My parents were born in the Great Depression and took the church’s program of self reliance seriously. We kept a cow, goats, pigs and chickens and had a big garden and an orchard of peach, plum, apricot and pomegranate trees. What we called the back porch was a room the same size as the eat-in kitchen that was dedicated to food storage. There was a chest freezer big enough to hold butchered animals and shelves of food storage featuring white five-gallon buckets of wheat and textured vegetable protein as well as the canned goods and preserves.

My parents lived full lives without ever needing to actually rely on their food storage, but I’m glad I grew up in a household where we at least practiced self reliance for several reasons. Here are just a few: First and foremost, a sun-warmed peach picked from the tree at peak ripeness is a bit of heaven on earth—definitely add this to your bucket list. Second, having thrown numerous chickens into cardboard boxes to contain the flailing following their decapitation and prior to dunking them in boiling water to prepare for plucking, I have developed a healthy respect for the suffering that the meat on my plate represents. Third, crystallized honey and peanut butter makes an excellent snack in times both good and hard.

You see, when you buy your honey in five-gallon buckets, you’re never going to eat it all before it crystallizes. Sure, you could dig some out, put it in a jar and warm it until it turns back into a liquid. Or you can mix it with peanut butter for a calorie-rich—to say the least!—snack that it a pleasure to eat.

But it’s been ages since I’ve enjoyed this childhood treat (mostly due to a dearth of five-gallon buckets of honey in my life, I suppose). In fact, it’s been decades since I’d even thought about it. But a couple of weeks ago a high councilor came and gave a presentation on emergency preparedness. He pointed out that there are a range of emergencies to prepare for, with a blackout being among the most severe, and that not all of the food we end up storing is ideally suited to long periods of limited access to energy sources. Noodles, for example, are a common staple, but they take a lot of energy (and water) to prepare the traditional way: add dry pasta to a boiling pot and cook for 10 minutes or so. So he recommended thinking about blackout-proof recipes that are high in calories which can be stored and prepared with little to no energy input.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to think of one: as I spread honey on a piece of toast, the crystals forming on the side of the jar released a flood of memories—I had my blackout recipe, which I will reproduce here:

• Add one part honey (doesn’t have to be crystallized, but it adds a little pizazz if it is) to two parts peanut butter to a bowl you plan to eat from (adjust quantities to taste).
• Mix with the spoon you plan to eat with.
• Enjoy!

Both honey and peanut butter keep for ages at room temperature and the only energy input required is a little elbow grease; they supply plenty of calories in a compact form; plus, the combination is downright tasty.

I realize that most of us are not likely to face an extended blackout, though the request we received this week from the Kyiv stake to supply gas stoves and power generators reminds me that not all are so fortunate and that circumstances can change dramatically and unexpectedly. And so I’d like to turn the time over to you—how blackout-proof is your food storage? Do you have a blackout recipe you’d like to share?

Peace is not a verb. One cannot go through the street “peacing”—not even during Advent. One might, in a very limited sense, use “peace” as a verb by appending to it the words “out” and “dude” in quick succession. But only if one drives a VW bus and wears love beads. For the rest of us, peace cannot be an action word, nor do we have good one-word alternatives to replace the unwieldy infinitive “to make peace.”

We do, though, have plenty of bad alternatives. According to the people who make thesauruses (thesauri?), the equivalents of “make peace” include “pacify,” “placate,” “appease,” “conciliate,” and “propitiate.” These words all describe actions that may bring about something that we might mistake for peace but that we should never confuse with the real thing.

Appeasing, conciliating, and placating can remove tension from a situation, usually through bribery, and make everyone feel more comfortable. Pacifying a group of people can stop a war through the use, or threat, of military force. And propitiating a divine being can (and least in theory) quell the god’s anger until the next time they get angry.

These actions all lead to a negative peace—or an absence of overt hostility or conflict. The Roman historian Tacitus referred to this kind of peace in Agricola when he wrote that Rome “makes a desert and calls it peace.” Martin Luther King also drew a sharp distinction between negative and positive peace in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he defines negative peace as “the absence of tension” and positive peace as “the presence of justice.”

Jesus also talked about negative peace from time to time, but he didn’t have many good things to say about it. In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, he makes it clear that he is not the guy who will bring this kind of peace to the world:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. (Matthew 10:24-25)

As I read this passage, Jesus is saying something like, “I’m not here to make you comfortable or to help you keep living they way you have always lived. Something truly magnificent, the Kingdom of God, is within your reach. But you can only have it if you want it more than anything else and are willing to sacrifice everything else to get it.” The only rational response to such a statement is profound discomfort. In his great Christmas poem, “The Journey of the Magi,” T.S. Elliot explains this discomfort through the eyes of his narrator, one of the Three Wise Men who visited the baby Jesus:

There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The hallmark of discipleship, I think, is being “no longer at ease” in the world that we inhabit. Christ makes, and should make us uncomfortable. To understand this week’s Advent theme, we must find a way to reconcile the discomfort that Christ brings with the peace he promises. We can start by acknowledging that comfort and peace are not opposites but elements of a sequence. Discomfort with injustice is a prerequisite to creating a just world, and creating a just world is a prerequisite to the peace of Christ and the Kingdom of God

Unlike negative peace, which is something we can wait for, positive peace is something we are called to create? So how do we do peace? What are the verbs? What concrete actions can we do to increase the amount of positive peace in the world? Among my favorite candidates are “understand,” “accept,” “advocate,” “care,” and “love.” We create a positive peace when we see people as Christ sees them and do the work necessary to learn how to love people who look, act, and think differently than we do. We create a negative peace when we skip the learning and loving parts of the process and simply suppress our disagreements so that everybody can be comfortable.

Immediately before ascending to his father after the resurrection, Christ turns to his disciples and says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you” (John 14:27). The peace of Christ is different than the peace “as the world giveth.” The world’s peace is defined as what it is not, namely war. The peace of Christ must be defined as what it is: justice, righteousness, caring, compassion, and a profound feeling of discomfort in a world organized by other things. This is the cost and the crux of discipleship: we can choose to have peace forever, but once we make that choice, we will never be comfortable again.     

I recently wrote a guest post regarding my nostalgia for the ‘I’m a Mormon’ Campaign. In that post, I argued that the campaign espoused a sort of inclusive Mormonism that we would profit from remembering and embracing. 

It was not my intention to start a debate on the wisdom of moving away from the Mormon moniker. The comments on that post, on the other hand, almost immediately did. As did the comments on a recent interview I did with Mormonland on the same subject. 

 With that in mind, it’s time to give the people what they want and share my own thoughts on the question. In this post, I don’t intend to make a full pro/con type argument surrounding the effort to remove “Mormon” from our vocabulary. Instead, I just want to offer two points on the debate that I feel are worth further consideration and, at least in my view, offer some nuance as we continue with that conversation. Both of these points are reflective of the ongoing thinking I have on the topic and may not be fully fleshed out. With that in mind I ask for your patience, and for you to set expectations accordingly. 

First Half Baked Thought

 First, at least for President Nelson, I sincerely think that it isn’t so much about rebranding as it is about aligning the church with what he believes God requires of it. To that end, I think much of the critique of President Nelson’s intentions misses the mark. For instance, I often hear some variant of  “you don’t get to choose your nickname.” Which is obviously true. But, at least according to him, that isn’t quite what he cares about.

As he stated, ““I did this because the Lord impressed upon my mind the importance of the name He decreed for His Church, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…Thus, the name of the Church is not negotiable. When the Savior clearly states what the name of His Church should be, and even precedes His declaration with, ‘Thus shall my church be called,’ He is serious. And if we allow nicknames to be used and adopt or even sponsor those nicknames ourselves, He is offended” (for the full quote see here).

I take him at his word on this. I don’t think there is any reason not to. While it is true that his efforts also included a new style guide for press and journalists I think it is fair to assume that he understands they will not fully embrace it. And, more to the point, that he can’t control what they do anyway. 

 And to speak in defense of what I believe his intentions are, it has a sort of beauty from a ritualistic perspective. President Nelson asks us to view speaking the name of the church, a name inscribed in our scripture, as a sacrament unto itself. This ritual comes with instructions and conditions; not because these things “matter” in the strictest sense, but because ritual must have boundaries. A baptism doesn’t “count” if the person isn’t fully immersed, the bread isn’t “properly” blessed if the priest misses a word. When describing the Lord’s Church, it must be spoken by the proper name. And by the same token, if you take the sacrament with your left hand or bless someone by the “power” rather than “authority” of the priesthood or say “Mormon” sometimes it all just sorta still counts. Ritual is able to ride that line between rigid and malleable as we remember that ritual is never truly about itself. 

I know there is more to be fleshed out in the above, but I want to leave it there for now, if only because that is where I remain in my own thinking. And with that, I’ll move to my second point.

Second Half Baked Thought

Despite my above argument I confess I am left with a tinge of discomfort when I consider abandoning “Mormon” entirely. In practice, referring to oneself as a “member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” rather than a “Mormon” denotes one’s allegiance to an institution rather than to a heritage. This I find very uncomfortable. For me, detaching my relationship with my religion (just a little, or a lot, as need be) from the institution that manages it has been helpful in retaining my relationship with faith when the institution disappoints, either because of structural shortcomings or the faults of leadership. Mormonism has become a means whereby I connect with my mother and father and grandparents and ancestors. It speaks to my history. It’s in my blood. In fact, I consider Mormonism as something I couldn’t leave any more than I could stop being anything else that I just am. Mormonism is a community, one that, both historically and theologically, spans generations. A focus solely on the institutional church forces us to lose sight of that and limit our vision of what our religion means.

(Seriously) Half Baked Conclusion

I do wonder if there is a compromise between the two perspectives I have outlined above. Looking solely at the text of President Nelson’s words, and (in my view more importantly) the scripture he pulls from, it seems to me that the injunction is to refer to the church, the institution, by its proper name. That is the sacred thing God is speaking of in the Doctrine and Covenants. The “ritual” is being conducted when the name of the church is being employed. It is not, however, necessarily instructing members of that institution in how to refer to themselves.The Lord states “thus shall my church be called” not “thus shall my people be called.”  This distinction may seem superficial but I think it matters, especially when the Lord has a habit of using the word “people” much more often than the word “church” in that book of scripture. It is possible to conclude that the church must be spoken of in accordance with scripture, whereas the members of that church are under no requirement.

With that in mind, it seems logically coherent to say “The name of my church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints… I’m a Mormon” and be in alignment with both the  scripture President Nelson is concerned about and the personal concerns I listed above. Doing so would honor the passage of scripture the prophet is concerned with, while also recognizing that one’s “Mormon-ness” is not quite the same as their membership in our church. 

