By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I’ve fallen behind in writing about the D&C Sunday School lesson scriptures!  Woe is us.  Will there ever be a time when I do not regret this failure?  Perhaps, after I write this post covering lessons 38-40, my shame will subside enough that I can come creeping out of the closet that I’ve been hiding in for the last three days — the very closet from which I write these words, O Beloved Reader.

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As noted in my last Back-Row Questions post, the D&C manual really stops revolving around the scriptures after it reaches the death of Joseph Smith.  Lesson 36 epitomizes this; the text for the lesson is Chapter 7 in the Our Heritage manual, and it doesn’t involve any material from the scriptures.  I really have nothing to say about this lesson.  It’s a good week to serve in the Primary, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

The D&C manual runs into a kind of genre divide when Joseph Smith dies; there is no longer a constant series of canonized revelations with which to partner a discussion of church history.  Some lessons, such as 34, have a directly relevant section to take advantage of, while others, like 35, do not.  Both lessons are really built around extra-canonical materials, which makes my project awkward: I’m only talking about the canon, but it just isn’t the center of the discussion anymore.

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What a great opportunity to engage with the scriptures we have this week in Sunday School!  Three verses of the scriptures, to be specific.  The only scriptural content for this week’s lesson is D&C 107: 22-24.  Here, let me do you a favor:

Of the Melchizedek Priesthood, three Presiding High Priests, chosen by the body, appointed and ordained to that office, and upheld by the confidence, faith, and prayer of the church, form a quorum of the Presidency of the Church.  The twelve traveling councilors are called to be the Twelve Apostles, or special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world –— thus differing from other officers in the church in the duties of their calling.  And they form a quorum, equal in authority and power to the three presidents previously mentioned.  (D&C 107: 22-24)

Now, if the teacher in your Gospel Doctrine class asks whether you did the reading for this week, you can answer in all honesty in the affirmative.

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This week’s Sunday School lesson is about the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum.  The only scriptural text is Doctrine and Covenants Section 135, which I think has been much more important in the cultural and institutional development of Mormonism than your average, run-of-the-mill section. Read the rest of this entry »

Section 2 is largely a quotation of the fathers/children/hearts text from Malachi.  I like this passage for a number of reasons.  It’s graceful in style, to start with.  I also like the image of reciprocity across generational lines that it conveys: new generations get the blessings of old generations, and in return they honor their forebears.  This is a very different image regarding respect for past generations from the sometimes superficial and bureaucratic geneology mode of gathering the bare minimum of information necessary to perform proxy ordinances. Read the rest of this entry »

My work has recently taken me to Independencia, a relatively rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Lima that began life some decades ago substantially as a collection of self-built houses on land taken in settler invasions.  During the course of the visit, I ended up walking down the main street of the area, right past the municipal headquarters building.  Just across the street was a striking LDS chapel complex. Read the rest of this entry »

Section 124 opens with a commandment that Joseph Smith blew off.  In the early verses, God commands Smith to:

immediately to make a solemn proclamation of my gospel, and of this stake which I have planted to be a cornerstone of Zion, which shall be polished with the refinement which is after the similitude of a palace.

This proclamation shall be made to all the kings of the world, to the four corners thereof, to the honorable president-elect, and the high-minded governors of the nation in which you live, and to all the nations of the earth scattered abroad.

immediately to make a solemn proclamation of my gospel, and of this stake which I have planted to be a cornerstone of Zion, which shall be polished with the refinement which is after the similitude of a palace.  This proclamation shall be made to all the kings of the world, to the four corners thereof, to the honorable president-elect, and the high-minded governors of the nation in which you live, and to all the nations of the earth scattered abroad.  (124: 2-3)

But Joseph never wrote the proclamation!  Parley P. Pratt wrote it, in 1845 after Smith was murdered, in an apparent attempt to retroactively fulfill this instruction on which Joseph hadn’t followed through. Read the rest of this entry »

The sufferings of the Missouri period really bring out the Old Testament in our faith.  Lesson 27, which we talked about last week, focused on texts that really struggle with the problem of evil, a recurrent theme throughout the Hebrew Bible.  Lesson 28 is in many ways much more personal and poignant, focusing not on the logical problem of why the Saints get the short end of the stick, but instead on Joseph Smith’s need for personal comfort and reassurance.  Will the wicked triumph in the end?  Will his friends abandon him?  Both Joseph’s prayer as reported in Section 121 and the revelations of comfort offered in that section and the next show a man deep in depression and reaching out for hope. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes in Gospel Doctrine class, the scriptural text we’re reading raises more questions, concerns, or downright silliness in my mind than it can rightfully be expected to resolve.  I think of these as back-row questions, because they’re the sort of thing that Sunday School teachers dread when back-row class members raise their hands to contribute to the general discussion.  This week’s lesson materials raised several such thoughts in my mind; rather than impose them on a Gospel Doctrine class or whisper them to Taryn, I thought I’d just post them here.  What follows may well add up to nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

