Cornucopia, Images, Latter-day Saint Images, Mormon Arts

A Mormon Image: Brothers

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We’ve been teaching our oldest son Peter that he’s a big brother to our younger son Jeremy.  When Peter learned that Joseph Smith also had a big brother, he fell in love with the concept.  Now whenever we go somewhere church-related, he asks, “Will there be a picture of Joseph and Hyrum?” By Robert Gibbons ___ This picture is part of our ongoing series highlighting Mormon images. Comments to the post are welcome; all comments should be respectful. In addition we invite you to submit your own images to the Mormon Image series. Other images in the series can be found here. Rules and instructions, including submissions guidelines, can be found here.

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Bloggernacle+, Cornucopia

The hidden apologetics of Banner of Heaven

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Scott at Bloggernacle Times has been putting on a very impressive Behind the Music retrospective about the old Banner of Heaven blog.  The hair, the women, the trashed hotel rooms — it’s all there, complete with interviews with band members (Brian G. comes clean about the infamous “no brown M&M’s” contract), groupies band aids, and even the occasional critic. In fact, about the only point that Scott seems to have missed so far is the group’s hidden apologetic purpose. What apologetic purpose, you ask?  Only that a widely read book — also widely perceived as hostile towards the church — was google-bombed halfway into oblivion.  Now, curious souls who google “Banner of Heaven” are as likely to read about X-boxes or the speculation train as they are to learn about Mountain Meadows.  Apologetics, meet Web 2.0. And the apologetic stone cut without hands will roll forth virally, until it has overcome the entire Googleverse.  Amen.

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Bloggernacle+

New Mormon Blog at Beliefnet

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Jana Reiss, former T&S guest blogger and author of Mormonism for Dummies, is running a new Mormon blog at Beliefnet: Flunking Sainthood. Put a link in your blogroll (do people still do blogrolls?) and visit often. Having myself previously hosted a Mormon blog at Beliefnet, I have some idea of the challenge the new blog is facing. The problem can be put very simply: (1) few people who aren’t Mormon have much to say about Mormonism, and (2) there aren’t too many Mormons hanging around the Beliefnet site. But it just seems wrong that one of the most popular Internet religion sites doesn’t host a Mormon blog (they host just about everything else), so I’m happy Jana is taking on this project. I hope she is the surprise hit of the year at Beliefnet. As the author of What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide, I’m sure she has a few tricks up her sleeve. You can help by visiting FS on a regular basis and leaving friendly and informative comments.

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Images, Latter-day Saint Images, Mormon Arts

A Mormon Image: Hand in Hand on Temple Square

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Walking hand in hand with my family on Temple Square in April 2009. Taking our one year old daughter for the first time was very special, and as we walked I looked around to ask someone to take our picture. We were alone. As I looked at our shadows, I thought that was a much more powerful image; for me, it invokes the feeling of moving forward and facing the future together. This is my favorite photo from that trip. By Christy D. ___ This picture is part of our ongoing series highlighting Mormon images. Comments to the post are welcome; all comments should be respectful. In addition we invite you to submit your own images to the Mormon Image series. Other images in the series can be found here. Rules and instructions, including submissions guidelines, can be found here.

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General Doctrine

Inoculation Works

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I finally picked up and read a copy of Simon Southerton’s Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (Signature, 2004) a couple of weeks ago. Yet I still attended church last week and have not drafted a resignation letter. Inoculation works. There’s nothing particularly new in the book — it summarizes mainstream academic views about the origins of the native inhabitants of the Americas, reviews more recent DNA evidence that confirms the mainstream view, then critiques mainstream LDS beliefs about the Book of Mormon and the peopling of the Americas. It is not a book that should have stirred up much controversy. That it did suggests we LDS have a problem, but it’s not a DNA problem. Our problem can be described in two words: Correlation and inoculation. Problems With Correlation What is Correlation? It is an organizational unit within the LDS bureaucracy with a staff and a budget. What does it do? It reviews most or all material published by the LDS Church for compliance with whatever guidelines they are (hopefully) given by senior LDS leaders. Lesson 42 of the D&C and Church History manual lists six things that Correlation does: Maintaining purity of doctrine. Emphasizing the importance of the family and the home. Placing all the work of the Church under priesthood direction. Establishing proper relationships among the organizations of the Church. Achieving unity and order in the Church. Ensuring simplicity of Church programs…