It also means you could still call them the “Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” Which is reason enough to buy in. 

“I am a Christian by Yearning. Opposed to my doubt and perversity is a longing that the gospel be true. Christians are made, said the apostle Paul, of faith, hope, and charity. Though I have little charity and less faith, perhaps I have hope in some abundance.”

—Levi Peterson, “A Christian by Yearning”

Hope is hard; let’s not pretend otherwise. The thing with feathers is also the thing with talons, and those who hope make themselves vulnerable to despair. When we embrace hope, we take the same risks we take when we embrace another person: we might be rejected, we might be disappointed, and we might find that we have misplaced our hope in something unworthy of our attention. “Embrace is grace,” writes Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, “and grace is a gamble, always.”

But hope is also part of our human nature. Human beings cannot live meaningfully without hope in something. And a longing to believe in something beyond ourselves—some principle of order and meaning in a universe that knows who we are—comes from deep within our species’ collective mind. Nobody captures this longing better than Thomas Hardy does in his 1915 poem, The Oxen”:

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Like many early twentieth-century intellectuals, Hardy was a non-believer who considered the probable non-existence of God to be a great tragedy. He wanted to believe, and he spent much of his later life looking for something to reassure him that his life would not end with his death. But he remained deeply agnostic all of his life. He never took the risk and embraced the hope that grew out of his longing.

Other great poets did take the risk. One such was John Berryman, a leading figure in the confessional school of poetry, whose long poem sequence Dream Songs (1969) is usually seen as one of the major poetic works of the second half of the 20th century. Less known, but no less great, is Berryman’s shorter sequence, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” (1971), which expresses the core of his religious faith. In the first poem of the sequence, he writes:

I have no idea whether we live again.
It doesn’t seem likely
from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view
but certainly all things are possible to you,

and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul
as I believe I sit in this blue chair.
Only that may have been a special case
to establish their initiatory faith.

Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.
May I stand until death forever at attention
for any your least instruction or enlightenment.
I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.

These lines strike me as expressing a meaningful hope in eternal life. It is not a statement of knowledge, or even of belief. Intellectually, Berryman is genuinely agnostic about the idea of an afterlife. And yet he expresses confidence in God’s power and goodness, and he declares himself willing to learn. Even those who claim to know things for sure rarely do better than this.

One thing that the Apostle Paul makes clear in his letters is that the value of hope does not lie in the eternal life that we hope for, but in the mortal life that we have to get through—a life that, for most people, is full of tragedy and loss. In Paul’s first-known letter to a Christian congregation, Paul resolves a concern that arose in the Christian community of Thessalonica about the resurrection of their dead brothers and sisters:

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. . . Therefore encourage one another with these words.

—1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, 18 (NRSV)

The great value of hope, Paul suggests here, is that it allows us to comfort others. He knew that the Christians in Thessalonica would still have to grieve. Sorrow and loss are inherent in the human condition. We choose loss every time that we choose to love someone absolutely, and there is no getting around it unless we become the cause of somebody else’s grief. Christians must grieve, but they do not have to grieve without hope. And this creates a context in which we can accomplish our most basic Christian responsibility of mourning with those who mourn and bearing one another’s burdens that they may be light.

I find myself thinking a lot about hope during this advent season because it has been a time of profound grief. The world has never been entirely well, but it seems a lot less well than it has been in a long time. Heading into the Christmas season, we are all dealing with a steady flow of horrifically violent episodes, a terrifying war, a sharply divided Republic, and a not-quite-over pandemic. This is a lot to grieve, and grieve we must. But we do not have to grieve without hope. I will admit that I have gotten very close on some days, but something always sustains me—a hope, very faint at times but never entirely absent, that there is something in the universe that cares about human flourishing and that this something will have the last word.

Like Levi Peterson I am not, in the traditional sense, a believer. I don’t claim to know anything with absolute certainty, and my beliefs are very modest and mostly about the things of this world. But I am an unbridled, inveterate hoper. I hope that God is real. I hope that my Redeemer Lives. I hope that some part of me is eternal and will live on when I am dead. I hope that there is some order and meaning in the universe that knows who I am. It’s not much, I grant you, but it is also everything. Because of this hope, I consider myself a person of faith, which has had profound implications for the way that I live my life.

And now for a special treat—and a reward for making it all the way to the end—check out this marvelous setting of Hardy’s “The Oxen” by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his 1954 Christmas cantata, Hodie.

On Election Day, I woke up to my daughter freaking out. Our cat had fallen down her sister’s ladder and was unresponsive. Almost instantly awake, we did a quick Google search and discovered that there was a 24-7 vet emergency room a mile or so from our apartment. Ten minutes later, we had Lemonade there. They rushed her to the back; she was severely dehydrated because of what we eventually discovered was a Lego head blocking her intestine.

Long story short, one surgery, two veterinary hospitals, and almost seven days later, we brought Lemonade home. That was a tough week—sometimes we thought she was almost better. Sometimes we were steeling ourselves for our young cat’s death. (2:00 am that first Thursday night—when we transferred her from the pet hospital where she had surgery to the pet hospital that had a kidney specialist was possibly the darkest moment.)

The day before we took her in, I’d been listening to Roy Ayers’s recording of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” And for a significant portion of the week, that song was on a constant loop in my head. It perfectly performed how I—and my family—felt. (A friend on Twitter suggested that my goal should be to have his “Lovely Day” replace it, which happened when I got her home.)

And honestly, while there’s plenty in my life to be thankful for, today, access to incredible veterinarians who can work miracles, and the fact that my family and I have both of our cats home with us, is topping my Thanksgiving Day list.

Our experience with Lemonade over the last couple weeks also underscored to me the grace I need to offer my neighbors. Our cat’s illness was all-encompassing and devastating. And we found grace in it, not only from the veterinarians and vet techs and receptionists and others at the hospitals, but from our friends who brought us vegetarian chili the night of our cat’s surgery, the people (IRL friends, online friends, and even strangers) who lent us support and prayers and thoughts over Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and private text chains, our kids’ teachers who recognized what our kids were dealing with, and my students, who were tremendously supportive when I had to cancel class to spend 10 hours at the hospital with my cat.

While Bill Withers took up most of my brain’s music space, occasionally a lyric from our hymnal snuck its way in: “In the quiet heart is hidden / Sorrow that the eye can’t see.” People passing me on the street as I biked to the first pet hospital didn’t know what I was feeling. They couldn’t see what was happening in my inner heart. They didn’t know that I was half a step from being broken.

And I can’t see that in the people around me. Not everybody is in pain all the time. Beyond that, what causes pain for them may not be something that causes pain to me and vice versa. But having my cat in the hospital reminded me that even publicly invisible pain can be real and that I need to extend grace to those who have sorrow that my eye can’t see.

But most of all, I’m thankful that my family—including my cats—is together today, thanks to the miraculous intervention of people who have trained to be able to accomplish the miraculous.

The photo is Lemonade coming home after a post-discharge vet visit where we learned her kidney and red blood numbers had finally reached normal. Also, don’t worry—she was in a cat carrier while the car was moving!

I’m something like seven years old and our house sits at the boundary of the town. Our backyard has some kind of tree in it, I remember. Beyond the backyard barbed wire fence, there is empty treeless rolling grassland populated by magpies, rabbits, and stray cats in summer. At the front of the house, the house I was not born in but came home to from the birth-hospital, there is a narrow blacktopped street. On the other side of the street is more treeless grass, long grass, but at this point in time, long grass that has laid over in its silent brown death agony. I think about the old green “push mower” my brothers use to cut the grass in our yard. It’s cold. I can’t see much beyond the road, but I know very well that there are, far out there, railroad tracks. I have sometimes wakened at the 2am whistle for the crossroads. The fog is thick this evening, I mean it looks like evening. Really it’s more like four in the afternoon I guess. I want to walk out there toward the tracks but I know there are half-frozen pools that could waylay a seven-year-old, if not in life-danger, then mother danger. As in, how did you manage to get soaked just after I put clean clothes on you? I don’t go out. But I stand there, indecisive. Should I take a step into the fog?

I think now in the present about my father, long dead. When he was my fog age, he was living on a farm hundreds of miles north of where I was contemplating a journey through dense fog over dead grass. I wonder at what he does at four o’clock in the afternoon on a November afternoon in the fog bank coming off the meandering river. He might go fishing. I don’t know. What I don’t know about his life is so vast that while we lived in the same house together for nineteen years I know nearly nothing about him. Oh, I know our interactions, such as they were. But really nothing. We were moving through fog. And that’s what we all do. At seven, I stroll across the road and look back. The fog is thick enough that I can see our huge willow tree in the front yard and the outline of the house but not much else. I am alone. Shivering, I run for the front door.

Fog. I’m seventeen. I think it was something like that really thick marine layer that can ghost in quickly onto the shore. I’m alone in my parent’s car, trying to drive home from a friend’s house in the country. The fog is so thick I can’t see the road. It’s dead dark and the fog muffles what noise there is as I grope, door open, head out, leaning down, trying to see the edge of the road. Since it’s November, there is school tomorrow I imagine. So I can’t just sit and wait for the fog to blow off. In fact, it sticks around for a couple of days. It’s late and I’ve got to get home. The fog seems to get so thick I can hardly see the ground. Home feels like a million miles from here.

Fog. I’m twenty. There is thick fog coming off Lake Champlain into the Vermont town where I’m living. And there will be snow tonight, I can tell. It’s cold. November cold. I’m heading for home because it will be dark soon and I can barely see the street lamps. I’m with my missionary companion and we are walking through a kind of strip mall, going into stores along the way, not to buy (or sell) but to stay a little warm. We are dressed in dark suits and dark overcoats. A man walks in front of us and by chance we seem to be making the same turns to our destinations. Finally, looking deadly fearful, he turns and faces us. No, we tell him. We aren’t cops. He turns and hurries away. I wonder what he was up too, who, knows. Maybe we had a Gestapo vibe. Our home is the attic of a dilapidated cramped rest home for the elderly. It has no heat but there is a gas range at one end. We keep the oven on and the door open at night so we don’t freeze. You have to remember to keep all the interior doors open though. No worries about carbon monoxide. Heck, the mice freeze in the bacon grease jar. Lots of draft. The fog is so thick we nearly miss the back steps. The fog has closed over the people I knew then, even that guy who was running from something. I’d guess many are dead and gone. Lost in the fog. I shiver to think about the aloneness of it. I know almost nothing of them.

