I know many think the focus on religious liberty is misplaced. To my eyes it seems we have more religious liberty now than at any time in American history. I recognize not all feel that way although often it is due to the majority religion being constrained in some ways from acting as the de facto religion. But in terms of individuals practicing their religion in general rather than limited practices of the majority in government contexts, we seem to be doing great. Why then the worry of the brethren over religious liberty? Robert Couch sent me a link today that may highlight the problem. It’s Rod Dreher talking about famous Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne giving a paper at the Midwest Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Note that this is a philosophy conference that is supposed to be discussing Christian philosophy. Swinburne is speaking about traditional Christian sexual ethics and arguing for homosexuality being extrinsically wrong.
Maxwell Institute 2017 Summer Seminar Announced
The Maxwell Institute just posted a call for applicants for its next summer seminar. The topic is Mormonism Confronts the World: How the LDS Church has Responded to Developments in Science, Culture, and Religion. The seminar runs June 26 through August 3, 2017. Plenty of time to find a topic and clear out six weeks of your schedule. Anyone with a topic to suggest is free to share it in the comments.
Call to Repentance
It is rather presumptuous to call someone to repentance, don’t you think? The act implies at least two things: that the caller knows better than the called, and that the caller has the authority to issue the call to repent. In a world of increasing moral relativism, many of us are uncomfortable with the idea that one person can or ought to impose his or her standards on another. This discomfort illegitimizes the call for repentance by not only undercutting the moral authority of the caller, but the very standards by which a call may be justified. But the call for repentance has always been a call away from the world. It is a beacon that returns us to the Lord’s standard, a corrective guide. In our church today, we accept that our leaders, especially the prophet and apostles, have the authority to call us (and the rest of the world) to repentance. And in part because of the cultural moral relativism mentioned earlier, many of us are content to leave that responsibility to them. We are happy to support them in making that call, and even echo it ourselves, so long as it is clear that we are not the ones leveling judgment. Interestingly enough, in the scriptures, the call for repentance often comes from outside of the authority of any institution, including that of the church. Over and over, in both the Old Testament and the Book of…
Issues in Epistemology: A Response to Inside/Out
I didn’t really touch on it in depth in my theology post last week but my view of theology entails being able to give reasons for why one asserts what one asserts. The emphasis then was in how we read. Underneath it all really was Eco’s view of the ideal reader who pays close attention to the process of interpretation. That reader is an ideal reader because they can explain why they read the way they do. It was with some interest then that I read the inaugural post at Patheos’ new blog, Mormonism Inside and Out with Patrick Mason and John Dehlin.[1] They started out with the whole topic of epistemology or how we know. It turns out one of the several half finished posts I have planned engaged deeply on these issues. Rather than going through my thoughts on epistemology I thought I’d respond to a few of the issues they brought up in their discussion.
Forgiving our leaders
It is about ten months ago now, that Sad Sunday when the ‘Exclusion Policy’ was upon us, the one that created a lot of problems, while solving probably none. In our ward we lost our bishop through it, and he still has not returned. Also, some of the Primary kids still have not been baptized, as some still wait for the exclusion policy to be revoked. There is ample reason for such a repeal; after all, as I analysed last year, the policy of excluding children of same sex parents from a normal entrance into our community does not really address anyone in practice, whereas it does send a signal of exclusion into the world. And into the Church. It is the wrong arena, the wrong battle, the wrong fight. Yet, a retraction is unlikely to happen for several reasons. In any formal organization, not just the Church, reversing a decision is much harder than taking one, as it erodes the authority of the leadership and ultimately undermines the organization itself. When presiding over an international sport federation, I had exactly the same problem: how to come back on mistakes without creating a lot of confusion in the organization, or losing too much political clout? I did make mistakes, and most I had to ‘suffer out’, only a few I could correct. In our church this issue is compounded by the mist of infallibility that hovers around our leaders, the…
Future Mormons?
This is a review of and a response to Adam Miller’s recent book, Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology (Greg Kofford Books, 2016). This book and others like it are part of the solution to one of the biggest problems facing 21st-century Mormonism: it’s shallow. It’s boring. It’s too programmed. There’s no meat in the sandwich. Miller puts some postmodern philosophical meat in the Mormon sandwich.
