This past weekend I was traveling to another state for my younger brother’s wedding. We had about a 6-hour drive to and from our destination, so during part of the drive we were catching up on some back episodes of one of our favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible. One of those episodes was this one, titled Invisible Women. It was an interview with Caroline Criado Perez, the author of a book also titled Invisible Women, about the problem she calls the Default Male. [Read more…]

Reading: Romans 1-6.

This week has us finishing Acts and going into the epistles. This means we’re no longer going chronologically. Instead, we’re going more or less by author and more or less by topic (though each epistle jumps around a bit). It also means that we’re not really reading a story anymore, we’re reading artifacts. For the most part, we’re no longer concerned with the story, but with the teachings contained in the letters of the apostles. We’re moving from events to doctrines, and Romans is arguably the most doctrinal of all the books of the New Testament. [Read more…]

Readings: Acts 1-5

This week we have finished the gospels and are moving into Acts. The transition here is from the story of Jesus to the story of the church and the apostles. Sometimes we talk of Jesus having organized his church during his ministry, but that’s not really accurate, at least not according to the gospels. He makes a reference to having “ordained” his apostles, but he doesn’t do (m)any of the other things we associate with ecclesiology in the modern church.

He doesn’t organize wards or stakes. Unless you count the last supper as an instance of the sacrament, he doesn’t really perform ordinances (other than maybe the equivocal reference to having ordained the apostles, and, maybe when he “breathes on” them and tells them “receive ye the holy ghost”). And if you do count the last supper, he doesn’t do it until the very end of his ministry. He doesn’t seem to organize regular weekly meetings with hymns and preaching. He doesn’t seem to create any kind of organization at all. His mortal ministry is almost entirely as an itinerant preacher of repentance and a sometimes cryptic prophet. The work of organizing the movement of people he left behind when he ascended to heaven was something he left to the apostles. And it’s not something they did all at once, it’s something that developed over time, partly from revelations, partly from policy decisions, or even just chance, and partly from traditions that developed. The beginning of that development is the story that Acts tells.

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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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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…]

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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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…]

I posted this two years ago on Holy Thursday. I’ve tweaked it and made some revisions. [Read more…]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t have a traditional Christian liturgical calendar, and the Come Follow Me New Testament manual is not a traditional lectionary. But Come Follow Me is also not entirely like a traditional Latter-day Saint Sunday School manual, and the ways that it departs from that form nudge it closer to functioning almost like a lectionary in some interesting ways. [Read more…]

It’s a fun calendrical coincidence this year that the first general session of General Conference falls on today, April 6. This is a big date for the church. It’s the date we recognize as the date that the church started as a church. (See this guest post yesterday for a discussion of what that actually means). But there’s a tradition in the church that says Jesus was born on April 6, 1 BC, exactly 1830 years to the day before the church was organized on April 6, 1830. This tradition is almost certainly wrong. [Read more…]

Readings: Matthew 16-17, Mark 8-9, Luke 9*

There is so much we could say about these readings, but this post will focus on the episode of Peter’s testimony of Jesus. The manual places the most emphasis on this part of these readings, and it uses Peter’s testimony as support for the idea that prophets and apostles are revelators and have revealed knowledge that’s worth listening to. This is a timely message, with general conference coming up, and the manual specifically asks us to ponder the testimonies we will hear from the apostles at conference this weekend along with Peter’s testimony.

That message is fine as far as it goes. But I think we sometimes misread Peter’s interaction with Jesus in Matthew 16:13-20, Mark 8:27-30, and Luke 9:19-21 if we overemphasize Peter’s role as an institutional revelator as the salient thing from this passage. [Read more…]

“Atan lantanë tana atani ëuvar; ar atani ëar tana haryar olassë.”

– 2 Nephi 2:27, author’s translation in Quenya

A calligraphic tengwar version of The Ataramma, the Lord’s Prayer in Quenya, by Danny Andries. Tengwar is one writing system that Tolkien invented for his invented languages. Source: http://www.ambar-eldaron.com/gwaith/andries.htm#aeadarnin.

Warning: this post is weird. It descends into depths of Tolkien nerdery previously unheard-of at BCC. Ye be warned.