There is thick fog. I’m sailing on the Atlantic on an obsolete and about to be retired steamer. You can’t see the water if you look over the railing but horizontally I know we must be close to New York. Not close enough to see the lights, even if it wasn’t over the horizon. I wonder, what would it be like if I jumped overboard? The water I know was very cold but seemingly calm. That would be alone, very alone. Alone forever. In my fifteen-year-old head I wonder what it would be like to be alone forever. They say most of us would go insane. We’re social beings, meant to spend at least some of our days with each other. Without that urge, we would never survive.

Fog. It is always there, keeping us separate, like Paul’s dark mirror. There is fog closing in now. It’s the fog of past worlds, past branchings of space-time perhaps, but we forget, and then make up cognates of reality to fill in the gaps. No one here knows our histories. Least of all, ourselves. This thanksgiving, take a moment, in person or otherwise, to dive deep into someone’s story before it’s gone from this world forever. Make it part of your self for a while. Before whatever comes next.

In the early 90s I was a young associate attorney in the public finance department of a large Chicago law firm. There was a public conference that our group was involved in, and we had to provide one of the speakers at this conference, and the senior partners gave me that assignment. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t because they knew I would do a good job, as they had never heard me give a public speech. I suspect I got the assignment because none of them wanted to do it, and as low man on the totem pole declining was not really a live option for me. (Public finance does not involve giving orations in courtrooms, it mostly involves drafting hella-complicated documents.) So I gave the speech, in a large Chicago conference center with about 200 attorneys from across the City in attendance. I honestly have no recollection what the topic of my speech was, but I do clearly remember the reaction of my firm colleagues. And that was back slapping and high fives. They were thrilled at the result and told me what a great job I had done. I was grateful for the praise, but not surprised that I had done an adequate job with the speech. Little did my partners know I had an advantage; as a life-long Mormon I have given many public speeches to audiences exceeding 100 people. I estimate that since my mid-teens I have given on average one such public speech (or in our vernacular, “talk”) a year, which means at the time I probably had given something like 15 such speeches in my life. Now that I’m in my 60s, that number has probably increased to something like 50.  And public speaking is one of those things that can really only be improved by the doing of it. And giving public speeches is just not something that the average non-Mormon does, unless they join Toastmasters or something like that.

(I sometimes visit other churches, and the pastors I have encountered are uniformly terrific public speakers (far better than I am), which only makes sense, because in the course of a year they give as many sermons as I have in my entire life.)

I thought it might be useful to pull together some tips for public speaking in the church context that I have learned (sometimes by hard experience) over the years.

1. Brainstorming 

Usually when you are given an assignment to speak you are also given a specific topic to address. My practice is to almost immediately start brainstorming ideas. I might jot these down on some scratch paper or just do it in my head. Are there scriptures I want to use?  Stories from my past I want to tell?  For historical topics, are there nuances the average member probably does not grasp?

The most recent talk I gave was a year ago September, with the assigned topic of Jackson County.  As I brainstormed ideas, I immediately thought of how the average Mormon knows the Saints got kicked out of Jackson County, but hardly any of them grasp why they got kicked out of Jackson County. So I made that the thrust of my talk, focusing on three areas. First was the concept of “gathering.” If a half-dozen families had moved there, it would not have been a problem. But large numbers moved there, which created a political risk for the locals. Second was concerns about the Indians living nearby in reservations just to the west. The Mormons wanted to make friends with the Indians, but the locals were scared to death of the Indians and wanted nothing to do with them. But the main source of conflict had to do with fears about slave rebellion This is information I learned at an MHA Conference, the gist of which is reflected in this blog post of mine: https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/10/08/jackson-county-and-the-specter-of-slave-rebellion/

Since this was a recorded talk, I never got any feedback on it, but I was pleased with it.

2. Practice, Practice, Practice

I have the distinction of having given the absolute worst talk in the history of the Church. This is not a joke or exaggeration. You can confirm it with the Church History Department if you don’t believe me.

I had just returned home to Illinois from my mission to Colorado. This would have been late in 1979. I was invited to speak in sacrament meeting–I was to be the final speaker. I don’t recall specifically how much time I was given, but I assume it was 20 minutes or so. This was to be my first experience being the final speaker in a sacrament meeting. My assigned topic was “Marriage.” (Real subtle, there, bishopric!)

Now, when I left for my mission I thought I knew everything there was to know about the church. Being out in the field and talking to actual, skeptical non-LDS with actual, you know, questions made me realize that in fact I didn’t know anything about the church. So I resolved to learn, and in fact I did learn a great deal as a missionary. When I came home I was pretty full of myself again and thought I knew everything again, only to be humbled by a variety of experiences, including college, and this humbling would finally take. Now I realize that I don’t know very much at all.

Anyway, I was still kind of a cocky kid fresh off my mission. And I was going to show my old family ward how much I had learned and just how smart I was now. So I prepared this unified field theory talk examining what all four standard works had to say on the subject of marriage. Oooo, this was going to be good, I thought. This will blow people away! Little Kevin isn’t just a little kid anymore.

So the appointed day comes, my turn to speak arrives, and I stand up at the podium. And I begin my masterful discourse. I’m still in the Garden of Eden talking about Adam and Eve, when I feel a tug on my pants leg. It was the bishop. I had gone over my time (probably speaking for about a half hour), and I needed to wrap it up and sit down.

I quickly realized that I wasn’t even a fourth of the way through the material I had prepared. If I had gone through the whole thing, it would have been at least a two-hour talk! I had had no idea how long the talk was going to be, and I had never practiced it nor timed myself.

Well, since I had gone through so little of my planned outline, there really wasn’t a very good or coherent way to tie all the threads together, which I hadn’t even introduced yet. So I just mumbled a closing as best I could, and sat down.

I was absolutely mortified with embarrassment. This talk was supposed to be a triumph, to let my old ward family know that I wasn’t just a little kid anymore, I was one of the big boys now and could give a big boy talk in sacrament. But I had totally muffed it. Of course, most people were polite, but one old man, a longtime friend of the family, who was not known for sugarcoating the truth, basically told me in so many words how much that talk sucked. I didn’t appreciate hearing it at the time, but I knew in my heart of hearts how right he was, and that it was my own fault.

That horrible experience was actually the best thing that ever happened to me as far as speaking in church goes. Because now I always prepare my talks and practice them. I time myself so I know pretty well how long the talk is going to take. And if I’m the final speaker, I have little modules that I can either remove or insert to make the talk shorter or longer, depending on how much time the previous speakers have used.

I used to read a book to my kids titled The Bike Lesson. The Papa Bear is trying to teach the Boy Bear how to ride a bike, but he keeps messing up. So he saves the teachable moment by saying “Now let this be a lesson to you, this is what you must NOT do.” And all the negative lessons work and the boy bear learns to ride the bike.

So let this be a lesson to you, this is what you must NOT do.

Ice Breakers

I began my BYU college career in late August of 1976. My older sister dropped me off at Deseret Towers, and there I was, alone, not knowing any of the 25,000 students on campus. Back in those olden days students on campus met in student branches, not wards, with a branch president called from the community. So that first Sunday I went to a theater on campus where our branch was to meet. I trudged my way there not knowing a soul. And most of the kids were in my same situation, just there by themselves not knowing anyone else, and I still can feel how heavy the tension was in the air.

So the first speaker gets up, a kid from California. And he says “When President X asked me to speak, he told me it’s usually a good idea to start with a joke to loosen up the crowd. I told him I only knew two jokes, neither of which was appropriate for Church. So he said that reminded him of a funny joke he heard the other day. He told me the joke, and it was indeed hilarious. And now I know THREE jokes I can’t tell in church!”

There was a beat of silence. And then the entire auditorium melted into laughter. I glanced at the Branch President, and he was laughing harder than anyone, and he almost fell off his chair.

But what really made an impression on me was that the heavy sense of tension in the air was gone. Everyone was now at ease and relaxed and in a frame of mind that they could now listen to the talks and learn something. And that made quite an impression on me.

An icebreaker doesn’t have to be a joke; it could be a story. If you go this route, all I ask is that you tell a personal story, not a story you heard from a GA in conference.

My last two talks were prerecorded due to the pandemic, and so for my icebreaker I gave an introduction of myself for the benefit of new members who had not met me, something like this:

“Good morning brothers and sisters, for those of you who don’t know me my name is Kevin Barney. I was born in Logan, Utah, where my dad was pursuing a master’s degree at Utah State. Then we lived for a while in northern Colorado, where my dad got his doctorate. In 1965 my father got a job as a professor of education at Northern Illinois University, so we moved to DeKalb, which is an hour’s drive that way (point). At the time the Church in northern Illinois was very small; there was only one stake, the Wilmette Stake. We actually attended church in a small branch in Sycamore, just five miles from DeKalb. Although the branch was very small, we did have a building. It wasn’t a standard plan building like this one with a basketball court. It was an old Congregational church building, with stone walls and stained-glass windows. In retrospect it was an awesome building. And you know, I had a wonderful experience growing up in that branch, because we were like a family, we did everything together. I simply cannot imagine a better way to have grown up in the Church. Now, on to the talk….”

Sing a Song

A handful of times over the years I have sung a song as part of a talk. When I do this I just do it a cappella for simplicity. I only do this when the song has some historical significance. When I was in law school, my EQP was Michael Hicks, who of course was researching early Mormon music, and he was always coming up with cool stuff. He made a list of Joseph’s five favorite songs, and none of them was a hymn as you might expect; they were all sentimental ballads, often with a military setting. Two or three times over the years I have sung one of these songs over the pulpit, “The Soldier’s Tear.” I have a pretty decent bass voice (think Jim Nabors) and this is always a hit. Another song I sometimes sing over the pulpit is “The Stranger and His Friend,” which you know better as “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.” I like to sing it to its original, simpler tune known as Duane Street. Here is a post where I describe one of these talks:

Record Yourself

As I mentioned, my most recent two talks were prerecorded. In the past it never would have occurred to me to do a recording of me practicing a talk, but now I see clear value in it. You will be able to see tics and odd movements that you will want to clean up. Watching yourself giving the talk will give you confidence that you can present yourself well.

The Importance of Maintaining Eye Contact

In the early 70s AP young men were given church workbooks. These were 8×11 workbooks (there were separate ones for deacons, teachers and priests). One of the sections was on goal setting, and one of the goals we were supposed to make was how many scriptures we were going to memorize during the year. My goal was always two, not because I actually intended to memorize two scriptures, but because you set the goal by circling a number and 2 was the lowest number you could circle. I didn’t intend to memorize any scriptures, because I quite frankly didn’t think I had the capacity to do so. (I probably memorized Moses 1:39 one year by default because it was our YMYW theme and we recited it every week. And at one point in my Primary career I think I had memorized the AoF. That was about it.)

