By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Note: I previously took a shot of making sense of an odd construction in Alma 36:9. Since that text is part of this coming Sunday’s GD lesson, I would like to take this opportunity to update that first, preliminary effort at making sense of it. Since that original post my views have changed somewhat. I hope you will find the below helpful in trying to parse the meaning of this verse.

Alma 36:9 reads as follows: “And he said unto me: If thou wilt of thyself be destroyed, seek no more to destroy the church of God.” This phrasing is repeated with a minor variation two verses later. Read the rest of this entry »

When we bought the house we now live in back in the late 80s, we had to move into a different ward in our stake. I loved our old ward, but I also loved our new house, so the switch had to be done. I went into it with low expectations; I figured from experience that it would be at least six months, maybe more like a year, for us to begin to make friends and fit into the new ward. I had braced myself not to be disappointed and to take the long view of (eventual) inclusion into the fabric of the new ward. And yet, as it turned out, we began to mesh well with our new ward very quickly. The reason I believe was something the ward did called “dinner groups.” Read the rest of this entry »

Part of tomorrow’s GD lesson is Mosiah 20, which includes the story of the wicked Noachian priests and the stolen daughters of the Lamanites: Read the rest of this entry »

I work in Chicago, and live in a northwest suburb of the City. So I’ve been following from afar the young basketball phenom Jabari Parker. It has been fun to read all the articles about the humble, serious-minded young man, excellent student, tight-knit family, with off the charts basketball skills. And oh yes, he’s black. And Mormon. Living on the south side of Chicago. He’s just an impressive, grounded young man. (And his mom Lola is hell on wheels!) Read the rest of this entry »

On our BCC backlist, one of our permas asked whether the below meets the Snopes test.

“Die Boek van Mormon” By John M. Pontius

The account was originally posted by Pontius at his blog, but he has since taken the actual account down, although the comments remain. Therefore, I’m pasting here the account as given by Pontius: Read the rest of this entry »

As I prepared for today’s GD lesson on Mosiah 7-11, it dawned on me that Mosiah 8 might be a good occasion to teach the class the stone-in-the-hat methodology Joseph used in his translation of the BoM. As you’ll recall, King Limhi asks Ammon if he can translate languages, and he replies that he cannot. He then asks if he knows anyone that can, because he possesses the 24 Jaredite gold plates and he wants to learn the reasons for their destruction. Ammon tells him that the King of Zarahemla (IE Mosiah [2]) is a seer who possesses interpreters by which he can interpret languages. After further explanation, in v. 18 Ammon says “Thus God has provided a means that man, through faith, might work mighty miracles; therefore he becometh a great benefit to his fellow beings.” Read the rest of this entry »

[The below is an approximation of a talk I gave in sacrament meeting today. It is only an approximation because I never wrote the text out but spoke from an outline. I was supposed to be the last speaker last week, but the second speaker took the whole time, so the bishop asked me to hold my talk for today, and he strategically scheduled me as the second speaker to assure I'd be able to get my 20 minutes in. I had some modules in reserve in case I needed to stretch, such as a section where I would have talked about LDS humanism and some insights on fasting and keeping the Sabbath holy I gleaned from Jana's Flunking Sainthood, but I didn't need those modules so they are not included below.] Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone wants Mitt Romney to talk about Mormonism, and so far he has more or less refused. That is perhaps the wiser political course. But if it were me, I’m not so sure that I would be able to stay silent on the subject. The vacuum has left reporters with the idea that Mormonism is far removed from traditional Christianity and thoroughgoingly weird. It’s true that Mormonism is rife with theological heresy (from the perspective of most Christians), but virtually every idea percolating within it can be found somewhere within historic, traditional Christianity. So if it were me, I would have a little talk with those asking about my Mormonism, to try to help them place the faith in some context that they might understand, something like this: Read the rest of this entry »

