By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

The other day a friend from Utah sent me a clipping of a Robert Kirby column from the Salt Lake Tribune about a stake president’s directive that all home and visiting teaching is to be done in Sunday uniform, regardless of the day of the week or hour of the day, that is, white shirts and ties for men (no Dockers, please) and proper skirts for women (no denim, please). Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, I began to see references in my family’s letters to DNA testing to see whether my brother-in-law (husband to my oldest sister) might be a descendant of Joseph Smith through his plural wife, Sylvia Sessions Lyon, and her daughter, Josephine Fisher (my BIL is a Fisher). I was totally fascinated by this, but my relatives didn’t really understand the DNA or the details of the project very well, so it was hard for me to get more specific information at that time. Read the rest of this entry »

I have heard some people decry the aesthetics of popular Mormon art. I say to those people, cast your fury upon the recent cover of JMH. Read the rest of this entry »

Abandon all hope if ye enter here, non-lawyers. Read the rest of this entry »

FYI: MCQ continues his guest-posting with us. He’s brilliant and witty in every way.

At the jail, the four brethren sweltered in the sultry afternoon heat. Joseph gave Hyrum a single-shot pistol and prepared to defend himself with the six-shooter smuggled in that morning by Cyrus Wheelock. Gravely depressed, the brethren asked John Taylor to sing a popular song entitled “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” about a suffering stranger who revealed himself at last as the Savior. Joseph asked John to sing it again, which he did. Read the rest of this entry »

MCQ’s request today for posts on Sterling McMurrin and Hugh B. Brown lit all my Dialogue antenna. I apologize I haven’t time to attempt a bibliography, even a Dialogue only bibliography with its numerous citations, but I will point you to a start: Volume 17, No. 1, Spring 1984, for Blake Ostler’s interview with Sterling McMurrin and a reprint of one of my favorite talks of all time, Hugh B. Brown’s address to BYU on May 13, 1969. Entitled “An Eternal Quest: Freedom of the Mind,” it is a classic. A wise blend of deep testimony and humble acknowledgment that “Our revealed truth should leave us stricken with with knowledge of how little we really know. It should never lead to an emotional arrogance based upon a false assumption that we somehow have all the answers–that we in fact have a corner on truth. For we do not.” Read the rest of this entry »

The grip of mammon over our lives is fairly invisible most of the time. Only when bills pile up or we consider major life changes like relocation or career shifts do we start to notice how bound we are by our financial concerns. Here’s a little test to make those financial ties a little more easy to discern. Read the rest of this entry »

Delbert L. Stapley plays a pivotal role in my family narrative. To be honest, I’m not sure how we are related. I think he was my Grandpa’s cousin, which really means I have no substantive claim to his legacy. Still, he called my father on a mission on-the-spot, set him apart and later sealed my parents. He proved most influential over my parents’ early family. Though I never met him, I love him, deeply respect him and believe he was an inspired servant of God. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, some of you will have noticed that Naiah, one of the ‘nacle’s most passionate and articulate voices, has been quiet. She had surgery last week, and has developed some complications. She’ll be ok, but it has been a rough week and more rough weeks are sure to follow. Please include her in your prayers!

FYI: MCQ continues his guest-posting with us. He’s brilliant and witty in every way.

As I told you a week ago, some friends and I decided to run the 177 mile Wasatch Back Relay from Logan, Utah to Park City, Utah, in an attempt to memorialize and honor the family of my friend Chris and the example of forgiveness that he set for us. We started Friday at 9:00 am and finished Saturday at about 12:30 pm (in case you can’t tell: that’s not fast). Chris heroically insisted on running all of his assigned legs despite the fact that (unknown to him prior to Thursday) he had a lingering injury to his knee from his car accident. He will undergo surgery tomorrow to repair that injury. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mormon temple is a place out of time. When I enter, I lose track of clocks, hours, minutes, and obligations. For the hour and a half or so that an endowment session lasts, I forget whether it is morning, afternoon, or evening. Admittedly, this effect is surely due in part to the fact that endowment rooms lack windows or natural light; I have sometimes experienced a similar loss of my sense of time during academic sessions in interior rooms of conference hotels. Yet the comparison emphasizes the difference. When in an academic meeting I lose track of time, it always seems to pass more slowly than it really does. In an endowment session, time instead seems to stop altogether, or better still to be entirely beside the point. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest BYU Studies is out. I thought I’d try to describe the contents for those of you who may be interested: Read the rest of this entry »

While looking at how mainline Christians used Mormons to establish their own identity and negotiate the meaning of inspiration, I’ve lately been fascinated by Turner’s cruel little book, Mormonism in All Ages. Attempting to establish that Mormons are as crazy as every strange Christian heresy over almost two millennia, Turner invokes Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History to describe the Quietists. According to Turner’s paraphrase of Mosheim,

They seated themselves daily in some retired corner and fixed their eyes steadfastly upon their navels, until a wonderful divine illumination beamed forth upon them and diffused through their souls peculiar delight. By this process they imagined that they acquired peculiar insight into the spiritual world, saw God himself with their bodily eyes, and other things equally strange and unutterable.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the book Global Values 101, which happens to be edited by someone I really like, there is an interview by bioethicist Peter Singer. Though sometimes I think Singer is crazy, his interview discusses his decision to give 20% of his yearly financial gain away to charity. He has plans to move it to 30% very soon. We clearly don’t bat our eyes at 10%, or if we do we try not to let our neighbors see the batting, but what about 20 or 30? Read the rest of this entry »

The Church’s internet publication of Richard E. Turley’s September Ensign article on the Mountain Meadows Massacre got me thinking about issues in the past that I have really enjoyed. Perhaps my favorite article was written two years after I was born, by William Hartley. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an inspiring article from Maurine Proctor at Meridian about community service projects undertaken by missionaries in Washington, D.C. I think this sort of thing is great, and that missionaries should be doing much more of it, not less. But apparently there is a Church-wide rule limiting service hours to four per week per companionship. Read the rest of this entry »

I am about to be arrogant, condescending, and fuddy-duddy at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

We forgot to introduce MCQ to everyone before he started posting. What can I say, it’s June.

