By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Twice in the past week, I have been asked, in essence, this very question, though not exactly as it is recorded in Matthew 22:42. Once the question came from a student of mine, a young person, unfamiliar with the Mormon church but filled with questions, a person generally uninterested in Christianity; the other came from a fellow Mormon blogger, an academic like myself, trying to make sense of certain statements I’d made in response to some of the temple-related controversies which the Mormon Moment has thrust upon us. I found myself responding as I did in both cases, I suppose, because I’m mostly unconcerned with, and admittedly sometimes outright dismissive of, many of the doctrines in question: the point of the church, for me at least, is to get close to God, and experience the condescension, love, and grace of Jesus, and I often find the need to justify or make sense of much of the rest of our teachings a distraction, at best. What follows is my attempt to recreate the answers I gave to those two questioners, with some help from Elders Holland and Uchtdorf along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

This is a sermon which I gave in sacrament meeting on January 1, 2012. It was the day after our third daughter, Alison, was baptized, and my parents and parents-in-law were in attendance, which all made for a wonderful occasion. I don’t think I would have done anything different with this sermon it had been just another Sunday though. In any case, I think it turned out well, and enough people told me afterwards that they liked it that I decided to post it here. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

This, or something very much like this, is perhaps my oldest Christmas memory. Also one of my best.

Best wishes for a great holiday tomorrow.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

I don’t mean to make a habit of responding to Matt Bowman’s essays in The New Republic, if for no other reason than that the man’s scholarly chops and writing skills are both impressive and intimidating. Both those talents are fully on display in his latest piece, which thoughtfully postulates a link between Mitt Romney’s technocratic worldview and organizational acumen (as well as his occasional history of deviating from quasi-libertarian, Tea Party-conservative Republican orthodoxy) and Mormonism’s history of progressive-style responses to social problems. But there’s a problem with Bowman’s essay: what he identifies from Mormon history and culture as a variation upon “classical American progressivism” isn’t really, or at least isn’t at its roots, despite his claims otherwise. In fact, the affinity which Matt sees between Mormonism and progressivism is actually just an echo of an ever deeper, more radical historical parallel and inheritance–one which, I’m sad to say, Mitt Romney (like most American Mormons) shows little sign of having been influenced by at all. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

The October 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine features as its cover article a lengthy, provocative, at times insightful, but mostly wholly tendentious anti-Mormon screed by Chris Lehmann, entitled “Pennies from Heaven.” Lehmann’s thesis basically boils down to 1) Mormon doctrine conveys a particularly pure version of the “prosperity gospel,” in which the tightly organized collective acquisition of non-speculative wealth (mostly gold or land) is held up as the ideal characteristic of God’s chosen people, and 2) this ideological mix of piety and material plenty has spread through the Tea Party movement and into the mainstream of the Republican party, with Mormon presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman being exemplary contributors to this continuing economic conversion. This thesis–both parts of it–is, to put it plainly, complete balderdash. At one point Lehmann, in criticizing the Tea Party, speaks of their “tortured and largely confabulated vision of the Founding Fathers” (p. 36); the exact same sentence could be used to describe how he treats what he calls “Mormon economics,” or indeed how he treats Mormonism itself. Even when he touches on an important point or two that could contribute to a thoughtful story about the unfortunate alliance between much of contemporary American Mormonism and the G.O.P.’s free-market fetishization, he still manages to get the actual argument wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

I recently finished reading through the four canonical gospels. I didn’t embark on this scripture study project because the church is studying the New Testament in gospel doctrine class this year, but because, after having completed both another family and a personal read of the Book of Mormon, I thought I should do something different. I thought about reading the Old Testament, which I’ve never completed all the way through (the closest I ever came was more than 20 years ago, on my mission, when I made it all the way to Lamentations when I just gave up). I thought about the Doctrines and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, but the truth is they’re my least favorite books of scripture; much better, to my mind, for occasional study, both historical and theological, than for devotional reading. And that’s what I’ve come to view my own scripture reading as: an act of ritual and repetition, a brief, daily, meditation upon The Word. The New Testament presented the obvious text of choice. And in reading through the gospels, one point seemed to me to be clearly hammered home by the text, again and again: Jesus seriously freaked people out. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

