Year: 2019

Revelation by the rooster

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It is a week after Easter now, and surely Petrus (Peter, the English call him, but I prefer his more apostolic sounding Latin name) has come back from his great shock, delivered by the rooster; that early morning crowing did put him back with his feet on the ground: he had showed weak when confronted with reality. Of course, he had regretted it deeply, but in the last week he has seen his risen Lord and things were turning out gloriously. Pentecost is still six weeks into the future, with its redemption by the Holy Spirit and we all know that from that moment onwards Petrus would never falter in his faith. I think he has never forgotten that particular rooster, which revealed that even the ones closest to the Lord could and did make mistakes. That animal cry embodied a reality check, a revelation from below, a call for correction of a mistake. And it worked, in Petrus’ life. Petrus’ real example is that he learned from being corrected and grew: he learned from the rooster. Well, the analogy is clear, we may get messages from above, but we are corrected from below, even sometimes doing the correcting. The last General Conference did not bring a large harvest of changes, but it did provide one major correction, in the treatment of the children of gay couples. This policy, called the PoX in the blogosphere, has been corrected now, in…

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10 Questions with Quincy Newell

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We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring. This is 10 questions with Quincy Newell. Newell is an associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. She’s also the author of Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James from Oxford Press. James has been a focus of attention the past few years with quite a few things written about her and a well regarded film focusing on her interactions with Emma Smith. One of the great things in the last decade of Mormon history has been a close attention to the lives of early black Saints along with a closer understanding of racism in the Church. Newell was one of the historians who helped initiate this era in church history.

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On the Honor Code

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Let me state my priors on the honor code. I think it’s an important set of rules that really sets BYU apart from most other top universities. Yet simultaneously I worry the honor code office has been poorly run for decades. At least it sure seems that way from many reports I’ve heard over the years since I attended. While I think discussion of the honor code office and reforms is important, I think that far too many have muddled the difference between the rules of the honor code and the enforcement tactics of the honor code office.

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Don’t Reform the Honor Code

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The current round of dissatisfaction with the BYU honor code will hopefully result in some tinkering around the edges and perhaps a few personnel changes, and then quickly be forgotten before it has a chance to undermine the university’s educational and religious missions, which might roughly be summarized as producing graduates who are educated, productive, and committed to the church.

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Easter

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I’m not big on religious holidays. I know some look at all the holy days of Catholicism or similar faiths with envy. I don’t. I’m definitely a minimalist when it comes to religious days. Yet since the first day I arrived in Utah it has struck me as odd how minor a day Easter is. Spring break never coordinates with Easter. Friday and Monday aren’t holidays. Very little religiously is done over Easter unless General Conference is on Easter. Why?

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Ethics and Mormon missionary work: what memoirs tell us

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They are still teenagers, 18 or 19, and are sent out to change the lives of adults. The boys dress up like CIA-agents, the girls like old-school women. They typically have no clue about the national, regional, social, cultural, religious, or familial identities of the people they try to interest in their alien sect. They pretend they are only adding to the truth people already have but have no idea which truths these people have. They work within a compelling frame of rules, goals, figures, and reports. Therefore they would do anything to drag a non-member to church on Sunday, even a drunk on the bus or a weirdo met on the way to church. If need be, they break up families to reach their goal, flippantly calling it getting wet, getting white, dunking, plunging, splashing, or putting on the Elvis suit—even if they know in their heart the candidate is not ready. They call their targets “investigators”—often loners or messed up people who let the missionaries in and who loosely acquiesce to lessons they vaguely understand. These targets are precious souls, ailing, but no patients for inexperienced teenagers. When genuine seekers or religious enquirers are eager to chat with the missionaries, the dissonance is awkward. The teenagers use testimony to dodge reasonable questions and objections. They repel the more thoughtful investigators by prematurely requiring commitments to baptism. They see Satan in the critic. It’s “us versus them.” They have…

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Grace and Cooperative Salvation

