The golden era of Mormon apologetics ran from Nibley to FAIR and Old FARMS. With so many distinctive doctrines as well as a high public profile, Mormonism attracts a lot of criticism, so the urge to publicly defend Mormon beliefs is understandable, and there is now plenty of Mormon apologetics out there. What is badly needed is some reflection on the whole enterprise, trying to distinguish between good and bad apologetics and perhaps some thoughts on when the best response is no apologetics (polygamy comes to mind — trying to defend it just seems to dig a deeper hole). Enter the latest publication from Greg Kofford Books: Perspectives on Mormon Theology: Apologetics, a collection of essays covering a broad spectrum of views on the topic. We will have two reviews of the book and maybe a Q&A here at T&S in a couple of weeks. For now, I want to address a narrower question: What’s worse, bad apologetics or no apologetics? Does bad apologetics do more harm than good?
Year: 2017
The (In)Consistencies of Church Employment
In 2012 a BYU religion professor named Randy Bott created a firestorm when he made fairly racist comments justifying the priesthood ban to blacks in an interview with the Washington Post. Many called for Bott’s firing. Shortly thereafter Bott took retirement from BYU. Sadly the comments weren’t that surprising and most of us have known people with similar views. Fast forward to this week. Ruthie Robertson, an adjunct professor at BYU Idaho is told that she won’t be retained after the summer semester. (She had been contracted through fall) This is after putting a fairly controversial post on Facebook saying that,
Future Mormon: Chapter 3
Welcome to the third week of the reading club for Adam Miller’s Future Mormon. For general links related to the book along with links for all the chapter discussions please go to our overview page. We’ll be trying to discuss a chapter each week. Please don’t hesitate to give your thoughts on the chapter. We’re hoping for a good thoroughgoing critical engagement with the text. Such criticisms aren’t treating the text as bad or flawed so much as trying to engage with the ideas Adam brings up. Hopefully people will push back on such criticism as that’s when we tend to all learn the most.
A Mormon Image: Izyek Steps into the Waters
On a cold day in January, Eldon Umphrey helps his son, Izyek, into Mission Creek in western Montana. The creek runs through the family property, and it has become a family tradition to perform baptisms there, even when there’s snow and ice. ~ Michael Umphrey (http://umphrey.net/) If you have a photograph you would like to submit for consideration in our A Mormon Image series, please see here for our submission requirements.
Mormon Doctrine for Grown-ups: A Review of Terryl Givens’s Wrestling the Angel
When I was young, I discovered C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and enjoyed every volume. Then one day, at my neighborhood library, I discovered Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia, essentially an encyclopedia of Narnia, and I fell in love. The entries were arranged alphabetically, and there were more topics than I had ever imagined. It was well-ordered and — at least to my child’s mind — exhaustive. Encyclopedias hold that promise. Around the same time, I discovered Bruce R. McConkie’s book Mormon Doctrine. With short, clear entries, Mormon Doctrine provided definitive answers to a wide range of gospel questions. Only later in life did I learn that Mormon doctrine is not so simple. Enter Terryl L. Givens’s book, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. In some ways, Wrestling the Angel (WTA) seems similar to Mormon Doctrine. Although not alphabetical, it has entries such as “The Godhead,” “Holy Ghost,” “The Fall,” and “Salvation.” But rather than a short, definitive declaration, Givens takes the opposite approach. For each topic, he first situates Mormon thought within a brief history of religious thought on the topic, and he then goes on to give a history of Mormon thinking on the topic. Consider the Holy Ghost. Givens begins with the early Christian church: “Christian doctrine on the Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit, was relatively late in developing. One of the earliest Christian creeds, perhaps dating to the second century, is…
Bad footnotes can be spiritually deadly
