Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Victorian Doubt

"Books contain a deadly and secret poison. Many a young man has been destroyed by reading a single volume." No, that's not a quote from a recent General Conference; it was written in 1829, warning young Englishmen about the dangers of reading scholarly analyses of Christian history and doctrine. The quote is the first paragraph in a short CT essay entitled The Power of Books, highlighting the struggles of 19th-century Victorians with higher criticism and with evolution. The Victorian debate sounds surprisingly similar to the ongoing dialogue between apologists and religious liberals within the LDS Church. Will Mormonism, too, split into fundamentalist/conservative and liberal camps? If it did, which would you follow?

[Note: Busy, busy. Light blogging for another week.]

Pearl of Great Price

I had a reader send me an inquiry about the Pearl of Great Price (PoGP), a short collection of canonized LDS scripture which offers translated writings from Moses and Abraham, as well as an enhanced version of Matthew 24 and a short history of Joseph Smith's early experience through the publication of the Book of Mormon. Specifically, the reader is looking for additional details on the publication history of the PoGP. Here's my best link: the Encyclopedia of Mormonism article on the PoGP, by Kenneth W. Baldridge. Anyone with other good sources, please note them in the comments.

Bushman at Session 1

Meridian posted a summary of the first session of the recent Joseph Smith Symposium at the Library of Congress. The article is the first of a series of balanced overviews of the conference sessions. They're a nice way to review the conference without having to sit through the whole video archive. Richard L. Bushman (emeritus history prof at Columbia) was the primary presenter at the first session, with responses by Robert V. Remini (emeritus history prof at Chicago), Richard T. Hughes (history prof at Pepperdine), and Grant Underwood (history prof at BYU).

Teen Religion

Christian Smith, one of the authors of Soul Searching (the book Pres. Hinckley cited at the last General Conference) gave a presentation at BYU this week, reported the SL Trib in an article headlined Study Ranks Mormon Teens No. 1 in Religiosity Nationwide. Smith noted that LDS teens "are the most intensely religious teens in the nation." Hmmm. From another perspective, if there is such a thing as a teenager being too religious, LDS teens are the group most at risk. Not the biggest risk facing teens, I suppose.

Kung on Modernity

I've just finished breezing through Hans Kung's Great Christian Thinkers (1994), which looks at seven Christian theologians: Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher, and Barth. I confess that the discourse of 20th-century theologians is utterly baffling to me; the words and categories employed just seem to lack any objective content. So I'll write a paragraph or two on Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), termed by Kung the first theologian who was "a modern man through and through." What does this mean?

Worship Wars

That's what Get Religion calls the Protestant debate over church services, which at first looks like "simply electric guitars against the pipe organ." But they explain there are also generational conflicts at work (the GI generation versus Boomers versus Gen X and Y) and possibly doctrinal conflict as well. The article profiles one congregation's "contemporary urban experience" service, "an alternative service staged by the church at a nearby nightclub that offers live rock music and a casual atmosphere that doesn’t frown on flip-flops and nose piercings." Chez LDS, I'd settle for a "contemporary suburban experience," but haven't run across one yet, at least on the mainland.

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.

McKay and Modern Mormonism

Julie at T&S provides a short review of the newly published biography of President David O. McKay, now on my "must read soon" list. I have been alternating my Book of the Month selections between what, for lack of better terms, I will call "Signature books" and "sympathetic" treatments of LDS history. I just finished Arrington's Brigham Young (sympathetic); I'm now reading The Prophet Puzzle (Signature; see upper left). Next I'll move into the 20th century, with a quick reread of Alexander's Mormonism in Transition (sympathetic), then Quinn's biography of J. Reuben Clark (Signature), and finally the new Prince biography of David O. McKay (blunt but sympathetic).

Sideblog Saturday

Here's a chance for you to comment on any sideblog entries you find interesting and maybe start your own discussion. Make sure you note which post your comment refers to. The ones from the list that really jump out at me right now are the T&S post on exposing LDS children to descriptions of graphic violence (which I called a "truly disturbing blog post") and the AZ post on ideological discourse (the most recent entry).

Bloggernacle Times - Issue No. 13

The recent Library of Congress conference on Joseph Smith headlines this week's list of articles.

The Joseph Seminar by Justin Butterfield
Catch-Up by Clark Goble
Satan, the Fall, and Adam-God by Ronan James Head
Weekly Zeitgeist by Steve
The Last Word by Dave

View From Fifth Avenue

The B'nacle's large NYC contingent might be interested in a GetReligion post on the New York Times' continuing reflections on what it means to be a liberal newspaper in conservative America. I'm not sure what's driving the sudden concern, but my cynical side suspects it must be either circulation concerns or advertiser feedback. Perhaps someone who actually reads some of all the news that's fit to print can comment.

