Dave's Mormon Inquiry

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.

Democratic Religion

Earlier I posted on Republican Religion, which touched on the tenor of religion immediately following the Revolutionary War. In this post I review what happened to the American religious scene during the first third of the 19th century, right up to the founding of the LDS Church in 1830. I'm using material from Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800-1830, particularly the second chapter, entitled "Christianizing the Republic."

Internet Mormonism: Threat or Opportunity?

The recent BCC post has shamed me into posting on a few of the articles from the new Winter 2006 issue of Dialogue. One of the reasons I subscribed, after all, was to get an additional source of good blogging material. Time to get my money's worth. The following article is posted online at the Dialogue site, so it's a good one to start with: Perserverence Amid Paradox: The Struggle of the LDS Church in Japan Today. The author, who is LDS and Japanese, is a university English prof in Japan. The article is a pointed reminder of what it is like to be a Mormon outside North America, in a country where Mormons are still considered an oddity rather than a fixture. But the issue from the article that I want to address is the troubling challenge that Internet information about Mormon history presents to LDS members in Japan and, by reasonable extension, in many other countries.

The (Holy) Ghost in the Machine

BYU faculty are encouraged to bring gospel principles and discussions into their teaching and into the classroom. Even in computer science, as illustrated in a recent BYU NewsNet article. I'll just pull a couple of direct quotes from the article that are either quoting or paraphrasing BYU computer science faculty:

• "I feel very strongly that the whole idea of learning by faith is as applicable to computer science as any other endeavor."
• "Personal revelation is key to developing new ideas, solving difficult problems, teaching students in a way that is most meaningful to them."
• "You can't teach without the Spirit."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not like anyone goes to BYU to get away from discussions of God or Mormonism in the classroom. On the other hand, I'm sure there are a few Comp Sci students who sometimes slink down a little lower in their chairs and say to themselves, "Can't we just talk about algorithms today?"

Cities of God

Just finished Rodney Stark's new book, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became An Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (HarperCollins, 2006). Stark centers the book around data he gathered from a variety of scattered sources that address the origin and nature of early Christian congregations in cities of the Roman Empire. Stark crunches the numbers and comes up with some surprising observations. In particular, he looks at the growth of Christianity and its relationship to other religious movements in the Empire: Gnosticism, the Marcionites, the Valentinians, and the Montanists. Isis, Mithras, and Constantine also make appearances. Mormonism even gets a cameo. Here are a few quick points from the book.

Three Takes on Mormon History

As I see it, history offers a more promising avenue for understanding Mormonism than doctrinal speculation (in all its varieties). History offers the advantage of talking about things that actually happened — it's more than just a clever word game. But what do you do with Mormon history? What does it mean? It seems to tell us something relevant about Mormonism and about our own religious identity, but what exactly does it or can it tell us?

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.

Meteorites at BYU

BYU NewsNet reports on a BYU geology prof's presentation on meteorites yesterday (as part of the "Global Awareness" lecture series). We may take the idea of rocks dropping from the sky for granted, but you have to sympathize with the ancients who had to come up with some sort of theory to explain it. Nothing in the BYU story about the age of meteorites, which may or may not have been raised in the talk. They're very old.

Viewer Mail From France

I received an email from a concerned French Latter-day Saint who I'll call "Sophie" (since I'm halfway through DaVinci Code at the moment). Sophie expressed "great concern" over how the Church was (or was not) performing some of its ecclesiastical tasks, as noted below. I will summarize the points and give my brief responses. I would invite readers to make their own comments if they have helpful comments to add.

The Real Jesus

Just finished The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (1996) by Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic scholar (and previously a Benedictine monk and priest). This is a must-read book for anyone who has delved into the "historical Jesus" literature. Johnson targets the book at the Jesus Seminar, its leading scholars, and their claims to have arrived at a (reduced) set of historical facts and teachings related to Jesus. I won't try to recapitulate every argument in the book against exclusive reliance on history and the historical method (as practiced by the Seminar) — you can certainly get a copy of the book and do this yourself. I'll just give a sentence or two on each chapter of this short book of only 177 pages.