Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Armstrong on the Emergence of Torah and Scripture

I recently read through Karen Armstrong's The Bible: A Biography (2007). The first two chapters, titled "Torah" and "Scripture," review current scholarship on how the Jewish Bible (aka "the Old Testament") came to be, which makes a good review for the upcoming year of studying the Old Testament in LDS Sunday School. Scholarship does not, of course, define the LDS view of the Bible, but it can help us recognize various questionable Protestant beliefs about the Bible that often get amalgamated with LDS views.

Calling All Introverts

There's hope! At least that's the message of a couple of posts I read through lately (here and here) presenting an interview with Adam McHugh, the author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. By "Church" he means Evangelicals, not the LDS Church, but the discussion is still relevant to us.

Peterson Down Under

The week-long fifth Parlaiment of World Religions just concluded in Melbourne, Australia. BYU professor Daniel C. Peterson chaired the popular session "Islam and the West: Creating an Accord of Civilizations," as reported at the Church's Australian website and, in a briefer account, at the LDS Newsroom blog.

Do We Need A Fifth Mission?

The news is out that LDS leaders are adding a fourth mission for the Church: caring for the poor and needy. According to an official LDS spokesman cited in the Salt Lake Tribune article, the new mission (or purpose or emphasis) will be included in the new edition of the Handbook of Instructions to be issued next year. With a publishing deadline looming, I propose that we put our collective heads together and see whether we need a fifth mission as well. Perhaps adding a fourth mission alone is not enough to fill in the gaps apparently missed by the first three missions.

The Questioning Church

That's a term that pops out of "The Acid Reflux of the Questioning Church," a post at the magazine/blog The Catholic Thing. The author was lamenting the habit of some internal Catholic dissenters of making every event or development an occasion to complain. Sound familiar?

Scriptural Skills: What Are They and Can They Be Taught?

So I'm skimming through one of those unexpected books that you stumble across and somehow end up reading: Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means For the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) by Daniel T. Willingham. In the second chapter he discusses teaching facts versus teaching skills. They are complementary, of course, and both must be taught. How does this relate to what we do in gospel settings? What are scriptural skills and how can they be taught in Sunday School or other church classes?

The Apocalyptic Jesus

I recently worked my way through Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (OUP, 1999), one of Bart Ehrman's earlier books. It is a very readable presentation of Ehrman's position on the historical Jesus issue, accepting and updating Albert Schweitzer's early 20th-century view that the primary proclamation of the historical Jesus was apocalyptic.

We're All Middle-Way Mormons

At the picturesque blog Third-Wave Mormon is a post titled "Is the Middle Way Actually Possible in Mormonism?" Of course it is. We're all in it.