By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t thank the Lord for having the courage to second guess the call to serve. Let me explain.

When I turned 19 in the spring of aught-ninety-eight (a show of hands if you’ve never heard the expression), I joined the throngs of other nineteen-year-olds (there may have been three of us at my venerable undergraduate institution) and went to the university clinic for a physical, filled out the paperwork, and submitted my application to serve a mission. A few weeks later I received a call with a reporting date the next fall.

In light of the distance to the Missionary Training Center, missionaries in my stake were traditionally set apart on Sunday to allow them and their families plenty of time to travel to Provo by Wednesday. When the appointed hour came, my twin brother and I were set apart and on Monday we left for the MTC. We arrived in Provo that night, and on Tuesday morning we went shopping for a few last items. While walking through the parking lot to the store, I felt like it was going to be now or never and told my parents: “I’m not going.” [Read more…]

(Shannon) Hope Harrison served a mission in Houston TX from 2013-2014. She is currently a senior at MIT and has been part of Adir, a group that encourages understanding and friendships across all religions. Studying Hebrew at Harvard University and coming to love Judaism has been part of her path toward understanding more about Mormonism. She spent last summer in Jerusalem.

Oh generation of vipers,” (Matt 12:34) “full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness.” (Matt 23:27) “How can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Matt 23:33)

Jesus said! Stay away from the Pharisees – they are evil! Or? Wait…

“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Luke 6:41)

It’s easy to find fault in others. And it’s good to make sure we don’t duplicate that fault in ourselves. But sometimes we must be reminded that we may have worse sins, and should learn from the good in those around us. [Read more…]

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”— Robert G. Ingersoll

If I had to select one thing that sets my adult spiritual understanding apart from the one I had as a child (i.e. until my late 30s or so) it would be that the adult me has adopted of a religious version of the decidedly non-religious writer Robert Ingersoll’s perspective above: I no longer see God as a rewarder or punisher in the sky, but as a natural force that helps us understand natural consequences. [Read more…]

I self-identify as a liberal-minded Mormon.[1] But I was just wondering, “How did I get this way?” I was pretty conservative as a kid, and it was not set in stone that I should grow up to become progressive in my religious views. So I thought I would think back over my life’s history and try to identify (at least some of) the influences that shaped my modern perspective on the faith.

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The following is an excerpt from Tracy McKay’s new book, The Burning Point. For the next three days, you can purchase the Kindle edition of The Burning Point for the surreally low price of $3.99–just because we love you. Don’t miss out on this phenomenal deal from BCC Press.

My search for God started early, much to the bemusement of my multi-generational atheist family. My childhood was idyllic, just south of San Francisco on old orchard land. My hippie parents and I had happy, carefree days tending our chickens, picking fruit from our trees, and making jam. We even had a goat before having a goat was fashionable.  My memories are tinged with happiness and the scent of freshly tilled soil, the tang of salt spray on my lips, and the tingling feeling of sunlight breaking through thick banks of fog. [Read more…]

Like a lot of people, I spent some time leading up to and following the recent American presidential election reading some dystopian fiction in my spare time. I’ll recommend a few titles at the end of this post. But first, this morning I read K. E. Colombini’s provocative First Things post about dysfic. In a nutshell, Colombini raises the specter of technology and its corrupting influence on our lives, the way it crowds out classic literature and other influences that no longer refine our culture. [Read more…]

As you all know, BCC Press has unleashed a tide of awesomeness on the universe that cannot be contained. And we have given up all pretense of even trying. On July 24–that magic Mormon miracle day–we will have our biggest release yet, as three (count-em, THREE) new books will be released all at once.

And what books! Four of the most prominent women on the Mormon arts and letters scene have combined together to produce the kind of cognitive feast you usually only see when they award the Nobel Prizes. Here is a sneak preview: [Read more…]

Some good discussions this week about Zion, a perennial favorite topic of my own. Most Mormons can probably agree that we should be seeking Zion, working towards Zion, consecrating ourselves to the establishment of Zion. But the next steps can seem a little ambiguous at times. We LDS no longer called to a literal gathering, we don’t talk anymore of Jackson County, and the temple lot is not ours (it belongs to other Mormons). At times it feels like we’re in a sort of holding pattern when it comes to Zion. We go to church, we do our callings, we pay tithing. Is that all there is? If we’re not gathering or building (aside from donations and regular callings), what are we doing? Where is our utopia?

Maybe part of what’s missing is some sort of sustaining vision of where we’re headed, the ultimate goal. So here are all the relevant scriptures on Zion that I could find, the ones that tell us what that utopian society is like. [Read more…]

Click for a larger image

July 12, 13, 2017, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. Leonard J. Arrington centennial conference. See the attached program for more information. Speakers include Marlin K. Jensen, former Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Greg Prince, Arrington’s biographer, Gary Bergera, editor of the forthcoming Arrington diaries, Matt Grow, Director of Publications, Church History Department, Matthew Godfrey, Managing Historian for the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will be addressing attendees at 7:00pm, July 12, 2017 in the L. Tom Perry Pavilion, Huntsman Hall 470, USU Campus.

Conference Sessions will address the Arrington Collection at the USU library and consider Arrington’s influence among students, colleagues, the state of Idaho, LDS history, and the Historical Department of the LDS Church. The conference is free and open to all. Say hi if you decide to come up and breathe some of the clear aggie air.

