By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Hey!! Jan Shipps will be speaking tomorrow night at the Salt Lake City Library. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Jan’s work for Mormon Studies. In particular, her 1985 book Mormonism should be near the very top of anyone’s list of Really Important Books You Must Read if You’re Going to Think of Yourself as a Reasonably Informed Mormon or Student of Mormons or Mormonism (RIBYMRIYGTTOYAARIMOSOMOM).

Jan will be speaking about what the field of Religious Studies offers for the study of Mormonism. Besides being an astute observer of Mormonism, Jan is a witty and engaging speaker and a delightful character and YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THIS TALK if you can possibly get there!!

Tuesday, November 17
Level 4 Meeting Room, Salt Lake City Main Library
210 East 400 South, Salt Lake.

Mingling at 6:30 pm, lecture starts at 7:00 pm.

Three cheers for Sunstone for sponsoring the event!!

When the book Jesus Christ and the World of the New Testament came out, Julie at T&S posted a very positive review, and I followed that up with my own (see “Finally!” FARMS Review 19/2 [2007]). A couple of months ago Julie and I had the chance to meet one of the coauthors of that book, Eric Huntsman, and found him to be as delightful a person as he is fine a scholar. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving 10% of one’s income to charity is a concept familiar to Mormons (although paying tithes to the Mormon Church is not really the same in its purpose as paying 10% to, say, Oxfam — no judgement implied). One Oxford academic has decided to go further. He has pledged not only to give up 10% of his income but also all of his income above £20k ($30k). Dr Ord predicts being able to donate £1m over the course of his life and thus save thousands of lives. His website (Giving What We Can) encourages others to donate at least 10% and usefully ranks charities according to their cost-effectiveness.

I find Ord’s decision inspiring and wish him well in keeping to his goal (the pull of Mammon should not be underestimated). He goes where tithing does not — hurting the rich (or in Ord’s case, the non-impoverished). Up-scaling our donations according to wealth seems like a sensible way to discharge our obligations to the poor and remove the love of money from our hearts.

Could I do it? Probably not. Off the top of my head, I think our household of five in this corner of England could live comfortably and make room for future needs with no more than £50k ($75k) p.a. Tithing 100% (to the church, or to other charities, or both) of income above £50k is something I really wish I could aspire to. Even then I think £50k is too high a ceiling if I am to “give away [a relatively sacrificial amount of my possessions] to the poor.”

The kids often come home from church with some kind of souvenir: a bookmark (we must have 57 of them floating around), a picture, a scripture card, etc. Last week, my tweenage son brought home a half-carton of chicken eggs. Read the rest of this entry »

Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday in November, the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day, which falls on November 11 every year. Each year my ward celebrates Remembrance Sunday with a peculiarly Mormon liturgy that is wonderful to experience. Read the rest of this entry »

My uncles tease (more than half seriously) that my grandmother can’t drive past a cemetery without getting the urge to stop and look for ancestors. That’s a trait that she’s passed on to me. As we take road trips around the country, Mike and I spend a surprising amount of time in cemeteries, looking for graves — not only of ancestors, but also of figures in church history and U.S. history. All the cemeteries we visit are solemn and hallowed places, but few sites can compare to the acres and acres of orderly rows of veterans buried in America’s national cemeteries. It seems appropriate to reflect on some of these this Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, outside of the U.S.) Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Remembrance Day, all.

Read the rest of this entry »

We just got back from Montreal, where my wife gave an absolutely outstanding paper on ways the Nation of Islam employed food and diet to craft a new identity, to overturn the malignant, dehumanizing narratives of slavery. What made her talk more brilliant still (aside from its great analysis, outstanding sources, and impeccable delivery) was that it was in a panel on boundary maintenance in Islam. So amidst fascinating papers by Islamic scholars on medieval Islam and the scandals the Quranic word could generate for gender mores (what does it mean for a woman to pronounce a Quranic text that normally requires immediate prayerful prostration of all hearers, including men? Islamic jurists debated the question heartily) and other fascinating topics, this Mormon woman stands up, describes and analyzes the idiosyncratic and fascinating foodways propounded by Elijah Mohammed, and then, because Delta moved up our flight and customs at Montreal reportedly takes forever, disappears to find a taxicab.

That’s just part of the drama that was AAR. Unfortunately because of childcare issues and other obligations, we were unable to attend many of the other sessions we wanted to. Was anyone else at AAR? Anybody care to share some details?

