By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I steal this line from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet, 14 as a way of approaching one of the more interesting and challenging points of Joseph Smith’s role as Prophet of the Restoration: his role as a mouthpiece of revelation.  I believe that the different rhetorical voices Joseph Smith took while expressing revelation have deep significance for how we should approach the Doctrine and Covenants.

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Stephen has agreed to comment on his essay “Weight of the Priesthood.” By way of a beginning, he responds here to questions Levi posed.  Stephen will be reading the comments and will respond to readers as much as he can.

LEVI: Your essay strikes me as a beautiful mix of gentle irreverence and an ultimate respect for the priesthood. Were you aware of these qualities as you wrote the essay?

STEPHEN: I’m going to take the long way around to answer your question. I started writing this essay just after reading two Mormon-themed personal essays by Eric Goold, a friend of mine here in Fairbanks. His writing was so vibrant, honest and funny that it pretty much knocked me out of my chair.

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You knew it was inevitable.  Within weeks of joining a family ward, I was assigned to corrupt the youth.  Okay, not actually assigned–apparently I "volunteered" to teach early morning Seminary, and let’s just say that no one has actually prescribed corruption.  We’ll see what happens. 

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It’s Friday, it’s summertime, let’s goof around.

We at BCC have noticed, to our chagrin, that we have fallen behind in the navel-gazing that has the rest of the Bloggernacle all a-twitter.  Never ones to not jump on a bandwagon as it rolls past, behold!  The return of the polls to BCC.

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The new Mormon Studies e-journal, Archipelago, is now making a call for papers. Go to: http://www.archipelago-journal.org for further information and contact details. Notice the cool, electronic interface. If you’re interested in contributing to Archipelago, you’ll have to register. Thanks to J. Stapley for his technical nous.

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We’re pleased to present more the first fruits of our newfound friendship with Dialogue: an advance look at Stephen Carter’s personal essay, "The Weight of Priesthood."  Stephen will appear soon at BCC as a special guest (once he returns from his remote Alaskan hideaway), and in advance we invite you to download and read his thoughtful article.  The article will appear in Dialogue’s Fall Issue #3803, available Sept. 1st.

While we are on the subject of stripling warriors …

One of my least favourite interpretations of scripture focuses upon the story of the army of Helaman. In Alma 56, the standard of good motherhood is set forth:

Now they never had fought yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their own lives; yea, they had been trained by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying We did not doubt our mothers knew it.

The simplistic conclusion that often seems to arise from any discussion of the army of Helaman is that these relatively unknown women were “good” mothers because their children did not doubt.

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Take a look at these guys. They’re HUGE! No wonder no-one died. How could you possibly defeat men like this?

But here’s the problem: this painting would seem to ascribe the Stripling Warriors’ success to testosterone. The scriptures tell another story. Helaman calls them his "little sons" and says that they were all "very young" (Alma 56:39;46). Their strength came not from their muscles but from the "strength of God" (Alma 56:56). Imagine then, if you can, 2000 near-children willing to fight for liberty. For me, that image is even more telling than that painted by Friberg.

Now, this is not some iconoclastic Friberg-bash. I like his paintings, and commissioned as they were for Primary, I think they give kids (read: boys) some Mormons superheroes to look up to. (Even today’s Star Wars figures are buff–Luke Skywalker was never buff!) Nor would I claim that in this case it really matters a great deal. But it’s worth noting how influenced we are by images (especially when they’re semi-canonical like Friberg’s).

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I am pleased to report that the Elders Quorum Menrichment meeting last weekend was a resounding success.  Saturday evening, the brethren of the quorum were edified by copious baby-back ribs, ping pong and darts.  We also spent 400%
of our annual budget. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we watch as the Israeli military continues the forced abandonment of Gaza. I am reminded how I lack the conceptual tools to realize a just and peaceful ending.  Like others, history and politics are blended into my amalgam, but there is also my Mormonism. Read the rest of this entry »

My first clue was the large NYPD van parked in front of the subway entrance at 103rd Street. 

As I came down the stairs to the turnstyles, a uniformed officer took me aside and removed the bag from my shoulder.  With a flashlight, he opened all the pockets, finding my Book of Mormon, cell phone, sunglasses and wallet.  He then sent me on my way, and flagged down another passenger to inspect.  I missed my train by a few seconds, but was none the worse for wear.

Welcome to life in the War on Terror.

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I’m on my ward’s Elders* Quorum Presidency, which means I spend a great deal of my church time worrying about home teaching. A while back we determined that the key to home teaching in our ward was accountability, and subsequently set-out to regularly hold "personal stewardship interviews" with our Quorum members (aka PPI’s). To make this easier we decided to hold a "PSI-Night," where all our guys would come and be interviewed over the course of one evening.

Now, EQ types are not used to EQ things on weekday evenings (for us, no "Men-richment"), so we decided to offer an incentive (bribe): come to the PSI’s and get a free baseball ticket. Yes, that’s right: our Elders Quorum was going to blow its budget on an Orioles game.

