By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog
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Blame it on babies- nursing, pregnant, in utero, babies. At first, I couldn’t figure out how in the world we made it four years and never fasted; then I remembered the babies… For the last four years I have pretty much totally been either nursing or pregnant- and thus not a prime candidate to fast.
Yesterday, not nursing, and not (please!) pregnant, I finally jumped in the water. [Read more...]
Greg at T&S posted poll numbers from a Gallup poll. As you all know, I love the polls.
The folk’s overall favourable opinion of us is 42%; while unfavorable is 46%. There is nothing particularly surprising about that.
More surprising, Republicans dislike us at a rate of 52% (the highest among political parties (Dems dislike us at a rate of 47%)). This is particularly interesting because Liberals dislike us 61% compared to Conservatives 45%. These numbers do not make very much sense to me, so I turn to you to explain it to me.
Feel free to comment on other aspects of the poll, which also shows that Catholics like us more than Protestants and frequent church-goers dislike us more than infrequent church-goers.
Our final winners from the Sweet Sixteen were:
1. Angel Moroni, 3. CTR Rings, 5. Large Families, and 11. Scripture Marking. Dan, NOW YOU KNOW MY PAIN!
Stiff upper lip, people! We must persevere:
[Read more...]
Recently, I was asked to prepare a brief presentation on the topic “How to use non-KJV translations of the Bible in Sunday School without seeming snooty.” I have to tell you that this is a fascinating topic for me. It seems to me that if the mere use of alternate translations is enough to brand one “snooty,” there are other things at work than a love of Jacobean English.
What is the danger in being branded snooty? [Read more...]
Bill Maher’s HBO show stirred-up some nice Mormon bashing this week. Maher’s position is that all religions are crazy and the notion that only a “person of faith” should inhabit the White House is something to be raged against. But for Maher (whom I generally like, btw), Mormonism is especially “crazy.” [Read more...]
Jana Riess comes to us as one of the regular Dialogue participants.
I just returned from a very encouraging conference for young Mormon scholars–the first-ever gathering of LDS graduate students who are getting advanced degrees in theology and religious studies. About 40 such students, plus a few spouses, convened at Yale Divinity School on Friday and Saturday. We had folks from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UNC, Claremont, Iliff, the University of Durham, and the GTU, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few schools. (All of our sessions were held in the RSV translation room, which felt very auspicious and cool.)
Sixteen students presented papers on everything from the Deutero-Isaiah theory and the Book of Mormon to the question of whether an LDS scholar is ipso facto a defender of the faith. All these papers were sandwiched between some great opening remarks by Richard Bushman, who helped conceive and organize the conference, and a closing session by Terryl Givens, who gave us a fascinating sneak preview of his cultural history of Mormonism, due out in August from Oxford University Press. [Read more...]
In future historical treatments of Spencer W. Kimball’s ministry, race will almost certainly be seen as a central theme. Indeed, perhaps the single most influential act in his religious life was the elimination of Mormonism’s ban on priesthood ordination and temple ordinances for people racially conceptualized as being of African descent.[1] The most recent addition to the Mormon canon is the official statement, by Kimball and his subordinates in the First Presidency, granting priesthood to black men, and access to temple ceremonies to black men and women. Beyond this major change in church racial policy, Kimball’s life also incorporated other important racial themes, including his racially-defined special ministry to the Lamanites (i.e., Native Americans and Polynesians), and his famous teachings on avoiding interracial and inter-cultural marriages. In light of the centrality of racial themes to Kimball’s life and ministry, we might expect race to play some role in this year’s priesthood/Relief Society lesson manual on his teachings. Are we to be disappointed in that expectation? [Read more...]
Salt Lake City Aug 2006
As Latter-day Saints many of us feel confident in our belief in God and our understanding of his attributes. We are often quite adamant, truthfully so, that we believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior and Redeemer, the Eternal Son of God. These two figures justly receive the majority of our devotions. The Godhead, though, contains another entity, what other Christians call the Holy Spirit and we prefer in its older English translation–the “Holy Ghost.” [Read more...]