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Since at least the time of Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius, western Christianity has been embroiled in a debate about salvation and grace. The two extremes have been represented as salvation by grace alone and earning salvation by our own works. Theologians and Church leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have generally followed a middle way. On the one hand, we believe in the free will of humans and that actions like baptism, temple ordinances, good works, etc. are necessary for salvation. On the other hand, however, we read in the Book of Mormon that we must “remember, after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved” (2 Nephi 10:24). Thus, it seems that in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we hold both extremes in tension but try to find a way of balancing the two extremes. Recently, I was reading a book by the Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian Kallistos (Thomas) Ware where he described an Orthodox approach to the subject that I felt resonates well with Latter-day Saint theology. Ware wrote that human beings “possess free will,” since “God wanted sons and daughters, not slaves.” As such, “the Orthodox Church rejects any doctrine of grace which might seem to infringe upon human freedom.” He goes on to explain how this is balanced with grace in their beliefs: To describe…

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When God Changes Address

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  One of the many striking episodes in the life of the prophet Elijah is his nearly-missed encounter with God atop Mt Sinai. Discouraged by the failure of his prophetic zeal to reform the Israelites, Elijah is instructed by the word of the Lord to go forth and stand on the mountaintop. It is not lost on Elijah that Sinai is the sacred site of the Lord’s appearance to Moses, and Elijah no doubt expects to encounter the Lord in the same way Moses did, in thunder, lightning, smoke and sound. A great tumult descends upon the mountaintop, but in it Elijah fails to find God. Instead, the prophet’s theophany unfolds unexpectedly. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11-12) The Lord is in the still small voice. God, inexplicably and without precedent, has vacated the elements and processes of the natural world. Underscoring the point, the text devotes more words to naming where God is not than where God is: God is not in the wind, not in the earthquake, and not in the fire. He…

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Church Statistics 2019

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Now that the latest Church statistics are out everyone is putting up their analysis.[1] I’ve not written a lot on statistics of late so I thought I’d retouch some of the topics I’ve discussed in the past.[2] The short summary is that missionary effectiveness is up slightly but overall growth is decreasing, partially driven by birth rate drops. The year over year growth of the Church was only 1.21%. The lowest rate since the 1930’s and well below the 3 – 4% growth seen during the rise of the international Church.

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10 questions with Philip Barlow

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We’re happy to have an other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring. This is 10 questions with Philip Barlow . Barlow is the Associate Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU. He’s written or edited a large number of books including Mormons and the Bible, The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, and A Thoughtful Faith. He was also the Leonard J. Arrington Chair at Utah State University and a constant fixture at many symposia on Mormon topics. That position will now being held by Patrick Mason.

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Spanish Hymns and the Future Hymnbook

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Recently, Walter van Beek wrote an interesting post on this blog about Global Mormonism. Globalization and decentralization are important topics in the Church right now. Even within the past few weeks, the gathering of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve in Rome has been portrayed as a hugely symbolic moment for the Church’s broadening its focus beyond Utah and the USA. When the new hymnbook was announced last year, Elder Erich W. Kopischke stated that one goal of the new edition was to “include some of the best hymns and songs originating in other languages that will then be translated into English and the other languages around the world.”[1] So far, the only hymn in the English hymnal to be written by a Latter-day Saint that had translated from another language is the stirring Restoration hymn “Sehet ihr Völker, Licht bricht heran!”, written in German but known in English as “Hark All Ye Nations!” The hymn was included in the English hymnal for the first time in 1985.[2] From there, it has spread around the world. As far as I can tell, the non-English hymn that stands the best chance of making its way into the new hymnal is the Spanish missionary hymn, “Placentero nos es trabajar.” One thing that must be faced to achieve the goal described by Elder Kopischke is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has historically prioritized the hymns of English-speaking…

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Global Mormonism: decentered and decentering

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One central question in Mormon Studies, from its inception, is in what measure preaching and practice in the Church is interwoven with American culture. Of course the American stamp on the Church is pervasive and evident, with its origin in upstate New York, its movement westwards with the 19th frontier, its establishment as the Deseret theocracy, all bolstered by an explicit theology of America as a new holy land. Plus, of course, the whole leadership structure. But religions do have their own geographic dynamic, especially a church that aims at expansion, and the LDS church is striving to become international, even global. What does that mean? Is expansion simply a spread around the world, a question of more-of-the-same, or does the encounter with different cultures entails dynamics that will change the face and form of the church and its message?

