All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation
–2 Corinthians 5:18

Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians presents us with a context that is difficult to understand. There is a good reason for this: it is not Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is at least his Third Letter to the Corinthians, and it may be an amalgamation of parts of his Third and Fourth Letters to the Corinthians. But we know that Paul refers to at least four letters to the Church at Corinth, and we know that only two of them appear in our scriptures. So we have to infer a lot.

Scholars today call the missing letter to the Corinthians “the Severe Letter” or “the Letter of Tears” after Paul’s description of it in 2 Cor. 2:4, “For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.” The Severe Letter, most surmise, involved Paul chastising the Church for something that he perceived on a previous visit. The two most common contenders are the toleration of sexual immorality and the encouragement of rival Christian missionaries. Both explanations have plenty of partisans.

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I recently had my first experience with designated drinkers–the opposite of designated drivers–who are assigned to drink heavily on behalf of someone who cannot or will not use alcohol. 

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[Note: This post was written in collaboration with, and is posted by permission of Amy Tanner Thiriot.]

Earlier this month I wrote a post reflecting on Century of Black Mormons and introduced it with a short vignette about Caroline Skeen and John Butler. According to family histories, when they got married in 1831 the Skeens gave the couple two enslaved people as a wedding present. In these histories, the Butlers then freed these two individuals and converted to Mormonism. I used this rupture between generations to highlight how we choose to remember and forget. I was also wrong.
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I gave this talk in Sacrament meeting this past Sunday. A few people in attendance asked for a copy, and suggested posting it somewhere where others could find it.

When my wife and I were in college, we became close friends with another couple from our stake—Rich and Angie [Note: Names changed for privacy reasons]. I had met Rich through work, but we became fast friends and ended up in the same stake as them, and our friendship grew closer and closer over time. Eventually they moved away after graduation, but we kept up a tradition of spending Thanksgiving with them for many years afterwards. One year, as Rich and I were watching a movie late at night, he told me that he had been struggling with his relationship with the church for some time, asked me if I would be willing to talk about it with him. I was happy to, of course, and he explained how he no longer believed many things he previously believed, and that he didn’t really know what to do about it. He asked me why I believed some of the things I believed. [Read more…]

I don’t write poems often, but sometimes I do. Here’s one. [Read more…]

Theologically speaking, what approach should Latter-day Saints take to unions?

Justify your answer below, you pinko!

Rebbie Brassfield, the author of this guest post, is a frequent guest-blogger at BCC and a copywriter living in Southern California. In 2012 she created the now-emeritus website Normons.com to try to prove how normal Mormons are (lol). Currently you’ll find her blogging here.     

Jana Reiss’s 2011 memoir Flunking Sainthood spawned a thousand imitation experiments on religion. Mine took me recently to yoga.  

I would never have gotten into yoga were it not for a friend from church. At first I thought she was nuts — she’d make comments in our Singles Ward Relief Society about how faith was like Aparigraha (roughly translated as the yogic principle of ‘letting go’) and I would cringe just a bit. Her comments were interesting, but it felt like the handbook might frown upon such pagan ideas being shared at church.

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1 Corinthians 8-13

 

Many of the more quirky traits of Paul’s letters are evident in 1 Corinthians 8. The chapter is, first of all, a valuable illustration of the complicated nature of scripture. Paul’s letters are often dashed-off and wandering productions, dictated to scribes frantically scrambling to stay engaged with Paul’s meandering trains of thought (see, for instance, 1 Cor. 16:21; Romans 16:22), preoccupied with issues not fully explained (in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul tells us the letter we are reading—that is, 1 Corinthians itself—is Paul’s reaction to a letter from the Corinthians in which they are complaining to and querying the apostle. We know next to nothing about that letter), and intensely engaged with apparently mundane but today obscure and confusing beliefs and practices.

