By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Today it’s in the news that President Nelson went and met with Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister. This was a little bit more interesting than just any meeting with a world leader for two reasons: (1) Ardern has been widely praised recently for her leadership, including her response to violence in her country, and (2) Ardern herself was raised in the church, but says she left the church in 2005 and currently identifies herself as agnostic.

But this post isn’t about that meeting, it’s about how we print and bind the scriptures. President Nelson made a gift to Ardern of what appears to be a very nice Deseret Book “Legacy Edition” of the Book of Mormon. It’s a nicely done hardcover edition that would look beautiful on a shelf, but it’s pretty pricey retailing around $100. Anyway, that got me thinking about what my ideal edition of the scriptures for my personal use would look like if I could design it myself.

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Matthew 21–23; Mark 11; Luke 19–20; John 12

These passages cover Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple. John puts the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Christ’s ministry; the three synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) put it toward the end. It is the inciting incident which leads the Jerusalem elite to seek Jesus’s death for Matthew, Mark, and Luke; as Mark has it, in 11:18 (KJV):

And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.

How should we understand what was happening here?  The first thing to note is that the people doing business at the temple were not necessarily doing wrong, so we cannot read this story as a critique of a self-evident crime; it’s not as though these were people hanging around selling souvenirs in a sacred place.
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Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has long served as the journal of record for the intellectual and cultural life of the Mormon people. Thanks to five decades of work by editors, authors, and the Board, Dialogue  continues to provide space for some of the faith’s most vibrant thinking on cultural, historical, theological, and social issues. To further this mission, we have recently completed a transition that has made all content freely available on our new website at the moment of publication and given us a more substantial internet presence with web-only content. Beginning in 2020, we will transition our production operations to the University of Illinois Press. With these actions, Dialogue will retain its status as a crucial voice in modern Mormonism. To continue this tradition, and in accordance with the journal’s transition to a new production model, Dialogue’s Board of Directors announces a search for a new editor to take control starting with the Summer 2020 issue.

Imagine that your worst failure, the most humiliating and traumatic episode of your life, became publicly known. Now imagine sitting in a room, expecting to talk about a topic related to Jesus or your spiritual life or a scriptural text. And imagine that, without warning (much less a private inquiry about how comfortable you would be with such a discussion), a roomful of people who claim to love you start talking about your failure, speculating about why failures such as yours happen. They adduce many sins that might cause awful things like the thing that happened to you. Of course no one asks you what actually happened, or if your experience has given you some insight. All you can do is sit there and listen to uninformed speculation about what you must have done wrong.

You would hate this. Stop doing it to people who are divorced but still brave enough to attend church. Just stop.

The readings for this lesson deal with a few different substantive topics: Marriage and divorce, the role of material wealth in a disciple’s life, prayer, soteriology (the theology of what it means to be saved and how we are saved), church leadership, children, and miraculous healing.

But if there is a unifying theme to these readings it is how Jesus’s teaching often disrupt what are often our natural or cultural beliefs about what is righteous and call us to believe and practice something that is much harder to believe, and much more demanding to practice. We naturally and culturally want to believe that we can be righteous by following the rules, and that therefore, if we just find out the right rules, we can make ourselves righteous and earn salvation or exaltation or blessings by following them.

But Jesus’s message over and over in these readings is that following the rules won’t make you righteous. Instead, if you want to become righteous you have to become a fundamentally different kind of person. The kind of person that humbles himself as a child, sells all that he has and gives it to the poor, serves others, and rather than glorying in his obedience to the commandments, begs only to be forgiven for all the ways he has failed to keep them, and follows Jesus all the way to the cross. [Read more…]

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Last month, the The New York Times set its sights on children’s artwork, publishing two articles on sorting out the stuff your kids bring home—”I Love Throwing My Kids’ Artwork in the Garbage While They’re Sleeping” and “How to Keep Kids’ Art From Cluttering Up Your Home“—on the same day. I’m not sure what was in the air that April day that prompted the news powerhouse to devote two parenting features to the same topic, but I’m sure that most adults who care for children can relate to the problem of dealing with the things they bring home or make. My daughter’s artistic output hasn’t been nearly as prodigious since learning how to read, but for a while the preschool was asking us to bring in more paper since it was our kid who was using most of it.

Today the First Presidency announced that “[w]here a licensed marriage is not permitted in the temple, or when a temple marriage would cause parents or immediate family members to feel excluded, a civil ceremony followed by a temple sealing is authorized.” [editorial note: see Jared Cooks comment (#2) below] I thought I would share a few notes about the history of the policy that this announcement changed.
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As Peter’s post points out, the First Presidency today announced that it has ended the policy that couples who live in countries that allow the church to perform legally binding marriages in the temple, but who are married outside the temple in a civil ceremony, must wait at least a year after their civil wedding to be married in the temple.

