By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

“Call no man happy until he is dead.”–Herodotus

This oft-quoted line from Herodotus requires some unpacking before it makes sense to modern ears. In the first place, Herodotus is not speaking for himself. He is quoting a conversation between Solon, the great Athenian lawmaker, and Croesus, the fabulously wealthy and magnificently powerful King of Lydia.

This is the point at which (unless you are a Classics student or ancient historian) you say, “wait a minute, I’ve never heard of Croesus. And where the heck was Lydia?” This, it turns out, is precisely the point. [Read more…]

Here is a sort of poem I have written. [Read more…]

Elizabeth Pinborough is a writer, photographer, and artist. She is also a TBI survivor and has a site at The Art of Striving. Her words are really powerful, so we asked her to share them here with you.

One of my posts from last week was actually part of a draft for a talk I gave in church today. The topic was “We can do hard things!” Here are my more complete thoughts on that and on how Christ is essential to our ability to overcome.

Today I want to talk about the Land of Not Yet—a beautiful and dangerous place, a place with innumerable opportunities. Not Yet is full of every imaginable landscape, plant, animal and person.

Sometimes Not Yet appears to be a land of black and white. People there can choose to be kind or to be cruel, good or evil, humble or proud, and on and on. Sometimes it seems that people without scruples prosper the most.

In Not Yet, if someone asks her neighbor how she is doing, her neighbor may feel compelled to respond, OK, with a polite smile, hiding her private burdens. Not Yet isn’t so black and white after all. Everyone there understands that good and bad befalls each in his or her turn, and some receive more than their fair share of either.

The Land of Not Yet is the land of Hard Things, capital H, capital T. [Read more…]

So today, two sorts of explosive news: first, that a prominent general authority has been excommunicated, and second, that Donald Trump is going to rain "fire and fury" upon North Korea if they should threaten the United States again.

These two events make me ask: does prayer work? [Read more…]

About a week before he went into the MTC, my son, who had been studying the scriptures earnestly like a good missionary should, came down stairs with a look of amazement on his face and said, “dad, guess what I just figured out: the Book of Genesis never actually says that the serpent was Satan. It just says it was a snake.”

That meant, of course, that it was time for “the talk.” It went something like this.

Satan, my son, was a fairly late addition to the Hebrew scriptures. When the Book of Genesis was first set down, there was no concept of a being of utter darkness and evil. The God of these people, Yahweh, was plenty scary. But as Yahweh came to be seen ever more as a good and loving father figure, they needed a place to put all of the evil scary things that were once a part of God. And it didn’t hurt that the Jews at this time were deeply influenced by the Persians, who were theological dualists, meaning that they had a figure of of ultimate evil (Ahriman) to oppose their otherwise monotheistic God (Ahura Mazda).

Even in the Book of Job, which was written around 500 years after the earliest Genesis texts, Satan is not yet the Prince of Darkness. He is not even Satan. He is “the satan,” a member of God’s court who functions something like a prosecuting attorney combined with a store detective—he goes throughout the kingdom looking for people who are disloyal to the King (God in this case) and then prosecutes them before God for their disloyalty. [Read more…]

Stephen Smoot is a BYU alumnus and current graduate student in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is also a Mormon blogger who writes at Ploni Almoni: Mr. So-and-So’s Mormon Blog. His writings on Mormon topics have also appeared, among other places, with the Interpreter Foundation and Book of Mormon Central. You can catch him on Twitter at @stephen_smoot. We’re pleased he agreed to share this post.

A few days ago I received a message from a friend of mine that I had known since I was a Freshman at BYU. It started out nonchalantly enough with him asking about how much longer I was going to be in Provo before returning to Canada for school. Eventually he got around to dropping some hints that things weren’t quite right. He mentioned feelings of loneliness and being directionless in life, and added that he felt awkward in his YSA ward and struggled with church attendance. He asked if I would be able to chat about some things he had on his mind, since he knew me, had followed me on social media, and felt like I was “a chill guy” he could be safe and somewhat vulnerable with. I happily agreed to be a listening ear. [Read more…]

So last night I’m sitting on the couch with a fairly new iPad in my lap. (I recently upgraded my phone, and they threw the pad in for a nominal amount. I’ve never used one before, so I’m still getting used to it.) All of a sudden this video popped up on the screen. I recognized the space as being Writ and Vision in Provo.  It was a roundtable discussion of that new Kofford book on apologetics, featuring Blair Van Dyke, Stephen Smoot, Joe Spencer, Amanda Brown and Loyd Erickson.[1]

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Mormonism Engages the World

This year the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar is being held in the basement of the Joseph F. Smith Building on BYU Campus. The morning session just wrapped, and I thought I’d give a very brief summary of the papers mixed (inexorably) with my own mental stirrings. Warning: these are in no way verbatim reports—they are very brief summaries. Caveat Emptor. Presenters who encounter this should feel free to disabuse the public of my errors.
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You asked for it, and we heard you. At BCC Press, it’s just what what we do. As of today, Mother’s Milk, the remarkable book of poems about Heavenly Mother written by Rachel Hunt Steenblik and illustrated by Ashley Mae Hoiland, is available for the Kindle. And for the next four days, you can get it for $3.95, which, let’s face it, is the new free.

If you haven’t seen what people are already saying about Mother’s Milk, check out the buzz: [Read more…]

“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” (They make a desert and call it peace)—Tacitus

 “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream.” (Isaiah 66:12 NIV)

For years I have been haunted by two different symbols of peace. [Read more…]

Today is the anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers.

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A friend of mine sent me this video yesterday. Please go watch, then let’s discuss…

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I’ve been thinking about Walter Wink’s book Jesus and Nonviolence and our need for moral creativity.

