Having heard nice things about the odd little book by Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (ht: someone out there), I finally found it. And read it. Summary: You read a very, very small slice of all published books. You forget most of what you read, so you retain only a small part of the few books you actually read. Worse yet, you bend and twist what you do remember to fit your own personal matrix of ideas and experiences. So what is in your head after reading a book, even more so for a book you read years ago, likely bears little or no similarity to the actual text of the book. Maybe we should forget books, forget any claim to link to some text that we supposedly read and remember, and just talk creatively and imaginatively about our own ideas and experiences. The author draws a lot out of that simple set of claims. He throws in some fancy terms (he is, after all, a professor of literature): the inner book is the personal matrix of ideas you use to deform what you remember of books you deign to actually read; the screen book is the collection of deformed scraps and snippets in your memory for any given book, which obviously varies dramatically across individuals and might have little to do with the actual book you read; and the phantom book is “that mobile…
What to Expect When You Are Expecting . . . A Bishopric Call
So a dear friend of mine[1] just got called to a new bishopric and wants to know the known knowns, the known unknowns, and, of course, the unknown unknowns[2].
My Experiment with Five Minute Prayers
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been setting a timer every time I say my evening prayers. This might sound like an absolutely terrible idea and, in some ways I guess it is. So before I tell you how that has worked out for me, let me explain why I would even consider such an idea in the first place. It starts with the idea of the curse of success. I first encountered this concept in Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. They wrote that when a policy or technology becomes successful, it can be known more for the hardships it illuminates by contrast rather than for the good it accomplishes. When everyone’s situation is universally awful, no one complains. When an imperfect solution makes the situation better for most but not all, it risks being vilified for the resulting disparity. In some sense, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suffers from the curse of success today. The success comes from the way that the Church is able to transmit the basics of its doctrine and moral code to our youth. Relative to other religions in the United States, at least, Mormons are the experts at this. I draw this conclusion primarily from a the well-known study conducted by UNC researchers from 2001-2005 involving over a hundred researchers interviewing thousands of American teenagers. (The results of the study were published in a book: Soul Searching: The…
In Your Heart and Mind
My son came stomping into the house from the garden a month ago, demanding I punish his sister,
Elder Ballard: “Don’t Talk Too Much”
Today Elder Ballard spoke at the Europe Area Sisters’ Meeting. (Yes, the same meeting with the poster flap.) You can see the video here.
A self-guided walking tour of Higher Criticism
So I wrote another book. At first I thought that I was writing a short article to explain why two different Reformation-era prophecies share the same title, but the project kept expanding. Along the way, I changed the way I think about biblical textual criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis.
Practical Apologetics: The First Vision
It’s not surprising that the First Vision has become one of the faith issues that gets kicked around the Internet these days. Visions are personal experiences of one particular person, so little effort or justification is needed for a third party to doubt or disbelieve another’s account of a vision. Most Mormons find it easy enough ignore or reject visions recounted in other Christian traditions without much reflection. As Steven C. Harper notes, “It is vital to recognize that only Joseph Smith knows whether he experienced a vision in 1820. He was the only witness to what happened and therefore his own statements are the only direct evidence. All other evidence is hearsay.” [1] But if accepting or rejecting Joseph’s accounts of his vision is so straightforward, why has the First Vision become so contentious for some people? Let’s consider a few possibilities.
