Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Menacing Mormons

Just finished Patrick Mason's The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (OUP, 2011). It's an informative book but a bit of a chore wading through 200 pages of 19th-century white southern Protestants assaulting and sometimes killing members of every racial, ethnic, and religious group that wasn't ... white, southern, and Protestant. The short version is that Mormons had it worse than Catholics and Jews but much better than African Americans. But there is more to the story, of course.

The Unwritten Order of Things, Revisited

At last night's Stake Leadership Training Meeting, the stake president announced the first two speakers, both bishops. The second was assigned the topic "the unwritten order of things." Hard to think of a topic more likely to spin out of control — I braced for the worst, and prepared myself for the upcoming train wreck by Googling up a copy of Elder Packer's actual remarks at the 1996 BYU devotional and (#3 on the Google search) Julie's 2009 post "The Problem with the Unwritten Order of Things" and the 103 spirited comments to that post.

On Not Reading the Book of Mormon

Having heard nice things about the odd little book by Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (ht: someone out there), I finally found it. And read it. Summary: You read a very, very small slice of all published books. You forget most of what you read, so you retain only a small part of the few books you actually read. Worse yet, you bend and twist what you do remember to fit your own personal matrix of ideas and experiences. So what is in your head after reading a book, even more so for a book you read years ago, likely bears little or no similarity to the actual text of the book. Maybe we should forget books, forget any claim to link to some text that we supposedly read and remember, and just talk creatively and imaginatively about our own ideas and experiences.

Practical Apologetics: The First Vision

It's not surprising that the First Vision has become one of the faith issues that gets kicked around the Internet these days. Visions are personal experiences of one particular person, so little effort or justification is needed for a third party to doubt or disbelieve another's account of a vision. Most Mormons find it easy enough ignore or reject visions recounted in other Christian traditions without much reflection. As Steven C. Harper notes, "It is vital to recognize that only Joseph Smith knows whether he experienced a vision in 1820. He was the only witness to what happened and therefore his own statements are the only direct evidence. All other evidence is hearsay." [1] But if accepting or rejecting Joseph's accounts of his vision is so straightforward, why has the First Vision become so contentious for some people? Let's consider a few possibilities.