By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

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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My mother went to the doctor with a stomachache. It was an admittedly vague symptom, and for months she received similarly vague diagnoses and remedies—could be ulcers, maybe gastric reflux; take some antacids and lose some weight. Finally, a visiting specialist ran a test and discovered that she had a cancer that had progressed to stage four. Thanks to this diagnosis and the care my mother subsequently received, she beat the odds for over a decade, each day a blessing. 

The author of an article in this month’s issue of the Ensign entitled The Book of Abraham, Revelation and You had a similar experience. At around the same time my mother’s body was being overtaken by cancer unbeknownst to the medical profession, he too was struggling with a medical mystery:

 

something in my knee started to cause me horrible pain. Deep within that knee I could feel a small particle grinding against other tissues. The doctors […] could not feel the lump themselves, so they took various kinds of X-rays and MRIs. Nothing showed up. As a result, none of the doctors believed there was anything inside my knee; they thought it must be some other problem, such as nerve damage. Some even tried to treat me for these other imagined problems.

Because I kept insisting that there really was something inside my knee, I was finally referred to the head of orthopedic medicine. He was willing to make an incision in my knee and see if he could find anything. Through this incision, he found a piece of cartilage that had been chipped off and had started to gouge the surrounding tissues. Its removal completely cured me.

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“Some disciples came to Jesus through the witness of others, while others found him independently. Some immediately recognized and followed him, while others, like Nicodemus, questioned more and took longer to come to their faith. In a time and culture that privileged men and a particular ancestral lineage, the experience of the Samaritan woman shows that in Christ there are no outsiders: all can come to him, find salvation, and share that joy with others.” (Eric Huntsman, Becoming the Beloved Disciple, p.123)

For the last few years, my observation of the Advent season has been guided by Eric Huntsman’s excellent book Good Tidings of Great Joy–a feast of art, music, scriptural interpretation, and inspiration that celebrates the miracle of Christ’s birth. This year, my Christmas gift list will also be guided by an Eric Huntsman book: Becoming the Beloved Disciple, a reading of the Fourth Gospel by one of the best Latter-day Saint scholars around. 

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A child of god died this week.
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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…]

Back in 2012, BCC ran a series of blog posts by Bob and Kay King, Latter-day Saints who have decades of experience in government. We’re thrilled that they’ve written an update after the 2018 midterms. In a break with current Twitter-inspired norms of political reporting, Kay and Bob have been methodical and thorough in their discussion, and their piece is longer than a typical blog post. It’s attached below as a pdf, and we have great confidence that our readers are up to the task of reading a few pages before commenting! Mormons in the 2018 Congressional Election (Updated)

Here are just a few of the important points Bob and Kay highlight (but do read the attached document–these are much more interesting in context!):

–Bottom Line: Fewer Mormons will serve in Congress in 2019 than at any time since
1981—that is over 38 years. [Read more…]

Hope is the Jan Brady of the theological virtues–the sober, responsible middle-child stuck between the mountain moving urgency of Faith and the flashy  never-failething of Charity. Hope does its essential work much more quietly. But it is nonetheless essential work.

If we aren’t careful, we can confuse hope for a sort of lesser faith. Some people know that certain things are true, and the rest of us just hope they are. If we nourish this seed of hope carefully, we are told, it will eventually grow into faith and we will know things too.

Well, I’m not there, and I don’t think that I will ever be. Hope is as much as I can muster, even on a good day. I hope that there is a God. I hope that there is some kind of existence after this life. I hope that my Redeemer lives. And I hope that the universe is organized around principles of goodness and meaningful justice far superior to those I have seen on earth. [Read more…]

Recently, Ammon Bundy has made some remarks about immigration policy. These remarks have been made on public radio as well as on Ammon Bundy’s Facebook page. Criticizing the Trump policy as one that is “fear-based”, Bundy said “These are people, the majority of them need help…There is a possibility of danger with some of them, they need to be vetted. And then they need to be brought in here and added to this great, wonderful country.” The reactions have been somewhat amusing. Some right-wing folks consider Bundy’s remarks a serious betrayal. Other people saw this as Bundy trending towards a liberal stance.

Fools, all of you! I shall explain this puzzle. [Read more…]

A couple of weeks ago I received an email with a question from an individual living in Italy. She had observed that “temple matron” had been rendered quite differently between languages, and she wondered what the history of that term was. She was quite correct, and the history is interesting.
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“You blushed, and now you are white, Jane: What is that for?”
“Because you gave me a new name—Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange.”

—Charlotte Brontë

Lil’ Emily Gilliland with her Grover doll

I’ve been thinking a lot about Carolyn’s post a couple of weeks ago in which she listed reasons for why she didn’t change her name when she got married. I’d like to respond to her post with some reasons of why I did change my name as well as reasons why this change was a lot harder than I expected it to be. [Read more…]

Daniel 1, 3, 5; Esther 3-5, 7-8

Let’s start with Superman.

America’s quintessential cultural hero is an icon of assimilation. He is a refugee whose home has been destroyed by an environmental disaster. He immigrates, not only to the United States, but to the American Heartland and grows up on a farm in Kansas, moves to the big city, and becomes a metaphor for the way that America saw itself in the 20th century. He is amazingly powerful, eternally good, and completely assimilated. So assimilated, in fact, that the only thing that can hurt him is a piece of the world he left behind. A small pebble from the Old World reduces America’s greatest hero to a simpering weenie. To be powerful, Superman must leave his old life behind.

When President Nelson urged us to no longer use the word “Mormon,” I could see where he was coming from and sympathize with the intention. The official name of our Church focuses on our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, information the nickname “Mormon” does not by itself communicate. But I could also see a serious difficulty in bringing such a vision to fruition. Whatever we might try to do in-house, externally no one is going to use a nine-word substitute (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) for a single word (Mormon). [Read more…]

2019 may be the start of a golden age of home learning for Latter-day Saints. Or in a couple of decades we will look back on three hour church with reverent fondness for all that structured pedagogy. Regardless of whether you will read them or simply adorn your shelves with them, here are this year’s recommendations for Christmas gift books.
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