The texts for this lesson are Luke 2 and Matthew 2. I welcome the opportunity to put these two chapters in juxtaposition both for what the comparison might tell us about the content (that is, the infancy of Jesus) but also the medium (that is, the two Gospels themselves). Examining them in tandem, far more than reading them individually, teaches us something about how to read scripture generally, and the Gospels in particular. [Read more…]

On June 11, 1843 Joseph Smith preached a sermon at the Temple stand in Nauvoo. From the History of the Church version of his words, we have the pithy phrase that “Ordinances instituted in the heavens before the foundation of the world, in the priesthood, for the salvation of men, are not to be altered or changed.” [n1] This was included in the Teachings of the President manual a couple years back, and I’ve seen a few folks wave this about lately to show how the church is bull crap, neener, neener, neener. [Deep breath]
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Yes, the short answer is yes. But there is a lot to say beyond that. In the last week I have seen a few people point to statements by various church leaders that ordinances [n1] are unchanged from the foundation of the world (insinuating that older ways of doing things are perhaps superior–fundilicious). The thing is, these are the same church leaders that presided over some of the largest changes in our ordinances. Anyway, here is a brief summary of some of the major shifts in just the first five ordinances revealed in the Restoration. Other liturgies experienced perhaps larger changes, but that isn’t the point. All but the last ritual below find anchoring in Moroni’s ecclesiastical and liturgical missives. They are introduced to the church with Joseph Smith’s Articles and Covenants (D&C 20) by way of Oliver Cowdery’s Articles of the Church of Christ.
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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…]

What did the Jews of Jesus’s time think about the Messiah? Who, exactly, were they expecting to show up? Why would anybody think that Jesus would fit the bill? These, I believe, are questions we need to try to answer before beginning to read the New Testament, and, especially, the Book of Matthew.

Keira Shae is the author of the phenomenal BCC Press megahit How the Light Gets In, a memoir of her early life in the dark underbelly of Provo, Utah. She will be Julie Rose’s guest on BYU Radio’s Top of Mind radio today at 2:00 PM Mountain Stadard Time. We present her essay “Mormon Batman” as a brief preview of the mature and reflective faith that you will find in her memoir. And because we love Mormons. And Batman.

Batman the vigilante is seen as both a hero and a criminal. To those who align with the law and revere the social structure in a unjust world, he is unpredictable and dangerous. To those who view the system as broken or favor less or no regulation, he is a corrective force–one that deals with crime and corruption in a way that the official entities cannot.

As my faith has matured and transformed, , I can see both sides. It is very difficult to place Batman on the scale. [Read more…]

In Saudi Arabia, women were recently given permission to drive. Women had been demanding this right and some had gone to jail for it. Even though women now have the right to drive, those activists who went to jail are still in jail, presumably because of their objection to authority. After all, what they did is no longer illegal.

People who care about human rights don’t punish others because they object to authority and they certainly don’t seek to punish them using ordinances that no longer apply.

It’s a new year, and with the new year comes a whole new approach to Sunday School in the LDS Church. I’ve given the manuals–excuse me, the “resources” or “materials”–which the church has provided a part of the “Come, Follow Me” program some thought, and as I approach this first week, which fundamentally is all about “encourag[ing] class members to learn from the scriptures on their own and with their families,” as our ward’s Sunday School president, I have a couple of thoughts.

1) The sow’s ear

To begin, let’s be frank: the actual scriptural material included in the new approved Sunday School resources is thin to the point of non-existence, and pretty terrible overall. I don’t consider myself a true scriptorian (though I was fortunate enough to have been taught by a few), but I’m hardly alone–especially here, among the readership of By Common Consent–to have felt great frustration over the years at the overly simplistic and much-too-short scriptural guides produced by the church for its Sunday School classes. [Read more…]

