Earlier today, someone asked me to sum up what the meaning of the Old Testament is for Mormons. Okay, he didn’t just ask me, but I was included (I think). Anyhoo, I wrote this:

God is complicated. Way more complicated than you think. Sometimes he makes requests that seem morally wrong. We don’t know why. Sometimes he has humans do seemingly ridiculous and useless things. We don’t know why. Sometimes he intervenes in human events and sometimes he doesn’t. We don’t know why. The one thing that we can know with certainty is that God loves us (we don’t know why).

This, of course, leads me to ask you the same question. Oh BCC readers, what do you think the meaning of the Old Testament is for Mormons? You’ve been sitting through classes on it for a year now, so I assume you have some notion of what it said to you. Please share below. If I like your answers, I’ll write my post about why Scott is wrong about everything. There’s your incentive there.

My very first post at By Common Consent was a half-serious, half-satiric analysis of a talk by President Monson (newly appointed). In it I posited that there is a method to the madness of President Monson’s talks, that the seemingly random stories and aphorisms are carefully chosen for the mood that they convey, rather than for their content. I stand by that analysis; but I have also personally regressed from it. To be honest, I have had a hard time being inspired by President Monson, because he has often seemed out-of-touch to me.

Take the most recent Conference. President Eyring begins the Sunday Morning session with a call for faith in troubled times. Elder Packer calls for moral clarity and repentance in troubling times. Excellent talks follow regarding following the Spirit and working the Gospel into your daily walk. Elder Oaks tries to describe the differences between ecclesiastical and personal revelation. And, after a lot of doctrine and controversy to chew on, President Monson asks us to remember our pleases and thank yous. I, personally, deflated a bit when his topic became clear, thinking “what? This again?” This is because I am a spiritual midget, of course, but also because I didn’t know what to listen for. [Read more...]

Consider yourself and your fellow church members. When something is wrong in our local society (define it however you choose), who do we tend to blame for the problem?

I don’t think that I like the notion of “Sunday School Answers.” Which isn’t to say that I don’t like prayer, scripture, and church attendance (the clear winner of last week’s poll), but rather I worry that the too frequent repetition of that triptych turns it into vain recitation, rather than a sincere attempt to seek and know the word of God. [Read more...]

In keeping with the current Negative Nellie atmosphere amongst the Bloggernaclites, I give you the following poll. Who is your ward’s preferred scriptural Anti-Christ (note: neither Glenn Beck nor Barack Obama is an option).

We are all familiar with the “Sunday School” answers. They are prayer, reading the scriptures, and…

It seems to me that we all have the same first two answers, but that there is some variation on the third. So, what do you think is the third Sunday School answer? I’ve come up with some possibilities, but feel free to chose and post a different answer in the comments. Or feel free to object to my saying that the first two are always the same. You’d be wrong, of course, but I can live with that.

Robert Millet’s recent book Talking with God: Divine Conversations that Transform Daily Life is about the practice of prayer. He is encouraging sincere daily prayer because he believes that it is key to increasing the spirituality, faith, and charity of the saints.

Bro. Millet is proselytizing for “dialogic revelation” in prayer. As Terryl Givens has pointed out, Mormons have a long tradition of approaching prayer as a kind of conversation with God. Prayer, understood in this manner, is not just a matter of reporting our thanks for the day’s good events and requesting comfort, forgiveness, and blessings to make up for the day’s lacks. [Read more...]

Just a quick note for all of you folks out there jumping on the anti-secularism bandwagon (you know who you are). Calling atheism or secularism a religion renders religion meaningless. You might as well sincerely call football, accountancy, or being involved with a political party religion. It’s a useless, tired attempt at a metaphor and, ultimately, it doesn’t mean anything. So, just don’t. Thanks in advance.

I was recently reminded of a blog where I used to participate. While there, I wrote this, which I think is pretty good (except for the ending, which I’ve changed).

On a whole, I think that Latter-day Saints fail to appreciate the power of doubt. It may be natural; we are a movement that demands faith and demands acts that indicate our possession thereof. At the same time, we say that it is good to have questions. We seem to approach doubt as a hobby; something that we keep working on in the basement level of our mind; something which we always work on when something more important isn’t pressing; something that fundamentally only the individual is interested in and which, therefore, ought not to be widely shared; something that can always be set aside and returned to after an appropriate interval. There is much talk in and out of the church about compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, both of which seem to accept the hobby form of doubt as the only legitimate form. People often push us to bring the doubts up from the basement; saying that there is nothing wrong with doing it. However, there is a persistent sense that, in so doing, one will become a freak, a stamp-collector or D&D player, unfit for normal company and consigned to only finding like-minded, acne-faced peers at symposia and conventions. The public airing of our hobbies risks real public consequences. [Read more...]