BBC3 (the BBC’s youth channel) airs a series called The World’s Strictest Parents. It’s a reality show where tearaway British youths (“oiks” as the London mayor would call them) are housed with said Strictest Parents in an inverse of Nanny 911 (where a British nanny schools naughty American kids). In last week’s show, two kids are sent to Utah to live with a Mormon family. Enjoy: Read the rest of this entry »

Blast it all, I’ve tried to thwart the inevitable but it looks like the dark ages are upon us (to use a variation on Godwin’s Law). Jane Jacobs, that wise, indefatigable social critic, tried to warn us, but would we listen? No. It turns out that only 48% of Americans believe in evolution (only 22% of Mormons!). More Americans believe in haunted houses than global warming, and there are still loads of wacky people running around scared of vaccines (often, all the while, holding up magical herbs and alternative medicines that will cure whatever ails you.) All of these represent a catastrophic failure of science education. It boggles the mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Mormons are often reluctant, whether through zeal or sense of duty, to miss Sunday services.  And yet this commendable trait can turn into a public health problem when people attend church with colds or flues in tow.  Picture if you will sacrament trays being passed through hands of sick, coughing people, nurseries where children mingle, and meetings where binders are passed through rows of people holding Kleenex to elderly members. How can we change our culture to encourage people to stay home when their health poses threats to others? Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you who have participated in the Bloggernacle for any length of time have no doubt electronically met my friend Bridget Jack Meyers (who goes by “Jack”). She’s an evangelical who attended and graduated from BYU in classics (the same thing I studied at BYU many years ago), which makes her a delightsome oddity and led to our immediate bonding. Now she’s pursuing graduate work in Illinois. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Mormon Studies Association Annual Conference
15-16 July 2010
Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
“European Mormonism and its Experience in Media and the Public Sphere”

I’ve been reading Milton — which I suspect is an important background source for a number of Mormon cosmological concepts from the “war in heaven” to Arianism (Jesus as a completely separate member of the Godhead, clearly inferior to God the father). Of course, I knew that Milton is one of the greats of English literature, but in my reading I’ve been shocked at the sophistication of his portrayals of Lucifer and his allies. Paradise Lost is not a cardboard polemic about the war in heaven. Milton puts himself in the sandals of the fallen angels and creates a realistic perspective. After their ostracism and exile, the fallen legions of hell consider their options. Mammon has a particularly realistic appraisal of any potential gains that might be made in renewing the war with heaven. Read the rest of this entry »

Along with sites such as icanhascheezburger and Cake Wrecks, one of the web’s great mindless time-wasters is Awkward Family Photos. As I was perusing the other day, I noticed a few that I thought just had to be LDS families. It’s a fun little game to speculate, so I thought I would open it up to BCC readers.

Here are several Awkward Family Photos. For each, dear readers, tell us, is this “A Mormon Image”?

Family #1: Pop Your Collar

Eleven months ago, the Joseph Smith Papers Project inaugurated their publication efforts with the Journals series (review here). While the documents of that series had been previously available, the volume was nonetheless an extraordinary contribution to the study of Mormonism and its history. In September of this year, the Church Historian’s Press released their second volume, the first in the Revelations and Translations series: a facsimile edition, comprising two manuscript revelation books. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 6, 1860, the prophet Joseph Smith Jr.’s widow and eldest son traveled from Nauvoo to Amboy, Illinois, to attend the general conference of a ‘new organization’ of Midwestern Latter Day Saints. Emma and Joseph Smith III were accepted as members on the strength of their original baptisms, and Joseph was then ordained prophet and president of what became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ. The majority of Midwestern Mormons, divided from 1844-1860 by schism after schism, now began to come back into communion together, in the most successful regathering of disparate groups within Mormonism to date.

To mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of this important event, the John Whitmer Historical Association will hold its September 23-26, 2010, conference near Amboy, Illinois. Read the rest of this entry »

Elna Baker’s new memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance,  is billed as a coming of age story of a Mormon girl in New York, a virginal Mormon girl in the face of Carrie Bradshaw’s (surprisingly STD-free) City. But her feelings of deep faith mixed with nagging doubts and her commitment to chastity while simultaneously wanting to have sex, are feelings any LDS girl or boy will know immediately as their own, even at (any one of) the BYU(s). And that’s why I think you’ll like this book, because it’s so frank and familiar. Also, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

There are, of course, the uniquely New York stories.  Fortune cookie subway moments, an out-and-proud freshman roommate that regularly leaves a sex toy on the counter, a whole story about a  celebrity “Warren Beatty” that, even if you ran into Peter Breinholt in a Cafe Rio, would never happen in Provo. But she tells her stories, the ones known to any single Mormon and the ones particular to New York, with an honesty that is disarming.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t much care for basketball. I’m horrible at it myself and I’ve never really lost myself in the game watching others play it. I can respect what Michael Jordan accomplished, but it doesn’t interest me all that much. That said, I was moved by Lance Allred’s description of the early morning practices he would have with his coach in high school in his memoir, Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf, Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA.

Those mornings were the purest form of basketball I ever knew. Just me, [coach Kerry] Rupp, and a ball. No money, no boosters, no politics. It was the pure love and innocence of the game, when it was still a game for me. We both worked and sweated, our shoes squeaking and echoing out the gym and down the empty hallways. I’d pay to have those moments again, those moments of hard work and sacrifice when I knew not what to expect as far as what my future held, with no sense of entitlement, no reward or motive in sight other than just the pure love of the game. I had no idea if I was ever going to be good enough to play college ball. We were challengers of the unknown.

