Over at BCC, John S. has a post that is, overall, not very helpful.
Why I am Not An Intellectual
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 large part because my own journey started tracking his. The big difference, of course, is that as an orthodox Latter-day Saint I do believe in what he would call the “writing in the sky” of absolute truth, but like him I believed that the wisdom of the ages had something to contribute to this grand understanding of capital T Truth, but also like him I later realized that it actually doesn’t do that as much as it claims to. I do intellectual things. I read a lot, I go to a local book club, I enjoy discussions, but as an identity and a structure for life intellectualism is pretty hollow. During my halcyon undergraduate days my educational philosophy was summed up in the Brigham Young quote (which I still love) “if an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy,…
Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part V: Population Genetics
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 sexual enslavement of Irish women by Viking raiders or the remote San people of South Africa being cut off from the rest of humanity for 100,000 years, these stories of our fathers and mothers are still recorded in our genes. So what does this have to do with the gospel? The most obvious issue is the Book of Mormon genetics question. In terms of apologetics, I feel like this issue is a draw; if you want it to be an issue it’s an issue, if you don’t want it to be an issue it’s not an issue. The first classical Book of Mormon genetics discussion revolved around mitochondrial DNA. This is a kind of DNA that everybody inherits from their mother. Consequently, by measuring how often DNA mutates we can come up with a clock for how related you are…
Important Documents from Latter-day Saint History
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 try to present in approximate chronological order and break it up into four broad eras, roughly following the time periods covered by each volume of the Saints history series. Period 1: Up to 1846 1832 Joseph Smith’s History The earliest effort on Joseph Smith’s part to write down a history, it is the account closest to the events of the First Vision and the visit of the angel to introduce the Book of Mormon Lectures on Faith These were lectures that covered a lot of basic doctrines of the Church prepared in Kirtland and published as the “doctrine” section of the Doctrine and Covenants until the 1920s, when they were phased out (at least partly due to a more trinitarian description of God) 1835, Oliver Cowdery’s Charge to the Twelve This has the account of what Oliver Cowdery told the…
The Church’s Position on Sexuality
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 same-sex marriage are related, albeit ultimately distinct. from the theological arguments surrounding same-sex sealings. However, since a lot of treatments of the subject touch on issues germane to both there is some political mixed in the batch too, but that’s not the primary intent. A note on the comments: yes, I’m aware that for many people literally any argument defending the Church’s position is arbitrary and capricious. I don’t have a ton of time to puppy guard the comments, so while I’ll keep them open I’m not going to be a super active presence there. Cassler, Valerie H. “Plato’s Son, Augustine’s Heir: ‘A Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology’?” SquareTwo 5(2): 2012. https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerPlatosSon.html Dyer, W. Justin. “Shifting Views on the Male-Female Relationship: Same-Sex Marriage and Other Social Consequences.” Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel 18, no. 2 (2017): 31-51. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1791&context=re …
Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part IV: Quantum Mechanics
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 half of his life trying to prove it false). If you said that particles behave this way back before we had evidence for it people would have thought you were nuts which, a priori, should make us more humble about the possibilities in the universe. One of the less sophisticated “atheist bro” arguments points out that our every day life works according to some principle, and some religious belief violates that principle (“how can Mary get pregnant as a virgin? Check mate!”), when on a meta level quantum mechanics teaches us that our everyday operating principles are most certainly not accurate guides for peeling back layers of reality. If quantum mechanics reveals a counterintuitive reality we can measure, how much more counterintive can layers of reality be that we can’t measure? (And yes, I know that quantum mechanics is a…
Let’s Talk about the Book of Abraham–a Review