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Like many Americans, I traveled last weekend. It wasn’t a horrible trip—about six hundred miles each way, all but about three blocks of it on big four- and six-lane highways. It was around 18 hours of driving and two and a half days of visiting friends and family. It was a good trip, and I will probably do it again. Family is important.

I can only do this, of course, because the federal government spent 35 years and hundreds of billions of dollars to create the most extensive and impressive engineering project of the 20^th century: the US Interstate Highway System. Most of us take this system for granted these days, but there was plenty of opposition to it in 1956. Without the strong endorsement of a popular president—Dwight Eisenhower, who saw it as a national defense imperative—it would likely have never received the funding required to make it happen.

This is pretty much how democracy is supposed to work. The Founders gave us a Constitution designed to make it possible for us to have the society we want—as long as enough of us want it for a long enough period of time. Limits on taxation and spending are, and were designed to be political, not structural. Read Federalist 30-35. It’s all there. [Read more…]

Hey folks! Happy 4th! If you’re looking for something fun to do tomorrow night, July 5th, join us at Writ & Vision in beautiful downtown Provo for a release party for the new BCC Press memoir, The Burning Point. We’d love to see you, and we’ll have cookies!

Vienna General Hospital in 1784 (source)

While the Grand Old Party kicks the can down the road—and seemingly ever farther from the then President-elect’s promise of “insurance for everybody“—amid turmoil about how much health care to strip from relatively many Americans to pay for a tax break for relatively few Americans, I figured there would be no better way to honor the 4th of July than to celebrate the freedom of living in a country where no political party opposes the goal of universal health care.

That probably sounds obnoxious on this tender occasion, but I’m actually not trying to gloat. Instead, I offer the following in the spirit of expanding horizons and to provide food for thought for what I hope will be a continuing and constructive debate about health care reform in the United States. I should also note that my experience hardly makes me a policy expert, and I don’t have the foggiest idea about what would and wouldn’t work given the lay of the land in the US. That will be for you to decide! [Read more…]

“All religions start with the cry, help.” I’ve looked for the original source of this quote since I heard it on a podcast and can’t locate it, but regardless, it is a line that spoke to me this week.

Today after I’d dropped my two older children at preschool for the afternoon and my six-week old baby slept in the back of the car, I said aloud the word, “help.” Nothing in particular was or is wrong, in fact, most is right, most is perfectly right, but I was overwhelmed, tired, full of doubt about my own abilities. I’ve learned to validate the difficulties that accompany parenthood, particularly motherhood, because for far too long I glossed over them as if they weren’t real (a topic for another post). My “cry” today was one of deep humility stemmed from my own insufficiencies, “please help,” spoken aloud and with a hope that someone might be listening.  That “cry” often seems to be the beginning of something useful in my life. [Read more…]

Mormon mission life has its own unique culture and a part of that culture is the “transfer.” Transfers happen for a variety of reasons, redistribution of man-woman power, training procedures, covering for departing missionaries, social issues between missionaries and/or members, etc. Transfers are sometimes fraught for various reasons but usually they don’t mean anything in particular beyond the mundane. But sometimes, they are unusual.
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I gave this talk today in my ward in the D.C. Metro area.

When I joined the church in 2002, I came into this faith backwards. I was raised in a gently agnostic home by good parents in a melting pot of the west—San Francisco. Yes, you can be agnostic and value home life, children, your community, and country. My parents did a fine job raising conscientious, moral children—while they may not have believed, they tried to allow room in the margins of our lives for their children to discover their own beliefs.

When I approached the missionaries I was already a wife and mother, and had been church shopping for quite some time. I had visited dozens of churches of different denominations, some Christian, others not. When I found the missionaries and asked to be baptized (yes, I am that person) as a Mormon, I wasn’t even sure I believed in Jesus, but I had received a searingly powerful witness that God was real—that was it. That was all I had. That witness was my mustard seed, holding the tiny bits of faith I had collected over my lifetime. [Read more…]

On the last Sunday in April, one of the counselors in the bishopric asked to meet with both Brother J and me. Whatever could this be about, we wondered—for about three seconds before my husband figured out that it must be about the upcoming Fourth of July Breakfast.

“No,” I said. “NO.”

“But this could be our chance to restore it to its former glory,” my husband said.

“NO.”

As long as we’ve lived here—which I guess is thirteen years now—our ward has provided breakfast for the neighborhood’s annual Fourth of July celebration, which also includes a parade and a modest carnival with bouncy houses, snow cones, a dunking booth, a clown, etc. In the beginning, the ward provided a full breakfast, complete with pancakes, bacon, and eggs in addition to fruit and beverages. As attendance grew (much) higher, we had to jettison the bacon and eggs and just serve pancakes, fruit, and beverages. Then the parks and rec district stopped providing us with tables, so we replaced the pancakes with muffins, bagels, and donuts, making it a “grab-and-go” breakfast. Obviously, the baked goods were much more expensive than pancakes, but what else could they do without tables? But every year I think to myself, “Why the hell am I getting up this early for half a muffin and a Dixie cup of fruit?” Well, why the hell does anyone? But everyone does. Last year, I think, we served this paltry breakfast to 1,200 people. Or maybe it was 1,300. I don’t really remember, just that the number was astonishing. Because seriously, why the hell? [Read more…]