Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Your Opinion Requested

I've had a bona fide inquiry from someone doing research into the religious experience of active Mormons. I'll respond, of course, but I'm not sure my own experience and opinions represent "mainstream Mormon experience," so I'd like to invite any interested readers to give their own responses to one or both of the following questions. You can also email me your response if you prefer, and I'll forward it to the interested researcher. As a quid pro quo, I hope to get a summary of the researcher's findings in the next month or two and share them in a blog post. Here are the questions:

1. What is the main attraction of the Mormon faith for you? [I imagine that many people might respond with something like "My conviction that it is the true church," in which case you might add one or two aspects of activity in the Church or of LDS doctrine that you find particularly attractive.]
2. Describe your understanding of the Mormon view of salvation. And do you feel assured that you have obtained or will obtain that salvation?

Mormon Symbols

Nobody really picked up on my brief discussion of Christian and Mormon symbols in yesterday's post, so I'll prod y'all a little with this week's online essay, "Symbolism." There are actually two articles at that link, one an essay by Todd Compton from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism and one an entry from Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McConkie.

The Soul of Christianity

Just finished Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition (2005). Huston Smith is a Christian scholar who stresses the broad, ecumenical themes of religion and Christianity. He was a friend and colleague of Joseph Campbell; he notes that "early on we agreed to divide mythology's turf between us: he would defend its power and I its truth." So Smith is well qualified to identify a handful of doctrines, beliefs, and symbols that constitute the "soul of Christianity." My previous post featured Bertrand Russell's definition of a Christian (to believe in God and immortality, and affirm Jesus Christ as the Son of God or at least as the most exalted of moral teachers), a definition which certainly includes Mormons. I wonder how Mormons match up using Huston Smith's list?

The End of Sam Harris

Get Religion posted "Covering Shallow Arguments," a short post on Letter to a Christian Nation, the new Sam Harris book. The title to the GR post says it all. It discusses this review of the new book from the Washington Post. No one seems too impressed with Harris, except for the fact that his books are bestsellers. Go figure. In recent weeks I posted two sets of comments on The End of Faith, his first book: The End of Faith: A Preview, and A Tree Died For This?

Why I Am Not a Christian

That's the title of a famous talk given by Bertrand Russell, which I hereby designate my online essay of the week. You don't have to agree with him to enjoy his remarks, but if you read it, you might find yourself agreeing with more than you would expect. Russell is unhappy with Christian theology and orthodoxy, and more generally with Christendom and its early-20th-century politics. But Mormons aren't always happy with Christian orthodoxy or institutions either. Take for example the definition of a Christian.

Bloggernacle as Middle Ground

J. posted about the angst of Mormon dissenters over at BCC and a mild kerfuffle ensued when DAMU visitors took exception. JDC may have revved it up a bit with "My enemies list" (an odd title for a post that supposedly tried to explain why there was really nothing to argue about). Since DMI came up in the first post, I thought I would reply and announce a couple of related blogroll changes here.

First, I eliminated the controversial "Borderlands" typelist from my sidebar. Several entries were defunct anyway. Of the three survivors, Sunstone Blog is now a full-fledged link in Group Blogs, and the other two are now in my newly rechristened "Solo Blogs" (see well down the right sidebar). Solo Blogs has B'nacle blogs, non-B' nacle LDS blogs, DAMU blogs, secular blogs, Christian blogs, even an anti-Christian blog. Like ebony and ivory, living together in perfect harmony, right there on my sidebar. It's not intended to be a comprehensive list of solo blogs, of course. Try MA for the B'nacle and Equality Time for DAMU if you want longer lists.

Dialogues With Myself

I'm pleased to note that Dialogues With Myself: Personal Essays on Mormon Experience (1984), a collection of essays written by Eugene England, is now available online at the Signature Books Library. If, like me, you haven't read much written by England, here's an easy way to get acquainted. For example, Chapter 3, The Possiblity of Dialogue, was the editorial he wrote for the very first issue of Dialogue. Here's a paragraph from the middle of that short essay:

Such a dialogue seems to me to depend on some initial commitment to values, to some beliefs that give a person a place from which to speak and a purpose for speaking. It can be engaged in best by those who hold fast that which is good. But such a dialogue depends also on willingness to prove all things. We must be willing to consider that anything we believe or base our lives upon may be a partial truth—at best something seen (as Saint Paul also said) "through a glass darkly"—or even may be dead wrong. We must take seriously the jovial words of the distinguished Mormon chemist, Henry Eyring, "In this Church we don't have to believe anything that isn't true."

Monday Musings

Here are a few interesting posts to get your blogging week started:

• Mirror of Justice reposts a short piece by Luke Timothy Johnson on the Catholic intellectual tradition. He writes some excellent NT books for general readers.
• Reformation Theology posts "I'm Not Like Them!", a critique of the hypocrisy of Pharasaism. Look for Joseph Smith's name in the short list of "them," which also includes Adolph Hitler, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and Mohammed.
• A portait of Jesus comes off the wall at a West Virginia high school.
• A must read: Becker and Posner on polygamy. Gary Becker starts with: "For a long time I have found the practice of polygamy intriguing, and have wondered why opposition to this form of marriage is so strong in the United States and most of the world ..."
• Get Religion reviews a Washington Post article on a current display of biblical manuscripts somewhere near the Washington Mall and how it won't destroy your faith.

Echoes of Greek Religion

Just finished Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (Yale Univ Press, 1996) by Thomas R. Martin. The book is a nice overview of Greek history and culture. After reading A War Like No Other, I wanted to "fill in the gaps" and see how the carnage of the Peloponnesian War gave rise to Alexander and his conquest of the East. And, after reading Between the Testaments, I wanted to see how Greek religion and philosophy, as mediated by Hellenistic culture, contributed to developing Christianity. The omission of the Apocrypha from modern bibles and the modern Christian (and Mormon) consciousness works to suppress the Greek influence; it takes a little work to find it, but it's definitely there.