I returned from my mission to Colorado in October of 1979. After working a couple of months to save some money, I returned to Provo in January 1980 to resume my education. That first semester I roomed with a friend from my freshman year. It was just a room in the basement of a tree streets house. There was no kitchen, just a minifridge and a hot plate. I basically lived on cereal, PBJs and hot dogs that semester. Near the end of the semester, I got engaged. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was on my mission, I had a companion who really hated it when young children bore testimony in the general fast and testimony meeting. I had never encountered that perspective before, but once he had articulated it I began to notice casual comments from a few general authorities here and there who shared his view. As I understand it, the idea is that testimony should reflect a genuine witness of the spirit, not rote memorized phrases such as the ubiquitous “I know my family loves me.” Testimony meeting is not the venue for children to go up and be cute and hear their voices project over the microphone. (I’m sure I’m not articulating the point of view well, so I invite others to express it more fully in the comments.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a director in a couple of Mormon world-related not for profits. It’s a hard role; much harder than I expected it to be when I signed on for this service. You have to deal with different personalities, different perspectives, different agendas, all the while sublimating what might be your own preferences to the long term future good of the organization itself. The Quorum of the Twelve is in some sense analogous to a corporate board of directors, and the problems they face in governing a worldwide Church of over 14 million members must be absolutely staggering. Let’s put ourselves in their shoes and try to think through whether a disavowal of the ban is something we should advocate for the institution. I’ll start with some of my thoughts, but then I want you to put on your apostle’s cap and add to the discussion, trying to think from their perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

A post by Speckles over at FMH contained this paragraph that got me to reminiscing a bit: Read the rest of this entry »

The gold standard of home teaching of course includes giving the most recent 1P message from the Ensign to each family. If you don’t do that as a HTer, then, as the kids like to text, “ur doing it wrong.” But has it always been that way? Read the rest of this entry »

Next Sunday we start our study of the BoM in earnest with a lesson on 1 Nephi 1-7. As you know, the text begins with these words: “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father….” Clearly there is a causal relationship between Nephi’s parents being “goodly” and the education he received. The late Marc Schindler had a theory to the effect that “goodly” here does not mean simply “good” (perhaps with the connotation “righteous”), as it is usually taken, but rather something like “possessed of goods,” and therefore “affluent,” suggesting that Nephi received an education because his parents were materially well off and could afford to educate him. Read the rest of this entry »

Several denizens of the Bloggernacle were heavily involved in The Student Review, an independent student newspaper that once existed, and has been reborn, at BYU. Those of us who are a little older fondly recall the Review’s antecedent, the Seventh East Press. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke 2:7 famously reads: “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” Read the rest of this entry »

A follow-up guest post from Barry Bickmore.

Last week, I responded to an opinion piece in Meridian Magazine, in which the author, Gary Lawrence, used out-of-context snippets of some stolen e-mails to suggest that global warming is a big hoax, perpetrated by dishonest and greedy climate scientists to gain fame and line their pockets with grant money. My take was that Brother Lawrence hadn’t done his homework. Since he wanted to believe global warming is a hoax, he willingly accepted and passed on such charges without so much as checking the context of the quotations he used for evidence. I showed that one of his quotations was actually altered to supply a context that was contrary to the true context of the passage. My main complaint was that Latter-day Saints, of all people, ought to know better than to throw out conspiracy theories based on out-of-context quotations, because that’s exactly what anti-Mormon writers have always done to stir up people against us. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow I’m going to be teaching the letters of John in Gospel Doctrine class. So I start reading 1 John 1, and run headlong into one of the longest, most convoluted sentences in the New Testament, spanning the first four verses (even though the KJV puts a period after verse 3 in English). Here’s what it looks like in our 1979 LDS edition of the KJV: Read the rest of this entry »

The below is a guest post from Barry Bickmore, a professor of geology at BYU. He blogs at Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah.

