I remember walking from the Mission Training Center in Provo to the Temple during my compressed weeks of language inculcation. One morning as we strolled along the curved sidewalks approaching the carrotesque spire (these were the days before sandblast rejuvenation), what seemed like an ancient lady approached us and grabbed my arm. She declared with solemn triumphalism: “This week, I finished the Book of Mormon for the one hundredth time.” (more…)
I hope you can pardon me for linking to research that is two years old, but I just found it. It helps me explain why some of our conversations, including conversations on blogs, are unproductive.
A10 And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve agates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
“We conclude that retention of the traditional definition of marriage does not constitute a state interest sufficiently compelling, under the strict scrutiny equal protection standard, to justify withholding that status from same-sex couples. Accordingly, insofar as the provisions of sections 300 and 308.5 draw a distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples and exclude the latter from access to the designation of marriage, we conclude these statutes are unconstitutional.”
California Supreme Court decision, In re Marriage cases.
How should we feel about this? (more…)
Element, the Journal of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology has issued a ca for student submissions. This is your chance to appear between the same covers as bloggernacle luminaries Jim Faulconer, John Hamer, Nate Oman, Rosalynde Welch, and even one of Zelophehad’s Daughters (we’re not telling which one, and you’d better not either!), and other hotshot Mo. Intellectuals (MoTels?). The SMPT is doing lots of interesting things you should know about, even if you’re not a student clever enough to have something to submit. (more…)
If you feel like buying a new laptop computer, go ahead and click on the “More” link. You will either laugh so hard the computer falls off your lap, or you will pick it up and throw it against the wall. Your response probably depends upon how you view this, the 249,428th installment in the ongoing discussion of gender in the church.
A familiar face returns to BCC. Kaimi Wenger was around when we founded this scrapheap years ago, and remains one of the Bloggernacle’s most recognized names. He used to be a real lawyer, but now has left that noble profession to teach hapless 1Ls about res judicata and other worthless arcana. Welcome back to this errant knight, this prodigal blogger who now guests among us.
Justice Brandeis’s famous phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant” set the tone for a century of securities regulation. The rule is this: To pass muster under securities laws, you must disclose. You must give accurate and complete material information to investors. And that’s about all. It’s fine if your business plan is “We will buy large quantities of lead and then hire a wizard to wave a magic wand over the lead, turning it into gold.” The SEC will not say, “That’s an idiotic business plan, buster.” What they will ask, is, “did you disclose?” And as long as you disclose, you’re generally okay (some exceptions below), no matter how ridiculous your business plan may be. This approach reflects a particular philosophy of law, a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to regulation. The SEC’s role is to make sure that the markets have accurate and complete material information — and after that, to get out of the way and let investors make their own choices. It assumes that investors, individually or collectively, are pretty good judges of information and are well-equipped to figure things out, themselves.
Or, to put it in Mormon terms, “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.” (more…)
I am not being snarky with this. I am genuinely interested. In the church, we often draw distinctions between how the world seeks to undermine the family and the church seeks to promote it. My question is “What exactly do we teach about the family that is contrary to some commonly held scholarly, social, or journalistic teaching about the family?” In this, I am not talking about morality in general (teen pregnancy and all that); I am specifically interested in the differences between what the world teaches and what the church teaches regarding family. Please elaborate them specifically for me.
BCC’s weekly romp through the best of the Bloggernacle, hosted this week by Steve, Ronan, Amri, and sisterblah2. Featured posts/sites: (more…)
I brought the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review with me to sacrament meeting on Sunday. I glanced at the cover and saw the captioned tagline (just above “The Secret Knowledge of Judas Iscariot”). The provocative description was a reference to an article by Aren N. Maier, “Did Captured Ark Afflict Philistines with E.D.?”, which you can read here. (more…)
Thanks to its deep Catholic roots, Austria is one of a handful of countries that still observes Whit Monday. So what better way to observe this holy day of obligation than to visit the purported sites of even older Celtic rites? No one I knew had a better idea, so off we went to follow the path of the Druids (no, not those druids) on the scenic Kaltenberg mountain in Lower Austria.