The Nova Effect – Secular Age, round 7
This third section of Taylor’s book is, to me, the most redundant, so I’m going to make up for lost time by condensing these four chapters into one blog post. In fact, I’ll leave Ch. 11 off entirely because it’s mostly an exploration of the section’s themes through case studies in Britain and France. In the last post, we saw the effects of the new “Providential Deism” (and the accompanying sociopolitical and economic trends) on the nature of belief in the eighteenth century. Religion among intellectual elites was naturalized (i.e. seen as non-mysterious, accessible by reason or observation) and circumscribed entirely to the flourishing of human beings and society in the here and now. In this post, we’ll see how Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reacted against the perceived stifling effects of this anthropocentric order, and what new modes of belief and unbelief (and countless hybrids) their reactions first spawned. In chapter 8, “The Malaises of Modernity,” Taylor delves into some of the early “cross pressures” that confronted Westerners who chafed against orthodox Christianity (and its perceived authoritarianism, conformity, focus on human guilt and evil, mystery, etc.) but also the buffered self. Undoubtedly, the buffered self had many attractions—the promise of power to “order our world and ourselves” through reason, self-control, and knowledge; the sense of invulnerability and self-possession or independence, with no need to rely on the power of God or other externals; and a sense…
Out of the Bubble
It is nice to take a break from the bubble that is Utah Valley. Last month we moved to Belgium for a year-long sabbatical, and I hoping that this time will be restorative. I’m ready to reenter the conversation.
The Open and Closed Texts of Theology
One of my all time favor books is Foucalt’s Pendulum by the great Italian author Umberto Eco. It’s a fantastic book about the problems of interpretation all wrapped up in a conspiracy theory. Despite having several famous books Eco’s greatest works are actually as a philosopher and semiotician. A constant theme of both his fiction and scholarly works are the limits of interpretation. He often explains this in terms of the “open text” and “closed text.” The closed text is a text (or any collection of signs like paintings or clothing) that has a very limited number of valid interpretations. The open text by contrast seems to have unlimited interpretations. Within his books his characters often face ambiguous texts out of which they attempt to gain understanding and meaning. The question always remains though: are all interpretations equally valid? Back in 1990 he gave the O. C. Tanner Lectures on this very topic.[1] It was reprinted in the book Interpretation and Overinterpretation. His goal was a way of explaining these issues in a fashion more accessible by the general public. His basic concern is the idea that while there may be an unlimited number of ways of reading at text, not all readings are equally defensible. He tries to walk a tightrope between the view that the meaning of a text is entailed by the intentions of the author and the view that all that matters are the responses to a text people form.…
Guest Post: Elder Bednar in Rwanda
Kirsten M. Christensen is Associate Professor of German at Pacific Lutheran University, where she directs the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program.
Book Review: Our Heavenly Family, Our Earthly Families
Our Heavenly Family, Our Earthly Families by McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding with artwork by Caitlin Connolly (link)
For Dutch-speaking readers
I apologize for not having contributed much to Times and Seasons lately, but since last year I have chosen to concentrate on our Dutch-speaking members and friends. So much is available in English, so little in many other languages. Our site Mormoneninfo.be is geared to information that can enrich the understanding of Mormonism. This year the site is mainly devoted to the Book of Mormon curriculum. Wherever possible it integrates intellectual, cultural and artistic contributions from the Low Countries (the Netherlands and Flanders).Even if you don’t read Dutch, you’re welcome to browse through one of the lessons under “Evangelieleer 2016”, like this one with 16th and 17th century paintings of old men (to celebrate patriarchal record keepers) or this one on language and Bible history.Enjoy the art and like us on Facebook if you feel so! But in particular: thanks for passing this information to Dutch-speaking people, including former missionaries from Holland and from Dutch-speaking Belgium.