“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Luke 15:4-7, NRSV)
We are all familiar with the famous good shepherd, who leaves the ninety-nine to find the lost one, who is the keeper of the gate, who lays down his life for the sheep. This brief essay is about the good shepherd’s younger brother, the bad shepherd. We all know him well, although he usually goes by another name. [Read more...]
Starfoxy continues her turn as a guest at BCC.
One of the joys of being a part of a marriage, or family is ease with which I am able to take joy in the happiness of my loved ones. It is a pleasure for me to work for something that makes my family comfortable. Frequently the work and sacrifices family members make for each other are seen as tokens of affection. The classic O. Henry story of the young couple exchanging gifts obtained through personal sacrifice is an excellent example of this sacrifice-equals-love mentality.
This past October conference Elder Christofferson spoke at the Priesthood session and told a story, which impressed my husband enough for him to tell it to me when he came home: [Read more...]
We welcome as a guest P. Anderson, more commonly known throughout the bloggernacle as Starfoxy.
In the grand tradition of Safeway, Vons, and and grocery stores the world over, I’ve been hired here at BCC as temporary holiday help. I’ll be providing two weeks worth of the blog equivalent to a inexperienced cashier at the the register with the slowest line waiting for the manager to come void the transaction, or something like that.
Some of the most awkward uncomfortable lessons that I’ve ever sat through- the ones where the teacher can never find the right words, and the class has little or nothing to contribute, and everyone talks in cirlces- are the ones about [insert dramatic pause] humility. [Read more...]
The winners from last Friday are:
1. Funeral Potatoes, 15. Wedding Receptions with Basketball Hoops, 14. Delivering meals to the sick and recently delivered, 4. Temple Square, 12. Euphemisms for swear words (Heck, Flip, etc.), 6. Food Storage, 7. Cheerios in Sacrament Meeting, and 8. I am a Child of God. Poor J. Golden.
Today’s contestants are: [Read more...]
Sam MB will be guest blogging at BCC for a time. He is an aspiring cultural critic with an addiction to alpine environments.
My childhood in Helena, Montana seems to me now like a water-damaged album of sepia photographs. There is a large-boned boy, his face blotted out below bright red bangs, demonstrating the finer points of cigarette smoking. There I am driving our swollen Ford station wagon into the neighbor’s Corvette, my eyes level with the steering column. Later I see his toddler son in diapers raising a Budweiser can in a salute that fascinated and horrified me. Here my brothers and I are delivering an advertising circular named The Adit in the icy quiet of Helena before dawn.
Most of all, though, I remember living in the shadow of mighty Mount Helena. [Read more...]
Here are your voting options. Remember the question you are seeking to answer is “Who Wins?”
It seems to me that we expect too much of non-members. I once attended a meeting in which a non-member scholar was criticized for reading the footnotes in the scriptures as if they were canonized. It is an easy mistake to make; one which I would imagine an awful lot of church members make. How was a minimally informed interested observer to know that the footnotes, while nice, are not considered authoritative? Nonetheless, this commentator was dressed down for his ignorance.
Obviously, in writing about this, I am writing about Andrew Sullivan, whose motivations, in spite of the accusations bandied about, remain unclear. Furthermore, I am writing it about that pastor from a couple of weeks ago who stumbled upon an anti-site and used it, and her own collected cult knowledge, to offer a depiction of the church that relied too heavily on long unmentioned and unused doctrines of the 19th century. Let’s assume, just for the moment, that these people are making honest mistakes and set aside the vast secret-combination theories.
Is it any wonder? [Read more...]
What is an anti-Mormon? Latter-day Saints tend to have quite strong, and quite negative, feelings about anti-Mormons. My guess is that they might be our least-liked group — the one that Mormons would feel most reservations about allowing to speak at a library or teach at a high school (standard indicators used to measure social tolerance in survey research). But defining the boundaries of this highly-disliked group is a bit difficult to do. Some of us define anti-Mormonism in such broad terms that virtually all non-Mormons, and some faithful Mormons, fit in the category. Others choose a more narrow definition.