Darius Gray and I showed our film Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons this weekend in Boise, Idaho. We had a good crowd and were quite well-received. But some of the information I got afterwards was interesting. Several talked about inviting friends who had asked, “Is it sponsored by the Church?” The underlying question in their particular cases was, “Is it going to be uplifting?” The mother of one potential audience member was quite nervous about him going to see it. I have no idea how many people did NOT come because of the “fear factor.” One person told us, “If you had shown it twice, the second crowd would have filled the theater, because the first crowd would have reassured them.” (The film is ultimately uplifting, I think, though it sugar-coats nothing.) (more…)
Friday my students and I sat at a set of pushed together tables with Valentin Quispe and his two sons in the pilgrimage town of Copacabana, Bolivia (across the lake from the Apu Inti Elder Rasband discusses.) Some three decades ago, Valentin was a leader in people from his Aymara speaking community’s joining the LDS Church. As a twenty-four year old graduate student of anthropology I found my way to Valentin’s community where he and his family befriended me while I studied ethnographically that watershed event. (more…)
Elder Rasband’s talk in the recent General Conference is, for the most part, a distillation of Elder Bednar’s “Tender Mercies” talk from a few years ago and Elder Eyring’s similar talk from last October. At its heart is a call for us as members to examine our own lives for evidences of God.
I do not want to be seen as mocking the Lord’s anointed, but it strikes me that Elder Rasband gets an awful lot of traction in this talk out of one of the vaguest stock phrases in the patriarchal blessing playbook, as it were. (more…)
In my notes from last year’s Sunstone Symposium, I gave a list of ten principal differences between Fundamentalist and Mainstream Mormonism as given by Brian Hales. See comment 93 of this thread.
While those are the biggies, there are other, more subtle differences that would mostly be lost on a journalist, yet will be meaningful to a person immersed in either tradition. This list derives from a friend who used to be involved in the Apostolic United Brethren and is now mainstream (some of this may be specific to the AUB and not necessarily applicable to the FLDS). The below is shared with permission. (more…)
I wish to honor my mother, the professor’s daughter who married into the collapse of the American dream. The woman who coaxed weavils out of home-made granola, cultured yogurt in Kerr jars in a water bath in our dilapidated oven, and tried forty-five different ways to hide goat meat in suppers; who withstood accusations of Satanic possession or insufficient faith to protect her family from her partner’s mental illness through divorce; who took calls from threatening neighbors angry that I would walk to school in winter without a coat (I hid it by the door as I left each morning); who held me as I cried about schoolyard bullies, whom I held as she cried about the monstrosity of desperate poverty and her defunct marriage; whom I proudly carried on my shoulders when I turned twelve and was taller than she; who was God’s messenger to her agnostic son in 1990, the human mediator of my conversion; who authored my favorite devotional phrase (”God is not a vending machine”); who taught me by example to love the printed and spoken word; who married again, badly, and divorced again, well; who creates life and survives tornados in America’s middle section; who scolded me for giving my only winter coat to a homeless man one Christmas then apologized years later as she helped me understand the complex valences of charity and Christ’s love; who has one of the most creative and wide-ranging minds I know; who is the beloved mother-in-law and granny to the people I love most in the world; who is more Hermes plus Athena than Gaia, and who is me and I her.
God bless you, Mom, for all that we are and clumsily strive to be. I am of all men most blessed.
When people learn I studied linguistics in college, they are generally unimpressed to discover that I frittered away my four years studying theoretical syntax–c-command, head movement, control theory, and a host of other words and word combinations whose meanings I no longer remember or frankly understand. What they had hoped to hear more often than not was that I had studied how people use language to shape and interpret their world, what the “meanings” of words are, something like the academic discipline of sociolinguistics, perhaps merged with popular semiotics. I confess I had a great time as a Chomskyan linguist, but this decade-or-so later, I feel the same fascination non-linguists do with how language can be used rather than with the formal structures of meta-syntax, as intriguing as they are (with apologies to my former teachers). (more…)
By a show of hands, how many of you have started each day intending to do good, only to realize upon retiring to bed that the world was probably worse off for your efforts?
