Our Spiritual Relationship with Language

January 6, 2019 by

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Natalie Brown is a former By Common Consent blogger. She is currently writing a memoir on the stories we tell about houses. You can follow her on Twitter @BtwnHouseHome.

Someone once asked how I could have prepared better for the temple. My response was bluntly honest: Nothing anyone said or taught me could have altered my initial experience, because the words I found inside the temple felt wrong.

Those words have now changed. Whether something more than words has changed is debatable. Over the past twenty-four hours, I have heard people say that nothing has changed and others that everything has changed. I’m with those who think everything has changed, because for me it has. That’s because I am a woman who learns primarily through words.
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Filed Under: Doctrine & Policy, Guest Post, Liturgy, Mormon, Mormon Studies, Scriptures, Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: , ,

Sunday Evenings with the Doctrine and Covenants. Doctrine and Covenants Section 130. Part 2. Comparing the Immediate Source with Section 130.

February 10, 2013 by

In honor of the Gospel Doctrine course of study this year, this is the second in a series of posts examining Doctrine and Covenants section 130.

Having fun yet? If you missed the vital part 1, better click here. In short, in part 1, you’ll find a manuscript that served as background for D&C 130. However, it is not the actual source of the section. In reality, Orson Pratt extracted his material from the History of Joseph Smith as it appeared in a church publication. Here’s a side by side with some of D&C 130 (on the left) and that source:
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Filed Under: D&C 2013, Mormon Tagged With: , , ,

Sunday Evenings With The Doctrine and Covenants. Section 130. Part I. The Manuscript Source of D&C 130.

February 3, 2013 by

In honor of the Doctrine and Covenants study this year, this begins a short series on one of the sections that doesn’t get too much play in the Gospel Doctrine course this year.

Sunday posts are generally doomed to obscurity. That is the conventional wisdom. And Super Bowl Sunday posts? They must be sucked into an internet black hole. That being said, enjoy: you two readers in Botswana!

Section 130 of the Doctrine and Covenants consists of excerpts of sermons by Joseph Smith. It found its way into the Doctrine and Covenants in 1876, 34 years after the date attached to the heading of the section.
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The Mythic Joseph Smith

May 4, 2011 by

Joseph Smith’s 19th century Utah editors held him in high regard, not necessarily for his personal perfection, but for his standing as opener of ancient mysteries, restorer of forgotten salvific lore and authoritative purveyor of power to defeat death, hell and the Devil.
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The Value of a Sermon Critical Edition, Part 5.

April 19, 2011 by

Here is part 4.

Bibliographical disciplines have divided up into various specialties and during the last several decades the dominant Anglo-American textual theories have splintered into a variety of approaches modeled on various ideas with roots ranging from multivalued and fuzzy logics to epistemology, philology, physics, biology, etc., which coexist in some tension.[1] This means that no matter what approach a critic or editor takes he or she is bound to fall victim to a thrashing by somebody. The good side of this is a wide open field for expression. One hopes that *someone* likes the result.

This time I want to give a few examples of various ways texts are presented. These will range from classical presentations where the editor is concerned with laying out both editorial decisions and the available alternatives, to a clear text format where the presentation records a smooth, clean (easily quotable) grammatically correct text whose relationship to manuscripts or other editions is essentially hidden from the reader or if not that extreme, at least annotation is placed in back matter.
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Filed Under: Joseph Smith Era, Mormon, Mormon Studies Tagged With: ,

James Adams. Part 3. Textual Landmarks. Conference Primer.

September 29, 2010 by

Part 1 is here, part 2, here.

As you watch General Conference this weekend, appreciate it for some of the textual certainties. And you never know what you may hear.
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