Contact between religions is a lot like contact between languages. One way for two language communities to interact is through invasion.
Author: Jonathan Green
Second-language acquisition in children; or, This life is a school
I’ve enrolled my two oldest children in a German elementary school. They have until Christmas to learn German and catch up to the rest of their first- or third-grade classes before the risk of flunking out gets to be too…
Hypercorrection
In linguistics, hypercorrection is the kind of mistake you make when you’re trying too hard to speak correctly.
The road to Oblivion
If you want to write the great Mormon novel, or the great Mormon dissertation, don’t play video games.
Religion class
I registered my two oldest children for school on Friday. The principal needed to know which church they belonged to so that he could assign them to the proper religion class. For a first and third grader attending public school…
Language and Belief
Linguistics, the study of language’s inner workings, is a source for concepts and technical vocabulary that are also useful for thinking about religion, because language and religion are both, among other things, mental constructs for making sense of the world…
Moving up, moving out
Since getting married eleven years ago, my wife and I have moved eight times.
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed
Up until about a year ago, if you had asked me why I had studied German, I would have said that I started in the ninth grade and just didn’t know when to stop. At BYU, my major in mechanical…
I was a Benson Scholar
Towards the end of my time at BYU, a friend mentioned to me that he knew some Benson scholars (today we would say Hinckley scholars, or more generically, presidential scholars), and that they were all stuck up and full of…
The Adjunct Life
Two years ago, I came within twenty-four hours of abandoning my academic career before it started. None of the applications I had sent out had gone anywhere, I had completed my degree, and my department had no money to keep…
Taking Aim at Mormon Folklore
There has been some recent discussion of faith-promoting stories and other Mormon folklore, including its complex relationship to factual history, the difficulty of finding an original source, and the tension that skepticism can incite. My question is: if you can…
Caspar Schwenckfeld: Mormon Hero of the Reformation
As much as we honor the Reformation in general, on closer inspection the individual Reformers have, from a Mormon perspective, some rough edges. Whether or not a given Reformation doctrine is closer to our views than traditional Catholic teaching had…
Awaiting the Restoration in 1531
Who before 1830 was anticipating the Restoration? For many cases we like to cite, the evidence consists of quotes that have been in circulation for a century or more, and that often rest on a fairly shaky foundation. Musings of…
Anabaptists II: Diverging Parallels
Despite the striking resemblance of the Mormon and Anabaptist experiences, significant differences remain. The Book of Mormon and the temple are the most obvious LDS elements without a precise Anabaptist parallel, but I’m more interested in how similar beginnings have…
Anabaptists on my Mind
Mormons are neither Catholic nor Protestant, we often hear, and I see no reason to doubt the basic truth of the statement. Is there any spectrum of Christian religions such that we can say, “Mormonism is one of the X…