to AD 2020. In the game there were two paths to victory. The first was to destroy all of the other civilizations and become the ruler of the world. This is a typical victory condition in gaming — defeat all your opponents and you win. The second path to victory was to be the first civilization to build a spaceship and colonize another planet. This was pretty innovative — in the combat-dominated gaming ecosystem of the day, Civilization provided the player with a peaceful, “enlightened” alternative. To stretch this into a metaphor about feminism and measures of excellence, the “enlightened” alternative feminine measure of excellence is traditionally intelligence. This advancement allowed smart girls to feel some of the smug superiority that beautiful girls had been enjoying and exploiting for millenia. Now you’ve got a three-faction game where the smart girls could call the beautiful ones shallow, the beautiful girls could continue to ignore the smart ones,…
Faith, Philosophy, Scripture: True Believer
It’s unlikely that I believe the right things about God, Jesus, the gospel, or the Church. It’s even less likely that I could express my beliefs in a coherent and justifiable way. I used to think that, because my ideas were clever, I was at least closer to being right than most. This I took as a consolation. But cleverness isn’t much to live on. God, I think, has been working to pry this cleverness from my cold, dead hands. I have felt God more than once pushing me to echo Meister Eckhart’s deeply orthodox prayer: “I pray to God to rid me of God.” In the midst of such a prayer, the wind stops howling and God bestows a terrifying calm. In this stillness, God gives a precise revelation that bypasses belief and instructs practice. Here, the gospel is given as a certain way of sitting in a chair, a certain way of meeting a child’s eyes, a certain way of kissing a woman’s cheek, a certain way of biting into an apple, a certain way of sheltering a breath, a certain way of reading a book, a certain way of folding a sheet, a certain way of greeting desire or holding, in open hands, a flush of anger. Perhaps it is no suprise, then, that so many Mormon beliefs are so unsettled. As Jim Faulconer notes in Faith, Philosophy, Scripture (Maxwell Institute, 2010), relatively few of what are often described as the…
Applying the Golden Rule Collectively
Christian religions, in general, believe in what is widely known as the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In fact, as I understand it, most belief systems have some version of this idea. It seems to me that it is usually understood individually. But I have to believe that we should also apply it to groups — other countries, other peoples, other races, other sports teams… and other religions.
Tsunami
I am sure that many of you have been following the stunning events in Japan: earthquake, tsunami, meltdown. Our first personal reaction to such events is always concern and sympathy for those swept up in the ongoing human tragedy. The first LDS institutional response, when resources are available, is to forward relief supplies and helping hands to those in need of assistance. But at some later point comes personal and institutional reflection. Is this just the sort of natural tragedy that happens from time to time, or is it a divine sign of the end times? Or both?
NT Sunday School Lesson 13: Matthew 15:21-17:13
There are a number of stories in this reading, and they appear not to be given to us in a haphazard way. There is a natural progression from one to the other: (1) Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter (Matthew 15:21-28). (2) He heals many and multitudes come to him (Matthew 15: 29-31). (3) He not only heals them, he feeds 4,000 (Matthew 15:32-39). (4) Having just given a miraculous sign, he warns the Pharisees and Saducees against sign seeking (Matthew 16:1-4); (5) He tells the disciples to beware the leaven, the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 16:5-12). (6) He asks the disciples who he is and Peter testifies that Jesus is the Christ (Matthew 16:13-20). (7) However, when Jesus tells the disciples that he will be killed and resurrected, Peter denies that teaching and is rebuked (Matthew 16:21-23). (8) Following that rebuke, Jesus teaches the disciples what it means to be a disciple (Matthew 16:24-28). (9) Taking Peter, James, and John as witnesses, Jesus is transfigured, speaks with Moses and Elijah, and the Father testifies of him (Matthew 17:1-9). (10) The disciples ask whether this vision of Elijah was a fulfillment of the prophecy that Elijah will come before the judgment day (Matthew 17:10; cf. Malachi 3:1; 4:25), and Jesus answers that he has already come in the person of John the Baptist (Matthew 17:12), distinguishing between the prophet Elijah and the priesthood calling that has that…
Misunderstanding or Malice?
I came across an interesting reaction to LDS missionaries recently. A letter to the editor of an English-language Thai paper suggested that the presence of LDS missionaries there is an insult: “Why do Mormon missionaries in particular always travel thousands of miles on the ‘mission’ when Mormonism was entirely founded in the United States over a century ago, yet the US is 98 per cent non-Mormon?”