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On Early Modern English and the Book of Mormon

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In some ways new discoveries about our modern scriptures have become much rarer of late. There was a burst of information and discoveries when I was young but that has definitely tapered off the past decade or so. Recent work that has pushed our knowledge forward includes discoveries about some of the content on the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon[1] and the influence of Clarke’s Bible Commentary on the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible[2]. A more controversial discovery involves the grammar of early modern English (EmodE) in the text of the Book of Mormon. Some of these elements arise out of quotations or paraphrases of passages from the KJV Bible. However far more interesting are the many structures that aren’t in the KJV nor in texts from the late 18th or 19th centuries. Stanford Carmack published several papers on these structures including many at the Interpreter Foundation.

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On Not Understanding the Atonement

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There are some pretty major aspects of our Latter-day Saint faith–and of Christianity in general–that I don’t really understand. Specifically: the necessity and efficacy of the Atonement. Repentance and forgiveness make sense to me. The Atonement is a mystery, and none of the explanations or theories resonate with me on a deep, personal level. I am convinced that the scriptural accounts–especially in the Book of Mormon and New Testament–are true. I believe what they tell me. I just don’t understand them. What I do feel, and feel viscerally, is the fundamental brokenness of the human condition generally and my own shortcomings in particular. The world is broken, and I am broken in it. I am just as utterly convinced of the splendid beauty which we may all glimpse from time to time within this broken world and among its broken inhabitants. We are broken, but we we dream of wholeness. That dream came from somewhere. Wholeness–perfection–is also real. What I don’t understand is how Christ and the Atonement comes into play in helping us get from the Point A of Brokenness to the Point B of Wholeness. There’s only one thing I’ve ever read that helped me start to build a scaffold across the chasm of my ignorance. That’s Sister Neill F. Marriott’s talk from the General Women’s Session of the October 2017 General Conference: Abiding in God and Repairing the Breach. I read the talk about a year ago,…

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“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” Throughout the Restoration

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I remember seeing a survey several years ago that claimed that the two most popular hymns among Latter-day Saints were “I Stand All Amazed” and “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”. I have not been able to find that survey online in recent years, but the latter hymn would be an interesting case, since it is not included in the current English hymnbook published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am pondering on hymns that may find their way into the new hymnbook, however, and there seems to be a lot of interest in the hymn and requests for its return. This made me wonder—what is the history of this hymn in our hymnbooks? Why is it not in the current English one? What is the status of the hymn in other Latter-day Saint hymnbooks? The hymn was written by Robert Robinson and was first published in the United States of America in 1759. It is uncertain what tunes it was sung to originally, but the hymn tunes NETTLETON and NORMANDY became standard in the USA and the UK, respectively. For Latter-day Saints, the hymn text was first included in A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, published in Nauvoo during 1841 as an updated edition of Emma Smith’s 1835 Kirtland hymnbook. The hymnbook competed with a different one published by the Quorum of the Twelve in Manchester,…

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Disputations in Zion

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A couple of weeks ago, we reached the end of 3 Nephi 26 in our family scripture reading. It’s the culmination of Jesus Christ’s ministry to the New World and the founding of Zion. I’ve always been fascinated by Zion, and especially by the practical side of it. The concept sounds so utopian, but we’re supposed to be building a real Zion down here. How? I wish I knew, but the scriptures seem so tantalizingly silent on the details. In 3 Nephi 26, we get one of the hallmarks of Zion in verse 19: And they taught, and did minister one to another; and they had all things common among them, every man dealing justly, one with another. But of course around that we are explicitly told that we’re getting a redacted version of Christ’s teachings, as in vs. 16, “the things which they did utter were forbidden that there should not any man write them” and again in vs. 18, “many of them saw and heard unspeakable things, which are not lawful to be written.” Then, the night after reading chapter 26, we started in with chapter 27: And it came to pass that as the disciples of Jesus were journeying and were preaching the things which they had both heard and seen, and were baptizing in the name of Jesus, it came to pass that the disciples were gathered together and were united in mighty prayer and fasting.…

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Interesting times for linguists