Over at Slate, Daniel Engber had an interesting and instructive article a while back entitled “Bad Footnotes Can Be Deadly” on how the current opioid crisis has been aggravated by the misunderstanding of a letter to the editor of a medical journal and its misquotation over decades in the medical literature, with the error propagated and compounded by researchers who failed to check the original source. Engber’s article on the error’s persistence and influence documents a process not unlike the formation of urban legends and faith-promoting rumor. But if you’ve ever done scholarly research, you should also be nodding your head in recognition
Personalizing Freedom of Religion or Belief
We tend to defer the responsibility of Religious Freedom to the State. But to what extent is it an individual matter as well? In this post I will guide us through some of the issues, and hope for a healthy discussion on what we can do to enhance Freedom of Religion. Is Freedom of Religion or belief a legal, institutional or personal affair? The USA First Amendment starts with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…“. In my discussions with Americans, Freedom of Religion is defined mostly on the legalizing of religions. One assumes that so long as the law does not limit religions, there is religious freedom in the nation. Historically this is understandable, as the Pilgrim Fathers left Europe, their mind was geared towards creating space to live their religion. It was not about freedom for all religions, but for freedom for their own religion as is evidenced by each State of the Union preferring its own religion. Putting limits on the government to constrain religions was apparently also central in the declaration found in D&C 134: “We believe that religion is instituted of God; and that men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, …; but we do not believe that human law has a right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion; that…
A Mormon Image: Calle del Templo (Madrid)
Calle del Templo, which in English translates to “Temple Street,” is the street on which the Madrid Temple stands. ~ Gabriel González (http://gabrielgonzaleznunez.wordpress.com/) If you have a photograph you would like to submit for consideration in our A Mormon Image series, please see here for our submission requirements.
Welcome to guest blogger Hans Noot
We’re happy to welcome another “international” blogger, Hans Noot from the Netherlands. During the past 36 years Johannus D. T. (Hans) Noot coordinated Religious Education in Belgium and the Netherlands for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also supervised this work in Ireland, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Balkans and Italy. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in organizational behavior from Brigham Young University and is currently working on a Ph.D. in organizational anthropology at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. He is an organizational consultant and entrepreneur. His passion, too, lies in Religious Freedom: he presides the Gerard Noodt Foundation for Freedom of Religion or Belief and consults as a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Without Frontiers in Brussels, Belgium, and the International Advisory Board of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU. Welkom, Hans! We luisteren!
Coming Soon to a Screen Near You: The Book of Mormon
Not the big screen, just lots of small screens. From the LDS Newsroom: Filming Begins on New Book of Mormon Videos. It will not be a beginning-to-end depiction; the project will select certain episodes and events, producing “up to 180 video segments three to five minutes in length, as well as up to 60 more running 10–20 minutes each.” These will no doubt become a go-to resource for Primary teachers, Sunday School teachers, and seminary teachers.
A Mormon Image: Sunrise at the Corrientes Airport
With my assignment to the office of the Argentina Resistencia Mission, I helped pick up our new mission president. I snapped this photo as we walked to the terminal to await his arrival.
Future Mormon Reading Chapter 2
This is the second week of the reading club for Adam Miller’s Future Mormon. For general links related to the book along with links for all the chapter discussions please go to our overview page. We’ll be trying to discuss a chapter each week. Please don’t hesitate to give your thoughts on the chapter. We’re hoping for a good thoroughgoing critical engagement with the text. Such criticisms aren’t treating the text as bad or flawed so much as trying to engage with the ideas Adam brings up. Hopefully people will push back on such criticism as that’s when we tend to all learn the most.