A temple, a temple, we already have a temple
Yes, we do, a lot of temples, more than ever in history. We are, as the leaders never stop telling us, a temple building people, and if anything distinguishes us from our fellow-Christians it is our temples. For us the temple is a crucial religious and ritual focus, the apex of our notion of holiness; it is also somehow a link with a distant past, with the deep salvation history of mankind, through Israel. Indeed, one of the themes running through the Old Testament is exactly that of the temple. But what is temple, and what continuity is there among the temples? What is the ‘third voice’, the one of the author, on the temple tradition in the religion of Israel and Judah? We focus first on Jerusalem. It all starts, as everything in the bible, with Moses, with the Pentateuch. Exodus gives a wonderfully detailed description of the ark and especially of the tabernacle, richly decorated, with lots of gold and silver, rich tapestry, and intricate construction of the ark and a tent made of dugong or badger skins. The description of the tabernacle takes up almost half of Exodus and does raise a lot of questions. Dugong or badger, the skins of which should cover the temple, the discussions on the meaning of tahash (tabernacle, but that is a Latin term for tent) is still raging, but both animals are equally unbelievable inside the Sinai desert, especially in…
Truth and Contradiction in Religious Communities
A couple of weeks ago I listened to the audiobook of Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction. As that was the first thing I’ve read on the topic (other than a multitude of Wikipedia entries) I by no means consider myself some kind of expert, but I was struck by several parallels and differences between Sikhism and Mormonism. The little I have learned has already helped me to see my own faith in new ways. In terms of similarities, Mormonism and Sikhism are both relatively new religions that arguably constitute a culture or a people (in addition to a religion) and that both have fraught historical relationships with larger faith traditions. Sikhs, for their part, have historically worked hard to stress their distinctiveness from Hinduism. Mormons, in contrast, have recently stressed our desire to be included within Christianity. In both cases, however, the exact nature of the relationship is complex and subject to change and controversy. The contrast that stood out that most to me was the ambiguous evolution of Sikh theology and scripture and institutions juxtaposed with the rigorous organization of the correlated Mormonism that I grew up with. Obviously this is apples-to-oranges, since I was comparing a snapshot of a relatively mature Mormonism with the historical origins of earliest Sikhism. Mormonism didn’t start out correlated and our own history is full of ambiguity as well. But it was illuminating to study the history of another faith’s development precisely because…
Book Review: The Crucible of Doubt
Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt, Deseret Book, 145 pages.
The Problem with Local Change
Imagine that everything in the church is precisely the way that it is now with two exceptions:
Book Review: The Miracles of Jesus
Eric D. Huntsman, The Miracles of Jesus, Deseret Book, 164 pages.
Women and the Church – Constructively Engaging the Arguments
I’m going to describe the dialectical geography as I see it, in order to try and help readers at T&S do better at constructively engaging the arguments in what I consider to be an issue of absolutely fundamental importance.
In Dialogue: The Best of Ten Years of Mormon Blogging
The Summer 2014 print issue of Dialogue arrived in my mailbox last week. Among other fine articles is a ten-year look back at Mormon blogging by Dialogue Web Editor Emily Jensen. The article consists of about 70 paragraph-length quotations from selected Bloggernacle posts over the years, in ten categories: theology, homosexuality, feminism, race, Mormon studies, public conversations, history, Dialogue, personal essays, and miscellaneous. The Dialogue website adds a few supplementary blog posts that did not make the print article, but to get the print article itself you will need to subscribe. Below are links to the T&S posts that appeared in the article.
About Social Media
Elder David A. Bednar just delivered a talk on social media at BYU Education Week. The text of the talk is already posted at LDS.org (video also available). You are probably going to be hearing about this one so you’d better go read it. Here are the highlights. Quotations in the italicized blockquotes; my commentary in plain text following the quote.
We Are Made to Suffer
In centuries gone by the best you could hope for in the case of an aching tooth would be that someone would yank it out, but thanks to modern medicine we can detect cavities and fill them before they start to cause any pain at all. Of course, the drilling of the tooth itself is painful, so you can have your tooth numbed with an injection. Someone jabbing a sharp needle into your gums isn’t a walk in the park either, so you can have some topical gel applied before the shot. Just to recap: you get a numbing gel to take away the pain of the injection which in turn numbs the tooth to avoid the pain of the drill which in turn fixes the tooth before it can start to seriously ache. That’s a triple-layer pain-mitigation strategy. Of course I took the topical gel and the shot. All else being equal, I’m definitely a fan of less pain rather than more pain. But I also wondered if we’ve reached a point in our society where we are so good at avoiding pain and suffering that we’ve come to view them as exotic. As defects than can be eliminated. As aberrant rather than as uncomfortable but necessary aspects of a meaningful existence. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he? (D&C 122:8) Health officials assure Americans that the terrifying Ebola outbreak in West Africa…