As Taryn and I walked through the residential streets near downtown Evanston, it began to rain. Late March is still winter here; there were no leaves on the trees and no green in the grass as yet. The rain began to leave streak marks on Taryn’s glasses. We admired the eminently practical hat of a passing mail carrier, which suspended a small umbrella above her head. The early stages of Taryn’s labor continued as we walked; it was all terribly romantic. (more…)
And when he had spoken unto them, he turned himself unto the three, and said unto them: What will ye that I should do unto you, when I am gone unto the Father? And they sorrowed in their hearts, for they durst not speak unto him the thing which they desired. And he said unto them: Behold, I know your thoughts, and ye have desired the thing which John, my beloved, who was with me in my ministry, before that I was lifted up by the Jews, desired of me.
Therefore, more blessed are ye, for ye shall never taste of death; but ye shall live to behold all the doings of the Father unto the children of men, even until all things shall be fulfilled according to the will of the Father, when I shall come in my glory with the powers of heaven. And ye shall never endure the pains of death; but when I shall come in my glory ye shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality; and then shall ye be blessed in the kingdom of my Father. And again, ye shall not have pain while ye shall dwell in the flesh, neither sorrow save it be for the sins of the world; and all this will I do because of the thing which ye have desired of me, for ye have desired that ye might bring the souls of men unto me, while the world shall stand…
And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words, he touched every one of them with his finger save it were the three who were to tarry, and then he departed.
Peter LLC grew up in the Mojave Desert, not far from the world’s first Del Taco in Barstow. He now lives with his wife in Vienna, Austria where he ekes out a living paying close attention to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues. When not fighting with the French and Russian delegations for a seat in the back row, Mr. LLC enjoys noodling on the guitar while watching dubbed re-runs of CSI: Miami, pushing his mountain bike through the Vienna Woods, choking on Ronan’s dust on hikes in the Alps and eating bulgogi.
BCC has kindly consented to host his guest posts for the next two weeks. He reckons he will begin with something of a vignette of life in Vienna as an introduction.
Just when you thought you knew your neighbors–better the devil you know, after all–they go and turn the tables on you.
I was talking to my brother the other day, as I do, and I was trying to get at what bothers me about the shenanigans in Texas. I think that the manner in which the FLDS church has established its beliefs and the manner in which they express them are manifestly evil. Forcing girls into unwanted marriage, driving away boys because they might win the hearts of the girls, and parceling out families and salvation as gifts to the sycophants all strike me as patriarchal behavior at its absolute worst. It is obviously wrong and that is, I believe, why Texas has so mishandled it. (more…)
Some of you may be familiar with the Genesis newsletter. For an article in that newsletter, we’d like to get responses to three questions. Comments in this thread may appear in the forthcoming article.
1) Where were you on June 8th, 1978? (If you don’t know what this refers to, then you are probably too young to answer these questions.)
2) What was your reaction?
3) What changes have you seen in the Church since that time?
BCC’s weekly romp through the best of the Bloggernacle, hosted this week by Steve, Brad, and MikeinWeHo. Featured posts/sites: (more…)
Stop me if this sounds familiar. I’m indebted to the always-handy BYU 100 Hour Board, as well as the LDS Church History site’s exhibit on Primary. (more…)
In March, Natalie posted about ways of reading The Book of Mormon, especially close reading. I’ve tried applying the close reading skills I teach as a high school literature and composition teacher — a sort of basic formalism, which involves coming to conclusions about the author’s intentions based on the text and the techniques used by the author. (more…)
I realize this is an old subject; see for instance this prior discussion. For those who have been living in a cave, starting I believe in 1967, women were not allowed to give the opening prayer in sacrament meetings, apparently on the theory that such meetings were “priesthood” meetings and had to be opened by priesthood authority. I think there may have been a letter rescinding this position within about six months or so, but it was definitely done away with by 1978: (more…)
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