Dave's Mormon Inquiry

A Very Short Introduction to the Book of Mormon

I just finished reading Terryl Givens' The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, a recent addition to Oxford University Press's wildly successful VSI series. It gives 125 informative pages on the content, structure, origin, and reception of the Book of Mormon. The book does a fair job of balancing competing views, no easy task for such a controversial subject.

What's Hot

It's been a little slow here lately, but here are a few posts from around the 'nacle that are worth reading. These and others are listed on my Recommended Posts feed.

• How Maine Is Different From Prop 8 at LDS Law: "For Mormons, one of the biggest differences in the two campaigns is that the LDS Church has not taken an active role in the Maine initiative like it did in California."
• Commandments and Revelations at the RSC Blog, praising the latest JSP volume and noting several articles on the volume in the latest issue of BYU Studies.
• The Church of the Big Bang at Mormon Matters. Because astronomy is always cool.

The Marriage Fight in Maine is Heating Up

From the Wikipedia entry, here's the background for the upcoming election fight over the fate of same-sex marriage in Maine.

A bill to allow same-sex marriage in Maine was signed into law on May 6, 2009. Maine is the fifth U.S. state to recognize same-sex marriages, and the second to do so through a legislative process rather than through a judicial ruling. The law would have taken effect on September 11, 2009, but will now be subject to a people's veto in Maine's November 3 elections.

Parsing Elder Holland's "Safety for the Soul" Talk

The transcript of Elder Holland's talk "Safety for the Soul" has been posted at LDS.org, so it's time to take a closer look at it. By parsing, I don't mean twisting the meaning or presenting the speaker as saying something he did not say or did not intend. I simply mean reading the talk closely: the dictionary definition of "parse" is "to analyze critically." To whom was his talk addressed? What did he say? And what did he not say?

The Problem of Evil, or the Great Plan of Misery

The main gate at Auschwitz, through which two million victims passed.

We heard a lot about the Great Plan of Happiness last weekend. What about the Great Plan of Misery? Or, in the classical formulation of the problem of evil, what accounts for the existence of evil in a Universe governed by a benevolent God? You will learn plenty about philosophy's struggle with this problem in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosphy (Princeton Univ. Press, 2002). Her discussion of the philosphical problem is framed by two events that overwhelmed the moral apparatus of their respective eras: the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and the 20th century's Auschwitz. I can't possibly do this dense and illuminating book justice in a short blog post, but I'll certainly recommend it to the philosophically inclined reader.

General Conference: Noticing the Little Things

With a little help from co-blogger Marc, I posted short notes on Conference sessions over at Times and Seasons. Listening closely and taking notes, there were a few little things that I noticed:

To Link or Not to Link

I know blogrolls are kind of passé, but I still update them. I do have to cull the bloated lists from time to time, but I'm not really the cleansing type. Rather than encourage a discussion of the ethics of blogrolling, I'll just say that those who are sensitive about where they link should be cleansers, and those who think a link is just a link (often those who get cleansed) shouldn't worry about it.