Why the Nones are Rising
One of the most interesting demographic shifts of the last era is the rise of the Nones. These are people who don’t self-identify with any particular religion at all. I’ve written about them several times in the past. My own view is that the rise of the Nones has primarily been a shift among people with loose commitment to religion. In the past they’d have named a religious tradition they were a part of. Now they say “none.” To my eyes the primary shift has been less a shift in their behavior than a shift in how they name themselves. But of course that’s not the whole story. While that’s probably what’s going on it doesn’t explain everything. Demographically the primary part of the population driving the rise of the Nones has been millennials. Fully 36% self-identify as part of the Nones. Older groups, like my Gen-X generation, have become slightly less religious but the primary driver of the social shift are these generational changes. It used to be that once people got married and became more integrated into the community in a traditional way that shifted. That’s no longer true. The reasons aren’t entirely clear. Partially people started marrying later and later, if at all. Further many of those who do marry don’t make the shift that they would have in prior decades. The other driver is almost certainly a different cultural climate towards religion that is leading to broader social shifts.…
General Doctrine, Philosophy and Theology, SS Lesson - Book of Mormon, SS Lesson - Doctrine and Covenants
Sacrament Prayers: A Close Reading
A while ago my dad had pointed out some features of the sacrament that somehow I’d missed in all the years I’d been partaking. A few of these were examples of something that’s right before you the whole time yet somehow you still miss. I thought I’d share them with you. We get our sacrament rite largely from the Nephites rather than the Palestinian Christians. Many have argued that the evolution of the sacrament amongst the Nephites takes the form it does going back to King Benjamin’s famous speech. (See for example John Welch’s argument in King Benjamin’s Speech: That Ye May Learn Wisdom where he argues for a close connection to Mosiah 5) The Palestinian version of the sacrament is most likely that found in the Didiche, an early 1st century document that deals with rituals and other such matters. It differs a fair amount although there are points of similarity. Given how the near eastern form of Judaism had been transformed by the exile, the Hellenistic and then Roman conquests, it’s hardly surprising for there to be differences. There are six centuries of divergent evolution. We need to remember that the Nephites had most likely been heavily assimilated into mesoAmerican culture much as the Palestinian Jews had assimilated a lot of Hellenistic and Babylonian culture. There’s also the effect of Joseph’s translation which regardless of the method of translation strongly suggest a fairly loose translation in terms of…
American Mormons Aren’t Leaving the GOP, the GOP is Leaving Us
Believe me, no one wants to write about the Trump campaign (yet again) less than I do. However, events last week might have long-term consequences for the position of Mormonism in American society, and I thought it was worth a little bit of a look. The story starts with a major shake-up in the Trump campaign. As the NYT reported last week: Paul Manafort is out; Stephen K. Bannon is in. So, who are these two folks, and what do they have to do with Mormons? Paul Manafort is famous for, among other things, working to rehabilitate the image and career of Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is the authoritarian, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was ousted in that country’s Orange Revolution. Manafort is the guy who was hired to get Yanukovych back in power. He overhauled Yanukovych’s image from clothes and haircut to people-skills, as this Slate article details. Surely, the idea went, if Manafort could sell Yanukovych, he could also sell Trump. Well, apparently not. As for Stephen K. Bannon, he’s the guy who took over Breitbart after Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Breitbart is a right-leaning Internet news/opinion site that—under Bannon’s leadership—has been heavily invested in Trump since the early days of his campaign. The most notorious example came from March, when a Breitbart reporter (Michelle Fields) claimed she’d been pushed and shoved by Trump’s then campaign manager. Bannon sided with the Trump campaign against his own reporter. As a…
Eschatology or How it’s Always the End of Days
Eschatology is the study of the end times. It’s hard to read much of the New Testament, Book of Mormon or even Doctrine and Covenants without noticing how much is focused on the end of the world. As some have recently noted a common refrain in the Church since it’s early days is how the end times are always nigh. In the 19th century many Mormons thought the Jesus would come before the 20th century. When I was a kid, we were constantly told we were a generation prepared for the last days. Most people thought a conflict between the USSR and America was inevitable. While all the apocalyptic movies from the 80’s now seem quaint (despite a resurgent Mad Max last year) it really was a time when people fully expected the end of the world. Is this pessimism though? I’m not sure it is.
Musement and Alma 30
One of the more controversial arguments in the Book of Mormon is found within Alma’s response to Korihor in Alma 30. Korihor asks Alma to “show me a sign, that I may be convinced that there is a God, yea show unto me that he hath power….” (43) Alma responds that “all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.” (44) Most people cast this debate as between the humanist skeptic of religion and the believer. Alma’s response is thus seen as a variation on Paley’s argument from design for the existence of God. Paley argued that if we found a watch on the ground we’d assume an engineer had designed it. In the same way creation makes us assume a creator. Now the argument is pretty bad for a variety of reasons, not the least of which self-organization and complexity is pretty well scientifically established. We find it not just in evolution but in very easy to observe phenomena ranging from protein formulation to the formation of various structures in thermodynamics. At this point complexity and self-organization is so well established any argument that depends upon it being false (as Paley’s does) seems quaint. The question is whether Alma is actually making a variation…
Classroom Discussion: Productive or Not?
