By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of my theism. In 1990 I was an angry autodidact in semi-rural Utah, reading Sartres and announcing my agnosticism to audiences both willing and unwilling. I wore my hair long and my clothing torn as badges of adolescent independence.

Over a long summer, I came to a muted respect for the tradition of my family, for the clear-sighted and powerful faith of my mother. I remained agnostic but felt open to involvement in a church community and to the moral responsibilities of the adulthood I sensed before me. An experience involving the LDS sacramental prayers on the first Sunday in August gave me my first experience of the Divine in a formally religious setting. That numinous conversion—were I evangelical I think I would call it my rebirth or regeneration—forever changed my life. Four weeks after that converting experience, I left the Rocky Mountains to begin college in the Northeast. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading Steve Fleming’s review of Edward Bever’s new book on what we might call the physiology of witchcraft, I was struck by a potent cultural image. William James called the practice “medical materialism,” seeking to describe the desire to find scientific explanations for religious or spiritual phenomena. It’s a natural impulse–our culture often allows itself to be dominated by scientific, pseudo-scientific, and scientistic narratives, and they can provide significant authority to the speaker or writer (my brother called it “Test Tube Envy” in his first book of literary criticism). Bever’s apparent reliance on a narrative of “immune dysfunction” related to stress as an explanation for the effects of witchcraft (not terribly valid physiologically, though that makes the narrative no less powerful for many audiences) reminded me of a condition we see a few times a year. The Japanese call it “tako-tsubo,” or “octopus pot.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I discovered that my grandfather had given my family one final gift. My aunt has been settling his estate, and despite the many outflows that accumulated over the years, there was enough left in my grandfather’s estate to patch a few roofs, repair a few cars, and replace lost furniture (or a rug), kindnesses spread across the lives of my siblings and their families. My grandfather died just after August ended this year, in the drug-induced stupefaction that American hospice workers seem to favor (we didn’t get the call that he was terminally declining until they had already knocked him out with lorazepam and morphine). In the haziness of his last week or two, there were two overarching themes in his conversations with my aunt. He worried that he had not lived up to his family name (he was the son of a mid-twentieth-century church leader), and he worried about his namesake son, my father.
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We just got back from Montreal, where my wife gave an absolutely outstanding paper on ways the Nation of Islam employed food and diet to craft a new identity, to overturn the malignant, dehumanizing narratives of slavery. What made her talk more brilliant still (aside from its great analysis, outstanding sources, and impeccable delivery) was that it was in a panel on boundary maintenance in Islam. So amidst fascinating papers by Islamic scholars on medieval Islam and the scandals the Quranic word could generate for gender mores (what does it mean for a woman to pronounce a Quranic text that normally requires immediate prayerful prostration of all hearers, including men? Islamic jurists debated the question heartily) and other fascinating topics, this Mormon woman stands up, describes and analyzes the idiosyncratic and fascinating foodways propounded by Elijah Mohammed, and then, because Delta moved up our flight and customs at Montreal reportedly takes forever, disappears to find a taxicab.

That’s just part of the drama that was AAR. Unfortunately because of childcare issues and other obligations, we were unable to attend many of the other sessions we wanted to. Was anyone else at AAR? Anybody care to share some details?

Reading Nick Litterski’s thoughtful review of a recent book on Mormonism and Masonry made me think again about how difficult it has been for many people within and without the tradition to wrap their minds around the origins of Masonry. It occurred to me that I have done some reading in this area, and as someone with no strongly held beliefs about what the answer ought to be, I might be able to offer a brief summary of the literature I’ve read. As I’m pressed for time, the prose will not be polished, and footnotes will be notable in their absence, but I suspect that the best sources will appear in the comments. I recommend that any discussion of the intersections between Mormonism and Masonry be directed to Nick’s thoughtful post rather than my canceled threadjack. With that preamble: Read the rest of this entry »

I recently attended sacrament meeting in the Mormon settlements[1], where a passionate orator discussed the power, through covenants, that we have to bind the Lord. I have been sheltered from this doctrine for several years, but when he held up his hands bound like a prisoner’s to demonstrate how we bind God, I instantly recognized a longstanding tradition in both official and folk Mormonism. While my response to this doctrine, other than several miserable months on a mission in the American South, has generally been one of revulsion, my understanding of the historical contexts of this tradition have matured substantially since I last encountered it on my mission in the early 1990s.

