If you want to reach an audience of church members on a sensitive topic, watch and learn from Earthly Parents.
Author: Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green has been described as a scholar of German, master of trivia, and academic vagabond. He is an instructor of German in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of North Dakota. His books include Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450– 1550 (2011), and The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess: Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe (2014).
Satan’s troll farm
Interfaces of modernity: proselytizing, universities, politics
Uto-Aztecan and Semitic: Too much of a good thing
Church is not boring
To correct one misconception, our Sunday meetings are not boring.
Notes on faculty gender balance at BYU
This is what it looks like when the prophet speaks as a prophet
It is a mistake to apply the heuristics of edge cases to central and paradigmatic examples.
Bonsai
I know this church is true
This statement is not nonsensical or trite. It is the essence of our belief in six words. It is, in its own way, even lyrical. One occasionally hears objections to the effect that statements can be true, or friends can be true, but how can an organization be true? I started writing this post some time ago, before Michael Austin’s recent post and not in response to it, but his post can serve as a thoughtful and well-written example of the genre. Michael writes: I simply can’t comprehend what it might mean for a group of 15 million people or so to “be true”—or, for that matter, to be untrue. Statements can be true. Ideas can be true. Accounts of specific events can be true. But a Church, it seems to me, needs to have some relationship to truth other than just being it. In his post, Michael expresses his concern about the danger of asserting that the church is true. I think Michael is responding not to “I know this church is true,” but to another statement he may hear in those words: “I know this church is truth.” That would indeed be a much different claim, but it is not our claim. Fortunately our prophets have been quite open to truth wherever it may be found—“If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine,” as Brigham Young put it. In other…
The Last 4,000 Years
The last 4,000 years of religious history, up to and resulting in us, can be described as a series of questions and answers, with each new question arising out of the previous answer over generations or centuries as the full implications of each answer become understood.
In the world
Is the world a generally wonderful place that is constantly improving and generally better today than it ever has been? Or, to restate the obvious, do we live at peril every hour in a world we must avoid becoming part of, and is this alienation from the world a fundamental part of the message of Jesus? As is usually the case with such things, the answer to both questions is: yes. And this is perhaps nowhere more clear than in Yellowstone National Park.
Lutheran Prophets and Mormon Studies
Loving my Prosperity Gospel
The term “prosperity gospel” describes an execrable set of ideas in American Christianity, chiefly that wealth is a marker of righteousness, and that believers can ensure material wealth and prosperity through spiritual practices. But “prosperity gospel” is often applied to a much broader set of beliefs
Fusion
Meeting with my ward high priests group has been one of my favorite parts of the week for several years.
Easter Conference
Based on a talk given this Sunday in sacrament meeting. This year, Easter and General Conference are on the same day, which illustrates how we measure time in multiple ways.
Stating the Obvious: The World
In the current unhappy state of online Mormon discourse, stating the obvious is sometimes controversial, and for that reason all the more necessary.
Moral calculus in the gig economy
What will you do the next time your client drops you into a real-world instance of the prisoner’s dilemma?
Journalistic Malpractice and BYU-Idaho
First the journalistic malpractice, then BYU-Idaho.
The two fundamentals of Mormon scripture reading
There are, I think, only two fundamental requirements that a Mormon reading of scripture must fulfill.
Onward, Mormon Soldier
Usually I reveal my ignorance gradually over the course of a blog post, perhaps saving the big reveal for the end. This time I’ll get it out of the way up front. I know how spiritual growth and progress toward engagement with the church at an adult level works in lives more or less like my own: high school graduation and transition to elders quorum or Relief Society, starting college and going on a mission (in roughly that order), finishing college and getting married (in roughly that order), and starting a career and accepting adult church callings. What I don’t understand well, despite a need to do so, is how typical milestones of spiritual growth fit into the lives of those who opt for military service.
Theorizing the Restoration in the Sixteenth Century
I’ve written before about Sebastian Franck, a spiritualist who charted his own path through the religious turmoil of the Reformation era. As I was recently reading Franck’s letter to the Anabaptist theologian Johann Campanus, I was struck by how familiar Franck’s discussion of apostasy, authority, and restoration sounded.
Bad footnotes can be spiritually deadly
Over at Slate, Daniel Engber had an interesting and instructive article a while back entitled “Bad Footnotes Can Be Deadly” on how the current opioid crisis has been aggravated by the misunderstanding of a letter to the editor of a medical journal and its misquotation over decades in the medical literature, with the error propagated and compounded by researchers who failed to check the original source. Engber’s article on the error’s persistence and influence documents a process not unlike the formation of urban legends and faith-promoting rumor. But if you’ve ever done scholarly research, you should also be nodding your head in recognition
What can LGBT Mormons Hope For? A response
John Gustav-Wrathall asks, “What can LGBT Mormons hope for?” As an answer, John offers his own experience as a guide, and there is much about it that is commendable. Optimism, faith, relying on God, and a commitment to the Church are all far superior to their alternatives, and John’s generosity and positive approach is a welcome contribution to what has too often been a toxic and polarizing debate. Mormons can fully share in much that John hopes for. But John has also chosen a path that is in some important points incompatible with Mormon belief.
The Hugh of St. Victor option
I have never read Rod Dreher and have no particular insight on how American conservative Christianity should respond to secularism. If Mormons look to medieval clergy for a model of forming intentional communities, however, I think a better option than Benedictine monasticism is that of the Canons Regular.
How studying the humanities helps me avoid faith crises: notes on deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon
Clark’s post and his links to David Bokovoy’s discussion of deutero-Isaiah at Rational Faiths reminded me that the dating of Isaiah does not cause me much concern, mostly because I am averse to crises, but also as a direct consequence of my academic studies and research.
Mormon apocalypticism
Apocalypticism has become virtually synonymous with the disreputable side of religion, the stall in the religious marketplace where respectable people don’t want to be seen rummaging through the close-out racks. This is unfortunate, as you can’t understand the New Testament without reference to apocalypticism, and (to get to the point of this post) apocalypticism is an inextricable part of the inner logic of Mormonism.
The inner logic of Mormonism
Trying to identify the core doctrines of Mormonism is a project doomed to failure, I think, because it sets up an unworkable categorical distinction between core and periphery, and makes the unsupported assumption that doctrine forms the core of Mormonism in the first place.
What we must not do
Although none of these assumptions can be taken for granted, let’s assume that Trump’s presidency will feature more or less what his campaign promised, that his term in office will be limited to 1260 1460 days, and that it will come to be widely derided as a disaster for the country. If we look back at the Church’s dealings with governments around the world during the last hundred years, we can see things in retrospect that the Church and its members should have avoided in the past that suggest things that we should avoid now.
Being subject to Voldemort
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Donald Trump is likely to destroy American democracy while leaving the nation in ruins and the world in flames, and let’s further assume that all of these are bad things. (I don’ t think the situation is quite as hopeful as that, but I’m not particularly interested in arguing about any of these assumptions in this post.) What should the Church do about it? What should you do about it?
Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes
The feelings we associate with spiritual experiences are detectable by brain scans, and spiritual feelings can be generated by stimulating particular parts of our brains. That is not surprising. Without something happening in our brain, we would have no feelings and no experiences of any kind, spiritual or mundane. It’s not just that spiritual experiences are associated with particular emotions, but that everything we think and feel is a neurological event of some kind.