When I was revising a manuscript a few months ago I realized that, in an academic mode, I used “Yahweh” to refer to the God interacting with particular Old Testament prophets, as well as the God interacting with the early Mormons. I realized at the time that I had started using Yahweh in place of “Jehovah” or “THE LORD” in less formal settings as well. Other than being pedantic, I think I decided that I should stop using Yahweh except in my written scholarship. [Read more…]

My first memories of the bishop’s storehouse are from the 1980s. My family was chronically on the verge of financial ruin, a sort of meta-stable poverty shored up by surplus from neighbor’s gardens, government welfare, fast offerings, Relief Society-coordinated sub-for-Santa projects, and my mother’s less-than-subsistence wage as a special education teacher. My mother and the bishop would confer about what we needed, then create a shopping list in triplicate (carbon copies were still important back then), which we carried proudly to a nondescript building in northern Kaysville, Utah. [Read more…]

It’s in San Francisco the second half of November, and it looks to be exciting. There are a couple of sessions sponsored by the Mormon Studies Consultation that should be good (disclaimer: I’m in one of them), but I confess I don’t know the lay of the land otherwise. Who all is going? What are the sessions that must not be missed? Or that must not be named?

As I navigate the intermittent brutalities of mortal existence, I occasionally have cause to remember two experiences that tend to orient my outlook toward Christ. Neither is happy in the sense that saccharine is sweet (cloying then nauseous in rapid succession), but both are holy to me. [Read more…]

A thoughtful young person approached me at church the other day, curious about the Journal of Discourses, and through them the rest of nineteenth-century Mormonism. I had recently shared with him an historical essay I wrote on Smithian Mormonism, and he was curious to read more. He asked for advice about how to orient himself to the world of nineteenth-century Mormonism, and I realized that it’s been two decades since I immersed myself in the literature surrounding the world of early Mormonism and that I have probably lost the capacity to understand that first transition into broader awareness of historical contexts. [Read more…]

The Women’s History breakfast is starting soon, kicking off the last day of active scholarly content for MHA. I thought it would be useful to have a new post for the new day.

My mind and heart are full today on this latest instance of Adventist disappointment. Most of my friends have enjoyed reasonably good-natured if sometimes hostile humor at the expense of the current iteration of muddled arithmetical exegesis, this time by a Protestant entrepreneur named Harold Camping. I’m sympathetic to their responses–the way Protestant millenarianism often presents itself is both arrogant and xenophobic. But one of my closest friends lost his mother this week, and today we bid her farewell in the LDS chapel that sheltered me for a crucial decade of my life. My heart is not in the Rapture parties staged by my friends and coworkers because my heart is with my friend and his family. As I reflected on the juxtaposition of C*’s funeral and the mostly good-natured mockery of Camping and his followers, I felt to attend more closely to the meanings that lurk behind Rapture rhetoric. In our shared grief, I want to draw out some of the important meanings hiding behind the half-silly, half-spiteful rhetoric that circulates around Rapture predictions. [Read more…]

I love the winter holidays and am fascinated by the ways people employ ideas about the meaning of these national (and complexly religious) ritual observances. Many of us have been reminded in various avenues to keep the “true meaning of Christmas” in mind; less often do I hear requests to keep the true meaning of New Years in mind. This seems to me to be a problem. [Read more…]

My dad was a troubled man. If he had lived in the time of Christ, I think he might have undergone an exorcism of the melancholy devil that short-circuited his attempts to be good and prevented his participation in meaningful relationships. Since he was born in the baby boom of the 1940s, he was instead diagnosed with manic depression and a personality disorder. We are all of us inclined to embellish in retrospect, to amplify faults in our cloudy memory—my father had moments of love and kindness that blessed the lives of the people around him. But his mind was broken, and his broken mind generally seemed to keep his soul hostage. [Read more…]

I’m pressed for time but wanted to draw your attention to a very interesting number of the New England Journal of Medicine, the top medical journal in the country. There are three fascinating features.

First, it turns out you can get, I kid you not, anthrax, from using animal-hide drums made in the developing world. Overpowered by funk, indeed. (old spores are liberated by the banging on the drum and then inhaled or swallowed.)
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This month marks the twentieth anniversary of my theism. In 1990 I was an angry autodidact in semi-rural Utah, reading Sartres and announcing my agnosticism to audiences both willing and unwilling. I wore my hair long and my clothing torn as badges of adolescent independence.

