While looking on www.deseretbook.com this morning for something, I noticed a link to Time Out Tours. I have also noticed that Meridian Magazine has its own tour business. I am sure that there are many others out there (I’d be interested in collecting these links, so if anyone knows of one, please put it in the comments). These tours are interesting to me because they deal with not only educational tours to Book of Mormon lands, Israel/Palestine, and Church History... Read more
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re not big on modernist notions of truth around here. Thus, as you can probably guess, I am not much of a believer in Natural Law. There is certainly a strain of Mormon thinking that has attempted to identify with the Natural Law tradition. Do we do this because there is something valuable about the Natural Law tradition besides its intellectual heritage? Does this actually have anything to offer us Mormons, or is it leading... Read more
This relates to a post I started before going on Christmas break on the topic of idol worship. I do intend to fully respond and revive that particular issue, but in this post I would like to know others thoughts on the related topic of communal judgment. In other words, in the Bible there seem to judgments made against entire groups of people: Sodom and G., the people during the time of Noah, and many of the non-Israelite tribes in... Read more
This bit of light writing was composed in response to an email from a friend. I have left it with that content and format except for a postscript added this afternoon. The question posed was the relationship between blasphemy against the Spirit and all that other business about demons and Beelzebul in Mark 3. How amazing that your question should concern the binding of the strong man passage! That is precisely the passage we are going to cover in GD... Read more
I’ve thought a little about this in the past but I was reminded of it again when I ran across a couple in our ward who had gone through the temple for the first time and when I asked how it went they remarked, “Temple prep sure didn’t help.”There is obviously a gap between what we are preparing new inductees for and what they experience. Now, I don’t necessarily have many numbers to support such a statement, but having gone... Read more
I apologize in advance if this post is mostly anecdotal, but I have been concerned for a while about the business practices of some Mormon run companies specializing in door-to-door sales. I have several friends who have taken positions in companies selling a range of things, from pest control services and alarm systems, to knives. For the most part, their experiences have been terrible. The companies of which I am aware tend to recruit male returned missionaries as their sales... Read more
As a freshman at BYU and a new Ancient Studies Club member I had the opportunity to hear one of the best lectures on predestination in Paul. I’d grown up being taught that I should read “foreordain” for every “predestinate” in the NT. (this isn’t necessarily wrong but we’ll get to that later) But here was an LDS scholar arguing for real, genuine predestination in Paul and boy was he convincing. (more…) Read more
JohnR has an excellent and touching entry at FMH on the lack of male feminists in the church. While I am not convinced that not claiming the label “feminist” means that one supports wife-abuse, date rape, eating disorders, or sex trafficking (I thought that Mormons opposed all of those things regardless of whether or not they were feminists…), nor do I think that the Vagina Monologues ritual is really all that great for anybody, I am sympathetic to the sentiment... Read more
A refreshing post at BCC asked bloggers what they were going to do for New Year’s, given that New Year’s Eve falls on Sunday. (Refreshing because rather than debate the requirements of Sabbath observance they actually talked about what they were doing.) This got me thinking again about a question that came up in a class on Christian use of the Hebrew Bible. The professor, who is a well-known expert in Judaism and early Christianity, said that Christian application of... Read more
This time of year Isaiah gets more airtime than at any other point in the calendar, thanks in no small part to GF Handel. One passage used by Handel is taken ultimately from Isa 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call his name EMMANUEL, God with us.” Careful readers of scripture will note that this is not exactly as Isaiah has it: “God with us” is a gloss explaining the name Immanuel, which gloss... Read more
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