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Life in the Church, Parenting, Scriptures

An Unexpected Gift

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At 3:28 this morning we welcomed a new son into the world. As one would expect, congratulations and well-wishes have come flooding in from friends and family all day. And for all of these we have been moved and grateful. First thing this morning, however, we received a congratulatory gift we hadn’t anticipated. Women housed in the Alexandria Detention Center had sent us a hand-crocheted blanket, cap and set of booties. (In Packer yellow-and-green for my Cheese-head wife no less). Both modern and ancient scripture admonish us to serve the “least” of those among us, noting that doing so is akin to serving Christ himself. My wife and I found ourselves touched that, at such a sacred and spiritual time for our family as the birth of our new son, we had been remembered by some gracious women who, by some standard, might consider to be the “least” of those in our society today. Humbled by the act, we resolved to reach back out in some way to those women at the Alexandria Detention Center. Small acts of love are truly contagious.

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SS Lesson - Old Testament

Old Testament Lesson 23 Study Notes: 1 Samuel 18-20, 23-24

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I apologize for the rough status of these study notes. They are not yet finished, but they are as good as they are going to get this week. As you read these chapters, ask yourself why they are included in scripture. Do they testify of Christ? If so, how? Do they serve some other purpose? History is important in its own right, but it isn’t clear why this particular history is important as scripture. How would you explain its importance? Perhaps the answer is “Ultimately this isn’t an important story,” but that ought to be our last conclusion rather than our first, the conclusion we come to only after the others fail. After all, people have found meaning in these passages for millennia. It would be brash, to say the least, to dismiss the collective judgment of millions of people without good reasons for doing so. Though David has been anointed to be king, he does not become king immediately. A great deal happens before he is finally made king. (See the list of events at the end of these study questions.) These chapters are devoted to the events of that time. Do you think that this interval of about 10 years was necessary to David’s development? Was it necessary, instead, for some other reason? Was it, perhaps, unnecessary? Perhaps it happened but didn’t have to happen this way. <em>1 Samuel 18</em> Verses 1- 4: The language used here is…

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Cornucopia

Interreligious — not Irreligious — Diplomacy

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Before I sign off – or am run out of town – I might serve you well by offering a perspective on an extremely interesting conference held last weekend on the USC campus in LA. The conference was titled “Mormon Engagement with World Religions,” and was organized by Randall Paul, founder of the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy, and by Brian Birch, head of the LDS chapter of same Foundation. Randall’s vision of the inter-religious conversation is quite rich and distinctive. He is not interested in diluting or understating doctrines in order to commune lamely on some lowest common denominator of belief; rather, he believes we can get closer to the truth by being frank about our differences and talking together to figure out what they mean. I think he’s right, and this conference went some way toward proving such a proposition. Let me first say that this was a terrific conference, with very interesting and substantial presentations from in 7 sessions over 2 days. Elder Bruce D. Porter gave a clear and bracing keynote address in which he first expounded the expansiveness of LDS thought, its openness to all sources of truth, and then made clear our commitment to the essentials of the Restoration. Finally, he emphasized the interest of LDS in making common cause with other believers against aggressive secular trends in our Western societies. Panels followed that focused on general theological questions, on the current situation, and on…

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Cornucopia

Taking it to the Third Order

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Since my “second-order” questioning elicited little discussion (albeit 200+ responses), let me try to “take it up a notch,” as George Constanza might say (forgive the erudite cultural references).  Herewith, the “third order,” the Meta-Meta Meditation on the problem of politics/morality/religion.  (I gather my guest privileges will expire before we have a chance to go to the Fourth Order, which would start to make me a little nervous anyway, since I don’t know what the Fifth Order might be.)  Anyway, here, from my forthcoming blockbuster, The Responsibility of Reason*, is a fragment of that third-order reflection.  (Is it relevant to LDS concerns?  Only, I suppose, if thinking about the relation between reason and revelation is relevant to us as LDS.  You help me judge):  Reason’s responsibility is a problem because the rule of simple reason is as impossible as it is inevitable. It is impossible because a clear and distinct grasp of the meaning and goodness of human existence eludes our natural powers, if only because we human beings are naturally aware of being part of some larger whole that exceeds our grasp. Thus an answer to the practical question of human purpose cannot be simply separated from the theoretical question of the way things are, of the nature or Being of what is highest or somehow ultimate. As Tocqueville saw with great clarity, human existence, considered personally or collectively, depends on “dogmatic beliefs,” and nothing can prevent beliefs or…