The First Presidency letter includes this line in the third paragraph: “Where a licensed marriage is not permitted in the temple, or when a temple marriage would cause parents or immediate family members to feel excluded, a civil ceremony followed by a temple sealing is authorized.” Some who have read the letter are questioning whether this implies that in places where a licensed marriage is permitted in the temple, and in situations where “parents or immediate family members” would not be excluded, a civil ceremony followed by a temple sealing is not authorized.

I think that would be a bad misreading of the First Presidency’s letter. The idea is that by saying one thing is true, the First Presidency is implicitly also that the converse is not true–what lawyers would call the canon of expressio unius exclusion alterius. And that may be a useful guide for interpretation in some cases, but in this case, I think it would be inconsistent with the rest of the letter to read it this way.

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Temple sealings for members in Austria have always (well, since at least 1955) started with a civil wedding—the temple sealing is not recognised by the state, and we Mormons are a law-abiding people—followed by a temple ceremony in a (distant) temple at the couple’s earliest convenience. As near as I can tell, no one batted an eye at this arrangement or worried about the dilution of the temple sealing—it was just the way things are, rendering unto Cæsar and God that which is theirs.

Today, the First Presidency announced that members all over the world will be able to follow suit: “a civil marriage between a man and a woman will no longer necessitate waiting a year for that couple to be married (or sealed) in a temple.” (See also this article with some fascinating history from historian par excellence Ardis Parshall.) As someone who married in Austria, I think this is a good move with the potential to disentangle the sealing from the legal and lawful business, strengthening both in the process.

At BCC Press, we believe that the line between poetry and prophecy is vanishingly thin and not really a line at all. Nearly all of the prophets in the Bible were also poets. Read correctly, the magnificent verses of Isaiah, the profound Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the stunning rebukes of Amos and Hosea are among the ancient world’s greatest poems.

The reverse is true as well: the poets of a culture are invariably its greatest prophets. Whether it is William Blake reconciling contraries through prophetic verse, or William Butler Yeats organizing history into self-annihilating gyres, or Walt Whitman telling Americans on the eve of the Civil War that “affection shall solve the problems of freedom”–poets warn us, challenge us, and reveal new and startling truths that complicate our lives. [Read more…]

Luke 12–17
John 11

The centerpiece of this week’s lesson comes in three interlinked parables about finding lost things. In the Christian tradition, the three parables have been given the titles “The Lost Sheep,” “The Lost Coin,” and “The Prodigal Son.” We need to keep in mind though, that Jesus did not name these parables–and sticking too closely to the traditional titles can cause us to focus our attention on the wrong things.

I’ve written a lot about “female ritual healing” in the last decade–frequently with Kris. I think a lot more people are aware today, than ten years ago, that women in the church regularly anointed the sick and blessed. The Joseph Smith Papers Project has published the once guarded minutes of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, which included examples of women blessing and Joseph’s revelatory approval of the practice. Deseret Book remarkably published that minute even before the JSPP released the document. The Church Historian’s Press has published transcripts of the minutes with notes, along with many other relevant documents from the subsequent decades (The First Fifty Years, even available in the Gospel Library App). The Church History Department has published several essays that deal with the practice, including a Gospel Topics Essay and a Church History Essay. I sense no danger in discussing it. It is a different world than when Kris and I first walked into the old Archives.
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One might, at first glance, think Elder Brook Hales’s talk “Answers to Prayer” is about…well…prayer. But it really isn’t; rather, it is about hope and the effect it can have in our lives. [Read more…]

We are all familiar with the religious biographies of Joseph Smith, and in particular the narrations of the First Vision. It is from the latter of these that we find God’s condemnation of Christian creeds, a formal category or documents that established beliefs for the last two thousand years. Many folks have written about the anti-creedal denominations of the Antebellum period, and how the restoration fit in with that. My experience has been that Mormons have consequently taken a pejorative view of these documents, even if we haven’t really been sure what exactly they are [waves hands and mutters something about the incoherency of the trinity].
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Who gets to decide what my religion is? Who gets to decide what my religion is called? Who gets to decide who gets to call themselves a Mormon, or a Christian? Should the church have anything to do with those who aren’t members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, but who call themselves Mormons?

Something I’ve been thinking about over the past several months since President Nelson’s announcement about the name of the church is the relationship between the right of religious institutions to define themselves, and the right of individuals to choose their own religious identity. [Read more…]

Watch this video of Matt Easton, valedictorian of the Political Science Department, giving the convocation speech for BYU graduation in the Marriott Center and announcing, “I stand before my family, friends, and graduating class today to say that I am proud to be a gay son of God.” 

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Matthew 18, Luke 10

The Sapiential, Constitutive, Consequential Kingdom of God
To read the Gospels is to become obsessed with a vision. And the name of the vision is “the Kingdom of God,” or, sometimes, “the Kingdom of Heaven” or just “the Kingdom.” It is the most powerful vision in any of the standard works, where it occasionally also goes by the name of “Zion.” It is the focus of nearly all of Christ’s parables, and of the vast majority of His teaching and ministry. And it remains one of the most poorly understood concepts in the churches that use His name.