Dave's Mormon Inquiry

How Modern Are We?

The LDS Newsroom just posted another interesting essay, "Mormon and Modern." The essay seems designed primarily as talking points for a gentle defense to secular critics who dismiss religion in general as a form of superstition unfit for the modern world and Mormonism in particular as a new and therefore even less welcome example of religion.

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.

History and Identity

I recently read a short essay by Eric Hobsbawm, "Identity History Is Not Enough." I came across it in his book On History, a collection of essays, but fortunately for you it is available online at the above link (except for the last page, for some reason). Mormonism is not mentioned, but the discussion seems to bear directly on the writing and reading of Mormon history.

Too Much Truth?

Blogger and journalist Rod Dreher posted an op-ed piece at USA Today, "How much 'truth' is too much?" It reviews in passing the author's personal journey from faithful Catholic journalist reporting on the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to Orthodox Christian who prefers to avoid repeating that experience a second time in his new church.

New LDS Journal: Square Two

SquareTwo, an online journal hoping to foster informed discussion and development of LDS issues. The introductory essay by Richard Sherlock notes in particular that history and sociology have had their day in the sun as avenues of discussion; now it is time for theology and public policy issues to move to the center of the Mormon Studies conversation.

A Sad Departure

I interrupt this vacation to note the passing of Richard Rorty last week. For an informative essay discussing one aspect of Rorty's thinking, go read "How Richard Rorty Found Religion" from the May 2004 issue of First Things. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. For a more straightforward summary of Rorty's life, see the New York Times obituary.

Belief Unbracketed

For this week's online essay, go read Stephen Prothero's Belief Unbracketed: A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From, posted at the Harvard Divinity School website. Hint: it's short, twenty modern paragraphs (that's about five 18th-century paragraphs; we're less patient than our ancestors). Prothero, of course, is the author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003), a penetrating work of religious cultural history that I read about half of two years ago over Christmas vacation and that I fully intend to finish someday. And I was just getting to the good part ...

Christian Backstabbing

I suppose I could come up with a mellower title, but hey, this is blogging. Go read an online essay from a couple of weeks ago at PowerBlog entitled "Hugh Hewitt and the Mormon Question." Hewitt is telling everyone who will listen that Evangelicals who go after Romney on religious grounds are setting themselves up for other politicians — a fairly opportunistic bunch, these politicians — to go after them , the Evangelical Christians, on religious grounds. I'll bet half the country would agree with the following statement: "If you can't trust a Mormon in the White House, what makes you think you can trust an Evangelical Christian?" Would you? Evangelicals ought to just shut up and vote. Or at least just shut up.

Synchronicity, Prayer, and Meteors

Since no one commented on my prior post on real astronomy, maybe y'all are more interested in speculative religious astronomy. To wit, a Meridian Magazine post entitled Synchronicity as a Sign. It includes the provocative question, "Can a meteor be an answer to prayer?" Sorry, rocks are just whirling around the Sun following their prescribed gravitational paths, and every so often (quite often, actually) one plummets through Earth's atmosphere and is momentarily visible. It's not an answer to prayer, it's just physics. Even if you are looking at the sky with a query in your mind when it happens, it's still just physics.

Straight Talk on Islam

For this week's online essay, go read Islam and Us by no less than the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, at First Things (hat tip: Right Coast). He sounds several notes of caution, such as: "[C]oncern begins with the Koran itself. I started, in a recent reading of the Koran, to note invocations to violence—and abandoned the exercise after fifty or sixty pages, as there are so many of them." And: "The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic conquest and domination in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula, and the Balkans makes abundantly clear." He goes into some detail on these and other themes.

Big Covenant

Before there was Big Love, there was Solemn Covenant (U. of Illinois Press, 1992). I think it's time to pull it off my bookshelf (where it has been sitting for a year) and actually read it. As a warm up (and for this week's online essay) go read Truth and Mistruth in Mormon History, an essay by Carmon Hardy, the author of Solemn Covenant. This one is well worth your time. Here's the first paragraph:

It was while doing research in preparation for a book on polygamy, especially post-Manifesto polygamy, that I encountered extensive resorts to purposeful mistruth by Mormon leaders and others. I will suggest that such practices have serious implications beyond the particular instances involving their employment. This was certainly the case, I believe, when dishonesty was used to defend polygamy.