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Cornucopia

Late-night Doctrinal Discussions

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I’m in the final semester of an MBA program at Oregon’s Willamette University. I took a job in California a couple months ago. That means I’ve got a killer commute to class. All that to say that my time for deep, theosophical discourse with my wife is limited to the occasional late-night discussion when we both really should be sleeping. Generally these discussions rehash the well-worn topics that have occupied our philosophical speculations over six years of marriage. This last week, though, I was caught flatfooted by an entirely new and vitally important doctrinal disagreement inspired by Geoff J’s post on cosmetic surgery: how much power do resurrected beings have over their appearance? Lacking any divinely inspired guidance on this matter, we swam deeply in the sea of groundless speculation. My highly nuanced and sophisticated argument was that, hey, if you’re a god, then of course you can make yourself look however you want. I mean, come on, you’re a god! Her subtly devious defense was that Amulek teaches that we will be restored to our “perfect frame”, which implies that each of us has an eternally unchangeable perfect state which we achieve in our resurrected bodies. So I throw the question out to the wisdom of the bloggernacle — am I going to be 5′ 10″ for all eternity? Are those teeth-whitening strips going to come in handy on the other side? And is there a divine Weight Watchers…

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News and Politics

A Peek Inside the Temple

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On May 28, a press conference was held in the South Visitors’ Center on Temple Square to unveil a new public exhibit: a cut-away scale model showing the interior architecture and layout of the Salt Lake Temple. The LDS Newsroom and Deseret News posted detailed stories with additional images; in this post I just want to toss out a few ideas for discussion.

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Cornucopia

LDS & Public Square

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 OK, now that we’ve basically cleared up any confusion surrounding the ontological status of agency and atonement, let me see what you think about something a little more… political. For many years friends and I had considered the possibility of some kind of political-philosophy oriented educational foundation that would try to help religious people, and LDS in particular, to navigate the world of ideas as these concern politics, broadly understood.   What finally got some of us off the dime with this concern was the controversy surrounding the Church’s efforts in favor of Prop 8 in California. Let me first satisfy your curiosity, if you have any, by stating simply that I favored and I favor the proposition, as well as the LDS Church’s efforts on its behalf.  This has been much discussed, and we can discuss it more if you like.  But maybe it will be useful to go back behind (or above, or beneath) this particular issue to some questions about religious convictions in the public square.  Here is what I found in conversations with many young and smart LDS (BYU students and others) during or in the wake of the Prop 8 business:  many were convinced (on religious and/or other grounds) that homosexuality is wrong, that homosexual “marriage” is not a good idea, and that it would be better if homosexual practices were not further encouraged/legitimized.  But a good number, maybe most I talked to, also were very…

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Cornucopia

Life’s Tough When You’re a Girl (or a Boy)

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A girl I know was considering taking a commissioned sales job at a truck stop. She commented to me, “Maybe I’ll wear a tight shirt and a push-up bra. I bet that would help with my sales numbers.” My immediate reaction was, “Don’t sell yourself like that!” I’m told that there is a correlation between a man’s physical height and his achievement in traditional measures of success (fame, fortune, etc.). I’d bet that there’s a similar correlation for women and bust size. So why would I feel comfortable encouraging a man to use his physical traits to advantage in his work, but uncomfortable encouraging a woman to do the same?

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Church History, News and Politics, Social Sciences and Economics

Zion and the Limits of Intellectual Agrarianism

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There is a strand of progressive Mormon thinking that associates Zion with an exaltation of agrarian virtues.  I am thinking here of folks like Hugh Nibley or Arthur Henry King or my friend Russell Arben Fox who argue that small scale, local economies, ideally based in large part on agriculture provide the best possible model for building Zion.  At least one way of understanding this line of thinking is to see it as a kind of Mormonization of agrarian thinkers like Wendell Berry.  It is striking in this regard that Leonard Arrington, whose works on nineteenth-century Mormon communitarianism provide the historical ur-texts for much of this thinking, was trained at North Carolina in a progressive economics department then much under the influence of an earlier generation of Southern agrarian thinkers. I am skeptical.

