By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I remember distinctly my first encounter with Hugh Winder Nibley. I was a missionary in the Provo Missionary Training Center experiencing a faith crisis. I had been converted from agnosticism just about a year before entering the MTC, and over a hectic first year of college I had matured in my commitment to God and Theism generally, but I had not entirely worked out what it meant that my conversion to God had occurred within the context of the LDS Church. Still, I felt that God wanted me to serve a mission for the Church, even if I could not immediately reconcile all of Mormonism’s complexity with my basic faith experience. I had some minor intellectual doubts about the details of Mormon history and scripture, I suppose, but what brought the crisis to a boiling point was the culture of the MTC. Regimentation, dogmatism, boys in their late teens, the disappointment I had in not being called to Russia, all played together to leave me on the verge of abandoning my mission. My branch president recognized that the patron saint of bookish Mormon teens might still save me, and he provided me a copy of Since Cumorah. Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t even a review, just praise in a few lines for some beautiful images as they entangle themselves in language.

I swung by Benchmark Books on my way home from work yesterday and grabbed a couple of books, including Adam Miller’s brief collection of whimsical (hence deeply serious) theology, Rube Goldberg Machines (Kofford Books, just now).

People who know me well know that my view of French philosophy goes something like

French philosophy = hashish + echo chamber – good sense

The young professor Miller (and other wonderful people whom I admire who think highly of Continental philosophy and make beautiful things from it) may one day persuade me to reconsider this visceral antipathy of mine. Read the rest of this entry »

For those interested, I will be giving several lectures the first week of April on the East Coast. All are welcome to attend.

April 1: Greg Prince’s study group in Potomac, Maryland at 7pm. Talk will be on early Mormon Masonry.[1]

April 2: Columbia University, Earl Hall, 7.30pm. Talk will be on “sealing” and communal salvation in early Mormonism.

April 4: Belmont, Mass, 7.30pm. Talk will be on the Chain of Being. This is a smaller venue so RSVP required if attendance desired.

April 5: Southern Virginia University, 7pm. Talk will be working through and contextualizing baptism for the dead.[2]

Back in Utah, I’ll be doing a totally non-Mormon talk on “The Lost Deathbed” at Intermountain Medical Center on April 10 at 11am.

Feel free to put any questions or RSVPs in the comments to the post. If you need anonymity, ok to email smb AT samuelbrown DOT net.

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[1] I will try to be more politic than I have apparently previously been in my framing of Masonic traditions for any Masons that might attend. Attendees at the study group are encouraged to bring refreshments.

[2] Tentative topic which may change.

In recent years ongoing negotiations over the constraints on membership and participation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have often invoked the language of political parties in favor of inclusiveness. These authors use the term “big tent Mormonism” to describe an LDS Church that could tolerate a wider range of opinions and philosophies than it has in the latter twentieth century. This terminology draws not on the metaphor of the Hebrew tabernacle that stands behind the nomenclature of “stakes” of Zion, but on twentieth-century political partisanship. A “big tent” philosophy suggests that a party will be more powerful if it manages to unite disparate factions for the greater purpose of social dominance and success vis-a-vis opponents. I am sympathetic to, and generally agree with, calls for more inclusive Mormonism, but I think the metaphor of the big tent is fundamentally wrongheaded. We must be able to accommodate a wide array of different people with different needs and outlooks and concerns, but we ought not to use the techniques of political parties to achieve that end. Read the rest of this entry »

I supervise trainees as part of my life as a medical professor. Some are quite timid. While I am always eager to be present to provide close supervision, it is important to me as a teacher that they have the courage to take a stand in public on what they think matters and what ought to happen. Until they risk embarrassment they will never learn how to watch people closely enough to make diagnoses. I do try to use levity to make this transition into something like adulthood a bit easier for them, and for a while I would tell them to “Man Up” and take a public stand on what they think the diagnosis is or the treatment should be. One morning, all the trainees were being timid again, and I was about to encourage them to Man Up when I realized that they were all women, and I remembered the famous truism that “the opposite of man is boy, not woman.” Read the rest of this entry »

In this sacrament talk from the late 1990s (when I was a medical student in Boston), I argued that Atonement is a perfect proximity, something like a mid-point between the traditional poles of the inscrutable (and to some, capricious) grace of Calvinism (though in its current version within evangelical Protestantism it comes off surprisingly Arminian at times) and the divine rubber stamp on Pelagian perfectionism (the disputed but still arguably “traditional” Mormon view).

