Faith-Promoting Rumor
One of the better bible blogs is Alan Lenzi’s Bible and Ancient Near East. He is also the featured interviewee at biblioblogs this month. I encourage you to read the whole thing. (more…) Read more
One of the better bible blogs is Alan Lenzi’s Bible and Ancient Near East. He is also the featured interviewee at biblioblogs this month. I encourage you to read the whole thing. (more…) Read more
In the 1990’s, I recall a strong movement against a pernicious offense in church education. The spiritual twinkie was soundly criticized as a useless item of spiritual nourishment, bringing only temporary satisfaction, but failing to build a solid diet. (It is likely that such discourse persists today, but I am not in those circles, so I speak here in the past tense). Like the the milk before meat metaphor, the twinkie came to occupy a particular kind of spiritual nourishment... Read more
This weekend Bill Maher’s movie Religulous will be released. I plan to see it. The title is a neologism combining “religious” and “ridiculous,” and gives you some sense of the tone the film will take. The trailer’s soundtrack is “Crazy” by Knarles Barkley. Of course, I haven’t seen it yet since no one has, but I’ve seen him appear on the talk show circuit promoting the movie. I have also seen the trailer, as well as years of Bill Maher... Read more
This is a guest post from The Monk, of Mormon Monastery, a repository of sorts for temple-related bibliography and a LDS Temple FAQ/essays. I have a favorite passage from Ugaritic literature. (Nitsav has written briefly on Ugaritic before. See that post if you need a primer.) I’m just geeky enough that I’d like a nice alphabetic cuneiform scroll* of it framed on my wall. Though everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, few know the Ugaritic texts which are... Read more
The main distinguishing feature of Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective faith, is the capacity and need for critical reflection. The critical reflection is directed both at the self and at a faith tradition. Religious symbols are no longer taken to be ontological realities, but are transformed into conceptual meanings. It is a stage of demythologizing. Finally it is a stage of tension between one’s subjective feelings and the pursuit of objectivity. (more…) Read more
Some non-LDS friends invite you over for dinner on Sunday. Gospel conversation is unlikely. Do you go? Why or why not? If not, how do you respond? How, if at all, is it different than inviting or being invited on Sunday to dine with LDS friends? Read more
The impetus for this post came from a conversation that started here. Since the blog administrator won’t publish my response, I wanted to raise the issue in a more general setting. (Personal attacks on the author of that post will not be tolerated in this thread. Anything that encroaches on an ad hominem–or is overtly condescending– will be deleted.) As religious people we are interested in religious things. This interest, for the most part, extends beyond our own tradition and... Read more
I think that we Mormons help people transitioning from Fowler’s stage 2 to Fowler’s stage 3 remarkably well. I think saying we are in the top 5 or 10% here would not be exaggerating. For those who are not familiar with Fowler’s stages I’ll give a brief summary of stages 2, 3, and the transition in between, followed by why we as Mormons do so well. (more…) Read more
This bounced into my in-box this morning… ————- The emails we have sent out to faculty across the country to date have all dealt with current issues in the academy. It has always been our intention, however, to provide occasional lessons about AAUP history, especially when the past is still with us. This year is the tenth anniversary of one of the AAUP’s more remarkable cases–the 1998 censure of Brigham Young University. The full report is on our Web site. Let me... Read more
Over at By Common Consent there is an article on Mormon pedagogy. The article is actually just a quote from Kevin Christensen, and the salient part is just Kevin Christensen quoting Louis Midgely. Anyway, the substance of the quote is that church pedagogy tends towards ignoring the scriptures and just using the scriptures as a way to “divert attention away from the message and meaning in the text under consideration, and back towards what we already know.” The purpose of... Read more
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