So I go on my mission to Colorado in 1977. That was back in the days where you were supposed to memorize the discussions, in our mission at least 95% word perfect. I thought that would be a huge challenge for me, but it really wasn’t that bad.

Also in our mission we were required to memorize all the scriptures mentioned in the lessons–100% word perfect. There were like 75 of them, and some were up to ten verses long. I didn’t see how I would ever be able to do that. But the practice in our mission was that at zone conferences the MP would go down the line and give each missionary a cite, and he or she would have to stand and recite the passage in front of everyone, and we were expected to do it word perfect. It had a sort of military feel to it.

I didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of everyone, so I got a stack of 3×5 cards, wrote out the passages one per card in longhand, punched a hole in the corner of each card and put them on a ring. I then carried those cards with me everywhere, and whenever I had a spare moment I would practice them. And a strange thing happened; they actually began to come together in my mind. I learned that it was a simple matter of repetition.

Once when I was in Colorado Springs my companion and I were quizzing each other on the discussion scrips, and the bishop walked out from a meeting he had been in. The bishop was Mark McConkie, son of Bruce R. He asked if he could play with us, and he sat down and joined right in. He wasn’t 100% word perfect, but he was in the high 90s, and it was impressive as hell. There’s no way I could do something like that now without practicing them on a daily basis. Those McConkie boys definitely knew their scriptures! (After my mission I was walking in the Wilk and I heard BRM giving a talk in the Step Down Lounge, and I wondered why he wasn’t in the Marriot Center. I peeked in, and it was Mark making a speech. His voice sounded just like his father’s.)

One of the virtues of having all the discussion scriptures memorized is that I could teach without reading anything, and could maintain full eye contact with the investigator. I remember one time in particular I went on splits with a ZL to teach a girl and her very skeptical sister. I was doing the second discussion (the plan of salvation), and to me it was just a pedestrian lesson; I didn’t feel any special spirit. But as I was talking I was looking into the eyes of skeptic girl, and all of a sudden I saw the biggest, roundest tears I’ve ever seen spring from a human tear duct welling up in her eyes. By maintaining eye contact I got to watch it as it was happening, which was wonderful. Both girls were baptized.

Once I got the hang of it and became confident I could memorize scriptures, I went beyond the discussion set. I had some tapes of Handel’s Messiah, which were my salvation on my mission, so I decided to memorize all the scriptures used in the libretto. I didn’t actually have a copy, so I figured out what they were using the little concordance in the back of the old Cambridge missionary Bibles. I wrote them all down longhand in a steno pad and then promptly memorized them. For some reason memorizing those particular scriptures was a great comfort to me.

So I had just been transferred into an area and I was asked to speak in sacrament meeting. It was to be a five-minute talk on faith; very pro forma stuff. I prepared the talk (using lots of scriptures), and then almost as an afterthought I decided I would just memorize the scriptures I wanted to use so I wouldn’t have to read them. It wasn’t hard to do.

When the service ended I was mobbed by people I didn’t know, telling me about their neighbors or friends or relatives that they would like for me to teach. Several people who couldn’t get close enough to talk to me actually scribbled referrals on to scraps of paper and reached in and stuck them in my pocket(!) It was like girls trying to slip their phone numbers to Zac Ephron at the premier of HSM3 or something. That was as close as I’ll ever get to feeling like a missionary rock star. It was truly an amazing experience. I was and am convinced this reaction of the members was largely because I didn’t read anything but maintained eye contact with the audience.

As a result of that experience, I almost always give my talks without reading anything, and if I have enough notice without using any speaking notes at all. And I have been very pleased with the results; to me it makes a huge difference in the quality of a talk. I see this as someone in the congregation as well. Whenever someone turns his eyes to the podium, it just deadens the talk. In contrast, our past 1C in our SP was a very dynamic speaker, and he never reads anything, and his talks are always terrific.

There are a lot of things that go into good public speaking. But as a young missionary I just stumbled onto one thing that will probably give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of making an immediate, noticeable improvement in your talks: don’t read anything. If you want to use scriptures, memorize them. Maintain eye contact with your audience. I’m confident you’ll notice the difference this makes in how people react to your talks.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Back in 2014, I embarked on a read of the complete Old Testament, with a close focus on the text. It took me two-and-a-half years to finish, and my insights along the way were hugely important to the way I have come to think about scripture and what it has to say about my life. Last year I decided to repeat that read, since Robert Alter, whose translations of various books were central to my first journey through the Old Testament, had finally finished his edition of the entire Hebrew Bible, and wanted his poetic sensibility and commentary to guide me through what I’d missed before. Of those missing parts, none were more important than Isaiah (the image here is Marc Chagall’s surrealist interpretation of Isaiah 6:6, when one of God’s seraphim descends from heaven, touches the prophet’s lips with a burning coal taken from God’s altar, cleansing his lips and calling him to reveal God’s will).

The centralized Sunday school schedule which those of us who attend Sunday school or follow the Sunday school manual for has only recently finished reading Isaiah; it is a heavily proof-texted and selective approach–but then, Isaiah itself has been heavily proof-texted and read selectively by Christians for centuries. No other set of poetic and prophetic texts which made their way into the canonical Old Testament have had a similarly massive impact on how Christians, over all the course of ancient and medieval and even modern Christendom, articulated the faith which the recorded statements of Jesus and the accounts and letters of His early followers inspired. It’s not just that Jesus Himself is shown in the New Testament gospels to be quoting from or referencing Isaiah more than any other Old Testament book besides the Psalms; it’s that our entire cultural and theological appropriation to and interpretation of Jesus’s message and meaning comes to us via a heavily Isaian lens–language of Handel’s Messiah being just the most obvious example. And we Mormons have our own particular doubling-down on this; you can’t get a more unambiguous association than the resurrected Jesus explicitly stating in 3 Nephi 23:1 “great are the words of Isaiah.”

That the words of the prophet–or possibly two or even more prophets, spread out over a century, all writing under the name of–Isaiah are great is something I fully agree with. (When I summed up my Old Testament journey before with personal ranking of its books, I put Isaiah in my top ten but near the bottom; now that I’ve read Alter’s translation, I think I need to push him up a few slots.) The poetry of the book is stunning, and frequently arresting, especially for a life-long Christian whose background assumptions include a Christianizing of the language of the Isaian text at such a basic, routine level as to often not even be aware of it. It soars to immense heights, but also digs deep within; it’s lovely. For whatever it’s worth, I want to share some of what Alter’s translated words captured for me–and also push back against Alter is one crucial way, where is deeply informed secular perspective struggles to make sense of something which all us clumsy, pious proof-texters over the millennia might have gotten right after all.

From the beginning, the book of Isaiah is–far more than those associated with any of the other Old Testament prophets–a text which presents calls to social justice on the same level as its condemnations of the cultic failures and ritual sins of Israel. Isaiah 1:14-17 sets the theme with its explicit comparison of those who hypocritically attend outwardly to religious duties, but ignore the needs of those who are part of that same religious community:

Your new moons and your appointed times I utterly despise. / They have become a burden to me, I cannot bear them. / And when you spread your palms, I avert My eyes from you. / Though you abundantly pray, I do not listen. Your hands are full of blood. / Wash, become pure. Remove your evil acts from My eyes. Cease doing evil. / Learn to do good, seek justice. / Make the oppressed happy, defend the orphan, argue the widow’s case.

Importantly, the text of Isaiah regularly connects the evil that must be ceased if the orphan is to be defended as inextricably connected to the accumulation of wealth itself, entirely aside form what charitable purposes such wealth might be set to. Growth itself, in a society where land had been–at least insofar as the legends of the Israeli conquest of Palestine suggested to those living in the 7th century BCE–distributed as an inheritance to every family, risks great evil: “Woe, who add house to house, who put field together with field till there is no space left, and you alone are settled, in the heart of the land. / In the hearing of the Lord of Armies: I swear, many houses shall turn to ruin, great and good ones with none living in them” (Isaiah 5:8-9). Of course in today’s economy, far more shaped as it is by speculative, debt-financed exchanges of information and images than by productive, land-based work, such warnings about growth might be easy to dismiss as limited to the agrarian world of ancient Israel. That the author(s) of Isaiah were primarily reflective of an agrarian sensibility is undeniable–but perhaps recognizing the pastoral and anti-urban context from which such beautiful visions and invocations of God’s justice were articulated ought to be recognized as potentially inseparable from the repentance which this prophet-author called for as well. Consider Isaiah 32: 13-20:

On My people’s soil thorn and thistle shall spring up / for on all the houses of revelry, the merrymaking town, / the villa is abandoned, the town’s hubbub left behind. / The citadel and the tower become bare places for all time, / wild asses’ revelry, pasture for the flocks. / Till a spirit is poured on us from above, and the desert turns to farmland and farmland is reckoned as forest / And justice abides in the desert, and righteousness dwells in the farmland. / And the doing of righteousness shall be peace, and the work of righteousness, safe and quiet forever. / And My people shall swell in abodes of peace, in safe dwellings and tranquil places of rest. / And it shall come down as the forest comes down, and in the lowland the town shall come low. / Happy, you who sow near all waters, who let loose the ox and the donkey.

Pastoral visions like this naturally generate all the usual individualistic reactions–start associating God’s promises some kind of communitarian ideal, and the next thing you know everyone’s on the hunt to drive out the dissidents, the foreigners, and anyone else who is seen as not fitting in with the community, right? To be sure, there’s rally no way to honestly discern in the Isaian voice any kind of validation of liberal concerns; it just ain’t there. But, perhaps surprisingly, what is there–and which I’d never noticed, until I read Alter’s translation–is the degree to which the prophecies in the book of Isaiah reflect the Mosaic insistence upon respect for, even the inclusion of, the stranger–even strangers that live in ways contrary tothe community’s shared faith. “And let not the foreigner say, who joins the Lord, saying / ‘The Lord has kept me apart from his people,’ nor let the eunuch say, ‘Why, I am a withered tree.’ / For thus said the Lord: Of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath, / and choose what I desire and hold fast to My covenant, / I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off…./ For My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the peoples” (Isaiah 56:3-5, 7). These kind of almost-if-not-quite universalist moves appear frequently throughout text (especially in the later, so-called Second Isaiah sections). Of course, that move away from understanding God’s revelation solely in terms of a tribal covenant and towards recognizing in it the seeds of a kind of universal love, is, culturally at least, inseparable from Jesus’s message in the Sermon of the Mount and elsewhere that God calls us to higher law. And while Atler’s presentation of the book of Isaiah is rigorously committed to a secular literary interpretive lens, there comes a point when even he struggles to separate the voice coming through these ancient prophecies from the Christian promise.

