The following are a few thoughts about discourses involving sex, modesty, and power in the LDS universe, obviously from a male perspective. That part is important. Here, I want to write as self-consciously and honestly as I can about the experience(s) of being a man regarding sex and modesty. My experience will not be every man’s experience, of course, but I hope some things will resonate with other men (and women). First, a story.

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Notes, commentary, and questions for LDS Sunday School teachers using the ‘Doctrine & Covenants and Church History’ manual. Feel free to share your thoughts or ideas regarding the lesson in the comments.

This lesson is all about the value of education, both secular and spiritual, a duality suggested by the key phrase “by study and also by faith” (which also happens to be the title for the two-volume Nibley Festschrift).  Certainly translating that duality of approach into practical terms would be one possible approach to take in this lesson. [Read more...]

Our Sacrament Meeting was especially, egregiously, exuberantly noisy today. I was on the stand to lead the singing, and it was so noisy that I started looking around to see if the grownups or teenagers were being excessively chatty. They weren’t. It was all good, wholesome, inevitable baby and toddler noise, punctuated by the barely controlled pandemonium of the Primary children’s musical offering for Father’s Day. I had a squirmy moment of worrying about visitors being shocked by our irreverence, and then just settled in to enjoy it. [Read more...]

If you’re teaching the Word of Wisdom, here’s something to blow your audience away: CONTEXT. The folks at the Church History Library have released today a new item in their ‘Revelations in Context’ series, this one being an engrossing look at the tobacco spittle on the floor of the Whitney store. It also includes a look at the American health reform movement of the time, without being sucked into the easy comparisons to contemporary health schemes or the modern approach to body issues. Definitely worth your time, even if most BCC readers (let’s face it) are rebels for whom the divine counsel of the Word of Wisdom is a road marker long passed on the highway to Hell.

We’ve recently learned that Richard Bushman and Fiona and Terryl Givens will be presenting a series of seminars or lectures on managing doubt and crises of faith. In a way, we can see nearly all of their scholarly work on Mormonism devoted in some sense to this topic. I’ve read most of their work and have been privileged at various times to work under them and with them as a graduate student. Consequently, I think I might have some sense of what they might discuss, though I’m anxious to hear and weigh the details. I don’t always agree with them, but I think it’s certain that they are among the best exemplars of faithful people trying to sincerely negotiate, reconcile, and do justice to the various worlds they live and move in (academic, religious, familial, etc).
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We are overbooked on the July 6th event featuring Terryl and Fiona Givens and Richard Bushman.  BUT, Terryl and Fiona will be giving their presentation before that event.  There will be other events elsewhere.  Details:

1.  Terryl and Fiona will be giving their “Crucible of Doubt” fireside on June 26 to a YSA Institute in Orem. The fireside will be held at the “Costco” chapel in Orem from 7:30 – 9:00 p.m. (There are two chapels next to each other across the street (north) from Costco. The Institute meets in the chapel that is to the north and the east of the other.)

2. The “Belief and Doubt in Mormonism: Negotiating Faith Crises” conferences will be held on September 28 in Manhattan, October 19 in northern Virginia, and November 9 in Boston. (We don’t have a space yet in Boston, but we will.) The “faculty” for each will be Richard, Terryl, and Fiona.

I’ll post on BCC when we have a recoding ready.

Looking forward to Father’s Day next Sunday, I’ve been thinking about my father who has been gone for two decades now, but whose influence I still feel in my life every day. I’ve tried to identify exactly why and how his character continues to effect me, and in that process I’ve recalled some of the things I remember him saying to me or others. I’ve decided to share some of those things here, and I invite you to share some of the things you remember about your dad in the comments. It can be wise, spiritual, sad, happy, endearing or funny.

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The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder: Scripture Study Questions

Author: James E. Faulconer

Paperback: 285 pages

Publisher: Salt Press LLC (February 1, 2013)

From the back cover: This is a book of questions. Just questions, no answers, though occasionally I will throw in some answer-like material to help make the question easier to understand. It is a book of questions because in my experience-in both personal scripture study and in teaching Sunday School and other lessons-questions are of more help for reflective, deep study. We learn new things when we respond to new questions, and the person who says “I no longer get anything out of my scripture study” no longer runs up against questions to think about as he or she reads. This book is intended to make reading harder-and therefore fresher-by giving such readers questions for study. [Read more...]

The following is some contextual material related to the Word of Wisdom, Doctrine & Covenants 89, Revelation, February 27, 1833. As current Mormons, however, I think that it is worth noting that there are many Words of Wisdom. There is the revelation text, there is the Temple Recommend rule and then there are personal rules by which we live. E.g., the text allows for mild barley drinks, and the Temple recommend rules allow for Diet Coke. I have friends who are vegetarian because of this revelation. The Word of Wisdom is many things and they are not all the same. [UPDATE] Also check you Jed’s article just published at the Church’s Revelations in Context.
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During the first week of July, Richard Bushman and Terryl and Fiona Givens will be presenting an all-day conference for those in a faith crisis. This conference would not be helpful to ex-Mormons or to Mormons who are not struggling with aspects of their faith.  If you would like to participate, please message me or let me know in comments.  Space is limited. It will be held in Provo, sponsored by the Temple and Observatory Group.