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Cornucopia

Eye Single

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A dear friend–who is a single, never-married, 40-something, extremely faithful LDS woman–emailed this to a few friends. I share it with her permission, having edited out identifying information:

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SS Lesson - Old Testament
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Though the lesson doesn’t include chapters 12 and 14, the manual recommends them as supplemental reading and I agree. We need to read them to see the full story. There is quite a bit in this section, from the choice of Saul as King, to his usurpation of Samuel’s authority and consequent loss of authority, to the choice of David to replace him, to Saul’s madness, to the story of David slaying Goliath. Rather than try to cover all of that material, these study questions will focus on chapters 9-10, 13, and 16: Saul’s selection and downfall; David’s election. Chapter 9 Verse 2: The phrase “a choice young man” is a hendiadys: “young and tob.” What the word tob means is debatable. Some translate it here as “handsome,” others as “impressive,” others as “good.” The root of tob means “pleasant,” so perhaps the majority of translators assume that the tob means “good-looking” as it is used here, particularly since the final comment of the verse is about physical appearance. (Compare this verse to 1 Samuel 10:23-24.) Why would Saul’s handsomeness be relevant? Verses 5 & 21: What attributes of Saul’s character do we see here? Verse 8: Why is the servant so intent on visiting the seer? According to Tesamura’s The First Book of Samuel (270), at the time a shekel was 11.4 g of silver, slightly more than $6 today, but it is difficult to know what its purchase…

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Cornucopia

A Fortunate Fall and Ontological Agency, cont.

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Thanks for some good suggestions, objections, discussion re. my first post.  Let me try to kick the can down the road just a bit further with a few more reflections: First, the Fortunate Fall  — that the Fall is good news, is extremely well attested in quite authoritative (or at least, to me, impressive) statements by LDS authorities.  To put it simply: to be fallen and then redeemed is better than never to have fallen.  I don’t have my sources here to document this – feel free to help me here if you wish – but I have little doubt of this.  Beyond Eve’s beautiful celebratory statement in Moses, which seems to me without any very close parallel in any other Christian tradition, there are many statements that go further, affirming even that Eve knew perfectly well what she was doing in “transgressing” and that it was all for the best.  Of course there are traces, and perhaps more, of the felix culpa idea before Milton in the Christian tradition.  In Benjamin Britton’s Ceremony of Carols, for example, there is a beautiful text from some middle-English (I think) source celebrating Eve’s partaking of the apple.  But the Augustinian association of the original sin of pride and sexuality as a disorder limit severely the theological development of any such notion.  So it does seem to me that LDS resources are quite distinctive in this respect – thus, for example, the deep…

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News and Politics

Carlos Boozer on Utah

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As one who has turned into something of  Boozer-apologist this past year in the face of attacks on him by some disgruntled Jazz fans, I was buoyed to see an account of a recent Boozer interview yesterday in the Deseret News. When the Miami-area sports station host interviewing Boozer called Utah  “gorgeous” but “a horrible place to live, horrible,” Boozer said: “Nah, it’s not that bad. You know, I’m raising my kids out there. It’s pretty nice.  We have a good time out there with our basketball team, successful of course. That’s the frontcourt of it, the most important thing of it. And it’s a great place to raise your kids. And it is beautiful.” The host kept at it though, asking: “But those Mormon people are crazy, aren’t they? I mean, the Mor…” At which point Boozer, cut in saying:  “Nah, they’re not bad at all. They’re not bad at all. Yeah. Not bad at all.” Here’s hoping Utah is able to keep him (and draft a decent center)… or next season could be a painful one for Jazz fans.