Moral creativity doesn’t mean making up new morals.

Rather, it has to do with the kind of creativity needed to break bad habits. Or the kind of creativity needed to breathe life back into broken relationships. Or the kind of creativity needed to unbalance cycles of anger and violence. Or the kind of creativity needed to see past prejudice. Or the kind of creativity needed to be something more—more kind, more attentive, more humble, more aware, more responsible—than I generally am.

Think about the last time you were angry with your wife or yelled at your son. How predictable was this anger? How automatic? How thoughtless? How uncreative?

Think about that moment, that gap, between what the other person did and how you, like a damn robot, responded. Think about how, in that moment, you might have done something just a little bit different, something that might have short-circuited your anger and changed the whole thing: how you might have used a different tone of voice, or met their eyes, or made the bed, or held your head at a different angle, or surrendered the point, or noticed the light coming through the window, or smiled, or laughed, or wept. [Read more…]

Doctrine & Covenants 121, 122

In preparation for this lesson I enjoyed reading Justin Bray’s Revelations in Context essay, “Within the Walls of Liberty Jail.” Especially useful are the links to images of the letter the sections are drawn from, thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers Project folks. People love seeing the documents.

I began this lesson with B.H. Roberts’s eloquent description of Liberty Jail as the temple-prison. [Read more…]

Mette Ivie Harrison, a well-known mystery and young-adult novelist, is the author of The Book of Laman, which was published this week by BCC Press. Below, reproduced in its entirety, is the author’s afterword to this exciting new book. The Book of Laman can be purchased here in paperback form and here as a Kindle e-book.

I lost faith in God completely in 2007 after the stillbirth of my sixth child and spent the next five years as an atheist. In 2012, I decided that I wanted to try to believe again. I’d felt very alone, in a spiritual way, despite the fact that I’d continued to attend the Mormon ward in my neighborhood.

And so began a full year of me trying to pray to God and ending up saying the only thing I found I could say with real conviction, which was, “I don’t believe in you.” I said it over and over again, night after night, because I was determined not to fall back on the old platitudes that I’d once used and that had ended up failing me. And then, one night, I prayed more than that. And a little more. And the journey had truly begun.

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Most of you I’m sure are familiar with the 1844 succession crisis. When Joseph was killed in the Carthage jail, who would then lead the Church? If his brother Hyrum had survived, as Assistant President it surely would have been him. There is a good chance it would have been Joseph’s son Joseph III if he had been older, but at the time he was but a young boy. There were various claimants by special or secret appointment, such as James Strang, or by virtue of the Council of Fifty. At the time the main decision was between Sidney Rigdon (by virtue of being a counselor in the First Presidency), or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, represented by Brigham Young. Had this happened a decade earlier it likely would have been Sidney, but he had long been out of the loop and so the majority of the Saints in Nauvoo chose to follow the Apostles.

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Melissa Leilani Larson is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose work has been seen on four continents. Her first book, Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love was released this week by By Common Consent Press. BCC Readers can purchase the book here for a 20% discount using the code QNTEGAHB. The Kindle version can also be purchased here.

Faith is a funny thing. It really shouldn’t work. Yet we’re always putting it to the test—even without thinking about it. We don’t doubt that a friend will pay back the money she owes; that a babysitter will show up when he said he will; that a new episode of our favorite show will air when expected. We assume that engines will start, that planes will land safely, that refrigerators will stay cold and that mangoes will be sweet.

Faith cannot exist without doubt. The two are sides of the same coin. One can outweigh the other and that balance can teeter back and forth, but the two are connected. They keep each other in check. [Read more…]

[Cross-posted to In Media Res]

I don’t know why this makes me so angry, but it does.

Maybe anger’s not the right word; I’m not angry, I don’t think. (I rarely get angry; not in my make-up, I suppose.) But I am annoyed, chagrined, bothered, upset, pissed off. And I suppose I know why too, though it’s not easy to pull it all together. [Read more…]

Rachel on writing Mother’s Milk:

How did I write 246 poems on a divine being we ostensibly know little about? In short, I prayed, I listened, I looked, I read, I lived, and sometimes I found Her. In long, I prayed to God the Father, to know more of God the Mother, to be close to Her, to feel Her love, and to be guided as I thought and wrote. I listened to my daughter, Cora, and my son, Søren–their words and their cries. I looked to children’s games–Peek-A-Boo and Marco Polo. I looked to the important women in my life–my grandmothers, mother, sisters, mentors, friends, nieces, and again, my daughter. I looked at the natural world around me–the trees, wind, stars, sea, mountains, birds, everything. I believe the Mother, like the Father, is a designer and creator. I read children’s books, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Peter Pan, The Little Prince, Where the Wild Things Are, and Are You My Mother? I read philosophy books, including by my son’s namesake, Søren Kierkegaard. I read poetry books, including by Amiri Baraka, Li-Young Lee, and Mary Oliver. I read passages from church leaders, including Chieko Okazaki, Erastus Snow, Joseph Smith, Jeffrey R. Holland, and Harold B. Lee. I read scriptures. Lots and lots of scriptures. [Read more…]

It’s July 24th. On this day 170 years ago, the Mormon pioneers entered Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young said “this is the place,” and we have been celebrating ever since.

But you know what we will be celebrating 170 years from today? We don’t either. But there is a good chance that it will be the release of BCC Press’s Pioneer Day lineup: three pioneering creative works by Latter-day Saint women that are destined to change the landscape of Mormon literature forever.

Yeah, they are that good. And we can’t wait for you to read them. These are the books! [Read more…]