So, because our valiant live-blogger Kevin isn’t here, we didn’t realize that we were missing an MHA live-thread until well into the conference. Our bad.

The schedule of papers can be downloaded at the MHA website. The conference is taking place in the beautiful, if over-commercialized, city of Layton, Utah. As with most MHA conferences that take place in the Wasatch Front, it is teeming with people, as over 500 individuals pre-registered.

For those in attendance, please feel free to share your reflections, experiences, and favorite points from the many fascinating papers.

And for those of you on twitter, you can follow along the frequent updates with #MHA2013.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM UPCOMING PAPERS TO BE PRESENTED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION, 6-9 JUNE, DAVIS CONFERENCE CENTER, LAYTON, UTAH [Read more...]

In D&C 130 we learn:

2 And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.

Can we read that word ‘sociality’ a little more broadly? I would like to interpret it in an expansive way. A biological way. To look at levels of sociality matching the kinds of deep societies that make up every biological system—a  move that would make Hermes Trismegistus proud (the coiner of the aphorism, “Tis true without lying, certain & most true/That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below”). Sociality implies relationships among things, and in fact relationships among organisms and their environment is my area of study. We call it Ecology. [Read more...]

In a short story by Stephen-Paul Martin, a discontented American copes with despair following the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush by fleeing to a Zen Buddhist retreat.

“What appealed to me about Zen was its technique of destabilizing human arrogance,” he writes, “humbling its practitioners by leading them into radical uncertainty, relentlessly making them see that any assumption they might make about anything, no matter how logical or factual it seemed, was nothing more than a verbal house of cards” (48). [Read more...]

Notes, commentary, and questions for LDS Sunday School teachers using the ‘Doctrine & Covenants and Church History’ manual. Feel free to share your thoughts or ideas regarding the lesson in the comments.

Part of the objective for this lesson is to ‘help class members understand… the Second Coming’.  In this lesson outline I aim to offer some thoughts on a particular passage in D&C 88 in connection with Beethoven’s 9th symphony.  Between Christmas and New Year I took my mother to hear Beethoven’s 9th symphony performed at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra. Aside, from hearing Robert Levin perform a few of his Mozart completions a few months earlier, this was the first time that I had ever attended a classical music concert. It was an unforgettable experience. Certainly my limited knowledge of the musical canon and of the forms that structure such large pieces necessarily made my listening quite unsophisticated.[1] It was primarily a raw and immediate response to this celebration of human contradiction.

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What follows here is an alternate reading of the “Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood,” viz., D&C 84. I realize that this reading differs from the traditional reading. I think that this is okay, mostly because the traditional reading is different than the contextual reading. Section 84 is based on a revelation delivered on September 22, and 23, 1832, when organizational concepts such as the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthoods had not yet been revealed. See WVS’s extended treatment of Section 107 for more on that. I tend to think that the common reading today translates the text into a 1836-era framework of administrative priesthood. The following is a reading based on Joseph Smith’s revelations and cosmology of the Nauvoo-era. Basically it starts as a contextual reading and then shifts to a translation of the text into the Nauvoo-era cosmological priesthood. I’m not saying that this reading should be normative, but I do think it works with from the Nauvoo perspective quite well and is more egalitarian. Your mileage may vary.
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Fasten your seat belts and hold on. The speculation coming may leave you with whiplash.

Take triangles. Most of us are tempted by the idea that there is some perfect realm where triangles in their formalwear are eking out an eternal existence being flawless and sitting beyond the ravages of time and circumstance.

Plato laid this out nicely with his sense that there was a world of perfect forms or ideas that stamped the shape of things that got instantiated in this world as particulars. The form of the ‘good’ or maybe ‘beauty’ stood as the form of the forms. This got taken as God. Existing up there (I’m pointing up) as the one pure being. Like the triangles, only rather than perfect sides, angles and such, he held all perfections including perfect being—sort of a really advanced trianglely sort of thing only better. And beyond time, where time is some ‘river’ that flows forward but which can be circumvented by this perfect being and who is its source rather than something embedded in it. Time is down here. With us. Not with him—the God of triangles. Oh and these perfect ideal formal triangles escape time too, just like all the Platonic forms. [Read more...]

In 2 Nephi 2, Jacob receives instruction from Lehi. In a metaphysical discussion he discusses aspects of spiritual reality, specifically the conditions necessary to establish righteousness. He says:

 11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.

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The last time I saw my daughter, she told me that she had decided to be more proactive about meeting people.  She had signed up for a (free) online dating service, and had recently gone out with four different guys.  None of them was a hit, but the evenings were pleasant enough and she felt good about actually trying and putting herself out there.  I was proud of her and told her so. [Read more...]

Today, the BSA’s 1,400 national delegates voted to rescind the ban on openly gay young men from participating in Scouts. According to the resolution, “Any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting.” However, the BSA director of public affairs stated in response to a question as to wether the BSA will ask scouts about their sexual activity that “we do not ask now and will not if the resolution passes.” [ibid] The LDS Church released a response to the vote, which indicated the continued sponsorship of LDS Scouting and included the following statement:
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