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This is a sensitive topic. I’m speaking for myself here and not for anyone else at BCC.
God does not call us to defend the morally indefensible, or to call wrong things right. Whether we’re talking about people or institutions, the mandate for Mormons is to be honest and to seek to do right. [Read more…]
We celebrated Relief Society’s Birthday in our ward yesterday. It isn’t exactly obvious to a lot of people why we would do that. Same with the Restoration of the Aaronic priesthood commemoration, I guess. In an effort to help new members and others contextualize exactly why we were celebrating, I offer the short description below:
[Read more…]
Our God, whose heart has become a wilderness
wide enough to receive our cries
and spacious enough to hold our suffering:
grant that our own wilderness journey
might teach our hearts to be more like yours,
so that as we prepare to remember your Son’s Passion,
we might open our hearts to the truth of his life
and the agonizing sorrow of his death,
until, thus stretched by the Holy Spirit,
we might turn in Jesus’ name to each other,
greeting one another in the Lord’s peace,
able at last to see and be seen in our truth
and to share together in the promised healing
that will make us one people as you are One God. Amen.
This morning I attended a regional auxiliary training originating in Chicago and reaching as far as Minneapolis, I believe. The featured speaker was the second councilor in the General Sunday School Presidency. The focus of the presentation was principles derived from the Church’s Teaching in the Savior’s Way initiative, and part of the presentation entailed modeling what is supposed to happen in Teaching Council meetings. [Read more…]
By Brother So-and-So
We were at church. I was sitting on the stand. My wife was wrestling with our kids, when the three-year-old escaped to the aisle. I knew the second my wife stood up, our daughter would try to outrace her mom.
Men were gathering to bless a newborn baby. My wife rushed to the front of the chapel, picked up our three-year-old just in time, and headed to the foyer.
After the blessing, she trekked back in, only to find that the rest of the bench was now full. So, in addition to carrying our three-year-old, she was climbing over five people. I watched as she lost her footing and fell into their laps! Then the three-year-old took off the one-year-old’s shoes and threw them over my wife’s head! [Read more…]
Photo by California Musical Theatre. CC BY-NC-ND 2.
Readings
Genesis 34, 37-39[fn1]
Learning Outcomes
By the end of class, students will be able to:
Introduction
In many ways, the story of Joseph in Egypt is the superhero origin story of the Israelite people. I mean, yeah, we’ve had some feints at origin already, everything from Adam and Eve to Noah to Abraham. And Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all received a covenant wherein God promised them land, descendants, and blessings.
But it’s Moses and the exodus from Egypt that really kicks things off. And without Joseph? The Israelites wouldn’t have been in Egypt to miraculously escape, and Moses wouldn’t have led them in the desert for forty years (and created the typology embraced by everybody from Jesus to the Nephites to African-Americans to Mormon pioneers). [Read more…]
This is part two of my look at the textual history of Joseph Smith’s oft-quoted statement on “the fundamental principles of our religion.” In the first part, I tried to find the original source of the statement in the Elders’ Journal in 1838, and then traced it through three revisions as it was collected in Willard Richards’ Manuscript History of the Church in late 1843, published in the Deseret News in 1853, and then published again in B.H. Roberts’ History of the Church in 1905. As I noted, the statement was later published again in Joseph Fielding Smith’s 1938 Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the church’s 2007 Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, but these later publications did not further revise Roberts’ revised text. Roberts’ revision became the standard text quoted by church leaders and members in the 20th century and that tradition continues to this day, with the exception of Elder Ballard, who quoted the original Elder’s Journal text in his October 2014 Conference address.
In this part, we’re going to look at the significance of the revisions. [Read more…]
Today is the one month anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. At schools across the United States today, many students will walk out of class at 10:00 am to protest Republican politicians’ refusal to enact common-sense gun regulations that would substantially reduce or eliminate school shootings. [Read more…]
Mission San Juan Bautista
Well, we broke the polar vortex [fn 1], though the 2018 pilgrimage from Mission San Juan Bautista to the Carmel Mission began auspiciously enough. [Read more…]
Last summer, Faith and Brian Kershisnik visited our Miller Eccles Study Group in Texas. For me, the most striking part of their presentation turned on Faith’s discussion of “moral creativity,” drawing on examples from the life of Jesus and the work of Walter Wink.
A few months ago I gave a talk at BYU drawing on these themes and misattributed those ideas to Brian rather than Faith. My mistake is especially ironic given that a significant portion of my talk called for Mormons to defend the family by defending women from misogyny in its many forms, both obvious and subtle.
My mistake is a decent example of the kind of implicit, systemic bias—the kind of bias that overlooks and undervalues the contributions of women—that I meant to speak out against. I was in a hurry and, without it giving it much thought, I just automatically attributed the presentation as a whole to Brian.
We have to do better.
I have to do better.
I’ve asked for a correction to be added to the text accompanying the video. And I hope that, beyond my personal apology to Faith, this post and that official correction will help make things right.