Be Still My Soul
When I was 19 years old and a junior at BYU, I took a volunteer opportunity teaching a semester-long “life skills” class at the Utah State Prison. Maybe it’s not apparent from that one sentence how absurd it was for a sheltered Mormon girl from rural Canada to be teaching “life skills” to a bunch of inmates, but trust me, it was pretty absurd. The closest I had ever been to criminal behavior at that point in my life was sneaking out of my house without telling my parents once to go get a Subway sandwich. I knew, however, that in order to get into a counseling graduate program one day, I had to bulk up my resume with some relevant volunteer experience so when I heard about the opportunity to teach at the prison, I applied to the program and was accepted. After a background check and an unnerving hour-long orientation—wherein I was asked to sign forms acknowledging that the government doesn’t negotiate with hostage-takers, so if that happened to me, I was on my own—I was given a packet of lesson materials and told to show up at the prison next Wednesday. When I arrived, I was shown by a prison guard to a classroom (with a piano, strangely enough—I’m assuming that was a Utah thing) that had a bunch of chairs set up in rows, and then left alone with my “students.” The class itself consisted of…
The Book of the Weeping God
One of the most striking features of the Bible is its division into Old and New Testaments, which present not only substantially different sets of religious beliefs and practices, but very different portrayals of God. The God of the Old Testament is a judgmental, jealous, and vengeful God, who destroys sinners without remorse, whether of his own people, the Hebrews, or even entire nations such as those of Canaan. God’s love and compassion are also visible in the Old Testament, but the harsher side is displayed quite dramatically. This judgmental conception of God is reflected not only in descriptions of God himself and his behavior, but also in the attitudes and behavior of his prophets and of his chosen people. There is quite a contrast with Christ in the New Testament, who is gentle with sinners and teaches that we should love our enemies, bless those that curse us, and turn the other cheek when others treat us badly. Christians explain the major differences between the Old and New Testaments as partly a reflection of the fact that the Law of Moses was offered to prepare the Hebrews for the new law, which was delivered by Christ. This account explains the differences in worship practices and in behavioral commandments, but it does not explain the different portrayals of God. I suggest that part of the difference we are seeing is precisely the difference in perspective between a people who are…
A Mormon Image: Scriptures Deconstructed
A few years ago I left my scriptures on the roof of my car when driving home from church. When I realized what I’d done I returned to find the pages scattered all over the road. These were my mission scriptures and they meant a lot to me so I spent about an hour gathering as many pages as I could. This is the result. In some ways this photograph symbolizes the process I have been through of deconstructing the very sure faith of my mission. My faith today is a lot less certain and much messier, but it feels a lot more personal and therefore more meaningful. ~ James Gregson If you have a photograph you would like to submit for consideration in our A Mormon Image series, please see here for our submission requirements.
How Pro Trump are Mormons?
Over at BCC there were a few people claiming in the comments how Mormons were for Donald Trump for President. Now I completely understand why people would say this, given that Trump won Utah in the election. However I think that at best one needs to seriously qualify this statement.
A Mormon Image: From on High
The title of and inspiration for this photograph of the Moroni statue atop Hill Cumorah in Palmyra comes from the text of Parley P. Pratt’s hymn “An angel from on High” (Hymns 13).
On Silence: A Midrash of Elijah
Most of us are familiar with the story of the prophet Elijah, who is particularly famous for his dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal. My favorite part of Elijah’s story comes after that, though, when he realizes that not much changed as a result of his demonstration of God’s power–the people are still worshiping idols, and the wife of the king has promised to assassinate him. Elijah, despairing and suicidal, travels to Mt. Horeb (more famously known as Sinai, the same mountain on which the Lord appeared to Moses) and waits. The voice of the Lord then comes to him and asks him a simple question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” It’s easy to sense some frustration and anger in Elijah’s answer. “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Elijah is despondent, and wants to die. Elijah is told then that the Lord is about to pass by. Elijah looks out from the mountain and sees a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire. God, we are told, is not in any of those, but is in the “still, small voice” that follows. This phrase, “the still, small voice” is used a lot in our common LDS discourse, everywhere from conference…
Future Mormon Reading Chapter 1
This is the inaugural reading club for Adam Miller’s Future Mormon. For general links related to the book along with links to each reading chapter please go to our overview page. We’ll try roughly each week to deal with a new chapter. The first part will be a brief summary of the arguments and assumptions. The second part will be a critical engagement with an emphasis of bringing out the issues of the chapter. Please don’t take the criticism as my treating the text as bad. It’s much more intended to be productive criticism to try and bring into clarity the issues. Hopefully people will push back on the criticism and also offer different criticisms. Future Mormon Chapter 1: A General Theory of Grace Grace is primal and sin is a suppression of what has already been given. We don’t have to work our way into grace; we have to stop working so hard to pretend we aren’t already in it
T&S Welcomes Guest Blogger Michelle Lee
Times and Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Michelle Lee. Michelle is a licensed therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently works full-time for her local school district, providing mental health counseling and crisis management services to adolescents and their families, and also has a private practice on the side (specializing in the treatment of anxiety disorders). She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Human Development at BYU, and her M.A. in Marriage & Family Therapy from the University of San Diego, and has spent several years working with teens and adults on both the east and west coasts (DC and California, mainly). Michelle grew up in Calgary, Canada, and still feels more at home in the Canadian Rockies than anywhere else in the world.