The other day, Meridian Magazine (an LDS-themed publication) published an opinion piece by Gary Lawrence, who wrote that climate scientists who warn about the dangers of human-caused global warming are on par with “those who love and make a lie,” and “sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers” the scriptures warn against. He apparently believes that climate scientists have been fraudulently adjusting their data and conclusions to promote global warming hysteria and line their pockets with research money. His evidence? A few out-of-context quotations from some e-mails stolen from a University of East Anglia computer. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a kind of meme in the Church to the effect that women who have already been sealed to a husband in the temple, but then are widowed or divorced, have seriously diminished marriage prospects due to the fact that they are not available to be sealed to another man in the here and now. Read the rest of this entry »

The below is a slightly edited version of a post I submitted to The Seeker. The post hasn’t been picked up (they prefer to only publish posts on topics where multiple different posts are submitted by the Seeker bloggers, and while the Amish beard cutting cult was a possible topic suggested, I was the only one to write on it.) But yesterday I saw the movie Martha Marcy May Marlene, a very intense portrayal of a young woman who got caught up with a group that is what in popular parlance would be called a “cult.” It wasn’t a religious group; they were located in the Catskills and were more like a 1960s free love commune on steroids. The leader of the group is portrayed by the actor John Hawkes, and he is terrific in the role. Anyway, watching this movie kind of pissed me off, because here is a group that clearly would be a cult in the popular conception of the word (the c-word is not used once in the movie, an excellent artistic choice), and yet conservative Protestant countercultists have so misused the word “cult” that, in a way, they have given such dangerous groups aid and comfort by lumping them in with established and safe Christian faiths with which such countercultists simply disagree theologically. So here are my thoughts: Read the rest of this entry »

“Going to the Show” is baseball slang for being brought up to the big leagues. Here I’m using it more literally–on Tuesday night I was part of a panel that was interviewed on the subject of Mormonism for Chicago Tonight, the flagship program of WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate. The program aired this evening; I just watched it. Read the rest of this entry »

I left the house about 9:00 a.m. for my five-hour road trip to Nauvoo. It was a beautiful day and the drive was very pleasant, except for several work calls I had to take. (I won’t be able to totally relax until tomorrow night when I can forget about work for the rest of the weekend. But still, it wasn’t that bad.) Read the rest of this entry »

About five years ago the Church flirted with a pilot program to put answers to about 50 challenging questions about the Church on its website. The issues were identified, and a couple of dozen respondents were assigned to write responses to two issues each. I was one such respondent, and I prepared a draft of my answers. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two circumstances that inform my (positive) opinion on Charles R. Harrell, “This is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology (n.p.: Kofford Books, 2011). First, in 2001, James Patrick Holding (a pseudonym) published a slim volume, The Mormon Defenders: How Latter-day Saint Apologists Misinterpret the Bible (self-published, 2001). Kevin Graham organized a set of responses to Holding’s book, and I agreed to respond to Chapter 3, “Persons and Pre-Mortality: The Mormon Doctrine of Preexistence,” at 53-61, with related endnotes at 144-45. The result was my paper, “On Preexistence in the Bible.” I needed to understand the development of preexistence in Mormon thought in order to be able to effectively write my paper, and so I turned to two sources. One I was already familiar with: Blake Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15/1 (Spring 1982): 59-78, which was actually a student essay published in a volume devoted to such student work. The second was one I had not been familiar with before and was new to me: Charles R. Harrell, “The Development of the Doctrine of Preexistence, 1830-1844,” BYU Studies 28/2 (Spring 1988): 75-96. Read the rest of this entry »

As a practicing Mormon, I have a tremendous admiration for the fast undertaken by Muslims the world over during the holy month of Ramadan. Read the rest of this entry »

My daughter, Emily, was the one who lured me into the Buffyverse. I was late to the party, but I made a deal with her. I would buy the DVDs of the various seasons as they came out, I would watch them, and then give them to her to keep. So that is how I ended up watching all seven seasons, and how she got a complete DVD collection of them. Read the rest of this entry »