Levi Savage, William Kimball and the Mystery of Redemption
At the outset I should state that I do not think this is a very good title, but it is the only thing I could come up with. So forgive me if it is mis-leading. The Willie Handcart Company has...
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A Bloggernacle Church Handbook of Instruction
Just recently I was re-reading an essay by Eugene England entitled ‘On Finding Truth and God’. It has been something that has helped me deal with, or rather live with, my own doubts. So helpful in...
View ArticleFinding Meaning in Suffering: Part 1
Two of the writers I have come to admire most over the last year have both said that they do not believe all suffering is meaningful, but I struggle to accept that emotionally even though it makes...
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A British Thanksgiving (on the Down-Low)
This is kind-of an impromptu post and so I hope you can forgive the intrusion. But, I love Thanksgiving. Ever since I celebrated it for the first time as a missionary I was hooked. Good food. Fun....
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Anish Kapoor on Spirituality
On the BBC, there is a great series of Art documentaries entitled ‘Imagine’. Alan Yentob, a Television Executive, presents them and in the most recent, as of 18th Nov 2009, Yentob interviews and...
View ArticleReally Elder McConkie? You think Education is Worship!
From an outsiders perspective, Mormon worship services may be perceived as lacking actual worship. We spend two and a half of our three hours in classes or listening to sermons. We have (maybe) half...
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Have you ever received a Christmas card from the First Presidency?
This year I received a Christmas card from the First Presidency. I have heard that Church employees get one, but it has not been my experience so far. Nor did it occur to me that I would get one. I...
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‘Christmas’ or ‘Winter Festival': I’m not sure I care!
This must be the the third year that I have heard people bemoan government plans to change the name of Christmas to ‘Winter Festival’ or some such other variant. A little research shows that this is...
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Gregory House and Emmanuel Levinas: Finding Meaning in Suffering: Part 2
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on suffering. Resulting from a thoughtful critique of that post, by Andrew S, and a recommendation (in the following discussion) to read Emmanuel Levinas’ essay on...
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The Word of Wisdom and the Temple: Personal, Political and Prophetic Dimensions
Obedience to the Word of Wisdom, it is commonly known, was not always a requirement for entering the Temple or advancement in the Priesthood. What is less clear from the historicl record is when this...
View ArticleRichard Dawkins, God and Santa Claus: Belief as a Form of Abuse
Between Christmas and New Year I had the opportunity to meet with some friends and at one point during the evening we began discussing the role of Santa Claus in raising children. As I was thinking...
View ArticleDialogue Subscribers and Book of Mormon Historicity?
In 2005 Dialogue conducted research among it’s subscribers. There was over a 1,000 responses which (assuming that everyone answered every question) is a fairly good sized sample to infer what the...
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On Being an Apostle but not in the Quorum
‘In 1866, at the age of only twenty-seven, Joseph F. Smith was ordained an Apostle by President Brigham Young, and served briefly as one of his special additional counselors. When a vacancy occurred in...
View ArticleOn Failed Patriarchal Blessings
Some time ago I spoke to someone I knew about a Patriarchal blessing they had received which seemed to have failed to come to pass. We discussed it at some length and I then asked them if I could have...
View ArticleCommitting Spiritual Murder: Analysing Alma 39
Michael Ash in a Sunstone article entitled ‘The Sin “Next to Murder”’ has argued that Alma’s exhortation to his son Corianton (who had ran off with an woman of ill-repute), that ‘these things are an...
View ArticleChurch Growth and the Tendency toward Liberalism
Some time ago, as a guest I wrote a post entitled ‘Academic freedom in the Church‘ which tried to explore some of liberalizing tendencies seen in LDS culture since the September Six, but particularly...
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The Sacred Made Real: Mormonism, Iconography and the Passion of Christ
A few weeks ago I attended an exhibition entitled ‘The Sacred made Real’ at the National Gallery in London. The collection was focussed on Spanish hyper-realism (painting and sculpture) between...
View Article‘God is not an enemy of Human Appetite’: The Church, the Lord and the M-Word
Disclaimer: This post, as you might expect, does contain some overtly sexual references to specific parts of the body that are prominent in human sexuality. If you think this might offend you then...
View ArticleSelf-Esteem and Sexuality: Another approach to Chastity
I want to take a lead from Hawgrrrl, who recently posted on the value of Sex Education in trying to reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancies and instil values of chastity in young people, but approach...
View ArticleBad, Worse and Worst
I would like to use Genesis 12 (and an interesting post by Aaron B from BCC) to examine the inverse of Elder Oak’s famous talk ‘Good, Better and Best’. Simply stated Abraham was married to Sarai (who...
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Memorialising the Holocaust: Post-memory and the Latter-Day Saints
According to Arrington and Bitton, “most individual responses of modern Mormons involve a kind of tie with the past”[1] . History is central to the Latter-day Saint faith. Stories from Latter-day Saint...
View ArticleProphets, Seers and Bureaucrats
I listened recently to a Mormon Expression podcast with John Dehlin, in which he comments upon the difficult position the Church leaders face. He observes that their are times when they make...
View ArticleA Marital Confession
A recent visit at FMH and John Dehlin’s Mormon Stories interview with fmhLisa (Butterworth) has made me realise something about myself that I am not very proud of. Therefore, in the spirit of a post I...
View ArticleMormon Myths as Transferable Charisma
Richard Bushman has recently given a presentation on ‘Joseph Smith and the Routinization of Charisma’. One of Bushman’s arguments seems to be that Charisma was located in the office rather than the...
View ArticleJoseph Fielding McConkie and the Lens of Literalism
In a recently published book ‘Between the Lines: Unlocking Scripture with Timeless Principles’ (2009), Joseph Fielding McConkie tries to deal with the issue of discerning between what is ‘Literal’ and...
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