Two Quick Comments
One: A “biblically-based cratering theory”? Aaaaauuuugh!! Two: The phrase “biblically based”. Whenever I meet a person who’s part of a new Christian church (now that I think about it, it’s kind of funny that this happens often enough for me to talk about it), they say that their church is unique because it’s “based on the teachings of the bible” — you know, as opposed to all of those other Christian churches out there, which are apparently using some other set of scriptures. Snark aside, I’m not aware of any mainstream Christian churches that don’t claim to be biblically based, so I’m not sure that calling your church “biblically based” really distinguishes you in any way. That’s all.
“It’s been scientifically proven…”
I remember an argument I had with an acquaintance in high school. I don’t remember the topic anymore (capital punishment? abortion? gay marriage? I’m sure it must have been one of those perennial high school kid debates). A friend had recently told me something that bolstered my side of the argument. I knew the information was correct, because he told me that “it had been scientifically proven.” So I went confidently into the argument, and when the climax came I pulled out my trump card with a, “And it’s a scientifically proven fact!” Yet somehow my opponent failed to see the genius of my argument, responding with, “Yeah? Show me.” Suddenly I was left empty handed and defeated. I’d based my whole argument on my friend’s claim and never sought to understand it myself. Fortunately, however, the debate woke the spark of critical inquiry in me. I learned that authority is useless unless founded on substance. The church equivalent of “it’s been scientifically proven” is “the prophets/scriptures say”. The scriptures say a lot of things, and the combined Journal of Discourses and archive of conference addresses say a lot more. “The scriptures say” is often shorthand for “my seminary teacher told me”. It can also mean, “I’m so confident that what I’m saying is true that I’m sure the scriptures validate it. I may not be able to point at a specific verse or anything, but I’m sure it’s in…
NT Sunday School Lesson 12: John 5-6; Mark 6:30-44; Matthew:14:22-33
As is almost always the case, there is far more here than we can cover in one lesson. These materials will focus on John 5, but I will also include some questions on John 6. John 5 Some have suggested that the gospel of John is partially constructed around seven wondrous works or miracles. (I believe I got this from Art Bassett, but I’m not sure.) With each, Jesus gives a sermon that illustrates the significance of what he has done. The seven are: Turning water into wine at the wedding feast and the discourse on being born again (John 2:1-12; 3:1-21) Raising the nobleman’s son to life and a discourse on Jesus as the living water (John 4:43-51; 4:1-42) Healing the man by the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath and explaining that Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath (John 5:1-14; 5:19-47) Feeding the five thousand and teaching that Jesus is the bread of life (John 6:1-15; 6:22-66) Walking on the sea of Galilee, Jesus comes to Capernaum mysteriously and the discourse on the inability of the Pharisees to understand him (John 6:16-21; 7:14-39) Healing the man born blind and the teaching that Christ is the light of the world (John 9; 8:12-59) Raising Lazarus from the dead and the teaching of the resurrection (John 11; 10:1-18). (Three of the seven are included in the readings for this lesson, one in this chapter and two in the next.) Assuming…
The Original Text of the Book of Mormon IV: Word for Word Control over the Original Text
In this last section, I want to mention the evidence that the original text of the Book of Mormon is a precise English-language text, specified word for word, and that when it was given by means of the instrument to Joseph Smith, he could see that text and he read it off to his scribe.
Why Do We Need So Many Gods?
The idea of a godhead fascinates me. If a god is omnipotent, then why do we need three of them (or more, depending on your interpretation)? Here’s my entirely-speculative take on it. (Now including advice on how to raise your kids, too! I know, I know, it’s hard to find people who are willing to offer unsolicited parenting advice. You can thank me later.) One of the hardest parts of being a parent is figuring out when to be strict and when to be lenient. When your child throws a temper tantrum over something trivial, do you snuggle him and say, “I bet you’re tired and hungry. Here, let me make you some soup and read you a story,” or do you say, “This is unacceptable behavior,” and put him in time out? Kids need both, but we can only do one of them at a time. Over time, our kids develop an expectation of how each parent is likely to react in a given situation. Impressions aren’t especially nuanced, so kids tend to paint their parents with broad strokes, e.g. “My mom is so strict”, even if the mom is in fact pretty even-handed, but tends to err on the side of caution over permissiveness. But what if you were a perfect parent? What if you knew exactly when to indulge and when to challenge? The sad truth is that it wouldn’t matter much. The child would still develop…