It’s not the usual suspects; passages like Isaiah 9:5 (“For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, and leadership is on his shoulders”) are pretty obviously–at least in Alter’s capable linguistic hands–presented as belonging to 7th-century BCE concerns particular to an Israel longing for an escape from the threats posed by Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. But then you come to Isaiah 53, starting with a powerful question–“Who could believe what we heard, and to whom was the Lord’s arm revealed?”–and going from there into a long, unprecedented vision of a Servant, first mentioned in the previous chapter, who redeems Israel through his suffering. Alter, while dismissing the Christian interpretation, to his credit admits that the verses perplex him, suggesting as they do a posthumous restoration of a Servant whose identity–as least insofar as “virtually all serious scholars” are concerned–remains unclear:

Yet he was wounded for our crimes, crushed for our transgressions. / The chastisement that restored our well-being he bore, and through his bruising we were healed. / All of us strayed like sheep, each turned to his own way, / and the Lord brought down on him the crimes of all of us. / Afflicted and tormented, he opened not his mouth. / Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like an ewe mute before her shearers he opened not his mouth. / By oppressive judgment he was taken off, and who can speak of where he lives? / For he was cut off from the land of the living for My people’s crime, bearing their blight. / And his grave was put with the wicked, and with evildoers his death, / for no outrage he had done and no deceit in his mouth…./ My servant shall put the righteous in the right for many, and their crimes he shall bear. / Therefore I will give him shares among the many, and with the mighty he shall share out spoils, / for he laid himself bare to death and was counted among the wrongdoers, / and it is he who bore the offense of many and interceded for the wrongdoers (Isaiah 53:5-9, 11-12) 

My reading of the Old Testament over the years has, more than anything else, taught me to think in terms of God’s patient, always evolving, always emergent work: the divine power manifest through the inconsistency and inconstancy of we fallen human beings. Such haphazardness, revealing almost against its own grain the loving attendance of the Creator, has come to me to be essential to understanding the whole complicated structure of this ancient, fascinating, maddening collection of texts. What I have come to not expect, by and large, is exactly the sort of thing so many of us were raised to focus solely upon: proof of the truthfulness of some doctrine or practice or miracle, delivered to us whole, across centuries of time and thousands of editorial interventions (both intentional and unintentional), in the plain words of the text. I’m pretty confident at this point that I’m really not missing much actual spiritual nourishment by discounting pious claims of such. But when a text more than 2500 years old lays out a possibility, one that has barely any connection to what we know about Hebrew thought of the time, and which matches both future texts and the spiritual experiences of hundreds of millions so well? In this case, bring on “All We Like Sheep,” says I. I mean, Christmas is on its way, isn’t it?

Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, eds. Jason R. Combs, Mark D. Ellison, Cathrine Gines Taylor, and Kristian S. Heal. Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2022. $49.95 (hardcover), $9.95 (Kindle)

Launching this week, just in time for the savvy Christmas shopper, is the Maxwell Institute’s first word on the 2023 Come Follow Me curriculum, in which Latter-day Saints will venture forth on their quadrennial adventure with the New Testament. This volume focuses, not on the people who wrote the New Testament, but on its readers and devotees in the two hundred years or so that followed.

Right off the bat, the editors make it clear that they are not going to encourage, or even tolerate, the standard LDS view of early Christianity—the one where they broke away from the truth after the apostles died and permitted Greek philosophy and Roman culture to permeate the plain and precious doctrines of Jesus Christ and turn His true church into something Great, Abominable, and of the Devil

In the introductory essay, Jason Combs makes it abundantly clear that this “great apostasy” narrative came directly from the Protestant polemics against Catholicism that were common in America at the beginning of the 19^th century (9-10). It is not revealed truth. The doctrines of the Restoration, he insists, “do not require us to spend time trying to prove other churches and religions wrong or apostate.” “Too often, rather than rejoicing in the blessings and purposes of the Restoration, we members of the Church rejoice that we are not like others. . . . Rather than imagine ancient Christians as duplicitous in their efforts to write about, understand, and practice their faith, it is more accurate to view them as earnest, believing Christians—our ancient spiritual ancestors and modern brothers and sisters” (10-11)

These are big words, and for the most part, the volume lives up to them. All of the authors take care to frame ancient Christianity as a positive continuation of the New Testament and the ministry of Christ and not as an inferior, hopelessly broken institution condemned to muddle through 1800 years until God got around to telling Joseph Smith to fix it. And the authors let the early Christians speak for themselves. The volume introduces readers to influential early Christian figures like Tertullian, Clement, Gregory, Irenaeus, and Augustine—as well as to some of the roads not taken, like Origen, Arius, and Pelagius.

Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-dqay Saints is a well-organized volume that begins with a series of essays describing who the ancient Christians were and how they lived in the world. These early essays include Kristian Heal’s excavation of some of the earliest known Christian sermons (25-61), Thomas Wayment’s description of the history of the New Testament’s canonization (63-94), Matthew Grey’s depiction of early Christian worship spaces (141-192), and Mark Ellison’s description of some of the earliest Christian rituals (195-247).

In my view, the most important essay in the first half of the volume is Ariel Bybee Laughton’s “Church Organization” Priesthood Offices and Women’s Leadership Roles” (97-138). Here, Laughton establishes, with abundant evidence, that women in the earliest Christian generations had significantly more ecclesiastical power than they ended up with. Women were called to preach, teach, go on missionary journeys, and prophecy. And they held formal positions within the church (i.e., the office of diakonos, or “deacon”) that contemporary Latter-day Saints associate with priesthood ordination.

In a minor but important irony, Laughton explains that the influence of Greek and Roman society led to the exclusion of women in leadership roles. Thus (though it is never said explicitly), this is the one area in the book where the standard apostasy narrative actually works. As Christianity evolved, it permitted Greek and Roman beliefs about gender roles and women’s inferiority to affect its theology and ecclesiastical structure.

The second half of the book (essays 7-13) shifts the volume’s focus from the lived experience of ancient Christians generally to its beliefs about issues of specific interest to Latter-day Saints. This includes some of the areas of significant departure between Mormonism and traditional Christianity—such as original sin, the Trinity, and salvation by grace—and specific beliefs controversial beliefs that Latter-day Saints hold, such as becoming like God and performing ordinances for the dead.

In this group of essays, the authors exercise great care not to overstate their cases. They show that ideas similar to those that Latter-day Saints have today were part of the large theological buffet from which the earliest Christians selected their beliefs. But they are also clear that none of these ideas were ever part of an uncontested (i.e., pre-apostate) consensus.

Yes, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls, Arius denied the Triune nature of God, and Pelagius believed that people are punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression. These views were part of the many arguments that early Christians had, but so were their opposites. We may agree with these ideas, but, if we are being fair, we must acknowledge that the ideas that eventually prevailed were held sincerely, thoughtfully, and for reasons that did not include being an enemy of God.

The volume formally ends with Nicholas Frederick’s essay on early Christian eschatology as compared with contemporary LDS and other Christian views of the last days (471-502). And yet (as if to place the eschaton itself in a cycle of eternal recurrence), it includes an Afterword by Miranda Wilcox on the Medieval Christians who lived in the world that the earlier Christians created (506-531). Both essays bring the book’s argument forward and help demonstrate the importance of studying earlier beliefs. If we want to be Christians, we need to understand the Christian tradition, and if we want to be decent human beings, we need to understand where other people’s beliefs came from rather than simply assuming the irrelevance of everything that happened between the Crucifixion and the Restoration.

The print version of Ancient Christians is lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed, and it weighs in at a hefty 561 pages. But whatever you do, don’t skip over the contributor’s biographies (532-537), because it is here that we learn something important. These people are good. The authors are all actual experts in the field who really (really, really) know what they are talking about. They hold advanced degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, and they regularly publish the results of their research to other experts in the field.

And this, ultimately, is among the volume’s greatest strengths. The authors are Latter-day Saints writing to other Latter-day Saints. But they know stuff that most of us don’t know. This is important as we study the New Testament in 2023 because—let’s just be honest here—as much as we insist that we are really Christians when somebody says we are not, most of us know very little about the first 1800 years of the Christian tradition. This is a real problem. Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints is at least the start of a real solution.

You may have heard that yesterday the church came out in support of the Respect for Marriage Act. For reasons I’ll describe in a minute, this support is, in my humble opinion, a big deal.

But before we get to why it’s a big deal, it’s probably worth looking and what and why the Respect for Marriage Act is.

In broad strokes, the Respect for Marriage Act is a replacement for the Defense of Marriage Act from the 1990s. (And I mean that literally—Section 3 of RfMA repeals a provision of federal law added by DOMA that expressly allows states and the federal government to decline to recognize same-sex marriages enacted in other states.)

RfMA replaces that with its opposite: under the RfMA, states must give full faith and credit to marriages performed in other states, and cannot deny marriage benefits on the basis of the “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin” of the married persons.

But, you might ask, why would something like RfMA be necessary? Didn’t the Supreme Court say that bans on same-sex marriage violate the U.S. Constitution? Well, yes. It did. But its recent Dobbs decision called into question whether the Supreme Court will follow its precedent and whether it will continue to recognize rights grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment. True, Justice Alito dismisses concerns that Dobbs will lead to the overruling of Obergefell and Lawrence as “unfounded.” But Alito’s assurances certainly ring hollow, both in light of the substance of the opinion and in Justice Thomas’s concurrence, where he urges the Court to reconsider all of its substantive due process decisions, including Lawrence and Obergefell. So while the bill is not currently relevant, it provides significant protection to same-sex married couples if the Court continues with its skepticism of substantive due process.

I’ll note here that I’ve seen some criticism of RfMA on Twitter, asserting that it doesn’t go far enough. While it requires recognition of same-sex marriages, it doesn’t require states to perform same-sex marriages; in a world without constitutional protection of same-sex marriage, states could ban same-sex marriage. LGBTQ couples who lived in one of those states would have to cross state lines to marry, a not-insignificant burden to place on them. These critics would prefer that the federal government codify same-sex marriage.

So why doesn’t it do that? Because it lacks the constitutional authority to do so. Since I’m not a con law person, I reached out to a friend and colleague last night who is, and he explained why my intuition was right. Essentially, he explained, the 14th Amendment enforcement clause powers are limited. If the Supreme Court overrules Obergefell, the federal government doesn’t have the power to force states to issue marriage licenses, because there would be no underlying constitutional violation to remedy.

So the best Congress can do is require states to recognize other states’ marriages. It’s not a perfect solution, but in the event Obergefell goes away, it provides important protections to married couples.

