By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Although Sam already beat me to a post on animals in the gospel, I’m adding the one I prepared to the conversation surrounding his post . . .

Last month my dog, Blitzen, passed away. To lose a beloved pet – and to recognize in its absence how deeply its life was intertwined with one’s daily routine – is to realize that it is possible to have a more intimate relationship with an animal than I will ever have with the majority of people I meet. Read the rest of this entry »

It is rare when anything dating as long ago as the pre-Exilic period can actually be confirmed by hard secular evidence. One example was just announced yesterday by the British Museum. You can read about it in the Times Online article here. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently become aware of a new church policy regarding housing the missionaries. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I have had occasion to think about animal sacrifice. The occasion is reading early anti-Mormon literature (I’ve been trying to add a component of identity negotiation to my cultural history, so have recently invested several hours making my way through various nineteenth-century texts). One accusation leveled by various critics is that Joseph Smith either engaged in or encouraged animal sacrifice. As I tried to inhabit the minds of these critics (and their intended audiences), I saw them struggling not just to enforce Christian orthodoxy (Christ had ended sacrifice by being the final sacrifice; the apostles encouraged early Christians to abstain from pagan animal sacrifices), but to play with rising early Victorian squeamishness about animals and slaughter. Thus by accusing Smith of animal sacrifice they both established his heterodoxy and made him exotic and dangerous. Modern anti-Mormons often operate from a similar perspective, in my experience.

Reading these accounts have returned my mind to the early 1980s when we were all convinced that actual Satanists formed a cabal every weekend night in the woods and sacrificed chickens as they chanted (I suspect they were in actuality 16-year-old boys telling crude jokes, smoking stolen cigarettes, and drinking Wild Turkey, but such was the tenor of the times). I think most of us now associate animal sacrifice with precisely these types of people, or worse with the sociopaths who torture non-human beings en route to heinous crimes against humanity.

There are at least two other models of modern animal sacrifice, though. Read the rest of this entry »

[A disclaimer: To be clear, the comparison being drawn here is between the shocking abruptness of the removal of people from photographs and the shocking abruptness of the removal of blog posts. At no time did I believe, nor do I believe, that Nate Oman imprisoned intellectuals and political opponents in Siberia in winter in order to let them starve to death. Nor do I believe Wilfried engineered an artificial famine that led to the deaths of 6-7 million Ukrainians. Finally, I don't believe that Adam or Kaimi killed their closest advisors in a paranoid frenzy (although, has anyone seen Jim F or Greg Call lately?). Please don't engaging in Stalinizing the nice folks at T&S (who hopefully know me well enough to understand that such was not my intent)]

I do not lightly make fun of another’s plight Read the rest of this entry »

In the spirit of “summer reading”–that is to say, not taxing– I want to talk about a phenomenon I call the Inverse Ratio of Response. As a regular reader but rare responder to BCC blogs I have observed that the more light-hearted posts, such as Levi’s about dress standards for home teachers, will generate responses in the hundreds while more serious topics will generate far fewer. I have some thoughts as to why. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always found it rather awkward to have to explain the terminology of “wards” and “stakes” to my friends of different faiths. But lately, I really like the connotations that are at least dimly present in the word “ward.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Encyclopedia of Mormonism is now online as a part of the digital online collection at the Harold B. Lee Library. Read the rest of this entry »

Although I believe that the single most powerful concept in the LDS faith is the principle of continuing revelation, I have lately begun to wonder why we have ceased to be a scripture creating people. Certainly, I have heard the argument that we should treat the apostles’ words as scripture, but these words do not appear to me to be granted the same weight within our church as our canonical texts – The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. Read the rest of this entry »

My family and I are spending some weeks of holiday in Southern California to visit friends and family and enjoy the weather. We’re attending my parents ward, which was the ward into which I was born, baptized, etc. My ‘hometown’ in the southeast corner of the San Gabriel Valley has always been an ethnically mixed neighborhood; in the last few years the Chinese and Korean residents and businesses have dominated the area in a way some might find threatening, but it has improved property values and (from my point of view) made a bland suburban vacuum something more interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

I am marrying a Mennonite. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been noticing this phrase a lot lately. I think it has been used for a while, but it seems to be kind of trendy at the moment. It seems to come up most often in contexts where personal revelation or mere human reasoning are being disparaged as less useful than prophetic counsel.

So where did this usage come from? Why is it popular right now? If you use this phrase in talking about General Authorities, when did you start using it? Do you remember where you first heard/read it? Also, does it have specific content, i.e. does it refer only to the Quorum of the 12, only to the President of the church?

Documentation is appreciated, but ungrounded speculation is also welcomed!

Natalie Brown attends Columbia University, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis on histories of reading and gender in Victorian literature. She recently began the blog Mormon Rhetoric, which you can find here. It is dedicated to understanding and improving the languages through which Mormons experience and share their faith. She lives with her husband in New York City.  Please welcome Natalie to BCC!

NoCoolName_Tom wrote the following in a recent comment:

beyond the reality of a God-guided creation, a human-caused Fall, and an infinite Atonement, there isn’t much that I find in the Bible to be historically necessary.

Do we believe in a human-caused Fall? Is the great plan of happiness a plan B, forced upon us (and God) by his wayward children? I would tend to say no (strongly even), but I am curious to hear what you all have to say on the subject. Do we believe in Plan B theology?

I simply cannot tell you how many times I’ve been asked about the unique Mormon belief that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri–usually by members of the Church, wanting to know whether they really have to believe that and, if so, how one is to defend such an idea. I’ve seen the question at least four times this calendar year, most recently just yesterday. My preference when such a question keeps coming up is to refer people to an already existing resource, but I’m not aware of such a resource on this particular issue. So I’m going to try to create one to which I can direct future questioners, and I am soliciting your help in fleshing out my quick thoughts on the subject below. Read the rest of this entry »

FYI: MCQ concludes his guest-posting with us. Thanks MCQ!.

As I mentioned in the thread to Kevin’s post, my wife is a descendant of Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. You may not believe this now, but I have been preparing a post on Mary Elizabeth for about a week. After obnoxiously jacking Kevin’s thread, I figured I better hurry up and get the post done.

When I first learned that she was my wife’s ggg-grandmother, I had no idea who Mary Elizabeth was, despite the fact that I had grown up in the Church. We tend not to talk much about our female heroes, especially the ones that were involved in practices with which we are currently uncomfortable. Well, the more I learned about her, the more I realized that Mary Elizabeth is surely one of our heroes, and we ought to talk about her, and many others like her, a lot more. Read the rest of this entry »