By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

M. David Huston lives and works in the Washington DC metro area. He is a husband and father of four who has previously written for poetry, international affairs, and LDS-related publications.

Christianity, at its core, comes down to one word, love.  The radical egalitarianism implicit in Jesus’s use of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 to explain his gospel message is what draws me in:

“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 neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-39). 

Indeed, as Jeffrey R. Holland recently explained, the “first great truth in the universe” is that “God loves… wholeheartedly, without reservation or compromise, with all of His heart, might, mind, and strength” (emphasis original).  Love crosses all boundaries and traverses all borders.  Love is the beginning and the end. 

[The publication Current asked me to write up my thoughts about abortion; I ended up writing nearly 3000 words. A much, much shortened version of the essay below is available on their website this morning, but if you want to read the full thing, go for it. Cross-posted to In Medias Res.]

That sign is in our front yard, signalling our support for defeating the “Value Them Both” amendment on the ballot here in Kansas this August. If the amendment referendum succeeds, it would overturn a state supreme court decision which determined that the Kansas state constitution guarantees at least minimal abortion rights to Kansas women, thus allowing Kansans opposed to abortion rights to follow our neighboring states of Oklahoma and Missouri and push for a total abortion ban. The sign thus betokens a “pro-choice” position, even though I’ve never called myself that and think the language of individual “choice” when it comes to abortion is part of the whole problem. So why am I, some who was raised in a politically conservative (but not, as I later came to see, particularly ideological) Mormon home and thoroughly absorbed the repugnance of abortion which was communicated to me, taking this position all these years later? Well, that’s a story, mostly having to do with what my wife and four daughters have taught me along the way. [Read more…]

Self-Reliance is not a gospel principle. It is found nowhere in the scriptures. The closest we come to it are various verses requesting that one not be idle. But we appear to have made an idol out of the “self-made” man that is antithetical to the gospel and really needs to stop.

[Read more…]

Texts are tricky things, whether they are scriptural, historical, literary, or constitutional. People who claim to be “textualists,” or even (in constitutional circles) “originalists” often hide behind the rhetorical value of being such a thing without acknowledging the actual difficulty of doing it. Texts are not self-interpreting units of meaning that will yield their secrets with no effort, but only to the pure in heart. 

Textual interpretation is a process of asking certain, well-defined questions and then trying to answer them from the words on a page. It has always been more art than science, and the value of the answers ultimately depends on the quality of the questions. The process of asking questions of a text is sometimes called “framing.” The way we frame a textual question controls the kind of answer we get, because it determines the kinds of things we look for. 

Apple TV’s series Severance is brilliant. Its topology in multiple dimensions is novel, strange, and thought-provoking. I want to talk about it because it problematizes Mormon theology in interesting ways. It is bursting at the seams with possible discussion topics, lesson plans, and late-night talks with family members among members of the Church. If you haven’t seen the show, there is really no point in reading on because this post is full of spoilers that will ruin the surprise in the unexpected directions the show takes. The series is just too beautiful to let my blog post ruin it with untimely reveals. So, back away if you haven’t watched it. Some future version of yourself will thank you.

I’ve experienced depression and generalized anxiety for as long as I can remember. It comes and goes and sometimes I’m not really aware I’m experiencing it until the clouds start to lift and I suddenly realize the sun feels good on my skin again, surprised at the revelation that I hadn’t been feeling it for a while.

When I started elementary school I was also diagnosed with ADD (now more commonly called ADHD, although the diagnostic labels overall could use some improvement). With all good intentions my parents decided to hold off on getting me medication for those conditions. Until my thirteenth year or thereabouts when I started junior high school and the increased organizational load became unbearable.

My mom tells a story that I can’t recall happening. I’m arriving home from school. I’m frazzled. I’m being asked about homework—again, and I take a multi-subject folder out of my backpack. I accidentally drop it on the floor. A flock of papers from 7 classes (was it 7?) burst forth and scatter to the four winds. I break down in tears.

That was the moment she decided it was time for me to know about my diagnosis and to see if medication could help.

And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? (Matthew 14:29-31)

There are two ways to look at Peter’s nautical adventures in the fourteenth chapter of Matthew.

We can look at the failure. Peter is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk on water, and he blows it. Christ stretches out His hand and assures Peter that it is going to be OK, and, after a few hesitant steps, Peter stops believing and starts thinking. He trusts his own reason and concludes that walking on water is impossible, so he begins to doubt Christ’s ability to sustain him. When he loses his faith, he sinks, fully earning the rebuke, “O thou of little faith” (33).