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Cornucopia

Agency and Atonement

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Thanks, Marc for the introduction, and for the opportunity to converse with friends old and new at T & S. Before I annoy (at least some of) you with some political reflections, let me run past you some thoughts on agency and atonement that occurred to me in trying to teach Religion 121 (Book of Mormon Part 1) to BYU students.  I’m not sure I connected with many of themwith these ontological meditations on Second Nephi 2, but I’m hoping somewhere out there in this cyberspace I might find some interested interlocutors.  As I review the question of agency with reference to 2 Nephi 2, I notice three aspects of a rich and distinctive teaching on agency in the Restored Gospel: 1) agency is redeemed 2) agency is bodily & fruitful 3) agency is a principle of reality  1) Agency is Redeemed The Fall is finally good news (22-25) because it opens up the possibility of redemption through the Father’s loving sacrifice of His Son.  The joy that is offered through the Son’s infinite atoning sacrifice is a joy of infinite possibility, the possibility of acting for ourselves and not being acted upon (v. 26) in the meaningful context of eternal life.   In the present mortal probation we exercise our agency most fully by responding to this Sacrifice with our own gift of “a broken heart and contrite spirit” (7), and this free response opens the possibility of freedom on another…

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Cornucopia, Images, Latter-day Saint Images

A Mormon Image: Mormon Helping Hands

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About 800 Members of the Sacramento California Stake and their friends donated more than 2,000 man-hours at the City of Sacramento’s William Land Park, which has seen its finding cut by 60 percent in recent years and its maintenance staff trimmed from 22 to seven employees. Volunteers focused on numerous work projects, including historic trail restoration, power-washing of park amenities, landscape maintenance, specialized gardening, and the cleaning out of the park’s three ponds. The volunteer service in Land Park has an estimated value of more than $70,000. by John S. McKinney ___ This picture is part of our ongoing series highlighting Mormon images. Comments to the post are welcome; all comments should be respectful. In addition we invite you to submit your own images to the Mormon Image series. Other images in the series can be found here. Rules and instructions, including submissions guidelines, can be found here.

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Guest Bloggers

Times & Seasons Welcomes Ralph Hancock

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While Rana Lehr-Lehnardt’s guest run continues, Times & Seasons is happy to introduce our next guest blogger, Ralph Hancock. Ralph is a long-time professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, as well as of numerous edited volumes, articles and chapters.  His forthcoming book, The Responsibility of Reason (Rowman & Littlefield),  addresses the meaning and limits of reason through a triangulation involving de Tocqueville, Heidegger and Strauss.   Ralph has also translated three books (including one with his son Nathaniel) and numerous chapters and articles from French, and has organized and directed more than a dozen scholarly conferences and colloquia concerning philosophical and religious dimensions of public issues. He holds degrees from BYU and from Harvard University. Ralph is also the founder and president of the John Adams Center for The Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs, which aims to resist the  narrowing of the notion of “reason” to the blind expansion of certain purported “rights” and instead encourage the exploration of the philosophical and religious dimensions of public issues so as to enrich individual understanding and public debate.  Just this past weekend, the John Adams Center sponsored an academic symposium in Duck Beach, North Carolina on “Mormons and the Public Square.” As if this was not enough, Ralph recently helped to found the online journal SquareTwo, which focuses on LDS thought concerning the important issues of the world…

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Cornucopia

Reasoning the Doctrines

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The question of the truth of the church didn’t enter my consciousness until I was about twelve years old. That was the age when I started discussing religion with my school friends. I remember a conversation I had with a friend after school. His family was not religious, and he was curious about my beliefs. I started by explaining to him the one doctrine that resonated the most deeply with me — the three degrees of glory. I remember learning about the three kingdoms in Sunday school and thinking, “Wow, this makes a lot of sense. Of course God isn’t just going to assign His children to eternal joy or eternal suffering. We’re a diverse bunch, and it makes sense that there should be a diversity of outcomes for us.” That phrase — “it makes sense that it should be this way” — sums up my reaction to most of the distinctive doctrines of the Restoration. It makes sense to me that there should be eternal progression for the soul beyond this life. It makes sense to me that the commandments are not arbitrary tests, but rather are designed to prepare us to comport with eternal laws. It makes sense to me that God should be our heavenly parents, and that we should be able to become like them. In contrast, most of the doctrines that clash with my sense of rightness in the universe are not doctrines of the…

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