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Lesson 34: Helaman 6-12 Chapter 6 Verse 3: How does the attitude of the members of the Church compare here with Moroni’s attitude? Verse 9: As soon as we read that the Nephites and Lamanites “became exceedingly richâ€? what do we expect to read about soon? Verse 17: Why do they want gain? What does it mean to be lifted up above another? What’s wrong with it? How do we lift ourselves above others? Verse 27: Why is the comparison of the Gadianton robbers to Cain an important one for us? What does it tell us? Verse 30: What does… Read More
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6 responses
Yesterday was our last long beach day before the start of school. As I watched my achingly beautiful children playing in the waves and building sandcastles, I couldn’t help but think about how utterly charmed their lives are (with the exception of having a neurotic and incompetent mother, whose genetic endowment to them will likely result in eyebrows, noses, and thighs that fail to meet the highest aesthetic standards). And of course, because of them, my life is also blessed beyond all reasonable hope. This unnerves me; it is so clear to me that these blessings are bestowed without my… Read More
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32 responses
I think this is now running. It looks like we just plain outgrew MT. I guess all of the earlier time outs were a warning. Apparently, it doesn’t handle particularly well when there are 1000 entries and 20,000 comments (3 MB of entries and 20 MB of comments). I would have preferred to have kept things in MT, having already done a lot of work in that software, but it looks like we hit the limit. There are still some changes to be made. Read More
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A new report finds that 70,000 women per year die in unsafe abortions. It looks to me like that is a data point that should be easy for both sides to spin. For pro-life advocates, it is further proof of the harm caused by abortion. And for pro-choice advocates, it is further proof that women need better access to safe abortion services. Read More
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By now it’s pretty old news, but in case anyone missed it, a tempest in a teapot hit D.C. a few weeks ago. (That’s the Washington Post link, and it’s completely safe for work, thouh the text is a bit sex-oriented in topic). A young female Senate staff assistant named Jessica Cutler (she was a mail opener) was having flings with multiple, multiple men. And she blogged about it. Her blog was apparently meant to be an update on her social life, so her friends could keep up with it. By the time it became public, she had detailed her… Read More
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More than once in my career, I have been told by colleagues that they had me wrong. They had assumed, because of my religion, that I had unkind feelings toward racial minorities. After observing me in various settings, however, they had concluded that their initial assumption was unfair. These moments are always bittersweet. On the one hand, I am pleased to have gained some measure of approval, even if I have not consciously sought it. On the other hand, I wonder how many other people never get past the initial assumption. When I was an undergraduate, a marketing professor told… Read More
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. Read More
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================================ Scheduled: Carol Armga: May 1-14 Patrick Mason: June 12-26 Jonathan Green: July 7-21 Carrie Lundell: August 1-15 Jill Mulvay Derr: End of August ================================ Accepted invitation, no date yet set: Jeremiah John (Adam) (on long-term hold) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Julie) Terryl Givens (Fall) (Jim) Jon Wilson (aka Ebenezer Orthodoxy) (Matt) Aaron Brown (Matt) Richard Oman (Nate) ================================ Invited, awaiting response: Mother of Ebenezer Orthodoxy Rob Daines? ================================ Approved by bloggers, not yet invited: Rob Fergus (post-post-post-election) Brother Haglund Sally Gordon Brent Andrewsen? Sarah Aldo Edwards Gray & Young (12Q?) Kristin Smith Dayley Christine Durham (12Q?) ================================ Invited, not accepted… Read More
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Hi everyone, here’s the scoop — Things are back to _looking_ more or less normal. However, rebuilding is still on the blink (and I’m still not sure why). Comments will eventually show up, but you’ll get a 500 error, until I figure out what’s going on. Read More
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We’ve been very happy to have had Jeff Lindsay as a guest blogger for the past two weeks. His posts were uniformly interesting and informative. Thanks for being a T & S guest blogger, Jeff! (And note that he can still be visited at his blog Mormanity, and it his own Cracked Planet website). Read More
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166 responses