Today is Tolkien Reading Day. Every March 25th the Tolkien Society chooses a theme and encourages readers to read their favorite passages from the professor’s work that relate to that theme, and read them on this day. This year’s theme is Tolkien and the Mysterious. That’s a topic with a lot of material, but one of the elements that contributes most to the sense of mystery—the sense that there is more to the story behind the story, is the presence of invented languages in Tolkien’s stories. Not just nonsense words with a “translation” in English, but full languages with internal rules of grammar, etymologies, and alphabets. This post will be an exploration of the idea of invented languages as it relates to the idea of the gift of tongues. [Read more…]

By now everybody has heard of the college fraud, bribery and cheating scandal. In case you haven’t: a bunch of rich folks paid a sketchy dude to find ways to cheat on college entrance exams and college applications, including lying and flat-out bribery to get their kids into high-ranked colleges that they would not have been able to get into on their academic or athletic merit.

We could say a lot about it, but one thing that really jumped out at me was a pair of statements made by Gordon Caplan, one of the parents caught cheating, and what they tell us about the nature of morality and rules. [Read more…]

The church announced today that effective immediately, missionaries can text, call, instant message, and video chat with their families at home on their preparation day, repealing the old rule that missionaries were only allowed to call home twice a year (Christmas and Mother’s Day), and were otherwise only allowed to email (and before sometime in the early 2000s, only write letters).

I imagine that this change is motivated at least in part by a concern for the emotional and mental health of missionaries. As long-distance communication has become cheaper and more ubiquitous, the world has become more and more interconnected. This is a double-edged sword: it makes long-distance and online friendships easier, but a side effect of that is that many people find it easier to primarily make friends with people online which means that IRL connection and friendship get harder. It can also be even more isolating when you grow up using online communication to make and maintain friendships, and then the ability to have online and log-distance connection is suddenly taken away. I’m no expert, but I suspect that this has a lot to do with the fact that many missionaries today find the mission experience, as rewarding and fulfilling as it is, to be seriously challenging to their emotional and mental health. And at some point, we have to ask ourselves whether that challenge is a necessary or worthwhile one. The church has now decided that it’s not. I think this is a very good thing. [Read more…]

Readings: John 2-4

We’re back in John for this week’s reading. And John moves really fast through Jesus’ life and early ministry. It’s almost like an anthology of snippets of Jesus’s greatest hits. And Jesus is travelling all over the place. In these chapters we get these episodes:

• Jesus in Galilee: Jesus turns water into wine at the marriage in Cana, his first miracle, according to John (John 2:1-11).
• Jesus back in Jerusalem: Jesus turns the money-changers out of the temple (John 2:12-17).
• Jesus prophesies of his death and resurrection: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:18-22)
• Jesus meets with Nicodemus: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:1-21).
• John in the desert: John the baptizer testifies of Jesus (John 3:22-36).
• Jesus in Samaria, on his way back to Galilee: Jesus speaks with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well and makes a lot of converts in Samaria (John 4:1-42).
• Jesus back in Cana: Jesus remotely heals a nobleman’s son (his second miracle) (John 4:46-54).

John is so compact and dense, and Jesus and John both speak in such mystical, prophetic language in John, that you could have many weeks of discussion about these chapters. In this post, I’m going to look at just a couple of these episodes. [Read more…]

Readings: Matthew 4, Luke 4-5.

In the chapters that immediately precede these chapters, Matthew and Luke have just shown us the moment where Jesus is baptized and as he comes up out of the water, the voice of the Father, speaking from heaven, declares that Jesus is his son (Matthew 3:17; Luke 3:22). This is an important reminder because the chapters for this lesson recount Satan’s immediate challenge to the Father’s declaration, Jesus rejecting that challenge, and then Jesus showing the signs that prove his messiahship–his status of having been anointed by the Spirit–to the people of Galilee. [Read more…]

Yesterday, this pair of tweets by a current BYU student sparked some interesting discussion about the role of grading in religious educations:

i think the moment i began hating religion classes at byu was when i turned in an assignment in my BOM class about being more christlike and the TA marked me down for my “surface level testimony”

— shave ice queen (@hayzul_nut) January 9, 2019

ihad gotten baptized one year before. iwas heartbroken.