Polar Express

For this week's online essay, go read Winter Light, a short personal essay in the November 2005 Sunstone. The author is Stephen Carter, who also had a longer personal essay published in Dialogue last year and did a 12Q on it over at BCC. I stumbled upon the featured essay following a visitor link back to the Sunstone site — it's always interesting to see what brings people to the blog. I'm sure you'll enjoy the essay. Writers love Alaska. Things just seem different Up North.

The Dark Side

For this week's online essay, go read The Lure of the Web at Meridian Magazine. It's good to know what connotations the word "blog" has for some people in the Church. I think the odds just went up that the word "blog" will enter the Conference lexicon this April.

Church and State

Edwin Gaustad posted a short essay entitled Roger Williams & Church-State Separation over at the Oxford University Press Blog (which any discriminating blogger will immediately add to their blogroll — where else will you find posts like The Year in Geography?). Roger Williams often gets overlooked in the bubbling pageant of American religious history, especially by Mormon readers who often have a hard time seeing anything of consequence in the historical record before 1830. Gaustad's essay (he also authored a recent biography of Williams) reminds us what a courageous figure was Williams, truly a man before his time. I'm also going to use this to resurrect my dormant online essay of the week feature.

Secular Anti-Mormonism

I promised a weekly FARMS piece, so this week's online essay is Reflections on Secular Anti-Mormonism, by Daniel C. Peterson. It was his presentation at the recent FAIR Conference (hat-tip to M* for the link). Despite the title, Peterson spent most of the essay debunking the nihilistic bent of modern secularism rather than focusing on anti-Mormons, and I agree with most of his commentary. Our few Eurobloggers should find Peterson's remarks particularly interesting. He did, of course, throw in a few jabs up front, poking fun at Signature Books, one of its authors, and "Sunstone atheists" in the first few paragraphs before moving on to his main thoughts. What surprised me is that I actually enjoyed the piece. Perhaps he should write fewer book reviews and more essays.

Tax Deductible Tithing

For this week's short online essay of the week, go read the Daily Herald's interesting editorial on tax reform proposals being discussed in the Utah legislature. The editorial notes: "The Legislature's Tax Reform Task Force is considering the idea of creating a flat income tax in Utah with a single standard deduction. The plan ... would eliminate deductions for children and for charitable contributions." One might expect the Church to be opposed to such a move, but here is the editorial's summary of the actual LDS position: "But the church said it's not worried about reducing the amount of tithing from Utah members. It is other charitable groups the church is worried about" (grammar corrected). Right. I'm not sure what bothers me more: That some LDS spokesperson could make that statement with a straight face, or that there are a good many Utah LDS who will accept it as a sincere statement.

God Loves Farmers

And professors. Those are two safe career choices offered in Nibley's famous Leaders and Managers essay (hat tip: Mormanity). Okay, his full list also included "artists, astronomers, naturalists, poets, athletes, musicians, scholars, or even politicians." To me, that still seems like a fairly selective, even elitist, list.

On Language

For this week's online essay, let's extend our range a bit: Politics and the English Language, a classic essay by George Orwell. He was an enemy of bad politics and bad language, and felt they ran together. In terms of its relation to language, we can consider religion a subset of politics, I think. You can see where I'm heading, but I'll let Orwell do the talking.

LDS 12 Step?

Can religious conversion piggyback on top of 12-step addiction recovery? Meridian posts an article and a link to Understaning Alcohol and Drug Addiction: An LDS Perspective, by Merlin O. Baker. The Introduction notes that "the average Utah addict is 31 years old, white and LDS." The book seems like a great resource for any Mormon who is dealing with their own or a family member's addicition problems, as most Mormons have little personal familiarity with regular, socially acceptable alcohol and drug use, much less addictions. But despite claims to the contrary, the excerpts in the "LDS 12-step program" section sure make it sound like LDS recovery (back into activity) and substance recovery (back to sobriety) are tightly linked in this approach. Or maybe it is simply a clinical fact that in Utah you can't succesfully treat LDS substance abuse recovery without also confronting religious issues? "Hi, my name is Nephi, and I'm an alcoholic." Yeah, maybe.