As many of us know, Sheri Dew was selected to give the invocation at the Republican National Convention. The prayer she gave, as transcribed, was rather simple and probably uncontroversial: Heavenly Father, we come before Thee as citizens who care about this nation to express our gratitude for this land of liberty where we have the freedom to live, vote, and worship as we choose. We are grateful for the evidence of Thy hand in the founding of this nation. We are grateful for every man and woman in uniform, and ask Thee to bless them and their families. We… Read More
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Woman Turns Husband’s Remains Into Diamond. Read More
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John Hatch continues his coup over at the liberalmediablog, with an interesting post on whether the church values orthodoxy (right belief) over orthopraxy (right action). John notes: If I don’t show up to help someone in Elder’s Quorum move, no one says a word. If I miss my home teaching, no one calls to chastise me. If I don’t sign up to do a cannery assignment, not a word of disapproval is uttered in my direction. . . . When I mentioned that the Melchizedek Priesthood was probably restored in 1830 and not 1829, two people were so angry I… Read More
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We get a lot of remarks about our wimpy little comment engine. It times out a lot. Sometimes people don’t realize this, and they double post (or triple, or quadruple, etc) a comment. I don’t know a way around this. I had previously thought that it was a result of the site being run by a bunch of lawyers in their spare time, with no real knowledge of programming or coding. However, I now think that it may just be a deeper MT problem. Over at Three Years of Hell, Anthony Rickey explains why MT sometimes tends to go out… Read More
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A question: what “evidences” might actually matter in obtaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon or of the Restoration? Is the issue one that we (the Church, “on the average”) emphasize too much or not enough? Background: Latter-day Saints rightly emphasize the importance of revelation in gaining knowledge and faith about the things of God. This can exasperate some critics, who wish that we would collapse under the weight of their alleged “evidence” that the Church is false and abandon our testimonies. They may attribute our stubborn persistence in the faith as a sign of lemming-like ignorance and self-deception,… Read More
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The 2004 Olympics have come to an end. Melissa and I are not complete Olympic junkies, but we watched and followed closely numerous athletic events, as we do every four years. I’m not much of a sports fan, last competed in an athletic contest when I was in junior high (cross-country: I was pretty good at running away from people), and know very little about most of the events we watch. But the intensity and quality of these men and women, and of what they can make their bodies do, is often compelling. It’s captivating to watch Australian Ian Thorpe’s… Read More
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A number of years ago I participated in a science and religion mail list with a group of scientists who were also Christians. It was there where I came to appreciate the faith of scientists of other religions who are able reconcile their faith (esp. Genesis) with modern science. I think everyone in the group accepted the finding that the earth is old, and so forth, often in ways that were remarkably compatible with what James Talmage taught in his landmark sermon, “The Earth and Man.” BTW, that speech is especially important because, as Michael Ash points out, it appears… Read More
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I speak not of the actual priesthood, but of the hymn. Number 320, set for men’s voices, is (I believe) the only hymn in the current book which is “approved” (i.e., has a notation at the bottom) for singing in rounds. Which we did today, in Sacrament Meeting. Logan Bobo led the first group. He took about a third of the priesthood; I had about two thirds for my group. (The numerical superiority of my contingent didn’t come close to hiding the fact that Logan has, by far, the best male singing voice in the ward.) I thought it sounded… Read More
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Last Sunday, I confirmed our oldest daughter, Megan Elaine Fox, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her baptism, performed by me, had taken place the day before. It went pretty smoothly, aside from the fact that I forgot to bring my white clothes to the church, and had to rush home and back again at the last minute, desperately afraid that the car (whose gas gauge light was flashing “low fuel” the whole time) was going to stall at some intersection, and I would end up running a couple of miles, white pant legs flapping… Read More
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If Bush is a warmonger and Kerry is a flip-flopper, what is an LDS voter to do? Bo Gritz is nowhere to be found, and Cody Judy is out of the question. Alas, it is probably too late for Gordon B. Hinckley to mount a Joseph-Smith style LDS-prophet-for-president campaign. Thus, it’s clear that the only principled thing to do is . . . vote for Jim Faulconer as President! But for those who think that they must remain within the traditional Republican – Democrat dichotomy, there are some interesting goings-on in the political quarters of the bloggernacle. To wit, two… Read More
