Dave's Mormon Inquiry

LDS Feminism: Another Look

The shrinking pool of Mormon feminists often asks itself, "Where have all the Mormon feminists gone?" Recent examples include In Search of Mormon Feminism (an FMH post last year), a T&S report of a panel discussion just last week, and a discussion of LDS feminist blogging (at Exponent II) as discussed at "Bloggernacle Night" last week. In this post I'll take a stab at answering the question of where the LDS feminists went. Short answer: They turned into animal rights activists. Or they should have. Long answer: Read on.

Blogs as an Open Forum

At "Bloggernacle Night" last week, Nate proposed the idea that LDS blogs represent a "public space" where LDS issues can be presented and discussed, giving due credit for the general concept of a public space (where free discourse can flourish) to Habermas. I'll give a few links where one can read about that general concept, then note how I think LDS blogs fit the schema in some ways but not others. I'll sometimes use the term "open forum," which does a little better job of capturing whatever it is that LDS blogs as a group represent vis-à-vis the larger LDS community.

Church in Smallville

I suppose I ought to post a flagrantly uplifting piece once in a while, just so y'all know I'm not opposed to such a thing. Consulting the April Ensign (I do subscribe), I stumbled on a story by Elder Charles Didier, "The Church: A Community of Saints." He contrasts his family's experience, in the 1950s, in a large Christian congregation with many worshippers ("[W]e didn't say a word to each other during the services, and the priest did everything. My church involvement was less than an hour only once each week.") with what his family found when, as visitors, they first attended their local Mormon congregation:

The meetings were held in a rented house, where the dining room had been transformed into a meeting hall. Before the meeting, the adults chatted amiably and seemed to enjoy being together. The attendance at our first meeting was only 12 to 15, including the five members of our family!

Free Bloggernacle Tour

For all those who attended one of the recent Miller-Eccles meetings in Southern California this weekend and are gingerly poking around the Bloggernacle, welcome! Here's a quick guided tour — just follow the links. The presenters were Nate and Kaimi of Times & Seasons and Caroline of Exponent II. Other blogs referred to by name in Kaimi's presentation include Feminist Mormon Housewives and By Common Consent (group blogs), Dave's Mormon Inquiry (right here, my solo blog), and Mormon Archipelago (not a blog; an aggregator displaying links to posts from many other Bloggernacle blogs). But wait, there's more!

Abortion: Another Small Step

Last year I posted Rethinking Abortion, a post that noted how the three-paragraph article Abortion in the True to the Faith doctrinal booklet published by the Church seemed to signal "a change in policy or at least a shift in emphasis" when compared to prior statements. Now there's another new statement on abortion, this one posted at LDS.org, that is even mellower than the TTTF article. The winds of change are blowing, it seems.

A Slippery Slope?

A conservative (but not libertarian) law prof posted Same Sex Marriage and Polygamy, disagreeing with those who suggest legalizing gay marriage would provide good justification for those who wish to legalize polygamy (termed the "slippery slope" argument by those who use it inversely, as a reason to not recognize gay marriage). Here's his take on how polygamy is a different case that won't automatically follow in the wake of gay marriage, should the latter become a widely accepted and legal practice:

I'm no expert, but my impression is that it really does take a village, and an isolated and coercive one at that, to make polygamy happen. Polygamy, in practice, seems to me essentially a slave trade in underage females, who are bullied and brainwashed by their religious rulers into marrying some nonsense-spouting ogre three times their age. If you rigorously enforced laws that prohibited marriages of women under 18, a lot of polygamy just would not occur.

Technology Might Kill You

As promised, here are comments on another chapter from The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, this time from chapter 2, "The Cracks of Doom: The Threat of Emerging Technologies and Tolkien's Rings of Power," by Theodore Schick, Jr. The article has the Ring symbolizing a new discovery or technology that could Destroy the World As We Know It, then asks what we could or should do about it in the here and now. The decision of the Council of Elrond to attempt the risky destruction of the Ring was even a possibility only because the Ring could be destroyed and never refashioned. The destructive technologies we now face are more like genies that can't be put back in the bottle and pose sobering challenges (both practical and moral) as we stumble into the 21st century.