The view that humans can command God is one that is most traditionally associated with magic. Douglas Davies has rather graciously referred to this Mormon tradition as “manipulationist,” by which he means that some LDS believe that they can gain control over God by token of an idiosyncratic reading of “covenants.” For a Christian tradition which defines God axiomatically as incontingent, such a view is a serious heresy.[2] Such a view even strikes many Latter-day Saints as heresy–my mother quotably rejected this teaching with a phrase I have treasured for almost 20 years–”God is not a vending machine.”[3]
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I ordered my copy of JSP Revelations way back in June, on pre-order from Amazon for about $67 (price “guaranteed”). Someone on JI reported receipt of a copy, so I checked, and the price had risen and the official story was that the book had not been received from the publisher. Now of course it is out of stock, and they write that I can cancel the order if I would like to. Read the rest of this entry »

To dissipate a little bit of the stress of being massively overcommitted these last few months, I have recently begun to try to follow in my wife’s footsteps and learn a little piano. As myriad Latter-day Saints before me, I have elected to do so on the basis of the familiar hymns. Yesterday, I spent some time struggling through two beautiful hymns, and I thought I would just acknowledge how marvelous Be Still, My Soul (go Luther/Spener!) and Where Can I Turn for Peace? (go Emma Lou!) are. That is all (now if only I could figure out how to get the left hand to work on the piano I’d be golden).

PS, how is it that this Lutheran pietist hymn ended up copyrighted by Westminster Press? At first I thought it was a Presbyterian hymn, but some random info on the web suggested she was a follower of Spener and a Lutheran.

I’m writing about Phelps’s much-discussed hymn because a) I love that hymn, and b) I need some help. For my book on the death culture of early Mormonism, I would really like to be able to cite the original version of the hymn. Unfortunately, although everyone gestures toward a Deseret News publication in 1856, neither I nor several partners in crime has been able to find the actual original publication, not in the Phelps papers at BYU, not in the electronic archive of the DesNews, not scrounging around all the usual places. So, who’s up to the challenge? Where and in what form was “If You Could Hie to Kolob” first published?
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The Sunstone session memorializing the Cambridge, MA LDS Chapel featured Claudia Bushman, Phil Barlow, Mary Webster, me, and audience participants (including Morris and Dawn Thurston, Charlotte England, Richard Bushman, and a variety of others). The session was a wonderful time of remembering, with important contributions from all participants. Because I have severe limits on my time right now, I’m unable to summarize much the fascinating content of the panel, but I will post the text of my talk here. (Claudia’s lively reminisces are slated for print publications, and Phil’s and Mary’s thoughtful and engaging talks were not written.)
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A few years after the Civil War, enacting a tragedy that had occurred hundreds of mournful times throughout the nineteenth century, a steamboat on Lake Erie sank on its approach to the Port of Cleveland. Though the main lighthouse was operating normally, for uncertain reasons the lower lights—flames kept by houses along the banks to illuminate the location of channels and treacherous parts of the shoreline—were not visible to the ship’s crew. Unable to see the dark shore, the steamboat struck ground and sank, with significant loss of life.

In the aftermath of the Cleveland steamboat tragedy, the mega-evangelist Dwight Moody reflected to his bard Philip Bliss that these lower lights were the lights individual Christians were to keep. These would be small, weak, pale compared to the Light of the Savior, but without them our sisters and brothers might perish even as they approached the brighter light of the lighthouse.

Much to the delight of Moody and generations of worshipers since, Philip Bliss promptly turned these reflections into the hopeful and inspiring hymn “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.” In his hymn Bliss calls to us to keep aflame our “feeble lamp[s]” in the hopes that some “poor fainting, struggling seaman” we “may rescue,” we “may save.”