Three Types of Goodness and Truth
My PhD dissertation was about bias in cost and ridership forecasts for transit projects. Before getting into any data analysis, I address the question of how we should even be evaluating forecasts in the first place. One response to evidence that forecasts for transit projects have generally proven to be overwhelmingly biased has been an argument that forecast accuracy is unimportant, or less important than other considerations. And it’s true that accuracy isn’t the only possible way to evaluate a forecast. A 1993 essay on weather forecasting by Allan Murphy (which I came across by way of Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise) defines forecast “goodness” in terms of three characteristics: (1) Consistency: Is the published forecast consistent with the forecaster’s best judgment? Does the forecaster actually believe her own forecast? (2) Quality: Does the forecast correspond with what actually occurred? Was it proven to be accurate? (3) Value: Is the forecast useful to forecast users? Does it help them to make the best decisions? Individual forecasts might be good in one or more of these ways, without being good in all three. For example, a financial forecaster might try to defraud investors by intentionally inflating her firm’s earnings forecast, but unexpected events occur later that end up making the inflated forecast accurate (thus, the forecast has good quality, but poor consistency). A weather forecaster might intentionally overstate the seriousness of a storm (poor consistency) because she’s knows…
A Mormon Image: The Kids Table Easter
I spent a lot of years at the kids table when I was young. Family dinners were a big deal. My grandmother lived for them. She was an excellent cook and a hostess extraordinaire. She would recite poetry and lead her guests in singing a few songs. She would also use her seating chart to try and make marriage matches. I have so many great memories of dinners and holidays and cousins and delicious food. I’m glad that the tradition is still alive with my own kids and their cousins.
Future Mormon Reading Club
The person who probably comes closest to my own views on many matters is Adam Miller. Back in the heyday of LDS-Herm we had tons of fantastic discussions on theology and philosophy. Ever since Adam’s last book came out I’ve wanted to do a reading club on it but just hadn’t had the time. One nice thing about this book is that it engages with a lot of the core theological topics where we disagreed. I’ve found I learn the most from disagreements. In agreements I’m usually just either confirming my biases or else I don’t read as closely as I should since I already agree. With disagreement I pay much closer attention. It forces me to rethink why I think the things I do think. Sometimes I find more reasons for my beliefs, but at other times I find myself reconsidering them.
Review: A Peculiar People, or How Protestants Viewed Mormons in the Nineteenth Century
So I finally got around to reading J. Spencer Fluhman’s book “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. I was expecting another account of “beat up the Mormons” episodes in the 19th century. Instead, it was an entertaining and informative review of how informally established Protestantism worked in the 19th century (hence my subtitle to the post). The focus is not so much on Mormonism as on how everyone else, in particular the Protestant majority, reacted to Mormons and their religion in 19th-century America.