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 written from an overtly faithful perspective and is apologetic in its orientation. It is a good, fast-paced introduction for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the ongoing discussion of this controversial entry in the Pearl of Great Price. The book is divided into three sections. The first explores the history of the Book of Abraham, looking at Abraham, the papyrus scrolls that Joseph Smith would later purchase, the translation project, and eventual publication of the book. The second section explores a series of questions about the Book of Abraham, including questions about the process of translating the Book of Abraham, the facsimiles and explanations offered in the published Book of Abraham, and historical evidences that align with the contents of the Book of Abraham. The final section is small (less than 10 pages) and briefly…
Latter-day Saints for Life
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 (there is a “Secular Pro-Life” group that has a presence every year at the march; a non-religious version of me, of course, would have probably spent that weekend eating pizza and playing video games). I suspect there are both religious-community and political-community facing reasons for combining the two. We want both of those communities to know that we can be X and a Latter-day Saint. For some, I suspect that there is also a desire to draw attention to a particular strand of Latter-day Saint thought that comports with that political/social position. The Hari Krishna temple in Springville, Utah is a fascinating example of this. They do not proselytize about becoming Krishna (not that I would find it unwelcome if they did), but they do have materials about how good Latter-day Saints should refrain from eating meat (and they’ve certainly…
My Top Religious Themed Movies, Ranked
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, do let me know. They are rank ordered with favorite=1. 1. Son of Saul Academy award-winner for best foreign film in 2015. A Jewish concentration camp prisoner forced to help dispose of gas chamber bodies comes across the corpse of his son and tries to find a rabbi to say Kaddish. The cinematography is experimental (the camera focuses on his face the whole time), which creepingly makes the graphic horrors of the camp happening at the edges seem like a sideshow. Definitely not for kids, but a very powerful depiction of earnest, concrete faith. 2. A Hidden Life Terrence Malik is controversial (aesthetically, not socially/politically), but I like his work. A Hidden Life is the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a (now beautified) Austrian Catholic living in the Alps who was executed for refusing to fight for the Nazis. The cinematography, music,…
Sextuple Endowment Rooms: What Does it Mean?
“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 counterpart [in Provo], represent a paradigmatic shift in the way Mormons conceived and interpreted the temple, transitioning from a sacred abode to a sacred machine.”[1] While the Ogden and Provo temples have an important place in history, it should not be assumed that they represent a worldview change in Latter-day Saint temple doctrine. The shift that Cornell and Huffaker are referencing is the streamlined organization of the buildings that allowed them to house six endowment rooms, which allowed an endowment session to begin every twenty minutes in each temple, while older temples usually were only able to begin a session every hour at best. Temple architect Emil Fetzer was commissioned to design a temple that was economical and functional that “the membership can use to do efficient temple work.”[2] Fetzer described the experience of creating the interior design that was…
Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part III: The Creation of Life
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 social alliance between people who are skeptical that chance could have led to the first cell and people who want to put disclaimers on biology textbooks teaching evolution, there is more of a visceral reaction to “design” among biologists than there is to “fine tuning” among physicists. (Indeed, before he passed away the great physicist Steven Weinberg admitted that the only options left for explaining fine tuning was God or a multiverse). And that makes sense, the “intelligent design” people are professional adversaries of the evolutionary biology and biology education discipline in ways that the fine tuners just aren’t for professional physicists. So to just be clear, I don’t think intelligent design should be taught in schools. If anything my “design” based realization that afternoon at the Riverside Country Club probably would have been muddied had it been immediately framed…
Does This Design Offend You?