But we can read the same scene as a triumph and a miracle. While all of the other apostles huddle in the safety of the boat (a dubious safety because of the storm they are experiencing), Peter asks Christ to call him forth. And then Peter actually walks on water, becoming only the second person in the history of humanity to overcome the straightforward laws of physics.

There is an ironic, even impish innocence to earth, an endless provocation to the human impulse towards wonder that provides no recourse for satisfying that impulse. Humans, then, live at odds with nature, forever, seeking to graft meaning, purpose onto a branch that cannot support the weight of our need. To live is to want to understand, but to seek understanding is to look past the wordless bounties of living.

—Matthew Wickman, Life to the Whole Being, p. 101

To the extent that we can believe Aristotle about such things, the Ancient Greeks had a single word to represent the entire purpose of philosophy and all other human endeavors. This word, eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), describes the highest good of human life. The word literally means good (eû ) spirit or minor deity (daímōn). In English texts, this word has been translated as “happiness,” “virtue,” “welfare,” “thriving,” and, my personal favorite, “human flourishing.”

For Aristotle, a eudemonic life is one that has all of the elements of flourishing—intellectual fulfillment, physical health, satisfying relationships, material prosperity, and spiritual understanding—in exactly the right proportions needed for a person to thrive. Though Matthew Wickman does not use the word in his remarkable new memoir Life to the Whole Being—a phrase that Parley P. Pratt used to explain the gift of the Holy Ghost—a key objective of the book is to describe a spiritual ideal of eudaimonia. In fact, “life to the whole being” would be a reasonably good translation of eudemonia, should the author ever want to take up his hand at translating, or even paraphrasing, the Nicomachean Ethics.

Robert George is in a difficult spot. As co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, opposing same-sex relationships has been a major focus of his public intellectual work even while the tide has been shifting in the United States—polls show more and more people approve of gay marriage. A record high 70% support it today according to the latest Gallup poll. Even Latter-day Saints follow this trajectory, with support doubling in the past decade.

I’m not optimistic enough to think the battle is over. America’s political makeup ensures that for the foreseeable future an increasing minority will have outsized influence on all kinds of things, from abortion rights to the contents of elementary school libraries. George seeks allies among conservative religious groups to keep his hope alive, that the state can be used to discourage and even prevent queer relationships from flourishing. George seeks allies to further his cause, including among Latter-day Saints. One recent think piece of his can be found at the unofficial LDS publication Public Square.

We live at a time when conspiracy theory is spreading. This is my fourth post on its particularly Mormon manifestations. See the first here, the most recent here, and part I of this post here.

Current news is this: According to David Leavitt, Utah County attorney, Utah County sheriff Mike Smith has accused Leavitt of participation in what Smith calls “ritualistic child sexual abuse,” involving cannibalism and child sex trafficking.

BCC Press is proud to announce the publication of The Burning Book: A Jewish-Mormon Memoir, by Jason Olson and James Goldberg—the true story of Jason Olson’s conversion from Judaism to Mormonism and his life spent reconciling the two cultures and religions into something beautiful, coherent, and whole. Along with the amazing James Goldberg, one of the Mormon world’s premier novelists and poets, Olson weaves a remarkable story of faith and change that makes room for everybody.

I don’t have any more words. I used them all up.

I used to believe that my country was capable of solving problems big problems by having big discussions. As I read over posts that I have written over the last ten years, I can’t help but pity the naivete of someone who once thought that reasoned discourse mattered. Here are the last ten things that I tried to say:

It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

Somehow, I managed to make it through both an awkward teenage phase and a college wanna-be-intellectual phase without reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. I read all the other required books: The Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land, Slaughterhouse-Five, Siddhartha. And I owned Dune–all three of the original trilogy. I displayed them proudly, and never got past a few pages. I knew it was about sand.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.
                                                —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

I have been impressed recently by how much of our culture’s touchstone literature operates from a messianic view of history. And I am not talking about explicitly religious texts like the Bible and the Qur’an. Nearly all of the great mythic sagas of our time—think about Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dune, Percy Jackson, and hundreds more—reproduce a basic trope of messianic salvation borrowed from the Abrahamic religions. 

Kent P. Jackson, Understanding Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2022)

Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: The Joseph Smith Translation and the King James Translation in Parallel Columns (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2021)