{"id":31040,"date":"2014-07-15T14:07:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T19:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=31040"},"modified":"2014-07-15T15:03:02","modified_gmt":"2014-07-15T20:03:02","slug":"james-faulconer-making-things-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2014\/07\/james-faulconer-making-things-harder\/","title":{"rendered":"James Faulconer – Making Things Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BMMH\"<\/a>It seems to me that the scriptures offer two types\u00a0of revelations: (1) they reveal\u00a0things you didn’t already know, and (2) they reveal\u00a0that you didn’t know many of the things you thought you knew. Both kinds of revelation are pivotal. And each tends to depend on the other.<\/p>\n

James Faulconer’s new series of books \u2014\u00a0The Book of Mormon Made Harder<\/em>,\u00a0The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder<\/em>,\u00a0The Old Testament Made Harder<\/em>, and\u00a0The New Testament Made Harder\u00a0<\/em>(forthcoming) \u2014 can help on both of these fronts. Though, to be fair, they’re especially good at the latter.<\/p>\n

The books are being published (and, in the case of the Doctrine Covenants volume, republished) by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute.<\/p>\n

Each of the chapters in each of the books\u00a0is pegged to the current Sunday School lessons. And each of the chapters consists entirely of study questions.<\/p>\n

No answers.<\/p>\n

Just questions.<\/p>\n

Each book contains hundreds of pages of questions – some textual, some exegetical, some theological – that can slow you\u00a0to a crawl and make your\u00a0scriptures harder to read.<\/p>\n

Each of the books in the series begins with this immortal epigraph (truer today than ever before) from Johannes Climacus in Kierkegaard’s\u00a0The Concluding Unscientific Postscript<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Wherever you look about you, in literature and life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier. . . . You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You’ve suspected for a long time now that so much of what matters most risks being\u00a0too smooth, too familiar, and too easy, that so much has been paved over flat (progress!) to make it easier to move from point A to point B without a thought for what lies between.<\/p>\n

You might be\u00a0right.<\/p>\n

These books are a massive roadblock.<\/p>\n

Get ready for some detours.<\/p>\n

(Watch for the official announcement with links and sale information from the Maxwell Institute on July 22.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems to me that the scriptures offer two types\u00a0of revelations: (1) they reveal\u00a0things you didn’t already know, and (2) they reveal\u00a0that you didn’t know many of the things you thought you knew. Both kinds of revelation are pivotal. And each tends to depend on the other. James Faulconer’s new series of books \u2014\u00a0The Book of Mormon Made Harder,\u00a0The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder,\u00a0The Old Testament Made Harder, and\u00a0The New Testament Made Harder\u00a0(forthcoming) \u2014 can help on both of these fronts. Though, to be fair, they’re especially good at the latter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":31041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/BMMH.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31040"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31051,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31040\/revisions\/31051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}