This Easter morning, I was riding a train to Salt Lake, snow-covered mountains, bathed in sunlight while their tops are erased by the cloud cover. It was a beautiful scene, reminiscent of the fickle nature of spring along the Wasatch. This visual combination of the light and the dark, the warm and the cold, winter and summer, and the living and the dead seemed especially appropriate for Easter. And, because I am who I am, so did contemplation of zombies. [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered something I never expected during the Sacrament: politesse. [Read more...]

Now that it has been confirmed that I will not be receiving a Niblet this year, it’s time to shift from the official BCC stance of indifference to my personal position of outright hatred. I hate you all. With the power of 1000 suns my rage burns within! I will crush you all, by means of blogpoll. [Read more...]

This is the third in a series of three posts. In the first post, I mostly whine about Sunday School and Gospel Teaching. In the second post, I’ll get more specific about what I think the problem is. In this post, I actually propose a possible solution.

Ok. So now I’ve blathered on for two long posts about how horrible everything is and why it is so horrible. “That’s great, Whiny McWhinikins!” you should be saying, “Where are these solutions you promised us?”

Um…pay no attention to the man behind the curtain… [Read more...]

This is the second in a series of three posts. In the first post, I mostly whine about Sunday School and Gospel Teaching. In this post, I’ll get more specific about what I think the problem is. In the final post, I will actually propose a possible solution.

Here is where I shift from whining to crazy talk. [Read more...]

This is the first in a series of three posts. It was going to be one long post, but then I hit 1,000 words and realized I was only about a third of the way through it. I’ll put the other two parts up tomorrow and Thursday. In this post, I mostly whine about Sunday School and Gospel Teaching. In the second post, I’ll get more specific about what I think the problem is. In the final post, I will actually propose a possible solution.

Two caveats: First, I realize that I’m just some schmoe and I’m really in no position to lecture anybody on teaching. Please recognize that is a rant, not a list of demands. Second, I also realize that this isn’t my church; it is God’s church and he is gonna do what he wants to do. But a guy can dream, right? (that God wants to do what I want to do; not that it could someday be my church)

In order to participate in Sunday School, do you need to read your scriptures in preparation? [Read more...]

Post your reasons below.
*Monism is the belief that everything in the universe is made up of one substance.

The day after Thanksgiving, I was walking around a track, listening to an episode of This American Life. It was broadcast a couple of weeks ago and one of the stories considered a “haunted house” put on by a Texas church called “Hellhouse.” The house features real-life horrors, including abortion, suicide, and, in possibly its most famous set, a version of the Columbine massacre. [Read more...]

I don’t much care for basketball. I’m horrible at it myself and I’ve never really lost myself in the game watching others play it. I can respect what Michael Jordan accomplished, but it doesn’t interest me all that much. That said, I was moved by Lance Allred’s description of the early morning practices he would have with his coach in high school in his memoir, Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf, Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA.

Those mornings were the purest form of basketball I ever knew. Just me, [coach Kerry] Rupp, and a ball. No money, no boosters, no politics. It was the pure love and innocence of the game, when it was still a game for me. We both worked and sweated, our shoes squeaking and echoing out the gym and down the empty hallways. I’d pay to have those moments again, those moments of hard work and sacrifice when I knew not what to expect as far as what my future held, with no sense of entitlement, no reward or motive in sight other than just the pure love of the game. I had no idea if I was ever going to be good enough to play college ball. We were challengers of the unknown.

I wasn’t playing for the future on those mornings with Rupp; I was playing for the moment, for the present. I wanted to be good at something; I wanted to excel at something.

While I have never been a particularly dedicated athlete, Allred’s drive to excel, to find the limits of his physical ability and push himself beyond them, is inspiring, in spite of the likelihood that it is, at least partially motivated by his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The drive to be good can be, I think, found in all people: the polygamists amongst whom Allred was raised, the athletes with whom he competes in amateur, semi-pro, and professional basketball, and his own family, struggling to define themselves within and without the Apostolic United Brethren, the fundamentalist Mormon sect of Allred’s youth. [Read more...]

I heard this in the hallway as I walked to class today.

“They’re not coming to church, but not for any legitimate reason. They’re just too lazy.”

Discuss.

This past week in Sunday School there was a discussion of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom and Doctrine and Covenants 135. My Sunday School teacher, whom I love and believe to have been sincerely sharing her thoughts on the martyrdom, went a little crazy. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the line “Joseph Smith died for us” was uttered. [Read more...]