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My bishop asked me to give a Mother’s Day talk in sacrament meeting in May. I spent five or six hours writing it out so that I could deliver it within the fifteen minutes suggested by the bishop. However, I didn’t get to give it because the speakers before me on the program used up all the time.

Before the meeting began, I told the bishop that it was likely a mistake on his part to ask me to give a talk. He said no, it wasn’t a mistake. When the meeting was over, I told him, “There, you see it was a mistake. The Almighty countermanded you.”

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You may have noticed that we’ve tweaked our color scheme, changed our banner image and made a few other changes.  Our site design is admittedly a work-in-progress; your comments (read: rants) are taken very seriously in that respect.

Let me point out for you the most important site change, in case you missed it: the button in our right-hand sidebar, linking to Dialogue.  It represents a new collaboration between Dialogue and BCC, one that we’re very excited about, but one that merits some discussion and explanation.

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Captain Moroni, general Mormon hero and all round good-guy. Right? I mean, there’s an action figure of this guy, and as Seminary kids we learned that famous statement by Mormon that if everyone was like Moroni, even Satan would quiver in his boots (Alma 38: 17). Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I began rereading the Book of Mormon, taking up President Hinckley’s challenge to the Church (I have it on good authority, incidentally, that posting about this challenge is not considered poaching, so there).  Reading the Book of Mormon feels like coming home to me – it is so familiar, so welcoming a book, that it is comfort food for the soul.

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I recently drove through the streets of Salt Lake City with Reading Lolita in Tehran. As I listened to the account of life in Iran, which I had previously read, I confronted my own vision of Zion and its concurrent political realities. In balancing my Mormon values to discern an appropriate perspective, I realized that the ultimate question does not consider the rectitude of Libertarianism, per se, but the magnitude of its ideal realization.
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I am one of a handful of people who can read Sumerian, the world’s oldest written language (c.3000 BC, from cuneiform tablets in Iraq/Mesopotamia). Not a great party trick, I grant you, but wonderful if you are into UFOlogy.

You see, according to a Russian-born "scholar", Zechariah Sitchin, the truth about human origins is revealed if one carefully studies the mythology of ancient Sumer. Sitchin proposes that Earth was colonised 450,0000 years ago by an alien race fleeing their dying home planet, Nibiru. Known in different cultures as the Annunaki, the Nephilim and the Elohim, about 300,000 years ago the aliens genetically upgraded monkeys to create a perfect slave race: humans.

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When I was on my mission I encountered my fair share of anti-Mormonism. Upstate New York was largely Catholic, and those good folks almost entirely avoided the anti-Mormon scene. But there were also the Evangelicals, and they had all the pamphlets, the books, the same tired arguments ready to go. What bothered me the most about anti-Mormonism was the havoc a few sentences could wreak on your work. If you were talking to a group of people, and one person started spouting off about how Mormons are racist, how we believe Jesus and Satan are brothers, and that Adam and God are the same person, no one else wanted to listen to you. They could tear down our whole faith and claim to know what we believed with just a few choice words.

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Yesterday I was reading my copy of the Summer 2005 Marriott Alumni Magazine*, and came across an article by J. Michael Pinegar, a BYU professor of Finance, entited "The Lord’s Goods."    After discussing issues of stewardship and consecration, Pinegar quotes one of his students as follows:

Money is one of God’s tools to help us become like him.  [As] with many of God’s tools, Satan manipulates money’s use and tries to bring us down…Money is the power of this world.  The priesthood is the power of heaven.  [When] we use money how God intends for us to use it, then He will also show us how He intends for us to use the priesthood.

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In the modern church, we posit that deep and romantic love for one’s spouse is most Holy. It is this love that is the beatific pinacle and is bound by the sealing power…Except that our history demeans romantic love. The 19th century saints taught that romantic love was not transcendent, but to be transcended. Read the rest of this entry »

William Morris has returned from the dead. Go and see A Motley Vision!

But, as I’m never one to squander a fantastic title, can someone please explain to me 1st resurrection, 2nd resurrection, and who gets up in the morning, and who’s in the afternoon? And doctrine, please — no secondhand texts allowed. Better still, perhaps someone could explain to me why it matters? Or, if this is just crazy talk, please let me know.

It’s time to embark on a long-overdue project. In recent years, Church leaders have instructed us on how to bear (and not to bear) our testimonies in Sacrament meeting. We have been given detailed procedures regarding when and how to give priesthood blessings. The Church has completely revamped the missionary discussions, encouraging a more flexible lesson schedule and malleable pedagogical approach. But for some reason, no one in Salt Lake has yet felt the need to provide an instruction manual on how to give (and not give) talks in Church. Thus, it is out of my amazing sense of selflessness (or perhaps my interminable obsession with ark-steadying) that I’ve decided to single-handedly take on this project. (What’s that you say? “Aaron, you’re like Mother Theresa! You’re a modern-day Martin Luther!” Yeah, I get that a lot.)

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