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34 responses
With the recent hullabaloo about Brad Wilcox’s firesides, I have had a few things on my mind, perhaps most intensely around the priesthood and temple ban against individuals of black African ancestry. The short version is this: After studying the evidence, I believe that the ban was not instituted and sustained by God’s will. Now, I’m not trying to pick on Brother Wilcox by bringing this up (he did apologize, etc.), but because of the discussion about his fireside, the topic has been on my mind, and I feel like I need to share my perspective. It should be noted… Read More
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12 responses
There are a variety of “end of the universe” scenarios that physicists currently see as most likely: Heat Death Because of a mysterious energy in the universe (aptly named “dark energy”), the universe’s expansion is speeding up. As things expand they cool down, so the heat contained in the universe will gradually dissipate until there is no light and no heat, just an immense void of cold darkness. This is the current leader for “most likely way the universe will end.” The Big Rip Dark energy accelerates with time, eventually causing space itself to grow so much that objects grow… Read More
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7 responses
“Leadership roulette” (or “bishop roulette”) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader. This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities of lived experiences of the Saints. Now, “leadership roulette” is real, and I don’t mean to dismiss its occasional relevance, but there are also a lot of complaints about the “one size fits all” solutions, when the two are essentially tradeoffs of one another. Tying a… Read More
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13 responses
If the 5-year cycle for Relief Society General Presidencies that has been followed for 20 years holds true, the current Relief Society Presidency is likely to be released at this upcoming general conference. With that in mind, I recently decided to go through and read all of the general conference talks given by members of the current presidency. It was a depressingly short exercise, especially given the quality of materials presented. These talks proved to be very meaningful to me, and after reviewing them, I wish that the full Relief Society General Presidency had been allowed to speak at every… Read More
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32 responses
Over at BCC, John S. has a post that is, overall, not very helpful. Read More
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54 responses
The American philosopher Richard Rorty recollected that when he was a teenager he dreamed of being able to read all the great works in his local library and arrive at some grand synthesis of truth from all the wisdom contained therein (for all truth to be circumscribed into one great whole, as it were). and later in his career he (arguably) became something of an apostate from philosophy as he increasingly challenged its ability to do what it claimed to be able to do. At the risk of being presumptuous, as an undergraduate I fell in love with Rorty in… Read More
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4 responses
Population genetics is an exciting, cutting edge area of research. In the past we had a fairly simplistic picture of our deep history, with humans migrating out of Africa and then sequentially expanding from continent to continent. However, occasional findings of very early human remains, combined with the genetics revolution, paints a completely different picture of turbulent demographic back-and-forths with extinctions, conquests, deportations, and uprooted wanderings. Since writing came on the scene relatively late, most (chronologically speaking) of our history as a species is written down not on paper, but literally in our blood, whether it’s the history of mass… Read More
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18 responses
I’ve always had the idea running in the back of my mind to compile a list of the most important documents across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that are not in the scriptures nor book-length publications. Documents in the list include important summaries of doctrine that capture the thought of an era, documents that outlined and solidified an approach to policy or doctrine in the Church, or which signaled some significant changes. I’m going to take a stab at it here, though no doubt it will fall far short of the goal. Still, I’ll… Read More
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33 responses
I’ve noticed a not-insignificant number of members, both orthodox and heterodox, assume that the Church’s position on human sexuality is a “just because the prophet said so” issue, and aren’t aware of any well thought out defenses of the Church’s (or conservative religion’s in general) position written by non-church leaders, so I’ve gone ahead and thrown together a collection of pieces that speak to the subject that I’m posting here. I’m intending for these sources to speak primarily to theological issues; I recognize that legal same-sex marriage is a whole other can of worms, and that the political arguments vis-a-vis… Read More
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9 responses
Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense. Basically, small particles act differently depending on whether they are being watched, either by a conscious human being or a detector machine (even if the detector is turned on after it has acted). I’m not going to rehash how we know, but the more details you get the more mind blowing it is (Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe has the best easy read description of said details). More and more refined experiments continue to close possible loopholes, so it looks like the crazy is true (despite, among other people, Albert Einstein spending the last… Read More
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5 responses
