By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I plead with our people everywhere to live with respect and appreciation for those not of our faith. There is so great a need for civility and mutual respect among those of differing beliefs and philosophies. We must not be partisans of any doctrine of ethnic superiority. We live in a world of diversity. We can and must be respectful toward those with whose teachings we may not agree. We must be willing to defend the rights of others who may become the victims of bigotry.
—President Gordon B. Hinckley

Tomorrow is the day that I have been waiting for since being called to teach the High Priests group in my ward earlier this year: Lesson 20: Fellowship with Those Who Are Not of Our Faith. It is something that I have been thinking about for a long time.

I started thinking about it 20 years ago, when I was in the bishopric of my student ward at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There had been a stabbing in the student enclave of Isla Vista, where our Church/Institute building was located, and a number of religious groups got together to demonstrate for better lighting. I went to the organizing meeting with a half a dozen other religious leaders, one of whom said, in the meeting, “I am so glad you are here. The Mormons usually keep to themselves.” [Read more…]

Yesterday, the good folks at the LDS Church History Library announced that the Church Historian’s Press would be publishing the William Clayton diaries. Mormon History Nerds united in celebratory meme-making. I imagine that most Mormons when faced with this news would likely shrug. The news of new Missionary interview questions and smartphone proselytizing has way more traction. I dusted off the appendix I included in my review of Joseph Smith Papers, Journals, Volume 2 (and yes having a review appendix is absurd, but I still think it was a solid review), and have updated it with info from the intervening half decade.
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Laura Harris Hales is the executive producer of LDS Perspectives Podcast. After raising five brilliant children, she took her brain out of cold storage and has since worked as a paralegal, adjunct English professor, academic editor, and freelance copy editor. She is also the co-author and editor of books published by Greg Kofford and RSC/Deseret Book respectively.

The noted Swedish theologian and Harvard Divinity School professor Krister Stendahl is famous for urging followers of all faiths to leave room in their hearts for “holy envy.” He meant it as a departure for understanding other religions, but I have always taken it as a fitting label for the unfulfilled yearnings of my religious soul. [Read more…]

The past several months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brock Turner. (If you need a refresher on who he is, look here.) My interest in his case has to do with suffering: who gets to claim the space of the cross? When Turner’s father wrote that he no longer enjoyed ribeye steaks the way he once had, the internet erupted in scorn: surely his suffering is nothing compared to that of the woman (I’ll call her Emily Doe) he sexually assaulted while she was unconscious behind a frat house dumpster. “Poor baby,” went the ridicule: Turner’s suffering was weighed against the cross and found wanting. [fn1]

Emily Doe, meanwhile, was the heroine of the feminist internet for the statement she read at Turner’s sentencing, in which she thoroughly and eloquently castigated him for failing to perceive her as a human being and treat her accordingly. She made her own suffering publicly visible in a way that the trial could not, and she did so in a potent attempt to reclaim her dignity from the abjection of that night. She was claiming the space of the cross for herself, as a way of validating her own experience, but also of calling the person who crucified her to account. [Read more…]

I’m finding it hard to piece together the words and emotions I wish to convey on this topic. Mostly, because it’s difficult for me to explain but also because it is painful.

The way women are viewed in the church is something I think about continuously. I am aware of my womanhood and the effect that has on my existence. Unfortunately, a lot of the effects I feel are due to others’ perceptions of womanhood. Since the LDS church plays a large role in my life, the way I feel viewed by the church community is often at the forefront of these thoughts.

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We’re really excited to announce that Amber Haslam is joining us as a permablogger. Amber has been our guest previously and we’re fans of how she is able to get right to the heart of complicated topics in a sensitive, profound way. Read her bio here. Everyone, say hi to Amber!

The last speaker in yesterday’s F&T meeting talked about the concept of free agency. First, he explained that that terminology was very flawed, because agency isn’t free, but was bought at great cost by our savior’s atoning sacrifice. Second, he told how his seminary teacher insisted that free agency only existed to make righteous choices, not wicked ones. He had great trouble understanding that, but finally concluded she must be right. [Read more…]

For reasons that are at once tantalizing and elusive, these few verses in an ancient book have served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. It has been both liberating and destructive, a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness, a celebration of daring and an incitement to violent misogyny. The range of responses it has aroused over thousands of years in innumerable individuals and communities is astonishing.
—Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (pp. 5-6).

 

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Stephen Greenblatt on literary culture. As the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, he shapes the textbooks used in about 90% of undergraduate British Literature survey and period courses. If literature is “what gets taught,” then Greenblatt is the guy who decides what literature is for the English-speaking world.

Fortunately for all of us, Greenblatt has excellent taste—and a whole lot of knowledge about the contexts in which literature is produced. His recent books for general audiences are the best examples that I know of literary criticism for real people. Will in the World, his context-heavy biography of William Shakespeare, was a surprise bestseller in 2004. And The Swerve, How the World Became Modern (2011)—a literary detective story about how Lucretius’s lost poem “On the Nature of Things” was discovered in the 15^th century—won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. [Read more…]

The Fifth Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology
“Are We Not All Beggars? Reading Mosiah 4”
Cittadella Ospitalità, Assisi, Italy
June 17–June 30, 2018

Sponsored by the Mormon Theology Seminar
in partnership with
The Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies,
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship,
and the Wheatley Institution

In the summer of 2018, the Mormon Theology Seminar, in partnership with the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University, and the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University, will sponsor a summer seminar for graduate students and faculty devoted to reading Mosiah 4.

