Year: 2012

Seeing Stars III

by Kathryn Lynard Soper • May 29, 2012 • Comments Off

read Part I; Part II III. Day of the Dead When I come inside from lighting the jack-o-lanterns, the boys are waiting for me. “When are we going to go?” Sam asks from behind the white sheet of his ghost costume. “Yeah, let’s go,” says pirate Matt, swinging his pumpkin-shaped candy bag. He is eight and Sam is six. None of our older four kids are willing to be seen trick-or-treating with their parents. Matt and Sam would actually be pleased to have both of us tag along, but taking a long stroller ride in the dark is not our preschooler’s idea of a good time, so one of us will stay home with him while the other walks the neighborhood. I know Reed will refuse to take the boys more than a few blocks, so because I am I good mother, I volunteer. And because I am a bad mother, I bring along my iPod, placed strategically in my jacket pocket so that I can easily hit pause if the kids stop thinking about candy long enough to talk to me.

Seeing Stars II

by Kathryn Lynard Soper • May 29, 2012 • Comments Off

read Part I II. Blue Boy The kids and I are decorating Christmas gingerbread men when the phone rings. I sigh, knowing that even a few minutes’ interruption could spell disaster in a kitchen full of rowdy kids wielding tubes of frosting. I head toward the phone, snatching the sprinkles away from twelve-year-old Ben, who’s sprinkling them straight into his mouth. My mother’s name shows on the caller ID; I pick up to tell her we’re in the middle of a mess and I’ll call her back. “I need you for just a minute,” she says, and her numb voice stops me short. When I ask her what’s wrong, she clears her throat and says, “I have some bad news about your brother.”

Seeing Stars

by Kathryn Lynard Soper • May 29, 2012 • 3 Comments

An essay posted in four parts. Originally published in Irreantum as an entry for the 2011 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest. The deadline for the 2012 contest is May 31. I. Descent It’s an hour or so from sunset when we pile into the jeep – me and my roommate Stacey, her friend Dave, his friend Tim, and a couple whose names I can’t remember, who Stacey and I squeeze next to in the back seat. It’s the beginning of my sophomore year at BYU, early September, 1990—a few weeks since I met Reed, the man who becomes my husband eighteen months later. I’d rather be with him on this Friday night and I regret promising Stacey that I’d come along for a caving trip west of Utah Lake. Tim starts the jeep and I search in vain for a seat belt. The warm air pushes against my cheeks as we pull onto I-15 south and Tim accelerates to freeway speed. He pops in a cassette tape and Led Zeppelin blasts from the stereo speaker, reminding me of humid East coast nights after high school graduation. I first heard the music years ago, vibrating through my brother’s bedroom door; I stole his cassette tapes and listened to them lying on my bed, using a battered Walkman with foamy earphones. The tapes came with me to Provo, where I sat under a tree next to the freshman dorms with…

In Memoriam

by Rachel Whipple • May 28, 2012 • 8 Comments

I spend the morning with my children at the cemetery. The high school band played, the mayor placed a wreath at the war memorial, and servicemen, including a veteran of Pearl Harbor, spoke to us. We bought red paper poppies to pin to our shirts. We didn’t talk about Memorial Day in sacrament meeting yesterday. The only mention was that the scouts would be placing flags on lawns. It seems that we should want to remember and honor those who have fought and fallen in our worship services. How many times in the Book of Mormon are the people exhorted to remember and always retain a remembrance of the the faith of their forefathers and the mercies God has shown to them? I am not a huge fan of the war chapters of the Book of Mormon; I’m not terribly interested in battles and strategy in general. But I do love the passion of Captain Moroni and his bold and heartfelt reminder to the people that there are things worth fighting for: our God, our freedom, our religion, our peace and our families. I love the sincere repentance of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis, their abandonment of war, even to the point of death. Their story of non-violent acceptance is powerful and heartbreaking. I love that the Nephites took them in and protected them, sacrificing their lives for the new converts to their faith. I remember these stories, and my heart breaks. I…

Literary BMGD #22: The Christian’s Temptation and Triumph

by Kent Larsen • May 28, 2012 • 2 Comments

The oft-described poverty and pride cycle in the Book of Mormon means that the peoples in Zarahemla and elsewhere repeatedly have to repent, generally in response to preaching or adversity. The first few chapters of Alma are no exception. In chapters 5-7, Alma preaches repentance, urging them to experience a “mighty change” of heart, and many Church members respond, reforming their lives.