BYU political scientist Valerie Hudson recently published a now much-discussed LDS feminist argument against same-sex marriage.  The central thrust of her argument is that there is a trade-off between gender equality and acceptance of homosexuality, and that Mormons should favor gender equality by opposing same-sex marriage and acquiescence toward homosexuality more generally.  The normative part of this argument depends on the empirical claim: that there is indeed a trade-off.  Can this assertion survive empirical scrutiny?  If not, Hudson’s entire essay basically fails. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last decade or so, there has been a voluminous, and often tiresome, debate about whether recent DNA evidence regarding the origins of Native Americans disproves the Book of Mormon.  The debate is wearying for several reasons.  To me, a key point is that the DNA evidence isn’t really providing very much new information; scholars have long had a variety of converging sources of data strongly supporting the hypothesis that Native Americans in general come from Siberia.  So DNA evidence is a useful piece of reinforcing data but not a revolution in understandings of Native American origins. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not a post about whether we should have same-sex marriage.  Rather, it is an exploration of the ways that strategic options for same-sex marriage proponents and advocates of traditional restrictions on marriage are evolving.  What kinds of arguments are likely to be meaningful to persuadable people? Read the rest of this entry »

…[O]ur Father’s plan is big enough for all His children…

Elder Quentin L. Cook’s talk from the recently concluded General Conference presents a useful and compelling presentation of what might be called a contemporary Mormon account of Christian universalism, a doctrine of how salvation can be extended to all.   One of the virtues of the talk is that it is clear enough in its presentation to make its own paradoxical limitations spring vividly to life: what Elder Cook discusses is a universalism with boundaries, a plan big enough to save all God’s children except the ones who are left out. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologetics in Mormonism is sometimes given an overly narrow definition.  Many in our community would regard as apologetic only the set of discourses that (in a tone that is vigorous, sometimes vicious, and rarely scholarly, civil, or notably charitable) seek to preserve contemporary understandings of Mormon orthodoxy at all costs and from all challengers.  However, apologetics in its technical sense is a much broader endeavor, involving efforts to relate faith and reason in ways that are in some sense true to both values.  With this broader technical meaning in mind, the Mormon apologetic community can be seen as including not only the traditional alpha males but also the more even-keeled authors associated with groups like FARMS and FAIR, as well as a clear majority of authors whose work is published in venues such as BYU Studies, Dialogue, and Sunstone.  Many or perhaps most bloggers at the well-known Mormon-themed sites would qualify as well. Read the rest of this entry »

While truth might seem like a simple and unitary concept (“It’s either true or it isn’t!”), nothing so important is ever really so simple.  Indeed, various competing conceptions of truth exist.  Truth might be regarded as a relation between sentences and worldviews; a sentence is true if it corresponds with the speaker’s (or the evaluator’s) sense of how best to think about things.  We might see truth as relative to some gold standard criterion; statements about historical documents, in this sense, are true if they correspond to what the relevant surviving document actually says — even if the document itself contains lies.  Some use truth to refer to human attempts at understanding the way the world works; a statement is provisionally true if it matches the current cutting-edge products of our best research methods, with the understanding that later information might qualify or reverse the truth judgment.  Or we might adopt a Platonic framework and regard truth as a substance or presence that exists in the universe independent of human thought or efforts, an entity that we might to some degree capture and possess but that we can never create. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s think about the church in 1990 and in 2008.  At the end of 1990, there were 44 temples; at the end of 2008, there were 128.  At the end of 1990, there were 1,784 stakes and 18,090 wards/branches; at the end of 2007, there were 2,790 stakes and 27,827 wards and branches.  This indicates a 191% increase in temples, a 56% increase in stakes, and a 54% increase in wards/branches. Read the rest of this entry »

For me, George D. Smith’s Nauvoo Polygamy: “…but we called it celestial marriage” is one of the most anticipated Mormon books of recent years. A great deal of Mormon Studies writing about the origins of polygamy suffers, in my view, from a serious limitation: it regards the story of polygamy as a story about Joseph Smith. Of course, Joseph is central to the story. No other person had a greater role in shaping the way Mormons thought about and talked about plural marriage. Read the rest of this entry »

During the just-concluded U.S. presidential elections, various Republican candidates drew opprobrium for referring to “the real America,” “the real Virginia,” and so forth. Presumably, the “real” versions of these various geographic and political entities were basically Republican, made up of people with center-right ideology and conservative Christian faith. Such rhetoric is not particularly new; as a former resident of the San Francisco area, I have over the last decade routinely encountered dismissive comments about the Americanness of people like me who live in major metropolitan areas, have worldwide social networks, and occasionally eat spring mix salads in the place of iceberg lettuce. Read the rest of this entry »