Reviving Our “A Mormon Image” Photo Series
We’ve decided to revive our long dormant photo series “A Mormon Image,” which features photos and other images that carry meaning for us because they resonate with our “Mormonness.” As part of this, we’d like to issue a renewed call for photographs to be considered for inclusion in the series. What qualifies as a Mormon image? It should be a photograph or other image which relates to your own Mormon experience. It can be an image explicitly tied to religious ritual, such as a picture from before a baptism. It can be a family photo outside the temple, or a picture of the temple at sunset. It can be a picture from your mission. It can be a picture of nature — sunrise, flowers, birds — but if so, these should have some expressed link to a theme within Mormon life, broadly construed. Your image should have a title as well, and should have accompanying caption. The text can be simple description — “my son before his baptism.” It can tie the image to a Mormon theme — “this sunset reminds me of the glory of creation.” It can be a line from a hymn, or a scripture text. It should be related in some way to the image, but again we’re willing to read that requirement broadly. We hope that this series will allow us to showcase images that illustrate beauty in Mormon life, from the variety of perspectives of…
Access to the Temple
During the three years I was a transportation planning student living in Los Angeles (I completed the final two years of my degree remotely), I had fairly consistent access to a car, but I generally only used it as a transportation mode of last resort since I preferred to travel by walking or transit, and I lived in very walkable, transit-rich neighborhoods (with terrible traffic and limited parking). I lived in three different apartments during that time. The first was within a marginally reasonable walking distance to the temple; the second was on a transit line that served the temple; and the third was within a very reasonable walking distance to the temple. In those characterizations, I’m referring to what it takes to get to the edge of the temple grounds, without regard to where any of the entrances to the grounds are. Here’s the problem: The Los Angeles Temple is basically a perfect example of a missed opportunity to accommodate pedestrians and transit patrons. There are other temples that are less pedestrian- or transit-friendly through the circumstances of their locations [fn]. The Los Angeles Temple stands out in my mind as a place where it could have excellent pedestrian and transit access, but it doesn’t. There is a transit stop right in front of the temple, which is great. What isn’t great is that you can’t get to the temple from the front. There’s an imposing fence around the…
6 Questions for Tom Kimball on the Kirtland Temple
The Sunday School curriculum is currently covering the Kirtland period of LDS history, including a full lesson on the Kirtland Temple. While we often treat that temple as part of 19th-century history, it is still around, it is still used for religious services, and it is available for public tours for visitors of any religious faith. I asked Tom Kimball, who lives in Kirtland, to respond to some questions about the Kirtland Temple. Tom is a semi-retired Mormon bookseller of twenty years, a former board member of the Mormon History Association, and presently a staff service volunteer at the Kirtland Temple visitor center.
Church and Hockey
I’m Mormon and my husband is not. He has his own religion that constitutes an important part of his identity, vaguely informs his religious beliefs, and minimally informs his religious practice. I would not describe him as religious at all. He would describe me as extremely religious. Sometimes people at church ask me if my husband is “interested in the church.” My answer to that is, well, yes, he’s interested in the same sense that I’m interested in hockey. My husband is a huge hockey fan. He puts a lot of time and energy into watching hockey, listening to hockey podcasts, reading hockey blogs, and discussing hockey with like-minded hockey fans. Among those like-minded hockey fans are his dad and his brother. In fact, hockey fandom is a major force that draws his family together. In some ways, hockey fills a similar space in his life that church fills in mine. I think I understand the appeal of hockey, and I’ve learned a lot about the sport since being married to my hockey-loving husband, but I didn’t grow up as a hockey fan (or even really as a sports fan). When we watch a game together, I’ll admit to having a hard time giving it my full attention because I have to really concentrate to even understand what’s going on. For the most part, when I watch hockey, it’s mostly just a way for me to express love for (and…
Welcome to Guest Blogger Carole Turley Voulgaris
Times and Seasons is pleased to welcome Carole Turley Voulgaris as our latest guest blogger. Carole recently completed her PhD in transportation planning at UCLA and will be joining the transportation engineering faculty at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this winter following her upcoming maternity leave. For the time being, she lives in the Seattle area with her husband, her cat, and (starting any day now) her baby daughter. Carole served a full-time mission in Germany from 2003 to 2004, and (in addition to her newly acquired PhD), she holds a master’s degree in transportation engineering from BYU and an MBA from Notre Dame.
Religion as Consumerism
We’ve talked a lot about recent LDS growth numbers here including my post on the drop in missionary numbers and Wilfried’s post on the controversial consolidation of units in Europe. Since then the Salt Lake Tribune has weighed in as well.[1] My argument about church growth is that while there are things we could do to improve numbers, we shouldn’t expect a return to the numbers we had in the 1980’s or early 90’s. There are many reasons for that but the basic one is a huge cultural shift in how religion is perceived. Given my relative ignorance of Europe, I’ll try and restrict myself to the US and Canada.[2] The rise of the Nones as a demographic category is the biggest development of the past 20 years here. There are many reasons for why the Nones are rising. I want to discuss a component that I don’t think many have looked at as much. This is the idea of a shift from religion as a duty we have to God to viewing religion as just an other consumer good with a focus on short term benefits to the self. That is religion is coming to be seen the way we might view a concert, clothing, or a movie.