President Nelson will soon give his first general conference address as the President of the Church. When he gave his first address as an apostle, then-Elder Nelson quoted Joseph Smith as saying that “[t]he fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.” He quoted the same statement in his April 2017 conference address. It’s a familiar statement. Church leaders and members quote it regularly. But where does it come from? What’s the story behind it?
A few years ago I quoted this statement when I gave an Easter talk. As I was preparing that talk, I was curious about its original context and I decided to track down the original primary source. I’m no historian, but that curiosity later led me down a rabbit hole of authorship, attribution, publication, revision, edition, and republication.
I’ve gathered those notes now into a two-part series. This part deals with the authorship, the revision, the publication, and contemporary use of the statement. The next one explores the potential significance of the revisions that later editors made to the statement. [Read more…]
Photo by Fibonacci Blue. CC BY 2.0
In the nearly-immediate wake of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the superintendent of a Texas school district announced that students who participated in protests (or “awarenesses,” whatever those are) would face a three-day suspension.[fn1]
There was immediate blowback; the Parkland shooting have led to a remarkable level of engagement among high school students on issues of gun violence and regulation. But the threat of suspension could have a significant chilling effect on student activism: colleges can revoke acceptances for, among other things, disciplinary actions. So in theory, a student in the Needville Independent School District, who has already been accepted to college, could have her acceptance revoked if she participated in a protest (or awareness!) and was suspended. [Read more…]
So in GD today we did lesson 9, which includes the story of the miraculous birth of Isaac in Abraham’s and Sarah’s old age. The teacher mentioned that where the KJV said Abraham laughed at the news he was about to become an aged father, the JST corrects that to “he rejoiced.” At first I didn’t give it a second thought, because I vaguely recalled that change. But then a woman sitting behind me said that the name Isaac actually means “he laughed,” and she asked me if I could confirm her understanding, which I did, pointing out that Isaac is an anglicized version of the Hebrew name Yitzhak (or Itzhak), which comes from the verb “to laugh” (the Y represents an imperfect verb form). (The Lord directed Abraham to name his son Isaac in Genesis 17:19.) And then the teacher said something like “And now we know it also means ‘he rejoiced.'” And the lesson proceeded from there. [Read more…]
O God our blessed Mother, who gathers us under your wings
as a hen gathers her chicks with tender care:
as we return this day to our Mother Church,
grant that we may love her full kindly,
the chicks tending now to the hen
with a gentle loving care,
binding up the breaches in her body
and making the covert of her wings
once again safe for her wandering chicks
that we may welcome them in love and kinship
and become one people as you are one God. Amen.
Readings: Genesis 24 – 29.
Introduction: I volunteered to give this lesson for BCC precisely because I’m a temple-divorced, now-engaged-to-a-Catholic Mormon woman. The Old Testament manual instructs teachers “As you discuss the importance of eternal marriage, be sensitive to the feelings of class members who have not been married in the temple or whose parents have not been married in the temple.” But other than that note, it doesn’t provide any practical tips about what that “sensitivity” might look like. I hope here to provide a model for how we can use this episode in Genesis to spark discussion on how everyone can achieve more Christlike relationships, without assuming that all temple marriages are happy, nor that all non-temple marriages are miserable.
I have recently spoken at several events related to the release of my book, The Power of Godliness. I have opened with several different anecdotes that highlight tensions that I hope I resolve in my work. One of my favorite stories is that of a pregnant woman who received a blessing from a prominent Relief Society leader; a story that also opens my chapter on healing and authority (ch 4). I’d like to describe the processes of reconstructing that story.
My husband was part of an interfaith discussion in which someone asked the LDS participants, “What’s the point of making someone quit smoking for a week before they can get baptized? Does God really care if you smoke or not?” I think the standard, or at least predictable, answer to this question is that it demonstrates a person’s commitment to what will (or should) be a new way of life, their acceptance of the church’s moral authority; it makes sense as a test of how serious someone is about baptism and how well they understand what will be expected of them as members of the church. Someone else defended the practice along those lines. Brother J, being Brother J, said, “No, actually, God probably doesn’t care if you smoke or not.”
At least, He probably doesn’t care if you stop smoking for seven days.
The Losers Club, a group of friends I strongly identified with in Jr High
“You would have [a girl] be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant—taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil.” —from Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be–what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into–you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.
—Barack Obama, 2016 graduation speech at Howard University
Christianity is based on a narrative of decline that goes something like this: The world began as a perfect place where people walked and talked with God and lived in harmony with the natural world. But human beings sinned and were cast of paradise, where they became wickeder and wickeder until God had to destroy all but eight of them. Those eight started a new society that also became wicked, and God had to periodically destroy cities and send Assyrians and Babylonians to punish His chosen people. Then he sent his only son into the world, and we killed him. Since then, we have been getting wickeder and wickeder and, sometime in the near future, everything will be destroyed again and Jesus will come back and be king. [Read more…]
Award season is now upon us, and BCC Press could not be prouder that, before we even reach our first birthday, four of our titles have been nominated for major awards in Mormon literarydom. And to show how proud we are–and also how awesome these books are–we will be offering our four nominees for half price all week. That’s right: four great books at four great prices. Because we love you.