Kerry Muhlstein’s Let’s Talk about the Book of Abraham Is the latest entry in a series that Deseret Book has been publishing to address controversial or touchy topics in the Church. Based on my experience with Brittany Chapman Nash’s Let’s Talk About Polygamy (the previous volume in this series of books), I had expected something like the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press, with a scholarly discussion of the topic. Muhlstein’s work does indeed follow this pattern, presenting a concise, readable, and informative in discussing the Book of Abraham. Unlike the Very Short Introduction series, though, it is… Read More
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65 responses
My family and I recently participated in the March for Life, the big annual pro-life march in DC, so I’ve been thinking about a variety of things related to that (in no particular order). To what extent should you use your religious affiliation as an adjective for your political identity (or vice-versa)? On the left there are certainly examples of this (Mormons for Marriage, MWEG, etc.), but what are we trying to say when you do this? My wife didn’t want to create the “Latter-day Saints for Life” poster because she would have marched whether she was religious or not… Read More
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29 responses
A well done religious-themed movie can be a powerful spiritual experience. Unfortunately, the movie industry generally either shies away from religious themes (unless to deride them), or they fit in the Christian cinema niche that produces simple starches for the masses. It is hard to find a religious-themed movie that is authentically spiritually touching and has good production value, that’s not sappy but also not cynical. Because of their rarity I’m on a lifelong hunt. I’ve scrounged foreign, domestic, old, and new, and these are the fruits of my labors (in order, so 1= my favorite). If I’ve missed some,… Read More
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6 responses
“In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures,” stated Frank Gehry—an important contemporary architect. One of the more interesting episodes in the treatment of historic Utah structures has been the decision to tear both the Ogden and Provo temples down to their frames and rebuild them with completely new façades. Back in 2010, preservationists Steve Cornell and Kirk Huffaker related this structure to the character or nature of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by stating that: “Architectural preservationists should be up in arms about the planned changes. The Ogden temple with its… Read More
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19 responses
Like most Latter-day Saints, my testimony of the Church is based more on the numinous than the intellectual. However, I still remember the moment when, ruminating on my AP biology class while taking a break during my summer lifeguarding job, I decided that there is no way life could have just spontaneously happened, and that I’d be a believer in something out there even if my Latter-day Saint faith cratered. As I type that last sentence I can hear the shrieking and eye scratching from the Dawkins disciples in the back of my head. Because of the catastrophic political and… Read More
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5 responses
It has been our privilege, as guided by the whisperings of thy Spirit, to build unto thee this temple, which we now present unto thee as another of thy holy houses. … We humbly pray that thou wilt accept this edifice and pour out thy blessings upon it as a house to which thou wilt come and in which thy Spirit will direct all that is done, that it may be acceptable unto thee.[1] Fifty years ago today, the Ogden, Utah Temple was dedicated. Its sister, the Provo, Utah Temple, followed a month later, on February 9. I’ve lived in… Read More
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17 responses
When I was in graduate school with a young family my wife and I went on government assistance. We didn’t have a car so I had to fill our stroller up with groceries every third day. Of course, one particularly cold winter our stroller got a flat and we couldn’t fix it, so I had to go out in face-numbing West Philadelphia weather and run multiple shopping laps back and forth with a backpack so that I could make it back in time for class. Those were tough times (somewhat obviated when we had our rent paid one month by… Read More
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3 responses
The Kinderhook plates provide an interesting incident in Church History that provide an interesting test case for how Joseph Smith approached translation. What are these plates? What can we learn about Joseph Smith from the incident? Well, Mark Ashurst-McGee and Don Bradley recently sat down with Kurt Manwaring for an interview to discuss what they found during their scholarly analysis of the Kinderhook Plates story. What follows here is a co-post, a shorter post with some quotes and discussion, but feel free to hop on over to full interview here. They explained the story of the Kinderhook plates as follows:… Read More
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11 responses
In part 1 of this series discussing the contradictory commands given to Adam and Eve to not partake of the forbidden fruit but to also have children, I discussed the possibility that they would have been resolved in time, but they jumped the gun and listened to Satan rather than God, which is why they were in trouble. In part 2, I discussed the more popular idea that Eve chose to obey a higher law when she ate the fruit and that it wasn’t a sin in the full sense. Today, in the final post to round out this series,… Read More
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16 responses
Many countries have continuity of government plans for what to do if the leadership suddenly dies in some sort of a catastrophe. The United States famously has a “designated survivor” that is in a secure location during the State of the Union so that somebody in the line of succession can be preserved if the Capitol building is destroyed; one of the of the most interesting manifestations of this planning is the fact that each of the four UK nuclear missile submarines has a handwritten letter from the Prime Minister in a safe that has instructions for what to do… Read More
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13 responses