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These are interesting times for linguists. Church leaders and administrators are working to change names in order to emphasize the correct name of the Church of Jesus Christ, as asked by the First Presidency. A main question is semantic: to what extent will the overuse of Jesus Christ lead to a devaluation of its meaning and sanctity? For example, what will be the effect of the perception of Jesus Christ as it is now included as jesuschrist in churchofjesuschrist.org as domain name for tens of thousands of mundane email addresses and web pages? Compare with how Muslims handle the name of Deity in their exchanges. Linguists know how the contingent nature of meaning is bound up with the context of use and therefore subject to upgrading or degrading modification. In the lexical field a known challenge is the lack of a proper adjective to identify the church. For other religious bodies we have official single identifiers such as Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim or Islamic. What Mormon church leaders and authors have been using for a long time, in order to circumvent Mormon or to simply alternate, is the compound adjective Latter-day, since it is part of the official church name, as attributive to Saints. For over a century it has been used in church literature to modify other names. The Journal of Discourses contains noun phrases such as Latter-day elders, Latter-day glory, Latter-day Kingdom, Latter-day laborers, Latter-day prophets and Latter-day…

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To Be Childlike or Childish

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Innumerable blog posts and not a few books have been written in the last few years about faith crises and doubt as the Church and our Secular Age collide. The Church understands that facts on the ground are changing and that–in order to accomplish eternal objectives–tactics need to shift to accommodate the new reality. The clearest example of this is Elder Ballard’s address: The Opportunities and Responsibilities of CES Teachers in the 21st Century. In the piece, Elder Ballard extols use of the Church’s new Gospel Topics essays–which cover sensitive and difficult topics like race and the priesthood and Heavenly Mother–and makes crystal clear that things have changed. As Church education moves forward in the 21st century, each of you needs to consider any changes you should make in the way you prepare to teach, how you teach, and what you teach if you are to build unwavering faith in the lives of our precious youth. Gone are the days when a student asked an honest question and a teacher responded, “Don’t worry about it!” Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue. Gone are the days when students were protected from people who attacked the Church. Elder Ballard could not be more clear that some of our old tactics are no longer serving current needs. It is important for us…

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Where are the women artists in the Come, Follow Me manual?

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As I started preparing family lessons using the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s new Come, Follow Me manual, I was struck by the quantity of art. In addition to photos and screenshots from Church-produced videos, the manual includes 78 reproductions of paintings or stained-glass windows. Many lessons – particularly in the first half of the year – include two or three paintings. But as I started going through the art, noting the artists, I saw a pattern: Brent Borup, Del Parson, Walter Rane, Dana Mario Wood, Walter Rane, Tom Holdman, Greg K. Olsen, Robert T. Barrett, Jorge Cocco, Simon Dewey. They’re all men. It’s not until the 20th painting that we get to a woman artist: Liz Lemon Swindle’s Against the Wind, showing the Savior lifting Peter out of the water in Matthew 14. Out of 76 paintings for which I could identify the artist and the artist’s gender, only 9 were by women artists – that’s just under 12 percent.* What’s more, 5 of those 9 were by just one artist, Liz Lemon Swindle. Even though Walter Rane has 12 paintings and Del Parson has 6, those only make up a quarter of all the paintings by men, leaving room for a wide array of lesser known artists to be featured. Why does this matter? We want to be involved in organizations where we can see ourselves (or see what we’d like to be). In India, adolescent…

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SMPT at U of U next week: “More Nations Than One: Theology, Culture, and Pluralism”

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The Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology will hold a conference at the University of Utah, March 14-16, on the theme, “More Nations Than One: Theology, Culture, and Pluralism.” The Book of Mormon presents a highly inclusive vision of God’s love and his work to redeem all humankind, affirming that “the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one” (1 Nephi 17:35). Yet distinctions among cultures appear to retain a meaningful role in God’s work, since he teaches them “of their own nation and tongue,” according to what “he seeth fit that they should have” (Alma 29:8). What role does the variety of nations and cultures among God’s children play in the project of building a people “of one heart and one mind” (Moses 7:18)? Next week’s conference includes a number of different presentations on this theme, as well as several on other aspects of LDS belief such as repentance, baptism, and personal revelation. Here is a sampling of speakers and topics: Jane Hafen, “Nor Any Manner of -Ites: Indigeneity and the Book of Mormon” Bob Millet, “God Grants unto All Nations” Jim McLachlan, “Deep Religious Pluralism: Bergson, Chamberlin, and Openness to the Religious Other” Sam Brown, “The Atonement of Love” Noel Reynolds, “The Language of Repentance in the Book of Mormon” Brittney Hartley, “A Bible, We Have Got A Bible: Gathering Zion Through Open Scripture” Keith Lane, “The Divine Beauty and Persuasion of the Latter-day Saints” James Holt, “Towards a Latter-day…

