By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Rich Davis has a PhD in Immunology and a phone that is full of pictures of parasites, bacteria and his kids. These sometimes appear on his twitter feed, @RichDavisPhD.

Saturday night, following the aftermath of a white supremacist rally and counter protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, I got a request from a friend asking for some reassurance on a much less worrisome topic than white supremacy.

That topic was the plague. Like, the actual, literal plague.

I’m a medical microbiologist, recently graduated with my Ph.D. where I studied a tropical human parasite. I currently work in the microbiology division of a clinical testing lab, the place that tests your blood, wounds or poop to diagnose what’s making you sick and how to treat it.
My friend’s concern came from news reports out of Arizona where health departments have reported finding in fleas the bacteria (Yersinia pestis) that causes plague. Fleas spread the disease among rodents and, much more rarely, to humans. Plague has a lot of social cachet—a professor of mine once called this, “disease sex appeal.” People know enough about it to know that it’s scary and sometimes deadly. In this case though, scary headlines notwithstanding, it’s evidence that the system for treating potentially deadly diseases was working: someone was monitoring rodents and fleas in the wild, someone informed the authorities of a finding and they in turn made a public announcement so that people can be more cautious if they come across something that looks like the disease. [Read more…]

This is a follow-up to a post from four months back, but we Never-Trump Mormons are a persistent bunch. (As a reader of BCC, perhaps you have noticed.) The Trump administration’s proposed travel ban–which many of us (including the three BCC-permabloggers who are co-signers of the linked amici curiae brief) believe demonstrates real discriminatory intent based on religion–will have its day before the Supreme Court this October, and when it does, a thoughtful and thoroughly Mormon argument about the dangers of religious discrimination, filed today, will be considered alongside all the other legal arguments. You can read the full brief here. This version of the brief was prepared by Nate Oman, whom Bloggernaclers need no introduction to, and Anna-Rose Mathieson, who represented the signing scholars before the Supreme Court and whom we really ought to invite to guest-blog with us here. Keep up the good fight, everyone; we are.

I hate, in Rome, a Grecian town to find;
To see the scum of Greece transplanted here,
Received like gods, is what I cannot bear.
Nor Greeks alone, but Syrians here abound;
Obscene Orontes, diving under ground,
Conveys his wealth to Tiber’s hungry shores,
And fattens Italy with foreign whores:
–Juvenal, Third Satire, 118 A.D.

For all of the bandwidth it has been getting recently, one might be tempted to think that “white culture” is an actual thing. When the LDS Church issued its forceful condemnation of white supremacy yesterday, the most controversial thing it did was put “white culture” in scare quotes. This was appropriate as “white culture” is not, in fact, a thing. And it never has been. [Read more…]

The Church has posted an update to its statement on the white supremacist mob in Charlottesville. It is unequivocal in its condemnation of members who support this movement:

UPDATE: Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The Church has released the following statement:

It has been called to our attention that there are some among the various pro-white and white supremacy communities who assert that the Church is neutral toward or in support of their views. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the New Testament, Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:37-39). The Book of Mormon teaches “all are alike unto God” (2 Nephi 26:33).

White supremacist attitudes are morally wrong and sinful, and we condemn them. Church members who promote or pursue a “white culture” or white supremacy agenda are not in harmony with the teachings of the Church. [Read more…]

Several years ago, I was visiting my mother’s home ward in my hometown in the South. My wife and I went to church with my mom and, as it was a fifth Sunday, all the adults in the ward (without a calling elsewhere) gathered together to watch a video. Normally, this just means that the bishopric hasn’t really had the time to put together a lesson (or call someone to do so). After all, we’ve all looked forward to Church videos when we haven’t gotten our Sunday School lesson together. However, this video wasn’t obviously by the church. I don’t recall the production company, but the content was disturbing.

The main point of video was that women don’t have enough babies. [Read more…]

The church’s PR arm released a statement yesterday condemning the racism and hatred on display in Charlottesville.

I’m not going to lie. I wish the statement were stronger and more specific. I wish that we didn’t have to go back more than ten years to find a statement by a prominent church leader condemning racism as the evil that it is.

But I’m not going to find fault. This is a statement that expressly condemns racism as the evil that it is. And that is a good thing. [Read more…]

Here’s a form of white supremacy: the belief that God is white. Holding that belief does not necessarily make you a supporter of neo-Nazism and white terrorism but you should know that it does make you a white supremacist. Sorry if that offends. [Read more…]

“Call no man happy until he is dead.”–Herodotus

This oft-quoted line from Herodotus requires some unpacking before it makes sense to modern ears. In the first place, Herodotus is not speaking for himself. He is quoting a conversation between Solon, the great Athenian lawmaker, and Croesus, the fabulously wealthy and magnificently powerful King of Lydia.

This is the point at which (unless you are a Classics student or ancient historian) you say, “wait a minute, I’ve never heard of Croesus. And where the heck was Lydia?” This, it turns out, is precisely the point. [Read more…]

Here is a sort of poem I have written. [Read more…]

Elizabeth Pinborough is a writer, photographer, and artist. She is also a TBI survivor and has a site at The Art of Striving. Her words are really powerful, so we asked her to share them here with you.

