Trouble, Right Here in Sal Tlay Ka Siti “I always think there’s a band, kid.” —Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man By the time that I figured out that I hated The Music […]
“Bound Hand and Foot with Graveclothes” a perspective on the new Race and the Priesthood page by Editor Kristine Haglund cross-posted at ByCommonConsent
I had never noticed before last Easter that Lazarus comes out of the tomb still “bound hand and foot with graveclothes.” He is not radiantly restored to life; he must have been a terrifying spectre. Jesus leaves it to those who believe to finish the miracle–to unbind their brother and be the ones who “let him go” by bidding him come back to them. God’s healing work was finished, but Lazarus could not be restored to life until those witnesses who “believed on” Jesus caught a glimpse of the life He came to offer, overcame their squeamishness and even their religious conviction that having anything to do with the dead was taboo, and went to work bringing Lazarus fully back into their communal life, which would be transformed forever by his return.
There’s a danger, of course, in drawing the parallels too closely, but I think there might be something for us to learn from this story in figuring out how we ought to respond to the remarkable statement on race and priesthood posted at lds.org
Cross-posted at By Common Consent by Blair Hodges
Last week, popular Christian evangelist Ravi Zacharias returned to Salt Lake City to address Mormons and other Christians from the Tabernacle pulpit. Back in 2004, Zacharias’s historic Tabernacle address was overshadowed in the news by Richard Mouw’s controversial introductory remarks. Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, issued an apology to Mormons on behalf of evangelicals who he said had sinned against Mormonism by misrepresenting their beliefs and practices. Over the past decade, the evangelical (Calvinist) Christian has continued to dialog with various Mormons in order to promote better interfaith relationships. During the last two presidential elections he became one of the many go-to sources for news outlets seeking soundbites on evangelical views of Mormonism. He’s taken a lot of heat for this within his religious community–early on being told that he didn’t know Mormons well enough and so would easily be deceived by them, later being told he had become too close to Mormons to have a clear view of their dangerous heresies.
His new book Talking with Mormons: An Invitation to Evangelicals is an effort to educate the evangelical community about his ongoing work with Mormonism.
As I’ve thought about this, I have come up with an idea that might be helpful for people troubled by their internet-based discoveries about the Church. I am going to call this the “Dialogue diet.” What I propose is a program of reading (with some skimming and skipping allowed, of course) the entire print run of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. (You can start at the beginning and work your way forward, or start with the most recent issue and work your way backward, I don’t think it really matters very much which direction you go.) My thinking behind this is as follows:
Just telling someone to “become extremely well read in Mormonism” is less than helpful. Your average member simply would have no idea where to start on such a quest, and the task would seem so overwhelming as to be self-defeating from the start. Reading Dialogue from stem to stern is at least a very well defined task.
[…] to have merit when someone says, as Michael Austin does in his new book, that Job 19:25 —”I know that my redeemer liveth”—not only has nothing to do with Jesus, but indeed expresses a […]
Cross posted at Times and Seasons
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought gets a new editor every five or six years, and that time is now upon us. As a subscriber and supporter, I wanted to get a sense of where the incoming editor, Boyd Jay Petersen, is going to take the journal, so I bought a copy of his Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Culture, and Family(Greg Kofford Books, 2013) to get the lowdown. After all, Kristine is a hard act to follow. After reading the book, I am optimistic. To offer a few comments, I will highlight one essay from each of the three sections in the book.
Faith. Chapter 5, “LDS Youth in an Age of Transition,” was originally a 2011 Dialogue article reviewing two books reporting survey data about the beliefs and religious activity of Christian and LDS youth. The review is also a response of sorts to an earlier published essay, “Soulcraft 101: Faith, Doubt, and the Process of Education,” in which Petersen reflects on the interactions he had with students while teaching Mormonism at UVU. Most online conversations about LDS youth are more pessimistic than warranted by the facts. Here is encouraging commentary offered by Petersen in Chapter 5:
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