— shave ice queen (@hayzul_nut) January 9, 2019

Though it was about a decade ago, I remember similar things as a BYU student myself. [Read more…]

This post might be a little oddly timed because we’re not doing the Book of Mormon Sunday School curriculum this year. But it’s a passage that we frequently refer to in talks and lessons, in my experience, and it’s on my mind lately because I’ve heard people invoke the old iron rod / liahona dichotomy. I confess I don’t like that distinction, because I think it distorts the meaning of the iron rod to place it in contrast with the liahona. This post, written as a sort of dialogue with myself, explains why.

I. The Iron Rod in Nephi’s Vision

Thesis: The iron rod from Nephi’s vision of his father’s vision of the tree of life does not represent the scriptures. [Read more…]

This is a post about what President Nelson’s counsel to use the church’s full name challenges us as church members to do.

However you feel about his declaration that using “Mormon” was a victory for Satan and an offense to God, there are lots of other places where that conversation has happened and is still happening. I don’t want to replicate that here. I want to focus on the core of his message: that the church’s formal name is important because it is connected to taking upon ourselves the name of Christ. President Nelson’s counsel to speak Jesus’s name more often may be both dangerous and rewarding, because God’s name is not to be taken lightly, and doing it will require us to either receive the spirit through repentance and faith in Christ and his grace, or condemn ourselves by using his name in vain. [Read more…]

The change about two-hour church that has attracted the most attention is the elimination of the “third hour” and the alternating classes for the “second hour.” Kevin’s post yesterday discusses some of the logistics of these changes. But as I’ve read through the October 6, 2018 first presidency letter and enclosure, one part that has caught my attention is the potential to use this change to radically re-work sacrament meetings. [Read more…]

You may have heard that President Nelson asked the youth of the church back in June to take a seven day “fast” from social media, and that he repeated the same counsel (but for ten days) was to the women of the church during conference. I’ve taken breaks from social media in the past, but I always thought of it more as a “Sabbath” rather than a “fast”: a time to disconnect from worldly influences, to re-connect with the real world of creation and with the Spirit of God, and to reset and renew ourselves.

This post is an attempt to think about some of the implications of casting this social media break as a “fast.” Fasting has important implications, both inward looking and outward looking. [Read more…]

My wife and I just took our kids on a fairly ambitious road trip: Leaving our home in upstate New York, we traveled along interstate 90 and then 80 across the Midwest and the high plains, through the Great Basin, over the Sierra Nevada and down to the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco. We spent several days in the Bay Area, then climbed the Sierra again and we spent a day and a night in Sequoia National Park. We then crossed the Mojave Desert and went west and north on interstate 15 through Nevada and nearly the whole length of Utah and then spent several days in the Logan area. After that, we traveled east through the Bear River mountains and through Wyoming on two-lane roads that approximate the old pioneer trails, joining back up with interstate 80 in Cheyenne, and making our way back home on interstate 80 and then 90 again. [Read more…]

Luca Giordano – Dream of Solomon

This week’s lesson overviews the life of David’s successor and son, Solomon. The overall theme of his life, as it is presented in the biblical text is, much like the story of David’s rape of Bathsheba, a theme of the King’s glory, favor with God, and ultimately, fall from grace. [Read more…]

This lesson has two parts: (1) The story of David’s rape of /adultery with Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah to cover it up, and his discovery by the prophet Nathan, and (2) Psalm 51, which tradition says is David’s repentant response to the episode. [Read more…]

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Illustration from Edward Eggleston’s The Circuit Rider: A Tale of the Heroic Age

I was recently given an assignment to speak in sacrament meeting. That’s a normal part of my calling. But the topic was unusual: The assignment was to speak on “the history and doctrine of conferences in the church.” I’m not a historian, but I love reading history, so I was excited to speak on a historical topic. It gave me a good excuse to learn about a part of church history that I hadn’t studied before. This post is adapted from that talk.

In 1829 and early 1830, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were working on organizing the church. They had finished translating the Book of Mormon in June 1829 and the prophet had received a revelation directed to Oliver Cowdery that instructed him to “build up my church” and to “rely upon the things that are written,” (that is, the Book of Mormon) to do so.

