Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Prophets in America

There are some very sharp essays in the first section of six essays in Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries (OUP, 2009). I particularly liked Richard H. Brodhead's "Prophets in America circa 1830: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith," which provides surprising biographical comparisons you won't find in any religious history survey. But I'll talk a bit about James B. Allen's "Joseph Smith vs. John C. Calhoun: The States' Rights Dilemma and Early Mormon History."

True to the Faith Posts

I recently imported to this site the six posts I did at By Common Consent back in 2005 on selected articles from the LDS booklet True to the Faith. The first post was A is for Agency, followed by body piercing, the cross, divorce, exaltation, and the family. I'm considering picking up with the series, starting (obviously) with the letter G. Any requests?

Reappraising Joseph

I posted a new Now Reading book: Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries (OUP, 2009), a collection of scholarly essays edited by Reid Neilson and Terryl Givens. [Doesn't it seem like Givens publishes about three books a year?] The quality of the essays seems quite good, with the volume as a whole being yet another attempt to make progress on "the prophet puzzle." That puzzle concerns how historians can reconcile two glaringly different views of Joseph Smith — as prophet or charlatan — each supported by some historical evidence. I'll post on a couple of the essays when I'm a little farther along.

A Very Short Introduction to the Book of Mormon

I just finished reading Terryl Givens' The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, a recent addition to Oxford University Press's wildly successful VSI series. It gives 125 informative pages on the content, structure, origin, and reception of the Book of Mormon. The book does a fair job of balancing competing views, no easy task for such a controversial subject.

What's Hot

It's been a little slow here lately, but here are a few posts from around the 'nacle that are worth reading. These and others are listed on my Recommended Posts feed.

• How Maine Is Different From Prop 8 at LDS Law: "For Mormons, one of the biggest differences in the two campaigns is that the LDS Church has not taken an active role in the Maine initiative like it did in California."
• Commandments and Revelations at the RSC Blog, praising the latest JSP volume and noting several articles on the volume in the latest issue of BYU Studies.
• The Church of the Big Bang at Mormon Matters. Because astronomy is always cool.

The Marriage Fight in Maine is Heating Up

From the Wikipedia entry, here's the background for the upcoming election fight over the fate of same-sex marriage in Maine.

A bill to allow same-sex marriage in Maine was signed into law on May 6, 2009. Maine is the fifth U.S. state to recognize same-sex marriages, and the second to do so through a legislative process rather than through a judicial ruling. The law would have taken effect on September 11, 2009, but will now be subject to a people's veto in Maine's November 3 elections.

Parsing Elder Holland's "Safety for the Soul" Talk

The transcript of Elder Holland's talk "Safety for the Soul" has been posted at LDS.org, so it's time to take a closer look at it. By parsing, I don't mean twisting the meaning or presenting the speaker as saying something he did not say or did not intend. I simply mean reading the talk closely: the dictionary definition of "parse" is "to analyze critically." To whom was his talk addressed? What did he say? And what did he not say?

The Problem of Evil, or the Great Plan of Misery

The main gate at Auschwitz, through which two million victims passed.

We heard a lot about the Great Plan of Happiness last weekend. What about the Great Plan of Misery? Or, in the classical formulation of the problem of evil, what accounts for the existence of evil in a Universe governed by a benevolent God? You will learn plenty about philosophy's struggle with this problem in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosphy (Princeton Univ. Press, 2002). Her discussion of the philosphical problem is framed by two events that overwhelmed the moral apparatus of their respective eras: the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and the 20th century's Auschwitz. I can't possibly do this dense and illuminating book justice in a short blog post, but I'll certainly recommend it to the philosophically inclined reader.

General Conference: Noticing the Little Things

With a little help from co-blogger Marc, I posted short notes on Conference sessions over at Times and Seasons. Listening closely and taking notes, there were a few little things that I noticed:

To Link or Not to Link

I know blogrolls are kind of passé, but I still update them. I do have to cull the bloated lists from time to time, but I'm not really the cleansing type. Rather than encourage a discussion of the ethics of blogrolling, I'll just say that those who are sensitive about where they link should be cleansers, and those who think a link is just a link (often those who get cleansed) shouldn't worry about it.

Some Visitors Welcome

No, that's not what the new signs at the Main Street Plaza actually say. I'm sure you could come up with your own suggestions for what the signs might say. Here is the actual text of the new sign wording dislayed at the entrances to the Main Street Plaza, per the Salt Lake Tribune and an accompanying photo.

                                     • Private Property •
The Church reserves the right to refuse access to any person for any reason.

White-Collar Sin

From an AP story reporting the results of a recent poll.

A politician taking bribes is considered by far the greater sin (chosen by 37 percent of the respondents) when stacked against extramarital affairs (just 2 percent).

Apparently sexual sin doesn't carry much weight with most people anymore.

One of the Newer Churches

The Jedi Church, discussed in a recent post at Get Religion, which recounted the founder's difficulties at a British supermarket when he would not remove his Jedi hood. They have a website, but it doesn't appear there are any brick-and-mortar facilities where you could attend ... Jedi worship.

What Kind of Mormon Are You?

The most frequently encountered terms used in internal discourse to categorize Mormons are "active" and "less active" (the updated form of "inactive"). However, these terms aren't generally recognized or understood by non-LDS and so aren't very useful for journalists. So what terms do journalists use to convey to readers the level of participation of a Mormon subject? And are there other or better terms we might use inside the Church?

Young Mormon Scholars, Bloggers, and Readers

On Saturday night I attended a Miller-Eccles presentation by Kristine Haglund, the managing editor at Dialogue. In the first half of her presentation, she talked about the present state of Mormon Studies and what younger Mormon scholars are doing. Kristine herself may have been the youngest in attendance, a hopeful sign for Dialogue, which needs to find a way to turn potential younger readers into paying subscribers. She apparently became interested in Mormon Studies through blogging and was an early T&S permablogger.

Hi Gang

Yes, I'm back here at DMI (the Typepad site) after a year blogging at Beliefnet. I've been fixing up the place in my spare time, so this site now sports:

• A new URL: http://www.mormoninquiry.com (but old links to the Typepad domain still work).
• A new template and new banner image.
• A horizontal link bar just below the banner image. I always wanted one of those.
• A Bloggernacle recommended posts list on the right sidebar, about two clicks down.
• An LDS Newsroom Blog feed.

Posts from T&S and selected posts from Beliefnet have been imported for archiving purposes — without the comments and with links back to the original posts at those sites.

Populism and the Early Church

I finally got my hands on a copy of The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch's look at how the egalitarian democratic spirit that pervaded post-Revolutionary America influenced five early American religious movements: the Christians (such as the Disciples of Christ), the Methodists, the Baptists, black churches, and Mormonism.

Two Kinds of Faith

I recently read Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, Terry Eagleton's critique of the contributions to that debate by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (who he conflates via the memorable moniker "Ditchkins"). It's less than I'd hoped for, but Chapter Three, "Faith and Reason," raises issues and questions about that most basic of First Principles, faith.

Life on the Fringe

I've seen several links but no discussion of the Slate piece on the hypothetical future role of Mormons, "The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?" It's part of an eight-part series on the theme How is America going to end? by a Slate senior editor.

New Primary Lesson Needed

Suggested lesson topic: What to do when you are seven years old and do not want to go to church. Yes, I finally watched the video of the seven-year-old kid who drove away in the family car to avoid going to church (see posts at Get Religion or the SL Trib for details and the video). The story coyly refrains from noting which church the kid was fleeing, but the video comes courtesy of the Weber County Sheriff's Office, so I'm just guessing ...