The Mother of All Tip Jars

See here. So now I don't feel so bad about hosting Google Ads and Amazon links. Say, have you checked out the DMI Bookstore yet? My thanks to the three people who bought Between the Testaments: From Malachi to Matthew using links from this site over the last two weeks. Sign in and take a bow. All three of you paid less than half of what I did (got mine new at the BYU Bookstore).

Mormon Blogs Get Recognized

In a recent SL Trib article about Dialogue's 40-year anniversary dinner, the current editor of Dialogue was quoted as follows about the "graying" of the Dialogue audience:

"Mormon blogs are where young people have gone," Peterson said from his home in Washington. "It's where they get their intellectual stimulation."

Well, on a good day there's some intellectual stimulation. Still, I feel bad that so many of us are wasting our time blogging around but not pitching in to keep Dialogue afloat. I felt bad enough last year to kick in for a 3-year subscription. If you feel bad too, click here to ease your pain. You can't put the Bloggernacle on your coffee table to impress the home teachers.

Early Christians

Today's scholars see amazing diversity in the first few centuries of Christianity. It lasted until the Christians obtained temporal power with the conversion of Constantine. I just finished reading through the short book The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities (2006), which summarizes some of those early "heresies," starting with the gnosticism. Here's a short tour based on the book.

News Update

The off-again, on-again BYU Study Abroad in Israel is back on for January, but with a scaled down enrollment. Let's hope they have a pleasantly uneventful stay in the Holy Land. Also, this sad story about a fatal missionary mishap in South Africa. How about some good news ... uh, BYU students are studying more.

FYI, one of my old BCC posts is up as the Vintage BCC feature of the week (top of right sidebar).

A Tree Died For This?

I sort of signed on to the Mind on Fire reading club project for The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason, so now I have to say something nice about it ... no easy task. Here goes: I have learned, over the years, how to pick a good book. You get to know authors, you look for university presses, you check who endorses the book on the back cover, you note the author's tone and perspective in the Introduction, and so forth. I've gotten pretty good at it so I don't normally read bad books anymore. If you read nothing but good books, you recalibrate your expectations, forgetting how pathetic a badly written book can be. If you have fallen into this trap, you should read The End of Faith. It will remind you how badly a book can be written and still become popular.

Nicene Links

Are Mormons Christian? For a new take on that timeless question, go read The Nicene Creed and Christianity at Positive Liberty (the post includes several paragraphs from an LDS correspondent). It features a link to The Nicene Creed by Clayton Cramer, another libertarian blogger, again with several paragraphs on Mormonism's view of the Creed. Honestly, I didn't know anyone else really cared. I did think Mr. Cramer, having linked to two posts from the All About Mormons responses page, should have linked to its Are Mormons Christian? page, too. It posts a half-dozen LDS variations on the "of course we're Christian" response.

The Politics of American Religious Identity

Just finished Kathleen Flake's The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004). The long title pretty much explains the whole book: Reed Smoot, a Mormon Apostle, was elected in 1903 to represent Utah in the US Senate, but a groundswell of opposition from women's groups and Protestant clergy led the Senate to refer the whole matter to its Committee on Privileges and Elections. The Committee then spent four years holding hearings as part of its "investigation" into Smoot, which was, in fact, largely a political attack on the Church as an institution. In the end, it failed, and Smoot took his seat, serving until 1933 and going on to become one of the most powerful and respected members of the Senate. The author uses the book and the Smoot hearings to investigate not the LDS Church but American religion in general during this period. In particular, the book uses the politics of the Smoot hearings to illustrate and highlight the change from 19th-century moral reform movements to 20th-century secular politics dominated by politicians who supported governmental neutrality over Protestant moralizing. God moves in mysterious ways: He used Smoot, TR, and the Republican Party to get the Protestants out of politics and Utah into the Union. Amen and amen.

Bookstore Upgrades

I upgraded the Mormon Inquiry Bookstore, adding blurbs to each of the nine books featured on the main page and adding Bart Ehrman's new book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot to the display. I'd be interested in feedback from anyone who has used the bookstore through the checkout and payment phase, for example the two people who recently purchased Between the Testaments using links from this site (thanks!).

Changes in the Land

I've got four books in my "completed and need to be blogged about" stack. First up: William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, winner of the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize (awarded to the best book in American history each year). It has been sitting on my shelf for years; I finally hauled it down to complement The American West, which I'm halfway through. First I'll talk about Nephites and North American Indians, then I'll summarize the book. Oh, and keep your eyes open for my new blog widget.

Framing the Jeffs case

Erik Luna, a law professor at the U, posted a short analysis of the legal issues in the upcoming Warren Jeffs case, The Polygamy Case That Isn't (hat tip: Positive Liberty). He suggests the case will turn on the straightforward facts of whether the FLDS teenager who married an FLDS man with Jeffs' strong encouragement did, in fact, refuse or attempt to refuse the sexual advances of her FLDS husband but was improperly persuaded or pressured to submit by Jeffs (who was thus aiding and abetting a rape).

Despite declaring that the case is not about polygamy, Luna can't resist talking about it anyway in the final section. He is surprisingly ambivalent ("Is it really anyone else's business when consenting adults want to form a domestic union?"), even suggesting that Article III in the Utah Constitution (forever prohibiting plural marriages) may be open to a constitutional challenge. Bottom line: we're all going to hear an awful lot about polygamy before this case is over.

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.