So why is it a big deal that the LDS Church came out in support? At least three reasons. The first is, this is, afaik, the first time the church has acknowledged the civil legitimacy of same-sex marriage. In the past, the church has recognized some fundamental individual dignity of LGBTQ people, but made a normative argument against same-sex marriage. Here, it recognizes the legitimacy of such marriages and publicly supports legislation that requires that civil recognition.

Second, it didn’t have to say anything. The church doesn’t comment on every piece of legislation out there. It could have stayed silent and nobody would have been surprised. I don’t think virtually anybody expected, much less demanded, that the church weigh in on this.

And third, as my friend points out, the support of an institution that has historically opposed same-sex marriage sends a signal. That signal goes to members of the church, but it also goes to other institutions that have historically opposed same-sex marriage and to Mormon politicians and to Mormon and non-Mormon LGBTQ individuals.

Now, just like the RfMA, the church’s response isn’t perfect. I really wish it didn’t preface everything with the fact that, for religious purposes, it will still decline to perform or recognize same-sex marriage. Like, we know that; it’s not a surprise. And it’s mostly irrelevant to the church’s support for RfMA.

But it definitely represents a step forward by the church. And I’ll always applaud steps forward.

(This post is already too long, so I’ll only mention in passing that the current version of the bill—which apparently has broad bipartisan support!—has a carveout for religious entities. I doubt the carveout is necessary, since the bill only requires state-level recognition of marriage and the First Amendment almost certainly already provides these particular protections to religious organizations. But politics being what politics are, this added language may be what it takes to get enough bipartisan support in the Senate to overcome the filibuster.)

Photo by Maico Pereira on Unsplash

BCC Press is proud to introduce one of the most remarkable books we have ever seen, much less published. East Winds, by Rachel Rueckert—a memoir, a travel narrative, a cultural tour-de-force, a love story, and a profound meditation on the core meaning of concepts like marriage, commitment, and eternity. And that’s just in Chapter One. This book will knock your socks off (if you wear socks, which you definitely should, especially in November, because it’s getting cold).

East Winds narrates the true story of Rachel and her new husband’s year-long honeymoon trip through South America, Asia, and Europe. During this trip, Rachel studied the marriage customs of every culture they visited in an attempt to understand how human beings view and experience this universal institution. To get a sense of how this book works, and why Rachel needed to write it, take a look at this brief video trailer that she prepared for the launch:

And don’t take our word for it, or even the video. Check out this STARRED REVIEW in Kirkus that calls East Winds an “evocative travelogue and a remarkably sensitive and insightful portrait of the difficulties of modern marriage and the compromises that one makes to feel both autonomy and connection.” And also, “an engrossing exploration of a hard but ultimately exhilarating trek toward love and commitment.” Or check out the phenomenal endorsements from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Phillip LopateGary Shteyngart, Wendy S. Walters, Michael Greenberg, and Allison K. Williams—writers that most of us can only dream about being associated with our books.

And finally, here is our sneak peek at Chapter One. Fair warning: don’t read it unless you are prepared to be seized with an irresistible compulsion to purchase it immediately, wait for it impatiently, and do nothing else with your life until you have finished.

Happy 2022, folks! We have another year’s Christmas book list, and I hope that we all find a measure of peace, hope, and joy. Note that Benchmark has 20% off on new books and ships widely.

 
Original Grace (MI, 2022), $19
Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard-and Still Is (Eerdmans, 2022), $20
The devotional is a regular feature, and both Adam Miller and Terryl Givens are perennial favorites. Miller’s meditations on grace really important, though. Don’t overlook it.

Mormon Women at the Crossroads (UI Press, 2022), $28
In my opinion, Caroline Kline’s volume is one of the most significant academic works for the future of the Church in a long time. She uses years of interviews with women across the globe to highlight the power of connectedness as both an analytical and religious framework.

 
The Burning Book: A Jewish-Mormon Memoir (BCC, 2022), $12
My Lord He Calls Me (Deseret, 2022), $23
These two books are different though both approach memoir. In The Burning Book we have the lived experience of a Jewish person who finds a home in Mormonism while maintaining a connection to his heritage. My Lord He Calls Me is a series of essays by Black Saints who all had enslaved ancestors. While the essays were written by and for Black members, we all need to listen to these experiences and wtnesses.

   
Heike’s Void (BCC, 2022), $13
The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories (BCC, 2022) $13
The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms & Observations (BCC Press, 2022), $12
Look. Steve Peck is must-read. If you have not read anything of his before, read A Short Stay in Hell immediately. Then catch up and include his latest in the queue. I wish Costco sold a box set. If short stories or more your thing then the various pieces in Abyss ranging from alternate history and science fiction to Mormon folk realism and experimental literary forms my be your jam. Lastly is Elizabeth Pinborough’s work of poetry and art, that Steve Peck describes as mixing “science, art, and religious thought with a facility that is breathtaking.” Check it out.

   
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford, 2018), $35
The New Testament: A Translation (Yale, 2017), $32
The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints, Rev Ed (Kofford, 2022), $30
2023 is the New Testament in Sunday School and Seminary (for most of the world) and we always recommend a good study bible if you haven’t used one before. The NSRV is a fantastic consensus translation and the Oxford edition is the newest. The Harper Collins edition is great as well, though a little older. I read Hart’s translation last time and was blown away. I loved it. He comes at it with an Orthodox impulse and devastating wit that Latter-day Saints will find resonant. Wayment’s translation, which was initially published by Deseret, but is now at Kofford, may be a good place to start if you are nervous about deviating from the Church’s KJV.

   
An Introduction to the New Testament (Yale, 1997), $42
The New Testament History, Culture, and Society (BYU/Deseret, 2019), $40
Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints (MI, 2022), $50
If you would like some resources beyond a study bible, there is no shortage. I am a massive fan of Brown’s magisterial Introduction. It is extraordinary. If you want something that is catered to a Latter-day Saint audience, then Blumell’s volume may be the way to go. And lastly if you want to spice things up, the folks at the Maxwell Institute have published a new volume on the Ancient Church, that will surely 1) educate, and 2) complicate facile notions of the apostacy.

   
Slavery in Zion (UU Press, 2022), $40
Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (UN Press, 2022), $30
Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon: Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife (Signature, 2022), $10
Now for scholarly history. Thiriot has tracked down every possible scrap of history on enslaved black people in Utah. In doing so, she powerfully illuminates the lives of these people while also helping to cut through the fabrications of time, both those that soften slavery’s sickening reality, and those used to bludgeon the Saints. Hendrix-Komoto’s volume is a sophisticated approach to history by family’s both in the Intermountain West and in the Pacific. Last is a short biography of Mattie Cannon, who was the first female state legislator in the Country. She beat out her husband in the election. So rad.

 
Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Diaspora (UU Press, 2022), $40
Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Revelations in Their Early American Contexts (Signature, 2022), $19
For those interested in Latter-day Saint scripture studies, we have two edited collections. One looks at the open cannon and represents largely new content. The other reprints articles on JS’s context that are difficult for non-academics to access, and which is a solid recap of recent scholarship. Looking ahead, The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition is due out in January and looks to be a really, really, great contribution.

   
The Joseph Smith Papers Documents, Volume 13 (CHP, 2022), $55
Liverpool to Great Salt Lake: The 1851 Journal of Missionary George (UN Press, 2022), $20
In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents (Signature, 2022), $40
For the extra nerdy: the regular documents volumes. The JSPP is almost done printing, so get the latest volumes while you can. The Watt diaries, which were originally kept in shorthand are on sale. And Compton has given a documents companion to his groundbreaking group biography of JS’s wives.

Merry Christmas!

Adapted from a RS lesson taught in the Sacramento, CA metro area on 11/13/22

Luke 10:25-28

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up…saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
And he answering said, what is written in the law? What readest thou?
And he answering said, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself
And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

Good morning, sisters. Today’s lesson might be a little tough, so if you need to leave and get a drink of water, check on something that just came up outside the room, etc., it’s okay. No judgment.

Today we’re talking about President Oaks’ talk from the April 2022 General Conference, Divine Love in the Father’s Plan. In it, he talks a lot about laws and practices around marriage, gender and family in the church that set us apart from those outside the LDS faith and covenant path. 

He introduces his talk through the lens of the two great commandments — to love God and love your neighbor — in this beautiful quote:

When Jesus was asked, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” He taught that to love God and to love our neighbors are the first of God’s great commandments. Those commands are first because they invite us to grow spiritually by seeking to imitate God’s love for us.

*****

Luke 10:29

…And who is my neighbor?

The story President Oaks’ quote draws from is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now, for context, Samaritans were pariahs to the Jews because they lived outside the covenant. Jews at the time considered them categorically apostate, and their religion a hollow imitation of the true Jewish faith. As a result, many Jewish people felt that the very existence of Samaritans, living and breathing as Samaritans (rather than Jews), mocked, diminished and undermined their Jewish identity and religion.

In his talk, President Oaks identifies certain religious beliefs, personal identities, and actions as categorically outside the LDS covenant path — beliefs or identities held by people we might consider to be the “Samaritans” of our day. So what does this parable mean for us today?

*****

Luke 10:30-35

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and left him half dead.
And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 
And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, take care of him; and whatsoever thou soundest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

In your groups, you’ll find an envelope taped to the back of a chair. Please open it to find a scenario of one of these modern “Samaritans,” then answer these questions:

1. Who is the modern “Samaritan”?

2. Remembering that it was the Samaritan who first showed love to the Jewish man, how does the “Samaritan” in this story first show love to you?

3. What actions might you take next in the story to honor the first and second great commandments (show love) to the person in this story?

Group 1:

Scenario: Yesterday, you found your 16-year old daughter Zoe and her best friend, Connie, crying. You find out Connie is getting ready for Protestant baptism and is deeply afraid Zoe will go to hell because she had an LDS baptism. Both friends are clearly devastated – Zoe, because her best friend thinks she’s going to hell, and Connie, because she thinks she’ll lose her best friend. Connie asks if Zoe would like to come to her baptism prep classes and see what it’s like.

Group 2:

Scenario: One of the sisters you minister to just got engaged to someone who is not LDS, and who has repeatedly asked the missionaries not to visit. One day you ask her if she needs anything. She tells you she is overwhelmed with wedding planning and pressure from her parents to marry in the temple; she tells you she would love a friend to help her deal with it all.

Group 3:

Scenario: You meet with a friend from college who says she has something exciting to tell you. She tells you that she has decided she doesn’t need a partner to create a loving family, so she has decided to conceive via a sperm donor and raise the baby on her own. She says she was nervous about telling you because she knows you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She says she is incredibly happy and hopes you will celebrate with her.