1 Corinthians 8 gathers all these points together. But it also illustrates Paul’s gift for taking seeming trivialities and drawing powerful themes from them. [Read more…]

Note: This week’s poll comes to you by way of suggestion from another BCC perma (her name rhymes with Schmarylon).
What is the status of salvation for God’s worlds without number?

Justify your answers below. And, if you like, offer suggestions for future polls. Maybe I’ll like it or something.

Some of the first of my relatives to join the church were a couple who lived on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. When they got married in 1831, relatives gave them two enslaved people as a present. Almost immediately and well before they had listened to the missionaries’ message, they released these people. I have taken pride in that. I could imagine that these were the type of people that found resonance with the gospel and moved to Missouri to help establish an egalitarian society, only to be crushed by the political and social reality of the time. I generally have ignored their parents, the enslavers; I’ve excluded them from my story.
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Anyone who spends much time writing things is probably familiar with the universal “dummy text” that begins Lorem ipsum dolor. Supposedly, typesetters in the 16th century used this scrambled Latin text to mock up books and show off designs. Lorem ipsum dolor now means something like, “don’t read the text; that will change when we have something better to say. Just look at the beautiful design. Oh, and also, something about pain.”

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I don’t know how many people actually subscribe to church magazines anymore, now that they’re all available on the internet for free, and if people don’t have actual physical copies of the church magazines coming to their homes anymore, I wonder how many people actually read anything in the church magazines. The only people I know who actually read church magazines are the people who post about how horrible this month’s Ensign (or Friend or New Era) is, and I kind of wonder if most of them aren’t just hate-reading the church magazines.

I found out through the evil of social media that August’s New Era is “The Body Issue” and it talks about stuff like the Word of Wisdom and other body-related issues. I haven’t had time to peruse the whole thing, but I did read this article that was being hate-promoted on Twitter last week: “What I Learned from Having to Lose Weight for My Mission.”  [Read more…]

There is that perennial argument about the Book of Mormon, which is usually settled by someone eventually stating emphatically that it is “copies of the Book of Mormon.” But the Word of Wisdom is somewhat different, because it is more like variant editions. I think much of the anxious hand-wringing over our dietary constraints would be sidestepped if we acknowledge that there are many Words of Wisdom.
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Which of these sins is closest to being the sin next to the sin next to murder?

Justify your answer below.

Sometime ago–I won’t say where or when–I was in a ward that got swept up in parties where people were expected to buy stuff. The two brands I remember most were “Creative Memories” and “Pampered Chef”–and something about Chinese magnets that were supposed to realign your feng shui or some such thing. Lots of people were into these businesses, and, for a few months, it seemed that there was a “party” every week or so that doubled as a ward activity

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In light of the recent Church announcement regarding the Word of Wisdom, I’m seeing a lot of chatter on Facebook where people are trying to figure out how the text of the revelation actually relates to our current interpretation and practice. So I thought it might be worthwhile to set out the text of the revelation (omitting the beginning and ending that do not contain specific prohibitions) and give you my take on them, and give you an opportunity to add your own commentary. [Read more…]

Two and a half years ago on March 16, 2017, Haley Wilson and her mentor for this research, Thomas Wayment, published “A Recently Recovered Source: Rethinking Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” in BYU’s Journal of Undergraduate Research, available here. This is not the research itself, but rather a precis; the actual research paper is still forthcoming. This is an exciting development, and I for one am looking forward to it eagerly. [Read more…]

What do you expect to spend the majority of your time on in the celestial kingdom? Or, if you don’t think you’ll qualify, what do you think people will be doing there?

Justify your answer below

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…]

The Dialogue Foundation’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce that Taylor Petrey, Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, has been appointed the next Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Petrey holds a BA in philosophy and religion from Pace University, and both an MTS  and a Th.D. degree from Harvard Divinity School in New Testament and Early Christianity. He joined the faculty of Kalamazoo College in 2010 and served as the Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program from 2012 through 2016. He is currently chair of the Religion Department.

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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…]