Dave's Mormon Inquiry

The Language of God

I recently breezed through a short book by Herman Wouk (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Caine Mutiny) titled The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion (Little, Brown and Co., 2010). The book has the virtues of being short, entertaining, and informative as it recounts the author's quest to relate his deep religious and cultural attachment to Judaism to his equally firm attachment to a scientific worldview. That's the sort of quest many people in the 21st century are engaged in at one time or another.

Divided by God

That's the title of a 2005 book by Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It. Inspired by Adam Miller's chapter-by-chapter discussion at T&S of Jim Faulconer's recent book Faith, Philosophy, Scripture, I am going to try a similar series with Divided by God. Feldman is a law professor at Harvard; the book is largely a historical review of the emergence and evolution of church-state law in the United States. That history and the present state of church-state law is often misrepresented, so this seems like a helpful discussion.

Ex-Mormon Orson Pratt, Jr.

I'm sure you have heard of Orson Pratt, 19th century LDS apostle, but I'm guessing you haven't heard much about his son, Orson Jr. Here's a paragraph from a post titled "Orson Pratt, Jr., Erastus Snow, apostasy and excommunication." at the Ogden Standard-Examiner's media blog Political Surf.

FPR Mulls Mormon Acronyms

Faith-Promoting Rumor is generally a fairly quiet group blog populated by pseudonymous theology bloggers putting up sophisticated posts. Definitely on my A-list. Then, suddenly, this recent orgy of confessional self-categorization: one proclaims himself a TBML (True Believing Mormon Liberal); another coins for himself the moniker HASM (Hopeful Agnostic Sympathetic Mormon); and a third adopts an inverse definition by declaring that he is not one of those people who uses the seemingly derogatory term TBM (True Believing Mormon) or even associates with groups that use the term. Maybe the world really is ending on Saturday. The FPR-types would be the ones to know. The rest of the crew better self-identify before they miss their chance!

Rethinking the Proclamation

What exactly is the Proclamation, or, to use its full title, The Family: A Proclamation to the World? It is not scripture. It is not a revelation. It is not even a Conference talk. What is it? What status does the Proclamation have at present in the LDS Church?

Church Discipline in the Internet Age

Sometimes technology changes everything. First came writing, then television, now the Internet: Instant global publishing by just about anyone on the planet. You. Me. The guy who just got called in for a chat with his stake president.

Making Mormons in the 21st Century

Jan Shipps always has something interesting to say about Mormonism. An essay you might not have run across is "Making Saints: In the Early Days and the Latter Days," in Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994). It turns out that becoming a Latter-day Saint (or acquiring the characteristics of Mormon ethnicity) involves more than just conversion or joining the Church.

More on the Mormon Gender Gap

Once upon a time, I wrote a post titled "The Puzzling Mormon Gender Gap." It is still puzzling, primarily because it seems so inconsistent with the popular picture of the Church as a patriarchal institution run by old white males. When the topic came up recently in a ZD thread, the ZD discussants (generally a fairly rational bunch) simply denied the data. Well, I think the question is too important and too interesting to dismiss simply because LDS feminists (and I use that as a descriptive term, not a dismissive one) don't want to talk about it.