Group 4:

Scenario: Your sister comes out to you as gay; she tells you the roommate she has been living with for five years is her partner, and that they are deeply in love. She says she is telling you now because they are registering to become foster parents and she wants to fully include you in their extended family.

*****

Luke 10:36-37

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then Jesus said, go and do thou likewise.

This is hard, isn’t it? As I walked around the groups, this was a common theme I heard. Putting yourself in these stories makes you feel like something inside you is just twisting, and it hurts. This is someone you want on the covenant path with you, and they’re not, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But yet your relationship with them is still there. And it’s on the line. And you just wish it wasn’t on the line; you might wish the whole situation would go away! – but then you remember Jesus is using you as a metaphor in a story about Christlike love. What do you do?

Let’s go back to the original Good Samaritan for a minute. From what I understand (I’m not a historian!), the Jews’ hatred of the Samaritans at that time was such that some Jewish people might also have said “nah, go away; you’re a Samaritan. I’d rather die than accept help from someone like you.” 

The injured man in the Jewish covenant also had to let this relationship happen. He had to show up and let the Samaritan help him as well. 

As I was walking around, I heard one woman say something that I asked her permission to share with all of you. She discussed how she has a gay child, and how that child’s identity has been excruciatingly difficult for her to accept. And then, again, how very hard it was for her to accept when that child found their lifelong partner. And now again that the child is getting ready to have children of their own. She didn’t underplay or discount how hard it was for her to accept her child’s “Samaritan” identity, describing how the stress of this tension, this twisting of something inside of her, at one point left her so physically ill she needed to go to the hospital.

And what was so inspiring to me is that she then talked with just as much blunt conviction about her love and commitment to her child, and her dedication to accepting her relationship with her beloved “Samaritan.” She said she feels living in the last days is to learn God’s lesson on judgment – and she needs to focus on passing her own test. Will she judge, or will she leave judgment in God’s hands? Will she reject her child, or will she try to love them as God loves them? 

And that brings us back to the President Oaks quote that frames this whole lesson. What are the two great commandments? What do they mean in context of the modern “Samaritans?”

When Jesus was asked, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” He taught that to love God and to love our neighbors are the first of God’s great commandments. Those commands are first because they invite us to grow spiritually by seeking to imitate God’s love for us.

May we do so – and may we find, in doing so, God’s love for us. Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of the man injured by the side of the road – he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. We are all Samaritans at different times — and He is eager for a relationship with each one of us.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Fun nonsense on a Sunday Morning. I’ve been working on a book about Joseph Smith’s (JS) King Follett Discourse (April 7, 1844) for quite a few years and it could appear in print next year. In the book I don’t go into theoretical critique much since the book is focused on an oral text, its recovery, and interpretive critiques and receptive evolution over time. One aspect that I’m fascinated about is JS’s talk about human spirits, or souls, or minds (he uses the terms interchangeably and so I will do that here). I mention black holes in the title, and I don’t want to get down deep into that much. Briefly, the quandary about BH’s is that they seem to form a laboratory where questions about the very small (quantum mechanics) and the very large (gravity) come together to form sharp paradoxes.

The two things team up when you take JS seriously about what he says late in his career. Minds, spirits, whatever, are eternal beings, without beginning or end. I won’t try to drill down much here but it seems to be an empty exercise to explicate much beyond this except to say that JS deploys the idea as a notion of comfort in terms of fleeting mortality. You don’t have to worry about losing a child or other loved person because the thought, person, mind is not going away (there are issues here but they are irrelevant the point I want to crawl around) to put it his way: anything that has a beginning will have an end (there is much more to say about this idea but not here). What does this have to do with black holes? Well, go with me a bit. A black hole is a space time singularity surrounded by a kind of shell called the event horizon–stuff that may be inside can’t get out. The diameter of the shell can be very large. What’s inside? Some current thought, when I used to keep up with that–its been a few years, is that there is maybe nothing inside–what’s ought to be inside is actually reflected far away in Hawking radiation. The big problem is about information. Think of information in terms of “bits” in this case a bit might be represented as a very low frequency photon which heads toward the black hole. What happens to information that heads “into” a black hole? Does it disappear? That’s a no, no. Information has to be conserved. Now there are things like entropy and such that come in here but I don’t think we need to go there. The idea is, for JS, people are like black holes. Mind is the central, indivisible thing. There’s stuff smeared around on the event horizon that is linked into the far field but nothing else inside the horizon. It’s inviolate. And I’m off to church.

I recently had the opportunity to watch “The Politics of Beauty,” a new documentary (currently touring film festivals around the country) on Stewart Udall, who was the Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and one of the strongest voices in the U.S. government on behalf of environmental protection during the whole history of the Cold War. He was also a product of the politically influential Udall family out of Arizona; the movie’s brief references to Udall’s identity as a cultural Mormon, and his relationship to the Mormon church and its people, is one of the few elements of the film which I think miss the mark, however slightly. (Marc Bohn’s tribute to Udall on Times & Seasons back in 2010 remains excellent reading in that regard.) I’ve written a post diving into Udall’s ideas, and both how they went beyond the environmental thinking of his time, and how subsequent developments in our thinking about the natural world (particularly as driven by climate change) show their limitations; you can read it here, if you’re interested. In the meantime, here is a preview sample of the documentary; the movie is quite wonderful overall, and well worth watching. At a time when, unfortunately, a majority of Mormon voters in Utah continue to support, however reluctantly, a fascist-adjacent flunky, it’s nice to be reminded of the progressives our tradition has produced as well.

Udall Sampler 12 min from Greg Davis on Vimeo.

The Policy regarding the children of same-sex couples introduced in November of 2015 and later rescinded in April of 2019 was a watershed moment in modern Mormonism. Many of my friends in the church left over the policy and, strangely enough, its recension did not tempt them back. I didn’t leave, but I was tempted.

I had always told myself that if the church was doing more harm than good in the world, I would leave. I am not entirely sure that isn’t the case right now. But something keeps me embedded, like a tick. I’ve seen and felt things that, if I were to deny them, it would mean that, earlier in my life, I had some sort of psychotic break. I’m not ready to adopt that paradigm, but I can sympathize with the early members who forever were calling Joseph Smith a fallen prophet. To declare it all false is to admit to a very thorough foolishness; easier to accept that what was once compelling no longer moves.

But it does move me. I am deaf to 90% of what I hear or see in Church. It is mostly fried froth, drivel disguised as dessert. But sometimes the truth, the Spirit, the glory, and the grace shine through. I don’t know that it happens more than in other traditions, but it at least happens here more than a little. The truth is the grace, the Spirit, and the divine that I have experienced are tied to the church. Yet, I cannot endorse joining it. Not yet.

The church has not repented of the Nov 2015 policy. It has not repented of the policy that excluded people of African descent from bearing the priesthood. It has not repented of its systematic dismantling of women’s autonomy and reduction to the satellites of some man. It hasn’t repented of building storehouses instead of spreading its wealth, of denigrating the world while turning its back on serious scripture study. It hasn’t repented of polygyny, attempting to bury it’s history rather than reckon with it. I don’t think it is false, because I feel the Spirit in it, but its claims to a unique moral authority simply don’t hold up. A church that sees the dangers in an apostle’s picture with a gay son, but is oblivious to its associations with MLMs and other grifts is not a church that can boast of its clear moral vision. I’m not saying it is blind or unable to do good, but it doesn’t seem any better than other denominations at deciding what is wheat and what is tare. Not yet.

So, I couldn’t leave the church. I won’t, I don’t think. But, sitting in Stake Conference, hearing about how I ought to share the gospel, I just can’t. Not because I don’t believe in the good news of Christ, but because I’m not sure the church does. At least not yet. I’m not who I was before the Nov 2015 policy. The church isn’t what it was either. That we both may make our way to repentance, to the covenant path, and to the good grace of God is my prayer. Amen.

Over the last week or so, a number of people have pointed me to investigative journalism regarding the church’s finances in Canada and Australia and asked my opinion on them. Which is flattering but, unfortunately, right now I don’t have a ton of spare time. So rather than go through in detail, I’m going to try to contextualize a little bit of what I think is going on.

And what I think is going on is two things. First, the church thinks of itself and, to the extent it legally can, operates as a single economic entity. Over the last several decades or so, it has consolidated its finances in Salt Lake (which significantly diverges from most religious organizations I’m familiar with, including other hierarchical religions like the Catholic church).

Second, the church is obsessed with being financially opaque. It values its financial privacy to a degree that it can be harmful to the public’s perception. (I’m sure I’ve blogged about this, but I’ve also written about the history of the church’s varying levels of financial transparency/opacity for Dialogue.)

And these two things, I believe, underlie the stories coming out of Canada and Australia. And frankly, my quick blog post (written between getting kids up for school, getting them breakfast, and getting ready for work) may or may not be satisfying. It’s not meant to convict or exonerate the church. And pretty much everything I know about this comes from two articles. And I believe that the church should be more financially transparent, and that such transparency would be good for it in both the short and the long run.

Canada

The news out of Canada is that the Canadian church has sent about C$1 billion to the BYUs over the last fifteen years.

Which, I have to admit, I found kind of unsurprising. More on that in a minute.

The church has a separate corporate existence in Canada (and Australia, when we get there). Like in the US, my understanding is that Canadians who donate to the (Canadian) church get a charitable deduction. But Canadian law (at least according to the article–I’m not an expert in Canadian tax law) requires a Canadian charity to use the money for charitable purposes or to give it to another qualified charity. The US church is not a qualified charity for these purposes, which undercuts the church’s general financial organization. Like, in the US, when you hand your $100 of tithing to the bishop, he deposits it in a bank account that goes to Salt Lake, then Salt Lake distributes that money back according to its own criteria. (This is, on net, probably a good thing. Otherwise, poorer wards would have fewer resources, while richer wards could fund massive parties or ski trips or whatever.)

That’s not an option in Canada. But good news! Money is fungible. So if the Canadian church can’t remit tithing to the Salt Lake church, economically it does exactly the same thing by paying expenses that the Salt Lake church would have to pay. If the BYUs are qualified recipients and the church would have put at least C$1 billion into them over those 15 years, the church is indifferent to whether it pays directly or the payment comes through Canada or Australia or the UK or Brazil or whatever.

Secondarily, Canadian law requires some level of disclosure of how Canadian charities spend their money. By transferring all except some administrative expenses to the US and letting the US pay expenses directly, it circumvents the detailed reporting.