The Approaching Zion Project: Index

by Sam Brunson • May 28, 2012 • Comments Off

Because Nibley’s Approaching Zion has 18 chapters, the Approaching Zion Project will eventually include at least 19 posts. You can find a link to the full text of Approaching Zion here, and links to all of the installments of the Approaching Zion Project below: Prologue 1. Our Glory or Our Condemnation 2. What Is Zion? A Distant View 3. Zeal Without Knowledge 4. Gifts 5. Deny Not the Gifts of God 6. How Firm a Foundation! What Makes It So 7. How to Get Rich 8. Work We Must, but the Lunch Is Free 9. But What Kind of Work? 10. Funeral Address 11. Three Degrees of Righteousness from the Old Testament 12. We Will Still Weep for Zion 13. Breakthroughs I Would Like to See 14. Change Out of Control 15. Law of Consecration 16. The Utopians 17. Goods of First and Second Intent 18.The Meaning of the Atonement

BMGD #22: Alma 5-7

by Julie M. Smith • May 28, 2012 • 1 Comment

An Un-natural ‘Natural’

by Kent Larsen • May 25, 2012 • 20 Comments

A review of The Last Natural: Bryce Harper’s Big Gamble in Sin City and the Greatest Amateur Season Ever by Rob Miech. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012. 356 p. Review copy courtesy of the publisher. The title ‘The Last Natural‘ packs a lot of meaning and connotation into a few words. While ‘natural’ clearly refers to the inherent talent that Bryce Harper seems to have, there are a few other connotations, at least in baseball. Since Harper arrives at what might be considered the end of the “steroid era,” it could be a kind of pessimistic reference to Harper’s eschewing drugs since ‘natural’ can also mean pure or unchanged. It could also be a nod to Bernard Malamud‘s novel The Natural, perhaps the finest work of fiction about baseball and the source for the Robert Redford film of the same name.

You and Your Righteous Religious Mind

by Dave Banack • May 24, 2012 • 14 Comments

Psychology has come a long way the last couple of decades. Instead of seeing us coming into the world with a mind like a blank slate, psychologists and cognitive scientists are discovering through cleverly designed empirical research that we are born with a preloaded mental operating system. It predisposes us to see the world like emotional, opinionated, tribal human beings rather than like rational, logical robots. You can get the whole story, with special emphasis on how moral systems and individual moral convictions are formed, in Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon Books, 2012; publisher’s page; official book page).

Internet Radio and the Church

by Sam Brunson • May 24, 2012 • 15 Comments

I recently bought a couple wireless speakers so that I could listen to my music collection away from my computer, without earphones. It turns out that these speakers not only play music off my computer, though: they’ll also allow me to listen to, among other things, podcasts, Pandora, and any number of radio stations, as long as the radio station broadcasts online.

Exploring Mormon Thought: Love

by joespencer • May 23, 2012 • 3 Comments

I’m more than happy to be turning from the divine attributes to the question of divine love. I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether God possesses the several “omni’s” before beginning this project, and, for all I’ve learned along the path laid out by Ostler’s first volume, I’m no more concerned now than I was before. Of course, I think in the end that Ostler himself would have to say that he shares my sentiments in this regard—at least to some degree. His project as he describes it in the prefaces to the several volumes of Exploring Mormon Thought is one of putting up with the sorts of ontotheological questions the tradition raises in order eventually to get to what he takes to be the beating heart of Mormon theology: the love of God. As with Ostler, the question of God’s love—and especially the question of grace—is one to which I’m not only willing but thrilled to give my attention. Ostler opens the first chapter of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God with exactly the right question: “It is commonplace in Christian theology to start from metaphysical concepts, such as the notion that God is a perfect being or that God is the metaphysical explanation of all existence. … What if, instead, we started from the most basic commitment of Jesus’s teachings—that God is the type of being who can enter into loving relationships of mutual reciprocity and…

Dogs’ Ears and Retention

by Julie M. Smith • May 23, 2012 • 56 Comments

A brilliant and faithful friend of mine was musing on the pattern typical to new converts in her ward. With her permission:

Post-structuralist Mormon?