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I’m back from a couple of weeks during which the internet wasn’t accessible–altogether, a very nice experience. This is the lesson that I will be teaching tomorrow, and I will try to get next week’s lesson out early in the week. Lesson 33: Helaman 1-5 Chapter 1 Verses 7-8: How do we understand a righteous person like Pahoran the elder having a child who was so unrighteous? For what did the Nephites condemn Paanchi to death? Why was his crime so terrible that it deserved death? Read More
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Over at Intellectual Exhibitionist, Ryan Bell comments on a topic that I’ve wondered about on occasion: The Joseph Smith translation is not the official bible of the church. So we still rely on the KJV as the official word. This is exceedingly odd to me– we have one take on the Bible that’s the source of direct revelation to the head of our dispensation, and one that comes from a bunch of medieval scholars, and we go with the latter. Weird, but true. Exceedingly weird. I have over the years heard some potential rationales (many of which have come up… Read More
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By now, most everyone has probably seen the district court decision invalidating the partial-birth abortion ban. It’s no surprise that the judge in that case invalidated the law. The law did not include an exception for cases where the health of the mother was threatened, and was thus (under pretty clear Supreme Court precedent) unconstitutional. There has been some interesting internet commentary about the propriety of the decision. Rob Vischer at the Mirror of Justice comments on Judge Casey’s role, as a Catholic judge, in the case. Vischer suggests that Judge Casey’s findings of fact may be helpful for pro-life… Read More
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Here is the second half of President Smith’s responses to your questions (for part one, click here). We thank him for his participation and extend our best wishes to both him and Southern Virginia University. 7. If the Church offered to take over SVU and turn it into BYU-Virginia, would the trustees go for it? Or does the institution value its independence from the Church and wish to maintain that independence? Read More
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We’ve previously discussed the state of Mormon film, and some of the bloggers have wondered wistfully when we’ll see a Mormon Kieslowski, Korosawa, or even Kubrick come along. Now, over at Let Your Mind Alone, J.D. Payne has expressed a different goal: to become a Mormon Woody Allen (minus the whole yucky Soon-Yi thing, one hopes). He has posted some ideas for a film script on his blog and asked for feedback. Readers with creativity and/or senses of humor may want to look it over. (The rest of us can now get back to work.) Read More
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42 responses
When I was six years old, my best friend’s mother got out some ice cream for me. When I put a spoon in my mouth, I noticed a strange flavor. I looked at the box to see what the flavor was: COFFEE! Panicking, I put my hand over my mouth and immediately ran home to spit it out in a toilet. The poor woman called my mom to see what was wrong. I’m not sure what she said, but thinking about that experience reminds me of just how overboard good Latter-day Saints sometimes go when it comes to the recommendation-turned-commandment… Read More
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We are pleased to present the first half of our 12 Questions for President Rodney Smith of Southern Virginia University (for part two, click here). For more information on President Smith and SVU, click here. 1. What were the driving forces behind the creation of SVU? Truthfully, SVU was created as a matter of inspiration, not to the church or its leaders but to a few very able and faithful members of the church, who saw the need for a university in the LDS tradition in the East. I encourage you to visit campus and you will come to better… Read More
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Over at BCC, John Hatch points out an important new change to the church’s political neutrality statement. The statement has an additional new sentence, and it reads: In addition, members who hold public office should not give the impression they represent the Church as they work for solutions to social problems. John gives a detailed breakdown of some of the recent incidents of church legislators invoking church doctrine to justify legislation, and of the numerous statements issued by the church over the last year repudiating those legislators. This change drives home the point the the political neutrality statement is serious.… Read More
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Davis Bitton, one of the Mormon church’s most prominent historians, has written an essay with the provocative title, “I Don’t Have a Testimony of the History of the Church.” First delivered at the 2004 FAIR Conference, his purpose is to distinguish the gospel, of which he has a testimony, from church history, of which he does not. Meridian Magazine has published the essay here. I don’t find his reasoning persuasive. Read More