The LDS Sunday School General President posted this short article at LDS.org (in the Church News section). Here is his observation about LDS classroom discussion: [W]e hear of many inspired classroom discussions. Occasionally, however, we hear of discussions that are open and lively, but at the conclusion there has been little, if any, doctrinal focus or emphasis. In essence, there have been some therapeutic conversations or a sharing of experiences, but little connection to doctrine.
How is the Church True?
I regularly see people complain about common LDS phrases such as “I know the Church is True” or “I know the Book of Mormon is True.” People often think these sentences are meaningless. Now I’ll be the first to admit that the way we speak in this context is alien to our fellow Christians. Pedagogically it’s perhaps not the best terminology to use in trying to help people gain a testimony. I do think the sentences are completely sensical though and that most people have a reasonable grasp on what they mean. Usually if you ask someone who’s used the sentence, they’ll rephrase it as “this is really God’s Church on earth.” Part of the problem is that culturally we’ve largely adopted a way of speaking that comes out of philosophy. This largely starts with Aristotle. Truth is a property of propositions (the meaning of sentences) and not entities like churches, books or the like. Remnants of earlier ways of speaking persist in our culture. We talk about truing a bike wheel for instance. (This is making sure the wheel is round like the ideal wheel) We still continue to talk about true friends or a spouse not being true. The language isn’t as alien as some make it out to be. It’s worth noting though that the terminology we use in our testimonies ultimately comes out of the scriptures. D&C 1:30 talks about this being “the only true and…
Reminder: SMPT Submissions due August 15
Paper proposals for the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology’s 2016 Annual Meeting are due soon—Monday, August 15. Proposals are particularly invited on the theme, “Christ, Our Forerunner,” but proposals on any aspect of LDS belief will receive full consideration. For full details on the conference and the call for papers, see the original announcement.
Book Review: Through the Valley of Shadows
Although Samuel Brown’s new book, Through the Valley of Shadows, is not a book that focuses on Mormonism, I jumped at the chance to review it for Times and Seasons simply because the subject matter fascinated me. Death, after all, is something that we all face, and I was already tangentially aware that technological advances are creating thickets of ethical and emotional—not to mention economic—concerns around this final encounter. I didn’t really have any preconceived opinions about the topic, however, just a curiosity that made me eager to read Brown’s book. I was not disappointed. The book covers an impressively wide range of territory. Of course there is a lot about medical care in modern ICUs—both from the standpoint of academic research as well as from first-hand accounts from Brown’s own career—but aside from that the book also delves into social history, cognitive psychology, and legal theory. Brown’s central argument is that two sea changes in modern society have left us naked and alone in the final confrontation with death. The first is the Dying of Death, which removed the narratives and social infrastructure that had provided a template of a “good death.” By the end of the Dying of Death, Americans had contained the terror of death by simply ignoring it until the moment of crisis, but the sanctity of death had disappeared along with its menacing presence… Since twentieth-century Americans had not generally spent their lives in the shadow…
Book Review: The Mormon Jesus
I remain fundamentally unconvinced of the book’s central claim and argument, and am personally ambivalent about it—though in that I’m surely in the minority amongst Mormons (rank-and-file and all the rest) whom I suspect will heartily cheer the book’s primary claim: Mormonism, taken as a whole in it’s historic trajectory, is patently Christian.
What Was the Nephite Law of Moses?
Most scholars assume that the type of Judaism Jesus encountered had its main development during and after the Babylonian exile. When we read the Old Testament, especially the books of Moses, it appears as if they were written as a single text. However there are compelling reasons to believe they were composed out of multiple texts and traditions by groups with competing religious views. The Book of Mormon itself suggests problems with the editing and redacting of these texts. Speaking of the Bible held by the gentiles, Nephi is told it “containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many.” (1 Ne 13:23) So at a minimum the brass plates held many writings not in the Bible, such as Zenos quoted by Jacob. Obviously many texts like Ezekiel weren’t written until after Lehi had left Jerusalem.
Accidental Institutional Skills, Like Genealogy
Strange thing: Simply by working to accomplish their primary mission, large institutions develop skills and capacities somewhat or even entirely unrelated to that primary mission. So, for example, the US Army is very good at education, because it has to teach thousands of average (or less) students how to do complicated tasks like repairing a tank or hitting the right sequence of buttons to fire an advanced weapons system. Now the LDS Church is a very large and well-funded organization that has developed a number of institutional skills or capacities largely unrelated to its primary religious mission. The more you think about that, the longer the list becomes. But first, some background.