The seminar will be hosted by the Cittadella Ospitalità in Assisi, Italy, from June 17 through June 30, 2018. Travel arrangements, housing, and a $1000 stipend will be provided for admitted participants. The seminar will be led by Adam Miller and Joseph Spencer, directors of the Mormon Theology Seminar. [Read more…]

A series of quick reviews from the layman’s perspective to tell you whether you should get a book or not. If you don’t want to read what I say about each book: I have to say, this time, each of these books are worth reading and owning, though some are more specialized in subject matter. I review some outstanding offerings by George Handley, Tom Christofferson, Max Perry Mueller, the Joseph Smith Papers, Craig Harline, and Turley/Johnson/Carruth. [Read more…]

Mette Ivie Harrison is a regular guest here at BCC and author of many books, including The Book of Laman.

I’ve struggled a lot lately with what it means to sustain a prophet within Mormonism, and if that is possible when I disagree strongly with policies which are given the status of “revelation” within Mormonism, including, for instance, The Proclamation on the Family, or the new policy demanding excommunication of same-sex married couples who are Mormon and the exclusion of their children from saving ordinances including baptism. [Read more…]

My wife and I recently purchased long-term care insurance. I told my insurance guy that if he had suggested it to me even three years ago, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But in very recent years we’ve had to deal with the effects of old age on our parents. My father-in-law had to move into a nursing home and eventually died. (The insurance we bought is pricey, but the annual cost is about equal to the one-month cost of keeping my FIL in a nursing home, so it’s all a matter of perspective.) That left my mother-in-law living alone in a big house on an almost two-acre lot outside of town by herself, and my wife worried herself sick over her being alone like that, so we sold the house and moved her into an assisted living facility (for now it’s basically an apartment with meals provided, but services can be added as needed). My own father died many years ago, but my mother recently had a health issue arise such that she could no longer live alone–she now lives with my oldest sister. [Read more…]

“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”–G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown

I hold two literary opinions that I rarely discuss with friends, because they are the sorts of opinions that make one unpopular. The first is that CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series is better than JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The second is that GK Chesterton’s Father Brown is a better detective than Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In both cases, my reasoning is the same: there are far more serious and profound ideas at stake in Lewis and Chesterton’s work than there are in Tolkien’s and Doyle’s. The latter works are entertaining. The former are important. [Read more…]

When Alma baptizes at the waters of Mormon in Mosiah 18, he preaches to these covenant-makers exactly what they will be promising to each other as a community. In his instructions, Alma says that in order to “come into the fold of God” and “be called his people,” they must also be “willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light, “to mourn with those that mourn,” and to “comfort those that stand in need of comfort.” We love to share these scriptures in Sunday School, particularly when we are aware of fellow ward members suffering from a death in the family, from sickness or unemployment, or if we have a family that needs help moving into or out of a home. One of the things I most love and value about my LDS church family is how we are there for one another.

I have noticed, though, that it is harder for us to be there for the LGBTQ members of our congregations, who are many of them hurting and not understanding what their life inside in the Church should look like. [Read more…]

When Charles W. Nibley[1] was eleven he came to Utah and settled with his family in the Cache Valley. From the start, Nibley had a knack for business and became successful in retail, lumber, and land. When he was a teenager, Nibley met Ira Ames, an early 1830s convert to Mormonism and he loved to listen to Ames tell stories about the early days of Mormonism. Late in life, Nibley related a incident where Ames told the story of being out on the streets of Kirtland, Ohio one night when he saw Sidney Rigdon walking by. Rigdon stopped and spoke to Ames and told him he had just come from witnessing a long and glorious vision (D&C 76). He told Ames of the beautiful vision. Nibley carried this experience to his grave as one of the more memorable scenes of his youth. There was a problem though. Ames was not in Ohio in February 1832 when the vision occurred, he wasn’t even a Mormon—and Rigdon was living in Hiram, Ohio when he experienced the shattering vision. Nibley felt humbled and strengthened by a fiction.
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(1)   The Book of Mormon is neither history nor literature; it is scripture. It makes historical claims and uses literary devices. The academic study of both history and literature can aid in its interpretation, but employing such tools comes with a price. The price is treating the text like something that it isn’t, which often leads to bad readings of the text itself.

(2) The Book of Mormon is unlike any ancient history that we know anything about. It is also unlike any 19^th century work of fiction that we know anything about. It is a lot like other scriptures that we know about, but the textual record that we have access to does not permit the same kind of analyses that are possible with other scriptures. For the purposes of textual interpretation, comparing the Book of Mormon to anything else is full of peril. It is in a genre of one. [Read more…]

So it has been our family tradition, since our oldest child was a toddler, to go to Saturday morning session at the church building and go out for hamburgers afterward. Even after internet streaming at home became the norm and we didn’t even go to church for Sunday session, we still went to church and out for hamburgers on Saturday because THIS IS OUR TRADITION. For the last couple years, it’s pretty much been just us and the missionaries. And our friend who’s the stake A/V guy says they’re going to stop showing it at the building after this conference. Which makes sense, frankly, but it’s kind of a shame because a) without making the kids sit through two hours of boring talks at the church, I feel like we won’t have earned any hamburgers, and b) even though we play all the other sessions at home, the session I’m forced to sit through at the church is basically the only one I pay attention to (because there’s nothing else to do). Which I guess isn’t really a shame, except it’s hard to watch traditions die.