by Rachel Whipple • May 22, 2012 • 12 Comments

I played with deconstruction a little bit this semester. It probably wasn’t a good idea; I didn’t feel I had a firm grasp on Derrida; his ideas squirmed away from me like slippery little fish. But it seemed like so much fun, like such a powerful tool; how could I resist? It was like fire beckoning, or the primitive call to throw rocks off a cliff, or the closed box full of some unknown something. It was seductive to be sure; that didn’t stop it from being a bad idea. One paper I wrote shortly after attempting to read Derrida was about conversion and the binary between internal and external reasons. Internal reasons are one for which an agent has something in his or her subjective motivational set, some desire or inclination, that gives him or her motivation to act. An external reason has no such component in the agent’s subjective motivational set, so while the agent may recognize the logical validity of the external reason, he or she has no reason to act on it. Here is the pertinent argument: McDowell’s counterexample of conversion is similar to Williams’s example of the reluctant soldier. In both cases, the agent is initially unmotivated to do something which others in his social group thought he should do. Williams solves the problem of the soldier’s change of heart by saying his internal reasons changed through deliberation. McDowell proposes that the community standards which…

Tragedy, Sorrow, and Serenity: A Response to Rachael Givens

by Ben Huff • May 21, 2012 • 43 Comments

Rachael Givens observes that Mormon theology is full of tragedy, but Mormons themselves don’t seem to be very good at dealing with it. She draws on some of the most distinctive ideas in Mormonism to offer recommendations on how to accept and process tragedy better. I enjoyed her post a lot and offer some thoughts of my own. In part I’ll press on some issues I’m not sure she really resolved, but I also want to expand on what I see in her closing paragraph. Rachael describes tragedy as a situation in which something precious must be lost or given up in the process of securing something else precious, where there is an “irreconcilable conflict between Good and Good,” because both goods cannot be realized. I think she is right that tragedy in this sense is an essential element of Mormon cosmology, and that this role for tragedy is part of what makes Mormonism a radical departure from traditional Christianity. Perhaps the most important tragedy is that in order to develop spiritually and fully partake of the glory of our Father in Heaven, we have to enter a realm of spiritual uncertainty, ignorance and weakness, and exercise moral agency in a context where grave sin is possible. As a result, many of us will depart from the path of salvation, perhaps permanently. This is a deeply non-traditional view in a few ways, and perhaps what is most non-traditional about it…

Literary BMGD #21: Our Kings

by Kent Larsen • May 21, 2012 • 3 Comments

In the final chapter of Mosiah, King Mosiah and his people face the fundamental political question—what form of government to choose. After Mosiah demonstrates the potential problems with a monarchy, the people choose a more democratic form of government, under the rule of judges. As the first chief judge, Alma then discovers that even democracy faces difficulties. While many early Mormon poems dealt with political issues, the majority were reactions either to the persecutions in Missouri and Illinois or to the enforcement of anti-bigamy laws in Utah. The poem I found for this lesson is an exception to that norm.

BMGD #21: Mosiah 29 and Alma 1-4

by Julie M. Smith • May 21, 2012 • 3 Comments

Seminar on B.H. Roberts’ Seventy’s Course in Theology

by Ben Huff • May 17, 2012 • 3 Comments

Next Wednesday, May 23rd, SMPT is hosting a mini seminar on B.H. Roberts’ Seventy’s Course in Theology, commemorating the centennial of its publication. Jim Faulconer, Blake Ostler, Kent Robson, and Grant Underwood will each lead a session on topics treated in the Seventy’s Course. The event will be held at Utah Valley University, in the Losee Center, room 243, and will run from 10am to 5pm, with a break for lunch. Please visit the SMPT website for more information, including session titles and links to suggested (optional) readings associated with each session.

Go Home, Christians

by Dave Banack • May 17, 2012 • 43 Comments

I live in a small town. We get lots of visitors and they’re all welcome, even the slednecks who take over the town once a year for a weekend of drinking and driving (up the mountain on snow machines). But a group has finally found the limit of a friendly tourist town’s welcome: Christians.

Literary BMGD #20: No one doth know

by Kent Larsen • May 14, 2012 • 2 Comments

The principal event in Mosiah 25-28, which is also beautifully and familiarly described in Alma 36, is Alma the Younger’s miraculous conversion. To capture this, I looked for a literary work in the public domain that expressed either the agony that Alma felt or the ecstasy he obtained after his acceptance of the Lord.