So what should we think of this? It’s ultimately up to you. The journalist points out that this is perfectly legal. Of course, perfectly legal is not the same as normatively good. And frankly, this issue would go away if the worldwide church were transparent about its finances, a thing entirely within its power.

That said, honestly, this feels like the church trying to shove the square peg of Canadian charity law into the round hole of its preferred corporate/economic regime. It really wants to act like a unified economic entity and, because Canadian law makes that hard, it has adjusted. But again, the fungibility of money means that, by structuring its expenditures to meet Canadian law, it can effectively include its Canadian revenue within its unified vision of church finances.

Australia

An Australian newspaper reports that the church has massively overstated its humanitarian giving. (Okay, it says “charitable,” but legally, charitable includes religious—it’s using “charitable” to mean “relief of poverty,” so I’m going to stick with “humanitarian.”) Several years of leaked financial statements suggest that Latter-day Saint Charities has made significantly less humanitarian donations than the church claims. (Apparently there’s also a 60 Minutes Australia TV segment? but I don’t watch US 60 Minutes—in fact, the only TV news-like show I watch is the Last Week Tonight segment that goes on YouTube—and I don’t plan on starting now.)

Is it plausible? Absolutely. Like I’ve said way too many times already, the church is far too opaque with its finances. But in evaluating the articles claims, I did have a couple questions.

First, the article says that the church:

“the church has claimed its global giving through its charity arm, Utah-based Latter-day Saint Charities increased by $US1.35 billion between 2008 and 2020. The church says it funds programs through organisations such as the Red Cross, Water For People and the World Food Program.

“But an analysis of the Latter-day Saint Charities own accounts — which have never been released or reported previously — show it only provided $US177 million in total charitable support over the same period, a discrepancy of $US1.18 billion ($1.82 billion). Latter-day Saint Charities uses global accounting firm PwC as its auditor.”

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t link to that claim. And in the church’s 2021 disclosure, it doesn’t mention anything about Latter-day Saint Charities in connection with its giving. And frankly, here the opacity gets in my way. I don’t know the purpose of LDS Charities. I don’t know whether the church does the bulk of its humanitarian giving through LDS Charities or if it just uses LDS Charities for particular endeavors. But without knowing whether LDS Charities is the exclusive font of church humanitarian aid or not, its financial statements don’t tell us much.

Again, it is clearly possible that the church is overstating its humanitarian aid. Its lack of transparency means that’s something we can’t objectively evaluate. But the Australian story doesn’t give us a ton of information about that question, either way.

And again, this is within the power of the church to resolve. It could be—and should be—more transparent.

And with that, it’s time to get kids to school and start the work day.

Please note that, if the rhetoric of Musk’s takeover of Twitter has shown us nothing else, it’s that content moderation is important and valuable. And I will moderate, though I won’t be here every second of every day to do so. Please don’t troll, because I’ll delete your comment. And please don’t respond to trolls, because I’ll also delete responses. Thanks!

Guest post by Taylor Kerby

I went on my mission at the high peak of the “I’m a Mormon Campaign.” We would often watch through the posted videos, ostensibly for the sake of our investigators, but also probably as a product of having no other entertainment. It was commonplace for us to play these videos during our lessons and, as a missionary assigned to a Chinese-speaking area, it was important to have something, anything, that featured a person who looked like the people I served.

Many of these videos are etched in my mind, and when I think about them, I feel a sad mix of nostalgia and longing for the sort of Mormonism they endorsed and proudly displayed in Times Square and other secular spaces. The thesis of the “I’m a Mormon Campaign” was that Mormonism represented a unified group of nevertheless very different people.

I don’t know if that thesis was actually true. I think it was. But even if it wasn’t, even if Mormonism is a great monolith of cookie-cutter personalities, it mattered that we Mormons believed it was true. It continues to matter that we do.

One video featured a stay-at-home dad. It was meant to push back against the stereotype of Mormons as relics of a 1950’s past. It was meant to say that we are more complex than that. Whether or not we actually are, it also gave us Mormons permission to be.

Another video showed a tough biker dude who confessed that he wasn’t always the best Mormon but tried his best to be. It was meant to push back against the stereotype of Mormonism as being all-consuming. Whether or not it was true, it gave us permission to have a more nuanced relationship with our religion and to more readily accept seemingly “less faithful” members as fully Mormon.

In several videos, we were introduced to people of color (and also here, here, here, here, and here) who were also faithful Mormons. It was meant to show the world that there were all sorts of people who were also Mormons. This was, and is, certainly true. But also, it mattered much more that we white members of the Church knew it. And that we knew we did not hold a monopoly on Mormonism as a heritage.

I could go on. Even now thinking back to them I feel that tender longing for that version of my faith. In the wake of President Nelson’s injunction to not use the term “Mormon” these videos have become forgotten. And I worry that the version of Mormonism they supported may also be falling away. We need to be reminded of the truths they conveyed. People outside our faith will view us however they’re going to view us. But how we view ourselves matters. In fact, I would argue it matters much, much more. And if we are serious about creating an eternal community here on earth, we must begin with accepting a version of a “Mormon us”  that is bigger, and infinitely more complex, than the “Mormon me.”

The Church Historian’s Press, well known as the imprint for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, has gradually expanded its offerings on several fronts both in print and online, publishing such outstanding offerings as The Journal of George Q. Cannon, At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, and The Journal of George F. Richards.

The Press has now announced the online publication of two more foundational texts that will be of interest to historians of nineteenth-century Utah and others with religious or academic interests in that period. The two collections are The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow, and The Diaries of Emmeline B. Wells.

Eliza Roxcy Snow’s Discourses

Snow (1804-1887) was a plural wife of Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Ill. and secretary of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo (March 1842),

[Snow’s 1842 Relief Society minute book—a work of fundamental importance to Mormonism]

forerunner of the Relief Societies established in Utah more than two decades later. Snow was appointed by Brigham Young in 1868 to assist wards in organizing local Relief Societies in the territory. Her trademark in doing so was rehearsing the minutes of the Nauvoo Relief Society organizational meetings. Her minutes remained with her up until her death and only later came into the possession of the LDS church historian in 1911. She frequently referred to the minutes in her addresses such as in these minutes of the Salt Lake 13th Ward Relief Society:

At a recent meeting the editor of the Snow collection, historian Jennifer Reeder, spoke about gathering Eliza’s addresses. She noted that the team scoured LDS publications for Snow’s discourses as well as her own records and other’s personal reports. There are few verbatim audits in existence and the available records span a wide range in terms of word for word reporting. It is unfortunate that shorthand reports were largely confined to male discourse in the Utah period, yet what remains is extremely valuable in plotting the nature of instruction delivered by President Snow (she became the first “general” President of the Relief Society on July 17, 1880) and the theology and praxis preached to the women of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in pre-manifesto Utah. Her nearly 1200 sermons found in this volume constitute a remarkable work for both the creator and Reeder and her fellow historians.

The Diaries of Emmeline Wells (1828-1921)

Historian Lisa Olsen Tait headed the group working on the Wells volume and Tait noted the extensive task in editing 47 individual diaries, one that began at BYU Special Collections ca 2002 with historians Cherry Bushman Silver and Sheree Maxwell Bench who initially transcribed and annotated the diaries. The volume editors searched for biographical information on every person mentioned in the diaries, a sometimes intense though rewarding task of detective work. The Press’s summary suggests some of fascinating source material: “One can respect the useful, straightforward diaries of other Church leaders. But the EmmelineWells diaries are fascinating in their diversity and complexities. Through her notations we recreate the workings of late 19th- and early 20th-century Salt Lake City society. She interacted with male and female Church leaders, social reformers, political aspirants, artists, and physicians. She lays out family entanglements and generational viewpoints. She documents women’s blessings to each other, their speaking in tongues, responses to plural marriage, the dynamics of women’s board meetings. She records personal feelings and thoughts. She is both practical and passionate in her views.” Wells eventually followed in the footsteps of Snow as general President of the Relief Society.

A few of the entires in the diaries give some flavor of their breadth:

“In the morning I was busy seeing after some business matters pertaining to the [Woman’s Exponent] office, and in the afternoon we had an excellent meeting, Sister Snow was present my husband seemed proud of my literary acquirements for once in his life . . . ” [June 3, 1875]

“I have desired with all my heart to do those things that would advance women in moral and spiritual as well as educational work and tend to the rolling on of the work of God upon the earth.” [August 1, 1895]

“This morning I presided over the General Congress [Chicago Exposition] in the Hall of Columbus—an honor never before accorded to a Mormon woman—if one of our brethren had such a distinguished honor conferred upon them it would have been heralded the country over and thought a great achievement. I succeeded very well.” [Diary, 20 May 1893.]

These two publications represent the best in careful textual scholarship. The casual reader or careful student will be equally benefited. Well done.

My memories of BYU are nearly 30 years old, so I am seeking more recent information. I teach Friends University, at a small Christian (originally Quaker, now non-denominational) liberal arts college in Wichita, KS, and the university community hosts, for most of the academic year, weekly chapel services. Those chapel services have evolved a great deal over the years, and will no doubt continue to do so. In times past, a certain amount of attendance at chapel meetings (which has gone by various names; when I arrived here in 2006, it was called “Faith and Learning”) was required of the student body; that stopped a while back, but now it looks it may be coming back. I am part of a committee attempting to design attendance policies, and at our last meeting, another faculty member–one strongly opposed to any required chapel whatsoever–surprised me by citing, as part of his comparative research, BYU’s devotionals, attendance at which is not required.

Thinking back to my years at BYU (1987-1994, with a mission in there), I agreed with him–but also felt it important to emphasize that everything locked down at BYU when there were devotional speakers in the Marriott Center: the library, the Wilkinson Center, everything. Such a total shut-down of campus during devotionals is not something that has been seriously considered as part of the discussion about required chapel here at Friends, and since my colleague brought it up (and since I think, given the disposition of our Board of Trustees and the administration, I think the return of required chapel is probably inevitable), I’d like to explore it further. But I need better information to do so. And hence I seek input from the BYU-attending and BYU-graduated readers of BCC. Specifically:

1) Is my memory correct, and if it is, does that policy of the entire campus–offices, food court, buildings, etc.–locking their doors and closing, with all employees being released for an hour, during devotional hour continue today?

2) If my memory is correct, and the policy does continue today, how rigorously, in your subjective judgment, is it enforced? (My memory also includes an understanding that if you got into the Harold B. Lee Library before devotional hour, that of course you wouldn’t be kicked out; the copy center–it was in the library back then–and the check-out desk would be closed, and if you left the building you wouldn’t be able to get back in, but that there would effort to shame the folks at their desks or shoo people away from computer terminals or the book stacks.)

Thanks in advance for your assistance!