I wasn’t playing for the future on those mornings with Rupp; I was playing for the moment, for the present. I wanted to be good at something; I wanted to excel at something.

While I have never been a particularly dedicated athlete, Allred’s drive to excel, to find the limits of his physical ability and push himself beyond them, is inspiring, in spite of the likelihood that it is, at least partially motivated by his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The drive to be good can be, I think, found in all people: the polygamists amongst whom Allred was raised, the athletes with whom he competes in amateur, semi-pro, and professional basketball, and his own family, struggling to define themselves within and without the Apostolic United Brethren, the fundamentalist Mormon sect of Allred’s youth. Read the rest of this entry »

The Religious Studies Program at Utah Valley University sponsors its 10th Annual (wow!) Mormon Studies Conference November 5-6, on campus in Orem. The theme is “Outmigration and the Mormon Quest for Education,” and the lineup of speakers includes Wesley Johnson and Marian Johnson (co-directors of the Mormon Outmigration Project), Grethe and (former University of Utah President) Chase Peterson, and rock star sociologists Armand Mauss and Jan Shipps. Also, it may be the only time that Jack Welch and Mike Quinn have appeared on the same program (putting an end to the persistent rumors that they’re really the same person)* Read the rest of this entry »

Mike and I have just returned home from Voree, where we spent another entire week pouring through the records housed in archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite). We’re working on an institutional history of the church since the martyrdom of James Strang in 1856, the first ever composed. It’s been a fantastic experience because the Strangites have been excellent record keepers and because the church has given us unrestricted access to the archives. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Christian Fellowship at my father’s school learned that he was a Mormon, they kicked him out.  He joined the Islamic Student Association instead.  While experiences like these undoubtedly happen, they also seem to reinforce an unfortunate trend:  Mormon students often belong exclusively to organizations like LDSSA or Ruben J. Clark Societies, while not belonging to or associating with other Christian groups on campus.   Read the rest of this entry »

In 1941, Morton Smith spent two months of meditative seclusion at the monastery of Mar Saba, about a dozen miles southeast of Jerusalem. Three years later he would be ordained an Episcopalian deacon, but eventually he informally left the clerical life for that of the scholar, quipping that he was giving out cigars because he was no longer a Father. 17 years after his first visit, in 1958 (the year of my birth), he returned to the monastery as a 43-year old professor of history at Columbia University. This time he did not observe the monastic life, but was come as part of his research into old books in monasteries in Greece, Turkey and the Holy Land. Read the rest of this entry »

Our very own Steven Peck will be giving a talk on Mormonism and ecology this coming Sunday November 1, at 6 o’clock at Sunstone House–343 N. 3rd West. Go!

Details here.

Reading Nick Litterski’s thoughtful review of a recent book on Mormonism and Masonry made me think again about how difficult it has been for many people within and without the tradition to wrap their minds around the origins of Masonry. It occurred to me that I have done some reading in this area, and as someone with no strongly held beliefs about what the answer ought to be, I might be able to offer a brief summary of the literature I’ve read. As I’m pressed for time, the prose will not be polished, and footnotes will be notable in their absence, but I suspect that the best sources will appear in the comments. I recommend that any discussion of the intersections between Mormonism and Masonry be directed to Nick’s thoughtful post rather than my canceled threadjack. With that preamble: Read the rest of this entry »

Some BCC chums and I had a disagreement over this recently sidebarred article, “To Spank or Not To Spank.” And by “disagreement” I mean that we had different interpretations of what the author said versus what she meant to say and blah blah blah–it’s really not that important, despite the number of words I personally devoted to the conversation (which eventually ended in fisticuffs, not that anyone asked), but on reflection I realized that I was reading the article through my own parenting-experience-colored glasses.

I presume that many people read this article’s anecdote about the church nursery worker who spanked a child in her class and thought, “Dude, if someone did that to my kid–HELL to the NO.” I read the anecdote and wondered how the issue was going to be resolved, and when it wasn’t, I felt cheated–because I am the parent of the child who, to old-skool disciplinarians’ minds, could certainly do with a swat on the behind (or two). In fact, considering my daughter’s behavior in church, I would be astonished if several people in my ward did not think this on a regular basis. Read the rest of this entry »

If you found out that you were going to die soon, what sort of note would you leave behind? Who would it be addressed to? Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Weston, a frequent participant in conversations at BCC, sends this account of his recent visit to the Joseph Smith birthsite.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” – John 3:8

We went to Vermont this fall to see the leaves fall. Before they relinquished their life on this earth, they accepted one last mission: to exhaust their last remaining energy witnessing to the miracle of life. We marveled at this last testimony of falling leaves, there at that moment only for us to enjoy. Though science teaches me to know better, I was momentarily moved by the sacrifice.

So like these leaves were the missionaries stationed at the Joseph Smith birthsite in Sharon, VT. Though we had intended to drop by briefly to see the monument and grounds, we (me, Marty, Mom) were greeted on our arrival by Elder and Sister M and given a private tour. Read the rest of this entry »