Voices

The winner of the Interpreter Foundation’s 2017 Ruth M. Stephens Article Prize has been chosen.  See the announcement here.

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A nice “Mormon Message,” this one (slightly more than four minutes long) based on remarks by Elder Robert D. Hales of the Council of the Twelve and filmed partially in France:

“Weaving Our Spiritual Tapestry”

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The eminent British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright speaks, in a lecture delivered in New York City on 27 October 2006, of “voices that I believe virtually all human beings, in virtually all cultures, listen for and know, but are puzzled by.”

The first of these is a voice that tells us to do justice.  You don’t have to teach people that there is such a thing as justice.  Go to a school playground where four-year-olds are playing together.  If you listen to what they say — and this is a point straight out of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, to which I happily doff my cap at this point — sooner or later, you’ll hear one of these kids say, “That’s not fair!”

Has the child been to a seminar on modern theories of justice?  No, he hasn’t.  The child just knows that there is such a thing as fairness and that this child who is beating him up or who has just stolen his ball is not obedient to this thing called justice, or fairness.  But, of course, we adults do exactly the same thing, and so do nations and countries and societies.  We all know there should be such a thing as putting things right: doing justice, getting it all sorted out.  But we all find it extraordinarily difficult.  (p. 204)

From N. T. Wright, “Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense,” in Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011), 193-233.

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Heard in a sacrament meeting speech today, one of my very favorite passages of scripture:

And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it.  (Mosiah 2:41)