By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Part Two: Salt and Light, huh. Well let me tell you….

Ye are the salt of the earth, huh? But let me tell you: if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world, huh? Well let me tell you: A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. (Matthew 5:13-14)

This is my translation of the text in Matthew 5: 13-14. After each opening declarative sentence (“You are the. . .”), I add a huh? and a let me tell you. . . . This translation is not based on knowing Greek or being a great theologian; I don’t, and I’m not. But this is how I represent what I am pretty sure Jesus was trying to convey when he told his listeners that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Part One: Blessedness and Happiness

Matthew 5; Luke 6

NB: Though this week’s reading is limited to Matthew 5, and the corresponding verses in Luke, it is still too much for one post. Or even two. So this will be the first of three posts this week on the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, covering verses 1-10: the Beatitudes.

I decided to look through some of the old missionary handbooks in my library to see if there were any antecedents to the no-phone-home policy that I experienced as a missionary. Beyond a few interesting bits that I had overlooked in the past (missionaries in the 1920s were required to have eight hours of missionary work a day, starting at 9:00 am), there was some material that is relevant, albeit far from comprehensive.
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The purpose of these periodic book review posts is to provide a succinct layman’s (or in my case, dilettante’s) impression of recent works in Mormon Studies. The ultimate goal is to inform consumer buying choice, as the selection criteria for home libraries can be vastly different from professional or academic libraries. All of these books deserve far deeper examination and hopefully will be the object of further study. [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…]

The current center-right/far-right governing coalition in Austria has a problem—a robust social welfare state. Even though the social welfare state is responsible for channeling the post-war economic recovery into a relatively high quality of life for everyone in the country, the current government has plans to weaken if not dismantle it entirely. Rather than admit that the center-right party—which has been in uninterrupted power for over thirty years but recently “re-invented” itself under Europe’s youngest chancellor—may have anything to do with the status quo, politicians have been busy painting the European Union and its directives that member states are obliged to incorporate into their national legislation (only after their approval by a qualified majority of the same members states, of course) as the obstacle to prosperity:

I am horrified. Apparently “religious freedom” is an empty phrase when it comes to Death Row.

Let’s recap the insane saga in the State of Alabama over the last week. Domineque Ray is a Muslim inmate on Death Row, with an execution scheduled for today. Late in January, as the State started walking him through execution procedures, Alabama informed him that a Christian chaplain was required to be in the room with him at death, but his Muslim Imam would be barred.

Ray sued within days, asking for access to an Imam. [Read more…]

In the past couple of weeks the Church News reported on two different and prominent instances of church leaders teaching that researching church history is not the solution to questions about church history. My first thought after seeing the second was “retrenchment,” to invoke sociologist Armand Mauss’s piercing analysis. And as a researcher in church history, I must say I felt a twinge of disappointment. It may be that my impulse is correct, but after some reflection, it seems to me that there is more going on.
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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…]

Half a loaf is better than none. But half a baby is not. The secret to being Solomon is knowing the difference.

I have recently started dividing my work problems into loaves and babies based on whether or not half-solutions will work. Loaf problems are problems where a partial solution is better than no solution at all. Baby problems are problems where partial solutions are worse than no solution at all.

Recently the good folks at lds.org have been updating the “Gospel Topics” section, as well as rolling out a slew of “Church History Topics” in conjunction with Saints. The latter has some really remarkable content (see, for example, the entry on “Masonry“). Today, however, I wanted to share some historical bits relating to the new gospel topics entry on “Book of Mormon Geography” that people have been chatting about on the internets.
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Lily Darais is a mother of four living in Orem, UT.  She earned a B.A. from Michigan State University, a Masters of Education from Harvard, and has earned a diploma in culinary arts.  She currently spends most of her time trying to keep her toddler and baby alive and begging her older kids to practice their instruments.  She previously wrote a BCC guest post on Heavenly Mother.

Over the better half of this past decade, I have returned to the same question over and over: Why stay in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? [Read more…]

This seems to be blacks and the priesthood weekend. First we have Paul Reeve’s guest post at Keepa on Joseph F. Smith’s notes from his 1879 interview of Elijah Abel (the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite a while!). Then I just received the latest Dialogue (51/3 2018), which is devoted largely to material on blacks and the priesthood in honor of 40 years since the revelation. I’ve started reading it, and I just finished Matthew L. Harris, “Mormons and Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks and Patriarchal Blessings, 1830-2018.” (I’ve seen Matt present a number of times at history conferences, and he always does a great job.) [Read more…]