BMGD #20: Mosiah 25-28, Alma 36

by Julie M. Smith • May 14, 2012 • 5 Comments

Mother’s Day, 1996

by Sam Brunson • May 13, 2012 • 12 Comments

I sit, waiting for the phone to ring. I haven’t spoken to my parents since December and, though I love what I’m doing, I love them, too. But I’ve been sitting here for almost an hour. I’m not 100% sure of the time zone difference between eastern Brazil and the western United States, but I’m pretty sure they’re late. In this area, none of our members have phones. One of our member’s father has a phone, but, in order to call, I’ve promised that it won’t cost him anything. It’s a party line, something I’d heard about in the U.S. but never actually experienced. (The way it works is, 10 households share a line. Calls come to the first house in the group. That person directs the call to whomever it’s for.) I told the person at number 1 that, when she got a call she didn’t understand to put them through to me. But, after the hour, I decide to call my parents to give them a phonetic way to ask for me. It takes some doing to figure out how to call the U.S., but eventually I succeed and, 15 minutes later, I am talking to my parents. I ended up paying about $15 for the instructional call home, but it was worth it. I got to talk to my parents, then return to the missionary work I was in Brazil to do. — I spoke today with…

Happy Mother’s Day

by James Olsen • May 13, 2012 • 12 Comments

Mother’s Day is a bit like Christmas time in terms of the mass solicitations sent out from various NGOs. To be honest, these are perhaps the only mass emails that I don’t mind. And I frankly agree with their general point: what better way to wish your own mother a Happy Mother’s Day than by contributing to another mother in her name?

Who to Watch for MOTY?

by Kent Larsen • May 11, 2012 • 29 Comments

Can you remember everyone who has made the news during the past year? Neither can I. As a result, when we get input each December about who should be “Mormon of the Year,” there is, I think, a bias towards recent events. If a Mormon showed up in the news during the last quarter of the year, that person is remembered. But if the person made the news only during the first quarter, no one remembers them. So what should we do?

Reading the Bibles: Why Translations Differ (Part 4)

by Ben S. • May 11, 2012 • 7 Comments

This is the third of four categories explaining why translations differ. 3) How does the translator resolve ambiguities on the word-level? Hebrew writing did not indicate doubled letters (which are significant) or vowels until the 8th/9th century AD*, when Jews who had memorized the pronunciation of the traditional text came up with a system (three, actually) of indicating the pronunciation in the text with marks above, below, and inside the consonantal text. That, again, is a thousand-year gap. Scholars vary in how much weight to give the vowel-pointing (niqqudot, or just “pointing”), but at times, greater sense can be made of a text by repointing a word or two. If we have GDSNWHR in God’s appearance to Moses, and the tradition said “GoD iS NoWHeRe” we might consider that a bit odd for a believing Israelite to say, particularly as God was there appearing to him. A scholar might repoint or redivide as “GoD iS NoW HeRe” since it fits the context better. Just as BT in English could give us BuTT, BiT, BaT, ByTe, BuT or BeT, many words vary only in their pointing. (For an LDS example, Don Parry’s BYU Studies article “Temple Worship and a Possible Prayer Circle in Psalm 24” repoints dor “generation” as dur “circle.” He also discusses the history of pointing.) One of the more common (and complex) examples involves debating whether lo “to him” or lo’ “not” is the correct reading. There’s also…

Reading the Bibles: Why Translations Differ (Part 3)

by Ben S. • May 11, 2012 • Comments Off

Here is the second of four categorical reasons why translations may differ. 2) How does the translator parse the mechanics (syntax, etc.) and disambiguate the text on the sentence and paragraph level? (NB: This is a very simplified presentation of complex subjects.) Biblical Hebrew is very different from English. Like many other ancient languages, it has no formal punctuation, no capitals, and word order can vary. Consequently, it’s not always easy to figure out if this word belongs to end of this phrase or the beginning of that one. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one sentence ends and another begins particularly since the word “and” functions in multiple ways and is used more frequently then English. Translators have to decide where the breaks are in the text, and then how to represent that in English. (As a side note, several FARMS papers have discussed this in terms of the Book of Mormon’s awkward English syntax, with its endless run-on sentences and sometime unclear subjects. See here, here, and here.) Another way Hebrew differs from English that may affect the translation is that it has only two verb “conjugations.” Whereas English makes liberal use of words to indicate tense and mood, Hebrew does not grammatically indicate tenses such as future, past, present, let alone those nightmare tenses like future perfect. This is not to say Israelites didn’t think about time or any such nonsense; what we indicate grammatically, they indicate…