Shortly before 2am today a lower light whose pale fire rescued and saved me almost twenty years ago sputtered and then died.
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I had the great good fortune of accompanying my wife to a session at MHA on race in the church. Alongside two other great presentations (one on a complex “branch” in Appalachia, the other on BYU student views of Civil Rights), was Stirling’s thoughtful consideration of race in Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine. In the discussion that followed after the presentations, several voices discussed why we continue to have Mormon Doctrine circulating among church members. A variety of reasons for the persistence of that text were proposed, not least the fact that the author is now dead and unable to edit out the offensive material for a revised edition and that the book is one of the best sellers for Deseret Book. As I reflected on the conversation, I wonder about the following proposal:
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Recently, I have taken to listening to podcasts of college courses during my downtime–commuting, perambulating, staring into space–and I have had great fun making my way through Open Yale Courses and similar. I am now about halfway through Shelly Kagan’s Philosophy[2] course on “Death” (the course actually focuses on the existence of souls, the nature of persistence of identity and meaning of immortality, and the ethics of suicide). Kagan spends the first about 10 sessions presenting an apologia (sort of) for the physicalist[5] view that the soul is “[something the body can do]“[1] rather than an immaterial entity intimately associated with the body (what is called the dualist view). I say sort of, because Kagan argues strongly that he has no more responsibility to disprove souls than he does to disprove fire-breathing[3] dragons. And in that lack of responsibility stands a matter of huge logical, philosophical, religious, and social significance. (PS, a simple summary of what follows is available just before the footnotes) Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce the first meeting of the Working Papers in Mormon Studies.
Wednesday, April 29, 8pm, at the University of Utah. We’ll be discussing a fascinating treatment of textual and oral culture in the earliest revelations to Joseph Smith. Location is below the fold.
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I’ve been reflecting this past week on how grateful I am to be a Latter-day Saint. I will confess that some of these reflections are driven by my work on the cultural history of early Mormonism, but–against my better academic judgment–I have been experimenting with the lived aspects of the religion I have been studying, specifically our Eden-emphatic agrarian quest for the primordial state of purity. Read the rest of this entry »

I am increasingly attending to how the early Latter-day Saints understood and used the Bible as part of a project on what I call the assault on Common Sense.[1] The best treatment of this topic remains Phil Barlow’s thoughtful and thought-provoking Mormons and the Bible. Phil draws attention to the extent of earliest Mormon Biblical literalism, emphasizing the ways that Smith and others created meaning in their exegesis, providing a space for the Restoration truths to fit within Christianity, broadly conceived.[2] I have been long striving for a phrase to use to describe this idiosyncratic, potent, and often supernaturalizing literalism in Biblical exegesis. This week I think I settled on a name for it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mormon Theology Seminar continues its work of very careful interactive reading of LDS sacred texts with a treatment of 2 Nephi 26-27. The culminating seminar will occur on Wednesday April 15 at the BYU Library, from 9am to 5pm. All are welcome. The formal flier can be found here.

For those interested in what has historically been a wonderful conference, I forward the following announcement.
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It’s my pleasure to let you know a few of the details of the 2009 conference of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. We cordially invite you to join us. Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you know, the BCC research group is working on a new history of ritual adoption in Mormonism, what is often called the Law of Adoption. I’ll save the details for actual publication, but we’re interested in ensuring that the paper both actually engages the ideaworlds and lives of the original participants and is of some use to modern readers. To that end, I’m interested in understanding what people would like to learn about the Law of Adoption. Read the rest of this entry »

Child 1: Daddy, you forgot to be the tooth fairy last night. I was very upset this morning.
Father [instantly filled with self-loathing]: I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I was so tired I just fell asleep and forgot about it. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been asked to teach EQ in my ward tomorrow as a pinch hitter. I’ve been asked to teach from Elder Godoy’s talk on the Process of Testimony. The talk primarily argues that testimonies can be valid even if they are not associated with a single, marvelous spiritual experience.
I am interested in what topics interest people in this broad set of themes. Read the rest of this entry »

With some additional planning, we have got things moving forward for the Working Papers in Mormon Studies meetings. So far, the schedule includes a paper on earliest Mormon record keeping, portions of biographies of Brigham Young and Parley Pratt, possibly a treatment of modern Asian-American Mormon women, and a variety of other topics. We’re putting the e-mailing list into order and starting to think more seriously about scheduling details. Read the rest of this entry »

We are delighted to announce another important step forward in the development of Mormon Studies.

The Tanner Humanities Center is pleased to announce it has been awarded a grant from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation for $36,000 to establish the Eccles Fellowship in Mormon Studies. Read the rest of this entry »

I have two confessions to make: 1) I am so distracted that I sometimes can’t find sources that I remember pretty well in general terms, and 2) I have become increasingly interested in and moved by the way earliest Latter-day Saints thought through their shared lives with the Native peoples they lived beside. Today, I can’t remember where in the early church organs William Phelps wrote a self-congratulatory semi-etymological essay about how the LDS knew the names of Indians and no one else did. Does anybody remember that piece?

In terms of making the post useful for everybody, there’s really been an outpouring of good work on Native pasts recently, some of it by practicing Mormons who are not pursuing apologetic or polemical aims. What are some of the books on Native history and culture that people are enjoying the most right now? I’m making my way through Pointer’s somewhat disappointing volume from U of Indiana, and I’ve been impressed by Jenny Pulsipher and am eager for Brett Rushforth’s book to come out in the next couple years. What are other people reading? Read the rest of this entry »