Owing the Vatican

For this week's online essay, I recommend Christianity's Debt to the Vatican, by Peterson and Hamblin. They reflect on John Paul II, "a talented writer, a linguist, and a trained philosopher, as well as an attractively athletic, approachable, guitar-playing pastor," and ask what we as LDS should make of him and the Catholic church. They give a generous summary of historical contributions for which all Christians should be grateful, and conclude that we are all "indebted to the Church of Rome and to its popes. And, among these, John Paul II was clearly one of the greatest."

Perceptive Paper

For this week's online essay (courtesy of Nauvoo Neighbor) I offer The Place of Mormon Women: Perceptions, Prozac, Polygamy, Priesthood, Patriarchy, and Peace, by Andrea Radke, PhD. Yes, that is really the name of the paper. Well, at least she didn't throw in Pregnant. I perused this perceptive paper, and proudly proclaim it professional, if perhaps not profound. Pointedly proper, it is a pensive paean promoting present policy. Publicly!

Card on Nibley

Meridian has a nice retrospective on Hugh Nibley by Orson Scott Card. It turns out that Card knew several of the Nibley kids as friends while he was a high school student, and he often visited the Nibley home, which he describes as follows:

Families are either open or closed -- and the Nibley home was as open as any family I have ever known. There was no pretense, though of course there was privacy. No one was trying to impress anybody.

Zeal Without Knowledge

For this week's online essay, go read Zeal Without Knowledge, the classic Nibley essay. This is also my weekend schmooze post, specially designed for people who have nothing better to do over the weekend than cruise a near-empty Bloggernacle, leaving long, aimless comments. Short and insightful comments are welcome too, but I know it's tough to think that hard on the weekend. My favorite line from the essay: "We [Mormons] think it more commendable to get up at 5 AM to write a bad book than to get up at nine o'clock to write a good one--that is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable, self-righteous prigs and barren minds." Wow. Imagine the flak I'd get if I tried to say that!

Bushman Essay

As the online essay of the week, I offer Church History, 1820-1831, by Richard L. Bushman and Larry C. Porter. This is a good refresher for the material covered in the first few Sunday School lessons of this year. This essay is actually an Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry, available online (as are many EOM entries) at All About Mormons. This is one of the few Bushman essays available online that I am aware of. However, a collection of Bushman essays on LDS historical themes was recently published, Believing History (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004). The first essay in that collection, entitled Faithful History, is also found as the first essay in an earlier collection by various authors, Faithful History (Signature Books, 1992).

Ecclesiastical Polity

My choice for online essay of the week is from the most recent issue of Dialogue, Ecclesiastical Polity and the Challenge of Homosexuality: Two Cases of Divergence within the Mormon Tradition, by O Kendall White Jr. and Daryl White. The authors are visibly sympathetic to the RLDS move to the left and unhappy with the LDS move to the right over the last century, but that perspective is nothing new. The divergence they are writing about is actually in the eccesiastical polities or governance paradigms of the two denominations, not simply the SSA policies. The article is much more interesting than I expected from the title!

On Bible Translation

I stumbled across an excellent blog post series on Bible translation at Challies.com. In Part 1, the author talks about three styles of rendering the translated English text (paraphrase or free translation, dynamic equivalence or thought-for-thought, and formal equivalence or word-for-word) and such general questions as the difference between thematic interpretation (bad) and linguistic interpretation (necessary). In Part 2, he discusses the different text lines which came together in the Textus Receptus pioneered by Erasmus, later displaced by the Westcott and Hort text toward the end of the 19th century. The more I read about translation, the less I like the KJV. What thinkest thou?

A Word From Grant Palmer

My online essay of the week is the Preface to An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, posted at the publisher's website. It's only a few pages in print, and it seems fair to give Palmer a chance to speak for himself. This seems particularly useful for those of you who haven't read Insider's View and wonder what all the fuss is about. He begins: For thirty-four years I was primarily an Institute director for the Church Educational System (CES) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He continues, explaining:

• Why he wrote the book: "[T]o introduce church members who have not followed the developments in church history during the last thirty years to issues that are central to the topic of Mormon origins."
• Who he sees as its audience: "This book is not intended for children or investigators."
• How he will approach Mormon history: "A more candid discussion of the foundations of the church beginning with the Book of Mormon."