When I began my university education at nearly 25 years ago, Student Review, an independent, non-correlated, student-run newspaper at BYU, was a year old. I’d never heard of it before, but when walking through the parade of booths set up by clubs and other student organizations during Freshman Orientation, I spotted a man with a beard. Since this was Provo, that was, of course, unusual. I walked to him, and learned he was Bill Kelly, the publisher and one of the three key founders of the newspaper. (He had to shave the beard the next week, when the semester officially began.) I’d worked for student newspapers before, and like the–admittedly, rather self-congratulatory–feeling of being a bit of a rabble-rouser, so I immediately signed up. And that was it. For all the rest of my time as an undergraduate–throughout my freshman year in 1987-1988, after I returned from my church proselytizing mission in 1990, and until I graduate in 1993–Student Review (or “SR” as we near-universally referred to it) was one of the defining elements of my education. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Another thought (shorter than last time) about the recent Newsweek cover story on Mormonism in America today, and Mitt Romney’s–or any other prominent member of my church’s–place in it all. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Matt Bowman, a Mormon blogger I know slightly (in the same way, I suppose, that just about all Mormon bloggers know each other at least “slightly”), has written a fine and thoughtful piece about the different “Mormonisms” of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, the two members of my faith that are at present making noise about their interest in pursuing the Republican nomination for president next year. His basic thesis is that the differences between them in how they talk about and relate to others in the context of their religious beliefs, and consequently their differences in how they may potentially reach out to voters in the Republican primaries and then the general election, is greatly a function of their ages: that there is a “generation gap” between a Mormon who came of age in the mid-1960s (as Romney did), and the late 1970s (as Huntsman did), and that gap is meaningful. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Years ago I had a friend, Andrew Christensen, that served his mission about the same time I did, in Sendai, Japan. Actually, I have a few friends that served in that country–and as I served in South Korea, there were, in later years, occasional expressions of joking rivalry between us. I’d forgotten about most of that, as I’ve forgotten, or at least seriously reconsidered, much of my own mission experience. Andrew, thankfully, has not–or at least, the tragedy in Japan, which hit hard the mission in which he served, and particularly devastated a community he knew and loved (the city of Natori, shown being wiped out by the tsunami to the left), has brought back all sorts of memories. He has posted some of them, and has kindly given me permission to share them. Perhaps his thoughtful, heartfelt words will help others to gave months and years of their lives serving the people of this (to us) distant land to share their own reflections as well. Anyway, here is what he wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

I’ve received a couple of queries about the conference I mentioned in passing in an earlier post. I suppose I could write at length about the presentations given at the conference, and what I learned, and who I met, and what the purpose of the conference was as a whole, but fortunately Robert Crouch, one of the conference participants and one of the geniuses behind the wonderful Feast Upon the Word blog, has already provided all the summaries and links anyone could need. So go look there, if you’re interested. Read the rest of this entry »

Toronto (actually Pickering), Ontario, Canada, July 2, 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res. A version of this post previously appeared at Times and Seasons]

This past Sunday, which was Palm Sunday (though so far as I know, no one in our ward made mention of that fact), my second daughter, Caitlyn, was taught in her Primary class that the Atonement which we accept Jesus Christ to have performed for us–the Atonement which we, along with the rest of the Christian world, particularly honor with our commemoration of His resurrection every Easter–was performed in the Garden of Gethsemane, not (or at least not primarily) upon the Cross. Read the rest of this entry »

The scene: a second-hour Sunday school class, “Principles of Exaltation,” with the 12- and 13-year-olds, this past Sunday, the Rolling Hills ward, Wichita, Kansas. Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

So it’s the Winter Solstice, December the 21st, Midwinter’s Day, the darkest day of the year. The last time I wrote a Christmastime post on this day, I was sitting right where I am today, looking out over the Friends University campus, seeing pretty much exactly what I’m seeing right now: a bright and relatively warm winter’s afternoon. But I thinking about story night tonight, and the dark.

Each Christmas season, usually right around this date, we have a story night: we get the kids together, and sometimes some friends, and turn out the lights and burn some candles and drink hot cocoa and share stories. Maybe we read them, and sometimes we tell them from memory. Old stories, new stories, fables, poems, scriptures, whatever. Given the ages of our girls, it often descends into silliness, but not always. Anything is allowed, really, just so long at involves something spoken, into a dimly lit room, to chase away the dark. Read the rest of this entry »