Not only do we have the new Maxwell Institute Study Edition of the Book of Mormon by Grant Hardy hot off the presses, we have now also been blessed with a study edition of the New Testament prepared by Thomas A. Wayment specifically intended for Latter-day Saint readers. The timing of this publication is particularly propitious, for tomorrow (i.e., December 31, 2018) begins our 2019 Sunday School curriculum focus on the New Testament. Further, under the new two-hour block system, individuals, families or informal groups will now bear more of the burden and responsibility for pursuing such study, so this new volume has the potential to be a primary resource that our people can turn to as they tackle our NT curriculum. [Read more…]

The Magnificat is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, and one might even say, the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. . . . . This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is, instead, a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of mankind. There are the tones of the women prophets of the Old Testament that now come to life in Mary’s mouth. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Mystery of Holy Night

Last week, the Washington Post ran a feature story on the Magnificat, the song that Mary sings in Luke 1: 46-55. It’s about time, really, the song is more than 2,000 years old and has been an important part of Christian liturgy for nearly all of those years.

15 years ago, Grant Hardy published a landmark volume in BoM studies: The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). This was the first attempt to put forward an actual scholar’s edition of the text of the Book of Mormon. I reviewed this volume in Kevin L. Barney, “An Elegant Presentation,” FARMS Review 16/1 (2004), available here. Suffice it to say, my review was highly positive. 15 years later, Grant has published a new study edition, with the standard title of the BoM (i.e., The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ) followed by the subtitle Maxwell Institute Study Edition. In this review I shall refer to the new edition as the “MISE.” [Read more…]

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Probably just about right now (or if not now, then within the next few hours), in Oberndorf, Austria, at Central European Standard time, many are or will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the very first time “Stille Nacht” was ever performed. The lyrics had been written a couple of years earlier by Father Joseph Mohr, while the music was composed by Franz Xaver Gruber, an organist and schoolmaster in a nearby village, for the Christmas Eve services Mohr would be conducting on December 24, 1818. Legend has it the organ was broken, and so Mohr asked for the composition to be for two solo voices, with guitar accompaniment, but the truth of that story is unknown. What is known is that John Denver was right–this song has become, very simply, “the most beloved of all Christmas carols.” Here are five versions that matter a great deal to me.

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The worst thing I ever did at Christmas was buy somebody a present. I am still ashamed of my actions on this occasion. I was a truly horrible human being, and my failure still haunts me every Christmas season.

Let me explain.

‘Twas the night before Saint Nicholas Day, and my wife and I blew it. We had stashed St. Nick’s gifts in the linen closet for easy deployment the next evening when the giver of gifts stops by unannounced to reward good children by leaving gifts on the doorstep. The closet doesn’t see a lot of traffic and I didn’t think twice about its suitability as a short-term hiding place until my daughter opened it up in search of a certain cuddly blanket. 

To make a long story short, she didn’t buy our explanations for why St. Nicholas would come early and go to all the bother of leaving the gifts in a closet when we all know that he leaves them on the doorstep. So we confessed the source of the gift. But even with one down, there are still two distinct gift givers to go whose reputations remain intact—the Christkind and Santa Claus—waiting in the wings of our Austro-American family tradition. 

My son learned his first Christmas song when he was four years old–“Joy to the World,” but he sang it wrong. Instead of “Joy to the world, the Lord has come” he sang “Joy to the world, the world has come.”  

When he was six, I decided to try to correct him. “You’re missing the point of the song,” I told him. And he replied, as only a six-year-old can, “no daddy, YOU’RE missing the point of the song.” It has taken me 15 years to realize that he was right and I was wrong. Joy, in its most essential form, is precisely the profound comfort that we take in the goodness of the world. 

This morning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent a digital letter to church members and leaders announcing changes in the advancement of youth through the ecclesiastical and ministry structures of the church. Before this announcement, children and youth graduated from Primary (the children’s ministry program) and their respective classes (young women) and ecclesiastical quorums (young men) on their twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth birthdays. Today’s announcement indicates that beginning in January 2019, youth will now graduate and advance through their organizations as cohorts at the new year, similar to a school class (you don’t go from sophomore to junior on your birthday). Moreover eleven-year-olds will begin to receive temple recommends for proxy baptisms in January as part of their advancements.
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