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 Weber County, Utah for a significant portion of my life, so in many ways, the Ogden Temple is my temple. Yet, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the temple itself—the space-age appearance I grew up with was unique, but not terribly attractive. At the same time, I found it a bit sad that the Church felt the need to change its appearance so drastically a few years ago and that we will soon see, as President Nelson announced in general conference, the “reconstruction of the Provo Utah Temple.”[2] I’m caught between the side of me that has a strong preservationist urge (as discussed last spring with the pioneer temple murals) and the side of me that has an appreciation for the aesthetically pleasing update to the Ogden Temple. I’m not alone in being caught in the crossfire of torn feelings…
Why Latter-day Saints (Or Anyone Else) Should Not Feel Bad about Having Kids on Government Assistance
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 an anonymous donor who left the message “love one another”). Even though we were in a low income area of West Philadelphia, and a lot of people were on government assistance, we still got the awkward stares when the cashier tried to figure out our WIC checks while the line stacked up behind us. (Thankfully I still had some of the “ignore the awkward stares” calluses left over from my mission.) For us the decision to have children was not really affected by whether or not they would require government assistance, but we ran into our fair share of people who were torn over the dilemma of whether to have children that they could not afford. In our particular circles, the people who had an issue with having kids on government assistance fell into two groups: the first were “bro”…
Translating the Kinderhook Plates
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: Mark Ashurst-McGee: It was in early 1843 that Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormon Christianity, translated a portion of the Kinderhook plates. These six small plates of brass—each covered on both sides with mysterious inscriptions—have become known as the “Kinderhook plates” because they were extracted from an Indian burial mound near the small village of Kinderhook in western Illinois. Kinderhook was about seventy miles downriver from Nauvoo, then the center of gathering for the Latter-day Saints. Over the years since the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, Joseph Smith had become widely known for his claim to have been led by a heavenly messenger to an ancient record inscribed on a set of gold plates, buried in a hill in western New York, and to have translated the record by means of a spiritual gift from God. Given…
The Contradictory Commands, Part 3: A Tale of Two Records
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, I will discuss a less popular, but scholastically important idea articulated through higher criticism of the Bible. Modern Biblical studies have opened the doors into a deeper understanding of the context and conditions in which the Bible was written. Some of these insights have bearing upon the question of the contradictory commands given to Adam and Eve. Admittedly, some propositions of modern scholars are challenging for Latter-day Saints because they challenge assumptions about both the Bible and Joseph Smith’s translation. David Bokovoy does a good job of addressing those concerns in his work Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis—Deuteronomy, but there is still a lot of room for differing interpretations and beliefs on the issue. Many Biblical scholars have come to believe that the Torah or Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) do not represent a single, monolithic production by…
What Happens If All the Apostles Pass Away?
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 with their nuclear missiles in case the UK government is destroyed. The hierarchy of the Church is structured around the doctrine that the top fifteen men in the Church have the same office as Christ’s original apostles, and that they are ordained to that position by other apostles, eventually stretching back to Jesus Christ through the laying on of hands. But what would happen if all fifteen pass away at the same time? The lack of a clear, legal successor might lead to a post-Joseph Smith martyrdom situation, with various splinter groups and claimants. Institutionally it seems the most likely scenario would be that the Presidents of the 70s would become the new governing body of the Church (assuming they were not affected by the catastrophe). D&C 107:26 could be interpreted as meaning that, just as the Quorum of the…
Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part II: Consciousness and the Soul
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 that consciousness arises from chemistry in the brain. However, a substantial minority hold that things we associate with consciousness such as internal experience and feeling fundamentally cannot arise from atoms and molecules interacting with each other. While our computers are becoming more human-like in terms of processing and even in terms of intuition with neural networks and other AI algorithms, they would argue that our computers are not getting any closer to “feeling” anything or self-awareness. One of the most famous thought experiments making this point is called “Mary’s Room.” Mary is a neuroscientist who has lived in a black and white room for her whole life, during which she has spent all her time studying the technical characteristics of the color red. Despite her lifetime of learning, once the door is open and she sees red for the first…
The Contradictory Commands, Part 2: The Higher Law
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 the command to not partake of the forbidden fruit was a lesser commandment compared to the command to multiply and fill the earth. In some versions of this theory, the command to not partake of the fruit was more a warning than a command. In other versions, the choice to partake of the fruit was still a choice to violate a commandment, but one that was done to obey a more important commandment. Most Church leaders who have articulated these positions maintain that partaking of the fruit was not a sin per se, but a transgression or lesser infraction in some way. As stated, one approach to the two contradictory commandments is to hold that they were indeed contradictory commandments from God, but Eve and Adam chose to follow the command that was more important. Elder John Widtsoe expressed this…
Reproductive Trends in the Church and General Authority Family Size
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 lifecourse decisions of orthodox members, so I was curious about the extent to which their family sizes tracked the changes in society across time. Some caveats: I inputted this data about six years ago, plus the site I was using doesn’t appear super up-to-date, so there may have been recent changes in patterns that aren’t going to get picked up. At the time, there were 416 General Authorities on that website, with 14 missing number of children information (which I know I could dig up if I put in enough effort, but for now the 416 should be sufficient), so this provides a reasonably comprehensive sense of overall trends. The first graph shows overall trend across the whole history of the Church (excluding the pre-polygamy General Authorities). Because of the highly fertile outliers, the Y-axis is stretched out and it is…
The Contradictory Commands, Part 1: Isn’t It About … Time?