McMurrin on Evil

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the problem of evil, I want to talk about Sterling McMurrin's surprisingly positive evaluation of the LDS view: "It is in the explanation of moral and natural evil, the most persistent problem with which theistic philosophy must contend, that Mormon theology exhibits its chief theoretic strength" (p. 91; all quotes are from the Signature edition of his short book The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion). The key to Mormonism's approach is its willingness to embrace "the heresy of the finitistic concept of God" (p. 95).

Something Wicked

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." We don't seem to have any trouble identifying (by a gut feeling, a thumb feeling, or some other device) evil persons, entities, or events, but it is trickier than it first appears to give a clear explanation of what exactly constitutes evil, where it comes from, and why it is so prevalent if God is both sovereign and good. I'm going to approach the subject from a comfortable distance, considering the philosophical approach to the "problem of evil" by way of a short essay, "Tolkien and the Nature of Evil," by Scott Davison, chapter 8 in The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (Open Court Pub., 2003). The book has been in my Featured Books queue (left sidebar) for some time now, although it is a short and easy read (hey, I've been busy). I might put up a couple of additional posts from other chapters in the book over the coming week. I'm sure you'll be interested in, for example, "Überhobbits," and "The Bounded Joy of Existentialists and Elves."

Science Is Good For the Soul

A science article reports the latest estimate of the age of the Universe as 13.7 billion years, "give or take a few hundred thousand years." Now that's a long time. In addition, this news has now penetrated the Jello Curtain, as I'm quoting this AP story from the SL Trib. The story summarizes cosmic inflation and pre-inflationary quantum fluctuations as a key to the present lumpiness of the Universe as we know it. Not only are stars clumped into galaxies, but galaxies come in clusters or sheets too — a fact that was particularly hard to explain at one time. As summed up by a Columbia physicist quoted in the article, "Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky.''

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.

South Park, Can You Dig It?

Isaac Hayes could, for awhile, but not anymore. Apparently South Park's habit of ridiculing the beliefs and practices of various religious denominations (aka "good clean fun" to Hollywood types) was something Hayes could handle ... until it devoted an episode to his own Church of Scientology. While some might criticize Hayes' rather delayed and sectarian sense of injustice, I think he deserves credit for (belatedly) becoming more conscious of his own moral values and acting on them at some personal sacrifice (forfeiting whatever benefits he would have received over the balance of his contract with South Park). I don't know if Hayes would risk his neck for his brother man, but he risked something.

Potluck 10

Time to resurrect an old feature, last seen in 2004 here and there. Every blog needs an "around the blogs" feature, I think. I'm not as comprehensive as John C. or as snarky as Steve or as irreverent as the anonymous Snark Committee, but worth reading nonetheless, I hope.

At T&S, Nate gives an etymological argument that Mormonism equals Friendship. It's an odd argument, but it gets to a nice conclusion: We are friendly, aren't we? Perhaps the banner of Mormonism should be "Liberty, Hierarchy, Fraternity." Freedom, friendship, and the chain of command.

Magic Realism

I first came across the term "magic realism" just last year in a series of posts at the award-winning blog AMV (here, here, here, and here). My literary dictionary defines magic realism as "a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic report." Wouldn't you know, I just recently stumbled into magic realism while reading Making the Ghost Dance (Signature, 2006), a short novel by an established Utah author. It's an interesting genre.

Jefferson on Nephites

This is from the Archives, first posted March 3, 2004.

Thomas Jefferson may have been the best educated American of his generation, which informed the quality of his prose and the depth of his observations. Notes on Virginia (1787), his only book, makes clear what a fine observer he really was, guided by his broad education and clear thinking. In Query XI, he provides A description of the Indians.

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 King's English, Part 2

So how did early modern English (the development of which was reviewed in Part 1) actually work in the King James Bible? What forms of grammar and language were used by the translators of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV)? My primary source in the following discussion is chapter 11 of Alister McGrath's In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (Doubleday, 2001). We're working up toward looking (in later posts) at how KJV language got carried forward into the Book of Mormon and into Mormon prayerspeak.

Mormon Movies

Holy Weblog put up a post entitled There's Something About Mormons, giving a few paragraphs (taken from a Washington Post article) on LDS cinema in Utah. It seems some producers are trying to break out of the LDS market, but it's an uphill climb. The full Washington Post story was titled Big-Screen Religion.