Over a long summer, I came to a muted respect for the tradition of my family, for the clear-sighted and powerful faith of my mother. I remained agnostic but felt open to involvement in a church community and to the moral responsibilities of the adulthood I sensed before me. An experience involving the LDS sacramental prayers on the first Sunday in August gave me my first experience of the Divine in a formally religious setting. That numinous conversion—were I evangelical I think I would call it my rebirth or regeneration—forever changed my life. Four weeks after that converting experience, I left the Rocky Mountains to begin college in the Northeast. [Read more…]

Reading Steve Fleming’s review of Edward Bever’s new book on what we might call the physiology of witchcraft, I was struck by a potent cultural image. William James called the practice “medical materialism,” seeking to describe the desire to find scientific explanations for religious or spiritual phenomena. It’s a natural impulse–our culture often allows itself to be dominated by scientific, pseudo-scientific, and scientistic narratives, and they can provide significant authority to the speaker or writer (my brother called it “Test Tube Envy” in his first book of literary criticism). Bever’s apparent reliance on a narrative of “immune dysfunction” related to stress as an explanation for the effects of witchcraft (not terribly valid physiologically, though that makes the narrative no less powerful for many audiences) reminded me of a condition we see a few times a year. The Japanese call it “tako-tsubo,” or “octopus pot.” [Read more…]

Last week I discovered that my grandfather had given my family one final gift. My aunt has been settling his estate, and despite the many outflows that accumulated over the years, there was enough left in my grandfather’s estate to patch a few roofs, repair a few cars, and replace lost furniture (or a rug), kindnesses spread across the lives of my siblings and their families. My grandfather died just after August ended this year, in the drug-induced stupefaction that American hospice workers seem to favor (we didn’t get the call that he was terminally declining until they had already knocked him out with lorazepam and morphine). In the haziness of his last week or two, there were two overarching themes in his conversations with my aunt. He worried that he had not lived up to his family name (he was the son of a mid-twentieth-century church leader), and he worried about his namesake son, my father.
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We just got back from Montreal, where my wife gave an absolutely outstanding paper on ways the Nation of Islam employed food and diet to craft a new identity, to overturn the malignant, dehumanizing narratives of slavery. What made her talk more brilliant still (aside from its great analysis, outstanding sources, and impeccable delivery) was that it was in a panel on boundary maintenance in Islam. So amidst fascinating papers by Islamic scholars on medieval Islam and the scandals the Quranic word could generate for gender mores (what does it mean for a woman to pronounce a Quranic text that normally requires immediate prayerful prostration of all hearers, including men? Islamic jurists debated the question heartily) and other fascinating topics, this Mormon woman stands up, describes and analyzes the idiosyncratic and fascinating foodways propounded by Elijah Mohammed, and then, because Delta moved up our flight and customs at Montreal reportedly takes forever, disappears to find a taxicab.

That’s just part of the drama that was AAR. Unfortunately because of childcare issues and other obligations, we were unable to attend many of the other sessions we wanted to. Was anyone else at AAR? Anybody care to share some details?

Reading Nick Litterski’s thoughtful review of a recent book on Mormonism and Masonry made me think again about how difficult it has been for many people within and without the tradition to wrap their minds around the origins of Masonry. It occurred to me that I have done some reading in this area, and as someone with no strongly held beliefs about what the answer ought to be, I might be able to offer a brief summary of the literature I’ve read. As I’m pressed for time, the prose will not be polished, and footnotes will be notable in their absence, but I suspect that the best sources will appear in the comments. I recommend that any discussion of the intersections between Mormonism and Masonry be directed to Nick’s thoughtful post rather than my canceled threadjack. With that preamble: [Read more…]

I recently attended sacrament meeting in the Mormon settlements[1], where a passionate orator discussed the power, through covenants, that we have to bind the Lord. I have been sheltered from this doctrine for several years, but when he held up his hands bound like a prisoner’s to demonstrate how we bind God, I instantly recognized a longstanding tradition in both official and folk Mormonism. While my response to this doctrine, other than several miserable months on a mission in the American South, has generally been one of revulsion, my understanding of the historical contexts of this tradition have matured substantially since I last encountered it on my mission in the early 1990s.

The view that humans can command God is one that is most traditionally associated with magic. Douglas Davies has rather graciously referred to this Mormon tradition as “manipulationist,” by which he means that some LDS believe that they can gain control over God by token of an idiosyncratic reading of “covenants.” For a Christian tradition which defines God axiomatically as incontingent, such a view is a serious heresy.[2] Such a view even strikes many Latter-day Saints as heresy–my mother quotably rejected this teaching with a phrase I have treasured for almost 20 years–“God is not a vending machine.”[3]
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I ordered my copy of JSP Revelations way back in June, on pre-order from Amazon for about $67 (price “guaranteed”). Someone on JI reported receipt of a copy, so I checked, and the price had risen and the official story was that the book had not been received from the publisher. Now of course it is out of stock, and they write that I can cancel the order if I would like to. [Read more…]

To dissipate a little bit of the stress of being massively overcommitted these last few months, I have recently begun to try to follow in my wife’s footsteps and learn a little piano. As myriad Latter-day Saints before me, I have elected to do so on the basis of the familiar hymns. Yesterday, I spent some time struggling through two beautiful hymns, and I thought I would just acknowledge how marvelous Be Still, My Soul (go Luther/Spener!) and Where Can I Turn for Peace? (go Emma Lou!) are. That is all (now if only I could figure out how to get the left hand to work on the piano I’d be golden).

PS, how is it that this Lutheran pietist hymn ended up copyrighted by Westminster Press? At first I thought it was a Presbyterian hymn, but some random info on the web suggested she was a follower of Spener and a Lutheran.