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 2:23). There was no death.”[1] Yet the very next paragraph taught that: “God commanded them to have children. He said, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth…’ (Moses 2:28). God told them they could freely eat of every tree in the garden except one, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Of that tree God said, ‘In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’ (Moses 3:17).”[2] I did my best to explain these ideas, and one of the people in the class pointed out that these two things seem to contradict one another—In the garden, they couldn’t have children. God commanded them to have children but also commanded them to not do the thing that would allow them to have children—partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I didn’t have…
The Gospel and Cutting Edge Science, Part I: The Other Children of God
“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 successor to the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. It’s a pretty big deal; in a few months we’ll be able to peer almost to the moment of creation itself (plus we’ll get some killer “worlds without end” shots). Because of recent events I’ve been lately thinking about big, existential questions that are still amenable to scientific testing, and the likelihood that neighboring solar systems harbor life is one such question. My personal interpretation is that cosmological research has a part to play in D&C 121:30-31, which prophesies that big picture questions are going to be answered in the last dispensation. Unlike most other Christian faiths, extraterrestrial life was built into our fundamental cosmology almost from the beginning; it’s not the domain of speculative theologians trying to weld the concept onto frameworks that weren’t built with them in mind. (A very-informed-about-the-Church…
“As we commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ”
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 He will someday return to earth. ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’ (Isaiah 40:5). He will rule as King of Kings and reign as Lord of Lords, and every knee shall bend and every tongue shall speak in worship before Him.”[2] Asides from some nice references to the Biblical texts behind George Frideric Handel and Charles Jennens’s Messiah (which President Gordon B. Hinckley was fond of quoting), this paragraph is brought up in the “Come, Follow Me” manual because it addresses the Second Coming of Jesus Christ: “Christmas is a time both to look back on the day Jesus Christ was born and to look forward to the day He will come again. … It might … be interesting to read, sing, or listen to Christmas hymns that teach about…
Polygamy and “Extra Women”
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 overland database was very recently merged into the Church History Biographical Database, so the code is already out of date). I then calculated percent female of adults for each cohort. In the aggregate it looks like post-Utah War (with one outlier year) there are slightly more women among those who are 18+ and for whom we have a solid year of migration. A few surprises: I thought that female converts might decline relative to men after the Church went public with polygamy, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. Matter of fact, the number of women relative to men increased after the Church “came out of the closet” as polygamist. Obviously then, to stop the hemorrhaging of women the Church needs to reinstate polygamy (relax ProgMos, I’m kidding). However, men are overrepresented among those with an unknown age. While…
Peace and Zion
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 excerpts and discussion), but feel free to hop on over to read the full interview here. Mason and Pulsipher explained the purpose of the book as follows: In a world increasingly filled with contention and violence, most Latter-day Saints don’t realize that our Restoration scriptures contain rich resources for transforming conflict and achieving peace…. More than anything, we hope to initiate a conversation among our fellow Latter-day Saints about principles of peace. But we also believe the Restoration has something important to contribute to a larger conversation that has been going on among other faith traditions, including other Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. We’ve benefited from their remarkable insights, and so we’ve tried to offer unique insights from the Restoration in return. When asked what those insights are, they responded: Too many to enumerate here (thus a book-length treatment was necessary).…