What keeps me warmly Mormon through the long nights of cold, cutting dogma and bad faith and that nasty, Christian urge to turn from the stranger and to call the hungry to repent? It’s nonsense, of course. When, with increasing frequency and vehemence, my spiritual home bares its teeth at good, gentle things, it’s the nonsense that keeps me unmoved where I am. I’m tethered to some ideas, certainly. However one chooses to read it, or any of the few... Read more
If Mormonism is a heresy, it’s only a Christian heresy. Which means that Mormonism’s very conflict with traditional Christianity demonstrates its Christian character. In the official record of existence, I have denied that I—a comfortably self-identifying LDS-Mormon—am a Christian. Many of my LDS-Mormon compatriots have voiced markedly, ironically, un-Christian objections to my denial, as though by way of invective they could force me to be Christian against my will. As it is, entities such as orthodoxwiki.org describe Mormonism as a “heretical... Read more
There’s a point in the play, before everything comes apart in disaster, in which the Oedipus chorus wonders, what are we doing? There never was a more genuine religious question. The chorus of Greek tragedy isn’t a remnant of a more ancient, ritual body. We’ve put to bed the old theories that insisted without evidence that Greek tragedy evolved, by some Darwinian mechanism, from a religious ritual that had to do with goats or something else. But this distinctly civic... Read more
Perhaps it’s an example of historical over-reach. But I’m reasonably comfortable suggesting that the LDS church in its current form—in its current character—is much more the product of Brigham Young’s practical determination than of Joseph Smith’s earnest vision. At least, a good case can be made that the way that LDS Mormons are more concerned with moving refrigerators than they are with theological proofs of god’s existence is the consequence of Brigham’s socialist pragmatism rather than of Smith’s religious imagination. ... Read more
We twenty-first-century pundits have become rather accomplished at discussing freedom of religion and freedom from religion. There may be one more preposition we need to add to our religious freedom rhetoric. Back in 2013, the LDS church—often erroneously dubbed “the Mormon church” in disregard of the several, distinct Mormon churches in existence—launched what aspired to be the hub of an Internet campaign to promote religious freedom. The campaign rolled out a Facebook page, a news room, and a cute cartoon that explains why... Read more
My distinct impression is that Avi Steinberg hopes to be able to say in twenty years, “I liked The Book of Mormon before it was cool.”And why not? It’s not impossible that, in the coming generation, The Book of Mormon could be “in”. Much more embarrassing fads have seized America’s popular imagination, from all-protein diets to M. Night Shyamalan to oxygen bars to Seattle. Plenty of us have hung our hats on something silly in the desperate hope that... Read more
One of the more bizarre practices among world religions occurs annually among a small group of devotees in Delhi, India. At a designated time during the last few weeks of the year, and coinciding with the community’s most significant yearly festival, the members of this community come together to perform a ritual which commemorates their sacred history. The rite begins with prayers and hymns, after which, a sacred text is opened and a passage specifically associated with the founding myth... Read more
Where are the bonfires? What we should see around the country these days are crowds of thousands, flinging their U.S. passports into soaring fires, renouncing their citizenship and their allegiance to a country that proves itself, endlessly, a shame and a disgrace.The Shining City on a Hill that we call the United States of America enslaved a population for centuries, then freed that population to a century of murder as the consequence of claiming its unalienable rights, and continues... Read more
“You’re not a religious man?”It’s a question of mild incredulity followed by a statement of the fact that makes the man’s claim to strict secularism so dubious.“But you’re a fisherman.”A bit from the film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which turns out to be a tract, wrapped in a Harlequin romance, wrapped in a sheet. But not a bad movie, for all that. Ewan McGregor is a really fun guy.In any case, the film starts to say something profound... Read more
Here we now, as December comes upon us, open another Xmas season, to remind ourselves of the ideals—human and divine—that ought to guide our lives.Because I am not a Christian, what I might say about the Christian ethos must admit the absence of an insider’s sympathy. Even so, Mormon that I am, I grew up with the Christian story, thinking of it as my own as much as anyone else’s. Anyway, if the story of Jesus is not for... Read more
Aestheism
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