Terminological debates like these are typically painful and difficult to resolve. If a major moral taint didn’t attach to the word, it probably wouldn’t be worth thinking about what it actually means. But moral stigma does attach, with anti-Mormons thought of by some Latter-day Saints in the same ways that anti-Semites are thought of by World War II-era Jewish folks. So it may be worth tracing through definitions and thinking about who would be included. [Read more...]
Our canonical texts are stridently negative about the practice of “wresting the scriptures.” Wresting the scriptures is said to lead to our own destruction (2 Peter 3:16, Alma 13:20), to lead us far astray (Alma 41:1), and to produce contention (D&C 10:63). What, exactly, is this dangerous thing, this sower of chaos, this “wresting” of the scriptures? [Read more...]
John Sentamu, Archbishop of York (he of the “prophetic enactment”, Anglicanism’s number two man), has come out swinging against media bias, the liberal elite, the Muslim veil, and Christmas commercialism. File under: when religious leaders speak their mind. For a staid old church, this stuff is a breath of fresh air. [Read more...]
George W. Bush is not a man of God…at least not my God. There is a possibility that he is devoted to some other God. I may even speculate about that as we move along. [Read more...]
Deaths and supernatural visions are said to come in threes; perhaps it is, therefore, fitting that I tell the story of my encounters with treasure digging in three vignettes.
***
When I was younger, my father served in the military, so our family lived in base housing. Our home had a sandbox that was remarkably important to me and my neighborhood friends. You see, we had concluded — using reasoning that now strikes me as somewhat opaque — that below the sandbox was a significant cache of “rich oil.” This belief was reinforced by an “old map” that one of the children drew, showing an X marking the spot of the sandbox. As we dug, we could almost feel the oil churning beneath our feet. [Read more...]
There are many interesting things about the 11th article of faith, not the least of which is that it is the only one that fails to begin “We believe…”. Instead, we get “We claim…” which is a pretty interesting difference. Unlike the others, which lay out the axia of Mormon faith, the 11th article defends a right, the right to believe as we choose. We are even gracious enough to allow those outside of our faith to believe what they choose (misguided though it may be ;) )
In the bloggernacle, I became acquainted with the term heterodoxy. Guessing from usage, it appears to mean believing anything that you believe is sufficiently unorthodox to have a blog-post regarding it. [Read more...]
If you had visited York Minster this week — northern Europe’s biggest gothic cathedral — you would have seen the strange sight of the Archbishop of York, Ugandan-born John Sentamu, camped in a tent within the church. His hair specially shaved for the event, Sentamu has been fasting for peace in the Middle East. His fast has been part-John the Baptist, part-David Blaine; the UK press, usually skeptical of public religiosity, is largely impressed.
Sentamu feels that God revealed this course of action to him after watching a news program highlighting the suffering of a Lebanese girl and an old Israeli woman:
“I was gutted at that news report,” explains the archbishop, who does not speak received Anglican. “Gutted at the plight of the young and the elderly, at those who are helpless in this conflict. And then I realised this was what I had been trying to hear. I was hearing the voice of God in that little girl, in that old woman.”
His decision to scrap [his family] holiday, move into a tent inside the cathedral and undertake a fast came when he read from the Bible about the disciples of Jesus failing to heal a young boy. “They ask Jesus why they couldn’t do it,” he explains. “Jesus replies that it was ‘only by prayer and fasting.’ And that was my word. I thought, this is the same. It’s got to be prayer and fasting . . . “
Once upon a time, when I had to choose an ancient language to study, my advisor — who knew I was a Mormon — advised me not to study Egyptian. “Mormons should stay away from Egyptian,” he said. The implication was that an induction in hieroglyphics would shatter my faith. [Read more...]
My papist pal and fellow academic Andrew has agreed to answer some more of my questions. For Part One, see here.
(1) If the Vatican opposes gay marriage/abortion/issue X, does it make it incumbent on you, a believing Catholic, to oppose said issues too?
(2) At what point do those Catholics who oppose some of the Vatican’s teachings cease to be “spiritually” Catholic? What is the point of Catholicism if the Vatican loses its authority to guide believers’ morals?