Reading the Bibles: Why Translations Differ (Part 2)

by Ben S. • May 10, 2012 • 3 Comments

Before looking at the two sample passages in detail, I want to familiarize you with some basic information about the Old Testament text and translation issues. And in the last part, I’ll make some suggestions about how to approach the text like this when you haven’t studied Greek or Hebrew. I’ve divided these into four semi-artificial headings, too long to all go in one post. 1) What are they translating from, and (1a) how much is the translation influenced by the versions? Translators must choose a base text from which to translate. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), the best manuscripts of the Old Testament were medieval, i.e. very late and far removed. This traditional Hebrew text is called the Massoretic text, or MT. Scribes copied biblical texts by hand for generations and as with all human endeavors, errors crept in by nature as well as by intention. That is, on occasion scribes would “correct” a text as they thought it should read (e.g. if you’re reading a story about a dog chasing a man, the dog catches him, and the man bites the dog, and then the man goes to the hospital, you would reasonably assume that it was the dog that bit the man, not the other way around, and “correct” the text.) Scribes also sometimes made changes in pronunciation (to make sure Yahweh was pronounced as Adonai) or bowdlerized the text a little, or…

Mormon Talks, Christian Sermons

by Dave Banack • May 10, 2012 • 39 Comments

Krister Stendahl, the noted Swedish theologian who was unusually considerate of the LDS Church, listed “holy envy” as one of his three rules of religious understanding. Let’s see if comparing Mormon talks with Christian sermons doesn’t create for us a bit of holy envy. I think there might be something we can learn from how other Christian denominations preach from the pulpit on Sunday.

Exploring Mormon Thought: Darwin

by Adam Miller • May 9, 2012 • 21 Comments

We’ve come to the last chapter of Blake Ostler’s first volume of Exploring Mormon Thought. After five months of reading and writing about this first book, I’m even more convinced than when we began that Blake’s work is and will continue to be the indisputable starting point for our generation’s work in Mormon philosophical theology.

Reading the Bibles: The Problem (Part 1)

by Ben S. • May 8, 2012 • 11 Comments

I received the following from an educated friend, and got permission to respond via blogposts. Slightly edited, he asks- >>As someone without training in the original languages, how can I evaluate alternate translations of scripture? Here’s what motivates this question: I’ve been reading Grant Hardy’s Reader’s Edition of the Book of Mormon, which I love. I’ve been working through Nephi’s Isaiah chapters, and, as I started working through 2 Nephi 19/Isaiah 9, I decided it was time to check alternate translations. I have several: a 4-in-1 that includes KJV, New Life Translation (NLT), New International Version (NIV), and New American Standard Version (NASB), a copy of the English Standard Version (ESV), and, via the web, the NetBible (NET), plus, of course, Nephi’s versions of Isaiah (BOM). There are four issues that one can observe by working through 2 Ne 19/Isaiah 9: • Similar translations, but with variations in clarity. • Most translations reading the same, but with one that disagrees sharply. • All translations vary • Most translations reading with clarity, but with one that is absolutely opaque. 2 Ne 19:1 illustrates 1-3. Note how these different translations say more or less the same thing [point 1], up until all of them but KJV say something about how Galilee will be honored or made glorious, while KJV explicitly says the opposite [point 2]. Galilee is defined differently, alongside the bit about Jordan and the “way of…

Adventures in Family History, part 2

by Sam Brunson • May 8, 2012 • 13 Comments

One Sunday evening, several months ago, I was playing around on FamilySearch, clicking back through my father, his father, his mother (or something like that), etc. After twists and turns—twists and turns I recorded so that I could get back there again—I discovered that I have ancestors from Jersey.[fn1] No, not that Jersey, the one famous for Bruce and the MTV show. Its namesake, the one in the English Channel. Through my clicking, I learned that my great-great-great-grandmother was born in Jersey in 1838 and died in West Bountiful in 1912. For most, this probably wouldn’t be remarkably meaningful. I didn’t do the work to get back these generations, and I have absolutely no knowledge of these ancestors’ lives.[fn2] But . . . . . . but Jersey is a tax haven.[fn3] And I’m a professor of tax law, a researcher of tax law, and, frankly, pretty darn interested in most things tax. And so, learning that I’m descended from residents of what has now become a tax haven is just cool. Way cooler than pretend being descended from royalty. And now I’m curious. I’m curious about when and how the Church moved into Jersey. I’m curious what life was like in Jersey (which, I assume, wasn’t a tax haven in the 19th century). And I’m curious what the Church was like in Jersey. My relationship to Jersey is more attenuated than the relationship that Ardis suggests careful family history research…

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