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Some Moral Considerations of Wealth and Growth

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Graph displaying sharp increase in world GDP over last couple centuries after two thousand years of no change.

The chart above estimates the per-capita GDP of the entire world over the last 2,000 years. There are all kinds of problems with estimating GDP over such a long time-horizon, but the only thing that matters for the purposes of this post is the general shape of the graph. At the time of Christ, there was essentially no growth in per-capita GDP. At our present moment in history—and going back to before the Industrial Revolution—there is very, very steep growth in per-capita GDP. If you live at a time when there is essentially no growth (on a per-capita basis) then you live in a zero-sum world. Generally speaking, the only way to become wealthy in a world like that is to expropriate wealth from someone else. This is true based purely on the abstract math. If there are 100 people and $100 dollars, then for every person who has $2, there is at least one person who has less than $1. Speaking concretely, the way to get wealthy in the Iron Age was to own more physical stuff, especially land. If you owned land, then you had control over the production from that land, either for crops or for grazing for herds. Since there is only a finite amount of land to go around, you get wealthy by owning more land than your neighbors. If you live at a time where growth dominates, then you do no longer live in…

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On the Church Masonry Essay

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As some of you may have seen, the Church recently released two new doctrinal and historical essays. One is on Masonry and the other on Book of Mormon Geography.[1] Both have a prominent “beta” in the upper left so they may be revised over the following months. LDS Living wrote up a bit on the Masonry article. I am going to assume most of you have read them. Here are a few thoughts on the Masonry essay.

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On the Half-Life of Admonitions

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Latter-day Saints don’t watch R-rated movies. This is one of those specific, concrete directions that has an amazingly long half-life. It’s such an embedded aspect of LDS culture that I have no memory of being told it for the first time. The upside of specific, concrete admonitions like this is that they are easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to apply. This means they can have a great and lasting impact on the behavior of the Saints. The downside of specific, concrete admonitions is that their clarity and simplicity can enable dereliction of duty. Practical admonitions are intended to provide practical guidance, but practical guidance is always funded on spiritual principle. It’s up to us unpack the admonition to access the spiritual payload within. Because specific, concrete admonitions are sticky (to use a marketing term), they can easily outlast their original context, however, and as they become divorced from their original context they are easier to treat as intrinsically valid rather than contingent upon some underlying principle. The contextual drift happens on at least two levels. First, the admonition was almost certainly initially part of a longer address that provided immediate context. Second, the admonition was given at some point in the past and therefore relates to a historical context. The longer an admonition persists in the group consciousness, the further it drifts from its textual and historical context. It gets harder and harder to reverse engineer the…

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10 Questions with Susan Easton Black

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An other of our co-posts with Kurt Manwaring is here. This is 10 Questions with Susan Easton Black. Black has written some great books over the years and contributed a lot to apologetics as well. I’ve given friends many copies of her 400 Questions and Answers about the Book of Mormon. It’s a great entry to get people thinking about the Book of Mormon and answering some basic questions. However her publishing history is pretty huge and well worth checking out. Her most recent book is Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon written along with Larry Porter. (Sadly not available in a Kindle edition for some reason) She’s an emeritus professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU and is an instructor at the Utah Valley Institute of Religion.

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Why I Wrote a Sex Manual for Mormons

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Earthly Parents is the pen name of the author of And It Was Very Good: A Latter-day Saint’s Guide to Lovemaking. He agreed to share some of the book’s background here. * * * On the top of my parent’s bookshelf, far above the white-spined World Book Encyclopedias I read as a child, sat a thick, black book. That book wasn’t the World Book Encyclopedia. That book was called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.

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