(3) If you’re a Catholic and you think the Vatican has lost the plot on certain issues, would it not make sense to go to a more “liberal” church, such as the Episcopalians?
If one considers the Bible to be genuine revelation, then the instruction one gleans from the Bible, with the teachings of Jesus having a particular importance for Christians, will have serious ethical implications. Scripture is revelation in that it reveals a God who acts with love and justice. These divine acts invite a human response in the same spirit of love and justice. This all sounds perfectly agreeable, but the obvious problem is how to appropriate a biblical ethic faithfully. Even if we could agree on what precisely constitutes such an ethic, how could we translate that ethic to the myriad issues one encounters nowadays. The biblical horizon and the modern horizon do not always meet and have to be mediated. [Read more...]
If you have been paying close attention to my posts here thusfar, you may have noted a theme. I’ll be a bit more explicit about it here. We, Mormons, don’t know how to righteously dissent with our leaders (or our Leader). In fact, generally speaking, we frown on dissent, no matter how well intentioned or politely put. We certainly have assurances that God is at the helm of the church, both public and private. But I wonder if we sometimes read too much into that, arguing that anything the Brethren say is the Word of God and not to be questioned. On the other hand, there are those for whom the advice of the Brethren and other Priesthood leaders is considered to have no greater weight than anybody else’s. That also seems to be an extremity. Of course, most Mormons live between the extremes of these two poles. However, should we?
The scriptures have something to say about this problem. In fact, they have several things to say about it, sometimes revolving around the same scriptural figure.
For reasons that I can’t quite get my mind around, my personal faith status has, in recent weeks, become one of the hot topics of discussion in the LDS blog community. I wouldn’t generally choose to respond to such remarks, but the widespread discussion about my beliefs provides a good opportunity for posting some comments that I’ve wanted to present for quite some time: my personal confession of faith. [Read more...]
The hot Judean sun bakes the dusty roads north of Jerusalem. From the brown hills of Judea, the Dead Sea is lost in a haze of blue and gold. In the distance, a donkey brays under its master’s load. Dust from a passing Roman cohort chokes the dry air. By the side of the road, a large crowd congregates around a rabbi from Galilee. The year is approximately 30 AD.
It is towards the end of the afternoon. As the crowd presses towards the man they call Jesus of Nazareth, the healer and holy man from the north, his disciples’ tempers begin to fray. It is hot and they are thirsty. As the shadows begin to lengthen, Peter, the chief disciple, glances impatiently at the people. The crowd are mostly poor, uncouth. As Jesus concludes his message of the kingdom of God, the people bring their little children to him. [Read more...]
The Catholic church has spent centuries refining its theology of “just wars.” This theology partly reflects biblical ideas, including Old Testament and New Testament statements about the necessity of conflict to defend the Kingdom of God. In part, the just war doctrine also reflects the pragmatic needs of a church that has helped govern much of a continent for hundreds to thousands of years.
Compared with the Catholics, Mormons have unique theological resources for constructing a theology of war. The Book of Mormon, in particular, contains extensive texts about righteous and wicked warfare. If we were to describe a theory of righteous warfare on the basis of the Book of Mormon, what would it look like? [Read more...]
I wrote the Old Testament section, Ed Snow the New Testament section.
Clearly, Mormon sexual doctrine is influenced by the Bible. It would therefore seem important for us to understand what the Bible says on the subject of homosexuality. [Read more...]
The phrase “Speak Truth to Power” has become something of a cliche among people on the political left. Street protesters, urban activists, and environmental organizers often think of and talk about their work in these terms. Implicit in this phrase, I think, is the idea that the truth (about poverty, the environment, the morality of abortion, civil rights, etc.) is self-evident to anyone who is willing to look. Furthermore, authority figures are probably willfully blind to this truth. So, protest and social communication are not only justified but, perhaps, mandatory: people in power need to be made to see the truth. Once they recognize the world for what it is, the social truth will overwhelm leaders’ decision to disregard a given problem and force them to take righteous action. [Read more...]
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