It is probable that, at this point in history, Brigham Young is the most widely misinterpreted individual in Mormon history. Until relatively recently, Joseph Smith would have been a clear winner in such a contest. But as we witness the spread of the historiographical revolution regarding Smith that began roughly with the 1945 publication of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and that seems to have entered something of a lull in the aftermath of Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, it would seem that many of the least plausible beliefs regarding Smith are waning rather than waxing. Such is probably not yet the case for Young. Read the rest of this entry »

I have little sense of the prevailing views of BCC readers regarding either the morality of abortion or the desirability of government action to make abortions illegal, more difficult to obtain, and so forth. I can, however, imagine the picture that at least some readers must possess regarding the typical BCC writer’s views on these subjects. Being wildly liberal in all ways, as is widely known — are you even allowed to read BCC if you haven’t donated to a Ralph Nader presidential campaign at some point in your life — we are imagined to believe something like the following. Abortion is to be understood solely as an issue of women’s control over their own bodies. An embryo or a fetus are not alive and so deserve no consideration. Because abortion is really morally neutral, the government should not have any role in deciding who can have an abortion and under what circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

If one were to offer sweeping generalizations and a broad periodizing scheme regarding dominant intellectual movements in Mormon Studies, one might suggest that the “New Mormon History” was the focal point of excitement and energy from perhaps the late 1960s until the middle of the 1980s. Its successor, from the middle of the 1980s until probably the present, is the “Faithful Scholarship” project. The two movements differ in a number of ways, but perhaps most explicitly in that Faithful Scholarship attempts to present a specifically Mormon and explicitly believing account of Mormon history and society, while the New Mormon History attempts to analyze Mormonism in terms that are acceptable to both Mormons and non-Mormons. Read the rest of this entry »

How much do Mormons really know about the Book of Mormon? Have we immersed ourselves in the text to the point where quotations from it are immediately recognizable, like long-lost friends? Or is our experience of the text more like attending our spouse’s family reunion, where we have a handful of very close connections but a much larger number of people who may be vaguely familiar but to whom we still need to be introduced? Read the rest of this entry »

As most BCC readers will know, I have fielded a pilot survey on people’s experiences of the Book of Mormon over the last several days. Thanks to all who have participated!

I want to comment briefly on an unexpected aspect of this survey. I’ve administered a number of surveys before, all in South America. For each of those experiences, very few respondents contact the project administration team to ask for additional details or to complain about the survey instrument. For this survey, by contrast, a little over 5% of respondents have emailed me, usually to complain. Read the rest of this entry »

I am currently seeking respondents for a survey of people’s experiences with and connection to the Book of Mormon. Many BCC readers have already probably received a link to the survey in one way or another, but I would ask those who have not to consider participating. It will be even more helpful to the usefulness of the project if you can pass a link to the survey along to friends, neighbors, and family members who don’t participate too regularly in the Mormon internet. All that’s necessary to participate in the survey is some present or historical connection to Mormonism; the perspectives of active Mormons are essential, as are the points of view of inactive Mormons, ex-Mormons, and even members of other denominations within the Latter Day Saint movement. The survey can be accessed at http://nelsonseawright.bookofmormon.sgizmo.com Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Taryn and I received our April issue of Sunstone — which included an advertisement urging us to attend the MHA Conference on May 22-25, 2008. (I hope the MHA didn’t have to pay for that one?) In any case, the magazine asks for reader submissions for a future issue on the theme of “coming clean.” This is an intriguing idea, but why should I wait three and a half years until the December 2008 issue comes out to share my coming clean stories and to ask other Mormons to share theirs? Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a list of topics that we could argue about other than gay people, their marriages, and whether they have cooties. Read the rest of this entry »

As Taryn and I walked through the residential streets near downtown Evanston, it began to rain. Late March is still winter here; there were no leaves on the trees and no green in the grass as yet. The rain began to leave streak marks on Taryn’s glasses. We admired the eminently practical hat of a passing mail carrier, which suspended a small umbrella above her head. The early stages of Taryn’s labor continued as we walked; it was all terribly romantic. Read the rest of this entry »

In this time of economic uncertainty and crisis, it seems perhaps worthwhile to reflect on our basic theological orientation toward capitalism. After all, some aspects of late 20th-century and early 21st-century capitalism seem to be responsible for our recent run of investment bubbles and collapses, and for the current credit crisis that has placed the U.S. at greater potential economic risk than at any other time in recent memory. How does the Mormon gospel see the seemingly imperfect but nearly ubiquitous economic system that we call capitalism? Read the rest of this entry »

Actually, this post’s title overstates the case a little bit. Mormonism in a general, worldwide sense is still very much a missionary endeavor. U.S. Mormonism, however, now has the demographic profile of an established intergenerational church more than a missionary one. These are the conclusions that I draw from Chapter 2 of the recent Pew Forum report on the U.S. Religious Landscape. Read the rest of this entry »