Here are the nominees with all the links you need to take advantage of this awesome deal:
Almighty God, who by your powerful hand delivered Israel from Egypt and reigns forever over all creation:
grant that we, when our hearts entertain the temptations of power,
might remember the tender power that your Son exercised by coming to live as one of us.
Turn our hands, therefore, to the works of love, the works of kindness,
that we may nurture the life of the Spirit among ourselves
and gently welcome all we can into that life,
until we become one people as you are one God. Amen.
March 3, 2018
Dear God,
I don’t believe in bargaining—theologically, that is. I don’t believe that you would be so unjust as to favor a few children with a whim of a miracle based on their pious pleading, while allowing others to suffer in a mercurial world. I don’t believe it, but I want it. I want to beg, “please God, don’t let this cancer take him. Of all those who have humbly served you, surely his kind and generous heart has called out and caught your notice. You have to have seen his pure soul. I know it shines. Please, let him stay a while longer…..he’s my dad.”
Did you know my novel Gilda Trillim had its start here at BCC? I posted a number of the opening chapters and she came into my life through the blog itself. She was birthed into existence in a post that I filled with hints that it was FICTION, but I didn’t say it explicitly, and unfortunately/delightfully some took Gilda to be a genuine lost Mormon writer that everyone had forgotten about. Great fun that. A few literary types called for studies to bring her out of obscurity and move her works forward. When I pointed out all the hints I’d inserted that it was fiction, some were not happy with me. One in particular, said that when he came to the internet he expected the truth. He must now be living a very disappointed life.
Gilda Trillim is now out and it’s a finalist for the Whitney Award for best adult novel and the Association of Mormon Letters Best Novel Award. Several reading groups have asked for a list of questions to guide discussions about the book, so I thought I’d post them here as there might be other groups I don’t know about. Note there are some light spoilers, so if you want your Gilda unsullied by any information stop now, but there is nothing too earth-shattering. See the last paragraph for an Easter Egg Hunt. [Read more…]
The Book of Mormon Studies Association is happy to announce a conference to be held October 12–13, 2018, at Utah State University.
I’ve subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Review for a long time. I recently got the latest issue, which includes an article by Eilat[1] Mazar, “Is This the Prophet Isaiah’s Signature?” The article is about the bulla pictured above. (A bulla is a piece of clay bearing a seal impression.) It would certainly be exciting to have a physical artifact relating so closely to the great prophet! [Read more…]
Shelby Hintze is a news producer in Salt Lake City. In the singles ward, but not of the singles ward.
Note: I attend a fairly young YSA ward. One speaker before me said she was not a feminist which prompted the beginning here.
I’m the last speaker but they told me to go as long I want, so buckle up. And my name is Shelby Hintze and I am a feminist. [Read more…]
Just a quick reminder: the 2018 LDS Church History Symposium is happening tomorrow at BYU and Friday at the Conference Center in Salt Lake. The topic—“Financing Faith: The Intersection of Business and Religion”—looks fascinating, and there are a host of great people presenting.
Also, I’m presenting Thursday at 1:00 in room 2265 of the BYU Conference Center (“Brigham Young vs. the Bureau of Internal Revenue“). I’ve got some pretty cool slides to accompany the presentation. If you’re in town and available, I’d love to see you then!
Two years ago, the Zion Art Society launched as a way to bridge the gap between the thousands of inspiring LDS artists and potentially millions of LDS art collectors. We have all been consoled to beautify Zion, and we hoped to bring original art into the homes of members across the world. In the years since, we have held two art exhibitions, and international competition, and started a arts-focused podcast, Mormon Visual Culture.
Someone who studies religion knows that there are many Gods and ideas of divinity throughout theology. They understand the differences between these beliefs and the intricacies of what God means to many people. However, I am not that person, so my knowledge is much more limited. But recently I have started to notice the subtle differences between the God that I worship and the God that people around me seem to worship.
Of course, the God that I have known and learned about throughout my life is different from the one(s) that my Hindu, Muslim, and even various Christian friends know. But the more I question my own beliefs and the more I learn about the beliefs of others, the more I am sure that none of us believe the same things, even when we claim the same religion.
Silently he arranged the firewood, bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife. Then he saw the ram that God had appointed. He sacrificed that and returned home . . . From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before; but Abraham’s eye was darkened, he saw joy no more. —Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Abraham 1:1, 5–20
Genesis 15–17; 21
Genesis 22
I once wrote a thing about Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. It was a chapter in Julie Smith’s award-winning collection As Iron Sharpens Iron. Mine was the free sample, so you can read it here (but you should definitely buy the book anyway). Following the design of the volume, I wrote a dialogue between Abraham and Job, with Job asking Abraham, “why did you agree to sacrifice your son?”
The original intent of the piece was to have Job, who had lost ten of his children when God took them without asking, attack Abraham viciously for agreeing to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham would wither under this questioning and admit his error. And thus we would see that Job was right to resist God while Abraham was wrong to give in to divine bullying. That is pretty much how I saw things before Julie asked me to write the chapter. [Read more…]
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