MCQ (Mark C. Quinn) was born in Falls Church VA and grew up in Orange County, CA and Salt Lake City. He received degrees in english and law at the University of Utah and Seattle University respectively. He now practices law in a small firm he recently started in Holladay, UT order to have more time to read trashy novels, write worse fiction and waste time and money on mountain biking, Bernese Mountain Dogs and starting the world’s greatest independent record label. He has a startlingly beautiful long-suffering wife and two genius-level children.

He also provided a photo, which I will not post here as this is a family-friendly site.

Being Mormon is a multi-dimensional affair, involving belief, practice, history, and community. Of the many aspects of Mormon-ness, one of the least-often discussed on LDS blogs is the simple experience of attending Sunday meetings. In this post, Steve Evans and I discuss our quite different personal experiences of the Mormon three-hour block. Read the rest of this entry »

FYI: MCQ is guest-posting with us for the next couple of weeks. He’s brilliant and witty in every way.

In February of this year, a friend of mine, Chris, who is the bishop of his ward, lost his wonderful wife, Michelle (who was near to delivering their fifth child) and two of his young children when their car was struck by a 17 year old boy who was driving drunk. This horrific accident happened not on some distant freeway with cars whizzing by at high speed but on a normal street just a few miles from where I live. Read the rest of this entry »

My oldest has spent the last couple months wishing everyone a “happy mother’s day” because she remembers how much fun we all had. I think she considers it to mean the same thing as “happy birthday” but specific to parents (she wishes me happy mother’s day as well).

Today (although, not following the holiday or my calendar well, I accidentally ended up on a work trip this weekend), I am not interested so much in being honored as in honoring my fatherhood, which to me means two things: my children, and sharing those children with my wife. (This is specific to my situation; others will honor fatherhood in different settings and permutations, and I am glad to honor those as well.) Read the rest of this entry »

My subscriptions to Bible Review and Biblical Archaeology Review have been piling up on my “to read” shelf. I had some time this afternoon, so I tried to pare the pile down. In the course of this, I read Ben Witherington III, “Joanna: Apostle of the Lord–or Jailbait?” Bible Review (Spring 2003): 12-14, 46. I thought this was a fascinating, if speculative, argument, so I wanted to share it with you. I am going to do this in five parts. Parts 3-5 is material many of you will already be familiar with regarding Junia; I share it here for the benefit of those who may not already know about it. Parts 1 and 2 is the stuff that was new to me. Read the rest of this entry »

The woman who is coordinating the local Junior Miss pageant is in our ward and, since we are known ward intellectuals, she asked my wife to do her a favor: she needs hard questions to ask the girls for their question and answer section. She turned to the intellectuals in the area (which is hilarious, since our ward is populated with college professors) and asked us to come up with questions that would challenge the girls. My wife explained all this to me last night by way of apology for suddenly being caught up in a pageant.

I haven’t watched the Miss America/USA/Universe pageants in years, nor have I attended local pageants. At a parade a couple of weeks ago, my sister-in-law noted that the difference between the dresses of the pageant winners we saw driving by was that the queen got the dress with the spaghetti straps and the low back and her attendants looked to be in hastily ordered bridesmaids dresses. At the Ephraim parade I attended several weeks ago, half of the attending pageant parties were in the backs of pickup trucks. I often find myself on the third floor of the Wilkinson Center, walking past all those homecoming queens. I am curious about the role of women’s pageants in Mormon society. Do they mean something different amongst us than they do among the wider Gentile audience? Read the rest of this entry »

I was trying to think of something I might like to blog about. I thought of when Rosalynde at T&S used to post entries from this day in her own missionary history from her journal. So I checked my missionary journal for June 14, 1978 and 1979, and the entries were short and boring. So I was putting my journal away, when I became curious what I had written about the 1978 revelation, given that we just had a week-long series on it. So I looked up the appropriate entry. Read the rest of this entry »

I lived in Albany NY for the last nine months and just recently moved back to Boston.  In Albany, I designed the bathroom with religious themes, mostly Christian. A 12 inch steel cross, an 8×10 framed doey-eyed Jesus with a bleeding heart, Buddha, the tall saint candles sold next to the Goya brand goods in the “International” section of the supermarket, a photo of the pope and other interesting religious items I cannot recall at this time. Read the rest of this entry »

I know of two people who were recently castigated by Austrian Mormons for saying “Grüß Gott.”* These people are also Mormon but not Austrian and were unaware of the specific kosher rules of this particular regional Mormonism. Apparently, Grüß Gott is verboten for Austrian Mormons. The following is my attempt to show why this Verbot doesn’t quite add up. Read the rest of this entry »