Of course, candor is no guarantee of accuracy and relevance, but it's worth something.

FARMS Through the Years

For this week's online essay, go read the three-part essay from the FARMS Insight magazine entitled FARMS Through the Years. Each part gives a brief Q&A with two FARMS scholars about the origin, growth, and development of your favorite apologetic think tank. Part One interviews John Sorenson and John Welch (aka Jack Welch, the original moving force behind FARMS). Welch described Sorenson's 1984 book An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon as FARMS' first major publication. Also interesting is his comment that he set up The FARMS Review to follow the same editing procedures as a law review. Part Two talks to Stephen D. Ricks and Noel B. Reynolds (who became president of FARMS shortly after the 1997 decision to officially attach FARMS to BYU). Part 3 talks to Daniel Peterson and Daniel Oswald (the FARMS CEO from 1998 to 2003). Their comments suggest the CPART project is broadening the FARMS mission in a positive way. CPART certainly appears to me to be the most promising scholarly project FARMS has undertaken. Does anyone have any firsthand experience with any of the CPART publications or resources? [minor edits, 12/7]

The Insider

In honor of Prof. Midgley's brief appearance at T&S last week (in that forgettable thread that went into meltdown), my online essay of the week is Midgley's review of Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, which he entitled Prying Into Palmer (read the review to get the reference).  I also added Palmer's book to my Mormon Studies blogroll on the right sidebar along with my own 45-word review.  If that's not long enough, go see my slightly longer review back at the old blog (which for some reason refuses to die, despite my not paying the renewal). Here's a paragraph from Midgley's review, on the minor but telling point that those denominations that endorse revisionist history in the Palmer mold do not seem to fare well:

But if worldly success is the measure, then the fact is, as I and others have shown in considerable detail, that the Community of Christ -- the controlling faction of what was once known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- has not prospered.  Instead, those in charge of the Community of Christ have managed, since the late 1960s, to turn the nearly 250,000 on their membership rolls into something like 70,000 members.  This dramatic decline has been the result of adopting radically revisionist guesswork about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.  Palmer thinks that this is the direction that the Church of Jesus Christ should now take. This is simply amazing.

Alma the Poet

Here's an early stab at an online essay of the week: a series of short essays entitled The Poetic Genius of Alma the Younger, over at Meridian Magazine.  The link is to Part 1 on Lyricism; there are later installments talking about Virtuosity and about Symbolism. Since my earlier post on depth in Book of Mormon elicited some interest, I though this might be a nice follow-up. The author doesn't try to make an apologetic argument out of his analysis, he just looks at some of the material in Alma as poetry and sees how far he can go with it. I find the author's approach rather refreshing, the kind I would expect from a backpacker turned missionary turned lawyer-poet (from the author bio paragraph accompanying the article).

Law and Marriage

The Worldwide Attack on Marriage is the online essay of the week. It is written by a BYU law prof but is written for a popular audience and is posted at Meridian Magazine. What's interesting about this short essay is that it highlights the more significant role international law is playing in discussions of domestic US law, even something as basic as marriage. You might find his account of experiences with international meetings on the topic to be interesting. However, his comment that the US Supreme Court was "relying on" international law in deciding last year's Lawrence v. Texas case striking down a Texas criminal law against homosexual sodomy might be misleading. Justice Kennedy's decision in that case noted similar cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights, but did so while countering claims that prohibitions against homosexual activities are rooted in "values we share with a wider civilization." They didn't really rely on international law or foreign cases to decide the case. There is no "global test" for US constitutional law. Yet.

The backdrop for this article is the present campaign for a Utah marriage amendment. Amazing how much life in Utah sets the agenda for the global Mormon Church. Surprisingly, this issue has not become a prominent campaign issue, although it did make an appearance at last night's debate. Nevertheless, after the election, plus two months of legal challenges about balloting, vote counting, voter registration fraud, etc., I think the marriage amendment issue will heat up again next year. The author of the essay goes so far as to call marriage a world issue.