Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Nibley in the 101st

Meridian Magazine posts a short review of Sergeant Nibley, PhD: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle, compiled and written primarily by Nibley's son. Hugh Nibley was on Utah Beach on D-Day, 1944. That's amazing when you think about it. If you've seen Saving Private Ryan or watched the TV adaption of Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, you have an inkling of what it was like.

Chess and Fundamentalism

For something completely different, try Chess and Fundamentalist Religion at Jollyblogger. Apparently the complexity of the game is just too much for the polarized worldview of fundamentalists. He quotes David Shenk (who just authored a book on the history of chess) for the fact that chess was banned in Iran under Khomeni and Afghanistan under the Taliban, which I had never heard before. Maybe they just thought it was too fun? Maybe they thought it was evil for a woman (the queen) to be more powerful than the king? Are bishops called imams in Islamic chess-playing communities? If I'm good at chess does that mean I'm ... a religious liberal? So is checkers the game for fundamentalists? What about backgammon?  Risk?  Uno?

Ehrman Interview

My cable company changed last week, so the entire channel lineup got scrambled. As I was laboriously searching through 200 cable channels (hoping the Military Channel was still in there somewhere) I stumbled across Book TV. This is what C-Span2 does on the weekend. Among the several programs I watched was a short interview with Bart Ehrman, author of two books I have reviewed on this site, Misquoting Jesus and The Lost Gospel of Judas. Ehrman is presently the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.

Big Love's Evil Twin

From the SL Trib: Warren Jeffs' preliminary hearing continues in a St. George courtroom, as a witness whose name is being withheld testified about entering an arranged marriage at the tender age of fourteen. She testified that Jeffs officiated at the service, which, according to the article, was held in a motel in lovely Caliente, Nevada. The article includes links to several other SL Trib stories, including one giving details from the witness about her allegedly unhappy marriage, and another reviewing Jeffs' teaching and counsel to his flock on the subject of marriage: that women should be "submissive and obedient," and that men should "'persuade through love' and act with kindness, not force."

No story on this at DN online that I could find. Their top headline was a review of The Work and the Glory III.

Searching for God in Hollywood

For this week's online essay, go read Part 2 of Kieth Merrill's "Write the Truth" series, giving some of his views on what's right and wrong (mostly wrong) with Hollywood and the movie business. Here's a quick summary of his view:

The search for God in the movies accentuates the division between the mainstream motion picture industry and main street USA. Many movies from the heart of Hollywood not only tend to favor stories that are often antagonistic toward faith and/or hostile to religion but leave God out all together.

Going West With the Mormons

I'm halfway through The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), an award-winning retelling of how the West was won. Hint: it's not a pretty picture. While Mormon pioneers get mentioned briefly, the book is more valuable (to the LDS reader) as a summary of just how violent and unfriendly 19th-century America was to those who weren't white and Protestant. It wasn't just the Mormons that got the short end of the stick. But in this post I'll focus on the concept of Mormons as a frontier people. In what way are the Mormons a frontier people, you ask?

Evangelical Cults of Personality

That's how megachurches are described in a recent GR post about the now-disgraced pastor of the New Life Church, an independent megachurch. Take a look at the photo with the story — looks like a sports arena, not a church. Is it worship or a show? The post points out that congregations that affiliate with established denominations have tried and tested procedures for training and supervising clergy, and for subjecting transgressing clergy to various forms of church discipline. But most megachurches "are independent from a denomination — an asset for their flexibility, but a liability when it comes to checks on power." So it's all about power — again, how cultish.

Republican Religion

I'm talking about 18th-century republicans — the Revolutionary War kind of republicanism. I just finished The American Revolution: A History (2002) by Gordon S. Wood. It includes ten pages on "Republican Religion" that speak directly to the religious background of Joseph Smith, Jr., and his parents. Seems like a topic worth sharing.

Methodists as Premillennialists

As my online essay of the week, I'm posting a link to Grant Underwood's essay "Millenarianism and Popular Methodism in Early Nineteenth Century England and Canada". It's a nice complement to his book The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, a new entry to my Featured Books queue (at the bottom of the list — I flipped it). Underwood is a history prof at BYU.

The United Brethren, an offshoot of the Primitive Methodists and a source of many of the English converts to Mormonism in the 1840s, make an appearance in the essay. For collected links to several posts I've put up on Methodism, see here.