Oliver took the revelation seriously and in the summer of 1829 he prepared a sort of constitution for the church called the Articles of the Church of Christ. Joseph Smith used his prophetic gift to add to Oliver’s work, and the resulting document, the Articles and Covenants of the Church, is the source of our modern section 20 in the Doctrine and Covenants. As the June 1829 revelation had directed, Oliver relied heavily on the Book of Mormon: the Articles and Covenants follows the Book of Mormon to establish the church offices of Elder, Priest, and Teacher, as mentioned in the Book of Mormon, as well as the sacrament prayers, which are taken word-for-word from the Book of Mormon.

But, from Joseph Smith’s additions, the Articles and Covenants also establishes certain church practices that are not found in the Book of Mormon. One of these is the practice of holding conferences. [Read more…]

Rembrandt’s visualization of Balaam, his ass, and the angel- Mbzt, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23551459

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The Old Testament’s hottest book is Numbers. This week’s reading has it all: burnings, plagues, miraculous leprosy, poisonous flying hell-snakes, and a meat sneeze. What’s a meat sneeze? It’s that thing where you complain about eating manna, so God makes you eat meat for a month until it comes out of your nostrils. [Read more…]

Here’s a poem I wrote for Easter a few years ago and that I’ve tinkered with recently.

Crocuses in my backyard. Taken Tuesday of Holy Week, 2018.

I woke in the dark.
I climbed a nearby hill where I could spy the eastern horizon
through a break in the wet trees.
And I watched.

The walls of the world veiled the living sun,
and a wet, grey curtain was drawn across the sky.
But the life that was in the sun shone out
from beyond the walls of the world,
And the grey cloud-curtain glowed at its hem, the color of burnished copper.
And it turned here and there
from the color of wet stones,
to the color of herons’ wings,
and to the colors of the pale crocuses that pierce snow and brown turf
and the wreckage of last season’s leaves,
and to the color of saffron,
and the color of robins’ breasts,
and the color of blood.

And then it flamed.

And a pinprick of consuming light
pierced the circles of the world,
and grew.

And the light washed over the world,
and the sun rose, or maybe the world went down,
until the world was immersed in the light of life—
the earth, the turf, the trees,
the lichens and fungi,
worms and insects,
the robins, and blue-jays, the woodpeckers,
the mice, squirrels, deer, and all beasts,
and women and men, with all their cunning craft,
to walk (and creep, and fly, and run, and leap, and dance, and sing, and love, and build, and make) in newness of life
upon the old earth renewed.

But then the golden hour ended,
and the living light that had bathed the world drained off
and soaked into the soil,
and was gone.
And I walked back home to breakfast.

But the sun shone still,
with a cold light, a quick light,
a light to reach into dark corners and uncover secrets,
and drive out hidden things from dark places in deep woods
where snow lingers long.

Doors from the Church of St. Peter Gallicantu, the site where tradition says Caiphas’ house stood. Source: By Anton 17 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28493336

Late last night, after all my family was asleep and I was restless and sleepless, I reread the passages from the gospels about when Jesus is taken. And I noticed something I had never noticed before: When Peter denies Jesus, he is denying women.

In that dark, liminal night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Peter is put totally out of his reckoning. It begins in the upper room when Jesus tells Peter he will deny him. “Not so,” he says, “I’ll die first.” But then when Jesus asks him and the others to stay awake and just be present with him while he prays, Peter denies him that. Sleep overcomes Peter, and Jesus wakes him asking “what, could you not even stay awake with me one hour?” That must have stung. Maybe it was a desire to prove Jesus wrong, to keep the oath he made back in the upper room that he would die before denying Jesus, or a desire to justify himself or redeem himself after falling asleep that motivated Peter to take up his sword not long after that. But then Jesus rebukes him again. First he’s been rebuked for not being zealous enough to accompany Jesus in his agony, and now he’s been rebuked for being too zealous in his defense of Jesus. And on top of that, he sees his Lord and Messiah bound and taken as a captive. He is out of his reckoning. He has no idea what he should do.

So he follows Jesus at a distance and sneaks in to Caiaphas’ court. Unable to save him, but unable to leave him either, he goes along—not to do anything but just “to see the end,” as Matthew put it (Matthew 26:58).  [Read more…]