12 Questions for Miranda Wilcox and John Young, Editors of Standing Apart—Part II
Here are the six remaining questions in our series with Miranda Wilcox and John Young, continued from Part I. 7. How much of what you do in this book should we understand as theology, as opposed to, say, history? Miranda: Religious communities perform theological work when they tell historical narratives. Remembering and memorializing their divine origins is crucial for communities to maintain distinctive self-identities and to realize their divine mandate. We see examples of this process when Israel retells the story of their ancestors’ deliverance from captivity in Egypt or when Lehi’s descendants retell the story of their family’s deliverance from the destruction of Jerusalem. Telling origin narratives also offers communities ways of distinguishing themselves from other communities, and typically these stories develop a legacy of antagonistic relations between communities. Sometimes communities have opportunities to redirect these relationships. For example, the book of the Acts of the Apostles tells how the Jewish Christians struggled to revise their attitudes towards Gentiles, whom they had considered antagonists for generations, when they were commanded to preach the gospel of Christ to all nations. Standing Apart examines how the concept of a Great Apostasy and narratives about it have shaped LDS historical assumptions, contributed to the construction of LDS social and theological identity, and impacted the ability of the LDS church to develop ecumenical relationships. We suggest that the exclusivism and antagonism in these narratives may have contributed to the survival of LDS identity…
The Hypothetical “Missionary Library”
As a companion piece to Dave’s post on missionaries, let’s talk about the approved missionary library. I have concerns about what missionaries study, know, and teach. The typical missionary develops far more motivation to read and study “the literature of the Church” than before the mission, but is far more restricted, although mission presidents have leeway to relax this. Certainly the primary content of missionary study should be scripture and the doctrine, but I think by narrowing the library too much, we miss real opportunities both for the missionaries themselves and the people they teach.
Salt Lake City, We Have a Problem
It has always been the case that some missionaries “come home early,” as the gentle phrasing goes. It turns out that more missionaries are coming home early than ever before. The percentage is now into the double-digits, and it turns out the folks in Salt Lake City are already well aware that we have a problem. This is based on information quietly passed down the priesthood chain, coupled with an urgent request to extend support and guidance to our young men and women as they prepare for and depart on LDS missions. So the leadership recognizes there is a problem and, surprisingly, the young returning missionaries are not being blamed. But acknowledging a problem is only the first step. What is going on and what can be done to improve things? How can we fix the problem?
Book Review: Way Below the Angels
Craig Harline, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary This may be the most painful book I have ever read.
Book Review: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray
How much did I like this book? So much that I do not regret the night of sleep that I lost to my inability to put it down. (That has literally never happened to me before. I always hate myself in the morning.)
DC Institute Class
Thomas B. Griffith (D.C. Circuit Court judge and former BYU General Counsel, Senate Legal Counsel, Bishop and Stake President) is teaching an institute class at the Chevy Chase building this fall on early Church history, with a focus on “Joseph Smith as Everyman.” The class starts Tuesday, September 2nd at 7pm and will run every Tuesday night throughout the fall. You can register either upon arrival or in advance at the Church’s Institute site. Please spread the word. Brother Griffith is a fantastic teacher and having a class from him on this topic is a rare opportunity — it is sure to be stellar.
A Day in the Life
I wrote this a few months ago and forget to post it.
12 Questions for Miranda Wilcox and John Young, editors of Standing Apart—Part I
Miranda Wilcox (BYU) and John Young (Flagler College) have recently published Standing Apart: Mormon Historical Consciousness and the Concept of Apostasy, a collection of essays examining the Mormon narrative of apostasy and restoration in light of the history of Christianity. It is published by Oxford University Press, in both hardcover and paperback. They have kindly shared responses to 12 Questions about their project. I am including six in this post; the remaining six will follow soon in Part II. 1. What led you into this project, and how did it take shape? Miranda: Although John and I grew up listening to Sunday School lessons about the “Dark Ages,” we found the Middle Ages deeply compelling. We met as graduate students of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where I studied Anglo-Saxon England and he studied Jewish-Christian relations in the high Middle Ages. As I learned about the Christianization of early medieval Europe, I discovered much sincere devotion to Christ and the Bible; stories written by medieval Christians resonate with my own religious experiences and teach me spiritual insights. It makes me sad when I hear medieval people, whose lives I have come to love and admire, characterized as living in spiritual darkness, rebellious against God, or willfully perverting truth. (For more of my personal thoughts, see my entry at MormonScholarsTestify.org). When I began teaching medieval literature at BYU, I confronted the challenge of making the Middle Ages…