One of my posts from last week was actually part of a draft for a talk I gave in church today. The topic was “We can do hard things!” Here are my more complete thoughts on that and on how Christ is essential to our ability to overcome.

Today I want to talk about the Land of Not Yet—a beautiful and dangerous place, a place with innumerable opportunities. Not Yet is full of every imaginable landscape, plant, animal and person.

Sometimes Not Yet appears to be a land of black and white. People there can choose to be kind or to be cruel, good or evil, humble or proud, and on and on. Sometimes it seems that people without scruples prosper the most.

In Not Yet, if someone asks her neighbor how she is doing, her neighbor may feel compelled to respond, OK, with a polite smile, hiding her private burdens. Not Yet isn’t so black and white after all. Everyone there understands that good and bad befalls each in his or her turn, and some receive more than their fair share of either.

The Land of Not Yet is the land of Hard Things, capital H, capital T. [Read more…]

So today, two sorts of explosive news: first, that a prominent general authority has been excommunicated, and second, that Donald Trump is going to rain "fire and fury" upon North Korea if they should threaten the United States again.

These two events make me ask: does prayer work? [Read more…]

About a week before he went into the MTC, my son, who had been studying the scriptures earnestly like a good missionary should, came down stairs with a look of amazement on his face and said, “dad, guess what I just figured out: the Book of Genesis never actually says that the serpent was Satan. It just says it was a snake.”

That meant, of course, that it was time for “the talk.” It went something like this.

Satan, my son, was a fairly late addition to the Hebrew scriptures. When the Book of Genesis was first set down, there was no concept of a being of utter darkness and evil. The God of these people, Yahweh, was plenty scary. But as Yahweh came to be seen ever more as a good and loving father figure, they needed a place to put all of the evil scary things that were once a part of God. And it didn’t hurt that the Jews at this time were deeply influenced by the Persians, who were theological dualists, meaning that they had a figure of of ultimate evil (Ahriman) to oppose their otherwise monotheistic God (Ahura Mazda).

Even in the Book of Job, which was written around 500 years after the earliest Genesis texts, Satan is not yet the Prince of Darkness. He is not even Satan. He is “the satan,” a member of God’s court who functions something like a prosecuting attorney combined with a store detective—he goes throughout the kingdom looking for people who are disloyal to the King (God in this case) and then prosecutes them before God for their disloyalty. [Read more…]

Stephen Smoot is a BYU alumnus and current graduate student in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is also a Mormon blogger who writes at Ploni Almoni: Mr. So-and-So’s Mormon Blog. His writings on Mormon topics have also appeared, among other places, with the Interpreter Foundation and Book of Mormon Central. You can catch him on Twitter at @stephen_smoot. We’re pleased he agreed to share this post.

A few days ago I received a message from a friend of mine that I had known since I was a Freshman at BYU. It started out nonchalantly enough with him asking about how much longer I was going to be in Provo before returning to Canada for school. Eventually he got around to dropping some hints that things weren’t quite right. He mentioned feelings of loneliness and being directionless in life, and added that he felt awkward in his YSA ward and struggled with church attendance. He asked if I would be able to chat about some things he had on his mind, since he knew me, had followed me on social media, and felt like I was “a chill guy” he could be safe and somewhat vulnerable with. I happily agreed to be a listening ear. [Read more…]

So last night I’m sitting on the couch with a fairly new iPad in my lap. (I recently upgraded my phone, and they threw the pad in for a nominal amount. I’ve never used one before, so I’m still getting used to it.) All of a sudden this video popped up on the screen. I recognized the space as being Writ and Vision in Provo.  It was a roundtable discussion of that new Kofford book on apologetics, featuring Blair Van Dyke, Stephen Smoot, Joe Spencer, Amanda Brown and Loyd Erickson.[1]

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Mormonism Engages the World

This year the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar is being held in the basement of the Joseph F. Smith Building on BYU Campus. The morning session just wrapped, and I thought I’d give a very brief summary of the papers mixed (inexorably) with my own mental stirrings. Warning: these are in no way verbatim reports—they are very brief summaries. Caveat Emptor. Presenters who encounter this should feel free to disabuse the public of my errors.
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You asked for it, and we heard you. At BCC Press, it’s just what what we do. As of today, Mother’s Milk, the remarkable book of poems about Heavenly Mother written by Rachel Hunt Steenblik and illustrated by Ashley Mae Hoiland, is available for the Kindle. And for the next four days, you can get it for $3.95, which, let’s face it, is the new free.

If you haven’t seen what people are already saying about Mother’s Milk, check out the buzz: [Read more…]

“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” (They make a desert and call it peace)—Tacitus

 “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream.” (Isaiah 66:12 NIV)

For years I have been haunted by two different symbols of peace. [Read more…]

Today is the anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers.

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A friend of mine sent me this video yesterday. Please go watch, then let’s discuss…

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