The Judas You Never Knew

This is Part 2 of comments on Bart Ehrman's new book, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (OUP, 2006). [See Part 1] It's worth reflecting on just why a book about a gnostic manuscript full of speculative musings about Judas and Jesus which almost certainly have no historical basis can be successfully marketed to a general audience. Answer: The Da Vinci Code ("DVC"). The wildly successful novel has created not just one but two new genres: the religious thriller genre and the non-canonical Christian writings genre. There were books in the second genre before DVC (such as Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels) but it has exploded since, with half of them being expressly designed as refutations of DVC itself. Just imagine what Dan Brown's next book will do for the Mormon Studies market!

The New LDS.org

Go check out the new and improved Gospel Library beta page at LDS.org (hat tip: LDSWebguy). It's slick. Note the "Gospel Topics" feature, front and center, which gives a listing of topics pulled directly from True to the Faith. Click on a topic, it opens up to a menu giving the full TTTF entry; active links to scriptures on the topic; direct links to Ensign articles on the topic; and so forth. So TTTF is now the schema for organizing and presenting LDS doctrine at LDS.org. This confirms what some have been arguing for almost two years now, that TTTF isn't just a doctrinal booklet, it is the doctrinal booklet. (That last point sounds better if you actually read it out loud; looks kind of silly in text.) TTTF is the long delayed official rejoinder to Mormon Doctrine. Thirty years late, but there it is.

Culture War

Still ... processing ... Tuesday. At First Things, there's a short note (which I'll designate my online essay of the week) on the nature of the Left's opposition to the conflict in Iraq: "The left, however, has seen Iraq almost entirely as a culture-wars issue. From the moment the invasion looked imminent, the left responded with petitions, denunciations, marches, placards, screeds—the whole leftist arsenal since the 1960s for fighting the culture wars." So to the Left, it's not really a military conflict; it's a culture war. Politics. Isn't it a little disconcerting to think that those now apparently in a position to determine (or at least influence) foreign policy and military strategy might not have their head in the game? At least the right game. Conservatives are fighting insurgents and terrorists. Liberals are fighting conservatives.

Et tu, Montana?

I've been watching the election returns this evening — it's all too depressing to blog about anything meaningful tonight. Montana, for example, has apparently elected a lentil farmer with a crew cut, giving the Democratic Party a majority in the Senate. Not just a lentil farmer, an organic lentil farmer! I will show my disapproval by boycotting lentils (of any kind) for the next ... oh, let's say five years. After two hours of watching talking heads hold forth on what "the American people" were saying in this election, I couldn't take it anymore. If I weren't Mormon, I suppose I'd go out drinking. Instead I clicked over to Military Channel and watched a show on mortars and howitzers for an hour. That cheered me up. I guess I'll muddle through.

American Gospel

Just finished Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006). It is an extended essay on how American presidents from Washington to Reagan have practiced and supported public religion. The author takes on the task of defending the middle ground against two extremes. From the right are those who portray America as a Christian nation, which misrepresents public religion as a form of sectarian religion. From the left are those who, relying on Jefferson's metaphor of The Wall (separating Church and State), would like to banish any hint of religious discourse from the public sphere, making no distinction between public religion and sectarian religion. Meacham supports his reasonable middle position with a pleasantly readable sampling of American political history and a wide variety of presidential quotes.

Orwell's Encounter With Mormonism

I was hoping for something interesting when I clicked on this post at M-Star last week claiming a link between George Orwell and Mormonism, but it was a hoax. Okay, call it a clever hook — something I would never do. But then, lo and behold, just the next day I stumbled across the following passage in Down and Out in Paris and London recounting Orwell's actual encounter with two Mormon missionaries in interwar England.

Judas and the Gospels

This is an intro post on Bart Ehrman's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (OUP, 2006). Someone at OUP noticed my post on Misquoting Jesus and was kind enough to send me a copy of Lost Gospel to review. My advice: buy it. Buy three or four and give them to friends. Okay, first read my comments, then decide for yourself. But Ehrman writes well and is very informative — without forcing his naturalistic, historical framework on the reader — so you can hardly go wrong with any of his books. In this post, I'll sketch out his review of Judas in the canonical gospels. In a later post I'll get to the new material drawn from the recently discovered Gospel of Judas manuscript.

Hinckley Denounces War

The SL Trib report of President Hinckley's "personal and poignant address" led with his comments against war: "What a fruitless thing it so often is, and what a terrible price it exacts." Articles also ran in the Deseret News and BYU NewsNet.

President Hinckley's counsel reminds me of FDR's famous "I Hate War" speech, delivered in August 1936. It was captured on film, and I recall seeing a documentary with a clip showing FDR deliver the key lines with truly impressive gravity:

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping exhausted men come out of line — the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.