The Prophet Puzzle, Part 1

After finishing Arrington's biography of Brigham Young last month, I moved The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith (Signature, 1999) into my Book of the Month slot (upper left). I bought the book a couple of years ago, but with the recent JS conference and Bushman's upcoming biography, now is the time to read it. While many of the essays were published earlier as articles in Dialogue or the Journal of Mormon History, the book as a whole is still useful for laying out many of the issues a modern (i.e., post-Brodie) JS biographer must confront. I'll use my reading of the essays to put together a list of questions I'll bring to Bushman's JS bio when it comes out later this year.

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.

On Satan

Touchy subject. An LDS seminary scripture (the next on our list) reads: "Pray always, that you may come off conqueror; yea, that you may conquer Satan, and that you may escape the hands of the servants of Satan that do uphold his work" (D&C 10:5). Well, seems like good advice to give LDS teenagers, but talking about the Devil in such blunt terms makes some people a little skittish. And who exactly are these "servants of Satan"?

Mormons and Jews

An LDS diplomat authored a short article (in the Jewish Journal of LA) giving his view of surprising ties and common interests between Mormons and Jews. Most Mormons have heard of Orson Hyde's 1841 prayer for a gathering, but the article notes more recent items such as the BYU Study Abroad center built in Jerusalem in 1987 and the substantial support the Church has recently provided to several related Dead Sea Scrolls projects. The article also notes fascinating overlaps between certain Jewish holy days and key foundational events in LDS history. Finally, for biographical data on the author, an interesting story unto himself, see this earlier story.

Blog Upgrades

I have uploaded my second attempt at a banner image (in case you missed it, here's the first attempt). I have managed to bend Photoshop to my will, but not without a fight. The term that leaps to mind is "counterintuitive graphical interface." I also patched in some code to give numbering and permalinks for individual comments, particularly useful when you want to single out someone's comment here for praise and honor (or for criticism and ridicule) in a post at your own weblog. Any resemblance to similar comment functionality at this blog is purely coincidental.

Bloggernacle Times - Issue No. 12

Selected posts from LDS bloggers like you and me.

Origin of the Universe II by Clark Goble
History is More or Less Bunk by Justin Butterfield
Weekly Zeitgeist by Steve
The Last Word by Dave

At Sea With Jack London

I finished The Cruise of the Snark, a collection of Jack London essays recounting his cruise on a sailing boat he had built from scratch in San Francisco. He, his wife Charmain, and several sailing companions sailed to Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, and eventually the Solomons between 1907 and 1909. The plan was to go around the world, but various picturesque island maladies overcame the crew, including London, while in the Solomons, which ended the adventure. Surprisingly, reading travel narratives is a little like reading early LDS history. How so, you ask?

Conservatives and Liberals

Liberal, conservative, and fundamentalist Christians—stereotypes or useful categories? At PlaidBerry, a Christian blog, there's a post distinguishing reasonable conservative Christians from extreme fundamentalist Christians as well as from arrogant, amoral liberal Christians. Sound familiar? It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn the author of that post is a "reasonable conservative Christian." I wonder whether the popular Mormon dichotomy (conservative versus liberal Mormons, iron rodders versus Liahonans) might be improved by upgrading to a trichotomy similar to the one used in the linked post (i.e., fundamentalist, conservative, and liberal Mormons)?

Mormon Theme Park

That's right: here's the home page. It even has its own temple! There's a catchy ad slogan ("Never a better time to see Nauvoo!"), live music and performances, fun for the whole family. If you get strange vibes touring the website, note that the small print identifies the site as the "Official Website of the Illinois Nauvoo Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." What a relief: Here I thought someone was commercializing Mormon history to make a few bucks! No, they're just commercializing Mormon history to make a few converts, that's completely different. And if it must be done, who better to do the commecializing?

FYI, there's a night shot of the new Nauvoo temple on my new banner image—second from the right. But look quick, it might be gone tomorrow.

Putting Out the Fire

LDS Newsline reports that a national psychology association is feeling really bad about comments they published concerning the recent documentary "Get the Fire!" The controversial comments in the documentary concerned its characterization of LDS methods for "retaining members and motivating missionaries." The PBS.org site has a short summary of the documentary, which follows several LDS missionaries through the MTC then over to Germany. Has anyone seen the documentary?