Any reasonably intelligent person can understand the principles involved in the search for extraterrestrial life issue that I addressed in my last science post. However, the issue of consciousness is fundamentally mind-wracking and forces us to question some of our basic intuitions. It can get crazy; with some philosophers going so far as to claim that consciousness itself is an illusion, and others claiming that consciousness is almost everything. Consequently, it’s a little foolhardy to do the issue and its relevance to the gospel justice in one post, but I will try. The standard position of philosophers and neuroscientists is… Read More
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12 responses
Part 1 of this series discussed the contradictory commands given to Adam and Eve to not partake of the forbidden fruit but to also have children, I discussed the possibility that they would have been resolved in time, but they jumped the gun and listened to Satan rather than God, which is why they were in trouble. In this post, I discuss a more popular resolution in the Church to the contradiction centering on the concepts of the Fortunate Fall and that it wasn’t a full-blown sin to partake of the forbidden fruit. The basis of this idea is that… Read More
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7 responses
Years ago I had fantasies of writing a book on the history of Latter-day Saint fertility. That dream has been put on hold, probably until after my kids are out of the house (and there’s more data), but before I realized it wasn’t going to happen in between a day job and a large young family I inputted the number of children each General Authority had in a spreadsheet to look at time trends in General Authority family size. Because of their prominence, General Authority families(whether they want to or not) serve as a sort of archetypal template for the… Read More
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17 responses
One Sunday while I was on my mission, I was asked to teach the Gospel Principles class. The class was very small (just the missionaries and one part member family we’d been teaching), and the subject was the Fall of Adam and Eve. I remember this lesson, because I was explaining conditions in the Garden of Eden and the results of the Fall. The manual summarizes the scriptures and doctrines by stating that: “When Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden, they were not yet mortal. In this state, ‘they would have had no children’ (2 Nephi… Read More
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8 responses
“John saw curious looking beasts in heaven, he saw every creature that was in heaven, all the beasts, fowls, & fish in heaven, actually there, giving glory to God. I suppose John saw beings there, that had been saved from ten thousand times ten thousand earths like this, strange beasts of which we have no conception <all> might be seen in heaven.” -Joseph Smith, 8 April 1843 That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God. -D&C 76 About two days ago the… Read More
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13 responses
Of all the Christmas carols in the English hymnbook, the one with the longest association with the Church’s hymnals is “Joy to the World.”[1] It’s probably fitting, then, that the “Come, Follow Me” materials for this week reference it. The reading material for the week is the document “The Living Christ,” published by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve on 1 January 2000, “as we commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ two millennia ago.” The document covers the mission of Jesus Christ before, during, and after his mortal life. In one section, it states that: “We testify that… Read More
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12 responses
The idea that polygamy helped provide spouses for a surplus of women who had joined the Church is an old one, as is its purported refutation. However, the refutations I read were based on Census data and didn’t seem super rigorous since 1) censuses include children born in the Church, and 2) not everybody in a Utah Census is LDS. To get a clearer picture of converts to the Church, I wrote a program that scraped the helpful Overland Pioneer Database and created a spreadsheet of names, ages, and what year they traveled. (While I’ve posted the code, fortunately/unfortunately the… Read More
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12 responses
For me, one of the most beautiful concepts in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the idea of Zion. Yet, to achieve that ideal, we are going to have to think and act radically differently than we are accustomed to thinking and acting. In a recent interview with Kurt Manwaring, Patrick Mason and David Pulsipher discuss their book, “Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict” and some of what that book covers to help Latter-day Saints think about proclaiming peace to work towards Zion. What follows here is a co-post (a shorter post with… Read More
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18 responses
Official Declaration 1 has some supplementary materials included in the Doctrine and Covenants in the form of three excerpts from different addresses where he explained the reasoning for the change. I’ve often mused on the idea of what would an analogous set of supplementary quotes look like for Official Declaration 2. At one point, I even created my own insert in my scriptures to fill that function. Admittedly, the addition of an introduction to the section in 2013 provides the key information, but I enjoy playing with hypotheticals for updates to the scriptures, so what would I include if I… Read More
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45 responses
One of the stereotypes conservative US members have to deal with is the idea that they click their heels and salute every time the Church makes a political statement, when anybody who’s had deep political discussions with them understands that there are multiple layers of nuances and influences built into their decision making process. Consequently, I can’t say that I was terribly surprised when vaccination rates didn’t seem to jump up in Utah when the Church very explicitly came out in favor of vaccines. However, in the spirit of humbly pointing out something I did not expect, according to a… Read More