I have since read and struggled with Gene England’s “Weeping God of Mormonism,” something like a celebration of a finite God and human perfectionism. I was a little surprised to see how Protestant I sounded in this original talk, despite the less-than-Calvinist views I have expressed in various settings. I have never thought of myself as neo-orthodox, either, though an emphasis on something more like grace would place me at least near that camp. In any case, I believe that there is still much to learn about Atonement. How important are weakly theological approaches to Atonement? What do people think about this notion of proximity? Read the rest of this entry »

When I first began blogging back in 2006, I was mostly done with a manuscript of a mediocre book on theologies of death and afterlife in early Mormonism that was then called Forever Family: Early Mormon Theologies of the Kindred Dead. Shortly thereafter, a dear friend who is an excellent colonial historian (buy his seminal work on French Indian slavery when it’s published in a few months) told me that my book had some good ideas but was of generally low quality. His kind and wise advice caused a crisis of confidence, a reading spree in the secondary academic literature, several total rewrites of that book, and a change in the title, which became an intentional inversion of the language of the Lord’s Prayer. Throughout this process, the participants in the evanescent communities of online interaction many denominate the Bloggernacle have offered crucial encouragement, insight, criticism, and friendship, for which I am ever grateful. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was revising a manuscript a few months ago I realized that, in an academic mode, I used “Yahweh” to refer to the God interacting with particular Old Testament prophets, as well as the God interacting with the early Mormons. I realized at the time that I had started using Yahweh in place of “Jehovah” or “THE LORD” in less formal settings as well. Other than being pedantic, I think I decided that I should stop using Yahweh except in my written scholarship. Read the rest of this entry »

My first memories of the bishop’s storehouse are from the 1980s. My family was chronically on the verge of financial ruin, a sort of meta-stable poverty shored up by surplus from neighbor’s gardens, government welfare, fast offerings, Relief Society-coordinated sub-for-Santa projects, and my mother’s less-than-subsistence wage as a special education teacher. My mother and the bishop would confer about what we needed, then create a shopping list in triplicate (carbon copies were still important back then), which we carried proudly to a nondescript building in northern Kaysville, Utah. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s in San Francisco the second half of November, and it looks to be exciting. There are a couple of sessions sponsored by the Mormon Studies Consultation that should be good (disclaimer: I’m in one of them), but I confess I don’t know the lay of the land otherwise. Who all is going? What are the sessions that must not be missed? Or that must not be named?

As I navigate the intermittent brutalities of mortal existence, I occasionally have cause to remember two experiences that tend to orient my outlook toward Christ. Neither is happy in the sense that saccharine is sweet (cloying then nauseous in rapid succession), but both are holy to me. Read the rest of this entry »

A thoughtful young person approached me at church the other day, curious about the Journal of Discourses, and through them the rest of nineteenth-century Mormonism. I had recently shared with him an historical essay I wrote on Smithian Mormonism, and he was curious to read more. He asked for advice about how to orient himself to the world of nineteenth-century Mormonism, and I realized that it’s been two decades since I immersed myself in the literature surrounding the world of early Mormonism and that I have probably lost the capacity to understand that first transition into broader awareness of historical contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

The Women’s History breakfast is starting soon, kicking off the last day of active scholarly content for MHA. I thought it would be useful to have a new post for the new day.

My mind and heart are full today on this latest instance of Adventist disappointment. Most of my friends have enjoyed reasonably good-natured if sometimes hostile humor at the expense of the current iteration of muddled arithmetical exegesis, this time by a Protestant entrepreneur named Harold Camping. I’m sympathetic to their responses–the way Protestant millenarianism often presents itself is both arrogant and xenophobic. But one of my closest friends lost his mother this week, and today we bid her farewell in the LDS chapel that sheltered me for a crucial decade of my life. My heart is not in the Rapture parties staged by my friends and coworkers because my heart is with my friend and his family. As I reflected on the juxtaposition of C*’s funeral and the mostly good-natured mockery of Camping and his followers, I felt to attend more closely to the meanings that lurk behind Rapture rhetoric. In our shared grief, I want to draw out some of the important meanings hiding behind the half-silly, half-spiteful rhetoric that circulates around Rapture predictions. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the winter holidays and am fascinated by the ways people employ ideas about the meaning of these national (and complexly religious) ritual observances. Many of us have been reminded in various avenues to keep the “true meaning of Christmas” in mind; less often do I hear requests to keep the true meaning of New Years in mind. This seems to me to be a problem. Read the rest of this entry »

My dad was a troubled man. If he had lived in the time of Christ, I think he might have undergone an exorcism of the melancholy devil that short-circuited his attempts to be good and prevented his participation in meaningful relationships. Since he was born in the baby boom of the 1940s, he was instead diagnosed with manic depression and a personality disorder. We are all of us inclined to embellish in retrospect, to amplify faults in our cloudy memory—my father had moments of love and kindness that blessed the lives of the people around him. But his mind was broken, and his broken mind generally seemed to keep his soul hostage. Read the rest of this entry »