News and Politics

Meditation and the Gospel

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The Listener, by James Christensen Meditation is one of those practices with religious roots that has managed to become popular even in very secular, non-believing spaces, but I haven’t really caught the meditation bug. I’ve done a few guided meditations and have enjoyed them, but in terms of stress release I’d rather just get a massage or play soccer. On a recent podcast I listened to the guest mention that he had tried the floating tank fad and “just got bored.” It was one of those moments when you hear somebody confirm something you haven’t been able to admit to yourself or articulate and you realize that you’re not alone.   However, I realize I probably haven’t given real, substantive meditation a chance. In my comparative religion class at BYU, the great Roger Keller put the class through a guided meditation session, and his account of his own meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery where he spent days clearing his mind was intriguing. According to him and other accounts I’ve heard, because we’ve swum in a monkey-mind world for so long we don’t even understand what a calm, focused, composed mind feels like (and this was before Twitter), and it takes a lot of intentional meditation time to really do a thorough, Marie Kondo cognitive housecleaning.   Could I become more sensitive to the whisperings of the spirit if I cleared out the detritus in my mind? I’m open to it, and look…

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Latter-day Saint Literature Review

Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2023

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A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints.  Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2023. The venerable Richard Bushman’s latest; a cultural history on the golden plates as artifacts. He’s been working on this for years. “Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith’s first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day?” Fenton, Elizabeth. “The Book of Mormon and Book History.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 32 (2023): 74-96. It’s paywalled, so it’s hard to know what it’s about.  Oman, Nathan B. “Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition.” William & Mary Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming (2023). Theological and historical exploration of Mormon perceptions of property and their ambiguities.   Oman, Nathan B. “‘A Welding Link of Some Kind’: A Minimalist Theology of Same-Sex Marriage Sealings.” Nathan B. Oman, Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint History, Thought, and Scripture (Salt Lake City, Utah: Kofford Books, Forthcoming) (2023). Theological exploration of the possibility of same-sex sealings. “This essay canvases the history of Latter-day Saint sealing rules and practices and argues that when viewed in their entirety, it is difficult to map these practices on to a particular model of…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Temples

The Law of the Gospel

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A couple years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included a list of the covenants made during the endowment session in their general handbook. It was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. Yet, I missed a part of the significance of the text presented until reading a recent interview with Samuel R. Weber over at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk—not only are the specific covenants included, but definitions were as well. In particular, the Law of the Gospel, had an official definition pinned down for the first time in recent history, which is the subject of the interview.

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News and Politics

Pascal’s Wager and the Restored Gospel

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Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less “import.” If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that’s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances.  While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal’s Wager for us. (Pascal’s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal’s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight.  As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I’m not claiming I’m some Pascal–I’d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before some 19th century white guy was the first one to put it in a book in a particular part of the world and have the concept forever attached to his name. Besides, Pascal is Pascal for much more than this…

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Book Reviews, Science

Let’s Talk about Science and Religion – A Review

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Back when I was studying biological engineering in college, I remember one Sunday where a stake high councilor came and spoke in our ward. He based his remarks on Elder Quentin L. Cook’s talk “Lamentations of Jeremiah: Beware of Bondage”. When he discussed how “Turning from the worship of the true and living God and worshipping false gods” results in forms of “spiritual, physical, and intellectual bondage,” the high councilor decided to add his own embellishments and examples of what those types of bondage looked like. His first example of intellectual bondage was the belief that organic evolution was real. Given my field of study and life experiences, that went over like a lead balloon. And yet, I at least understood where he came from. I can remember talking with an evangelical farmer at the edge of his property in rural Iowa on my mission and talking about evolution. The farmer was accusing Mormons of believing in evolution, which was a grievous sin in his eyes, and I was trying to convince him that because Bruce R. McConkie said that belief in evolution was wrong, Latter-day Saints were required to reject evolution (since he was sustained as a prophet, seer, and revelator), so the farmer didn’t need to feel concerned about that aspect of our religion. While I was very conflicted about rejecting evolution, at the time I was also in the camp that essentially believes that Bruce R. McConkie…

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From the Desk Co-posts, New Testament

Jesus’s Female Ancestors

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Jesus the Messiah was the son of a righteous and godly woman named Mary, through whom he had many ancestors discussed in the Hebrew Bible. Among those were several remarkable women. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Camille Fronk Olson discussed some of the women in the genealogy of Jesus. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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News and Politics

Will Nobody Think of the Children! Hypocrisy and the November Policy

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Pearls Being Clutched I vaguely recall when I was younger learning about the special restrictions put in place in regards to Church membership for people from a polygamous background. I could think of a few narrow cases where I didn’t think the restrictions were necessary, but they would have been such a small portion of everything that goes on that I didn’t give it more than a passing thought.  Fast forward to November 2015. The Church very explicitly connected the November Policy of Consistency to the long-standing policy regarding polygamous children. Again, I had had some reservations about the latter, but if that was going to be the policy I didn’t see why the rationales wouldn’t have also applied to children of same-sex couples given the unique intersectional issues at play.  Now, some could argue that there are fundamental differences-in-kind vis-a-vis our 2023 doctrine between polygamous and same-sex couples, and there might be, but I just don’t care. They’re simply irrelevant to the argument that was being invoked by the policy’s detractors, which hinged on the idea that the children were being punished for the sins of their parents.  This argument always smelled a little of bad faith since a lot of the people making it clearly did not believe that the parents were, in fact, in a state of sin, but the bad faith became even more clear when the polygamy policy that the rule was based on seemed…

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Book Reviews, Church History

George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy: A Review

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George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy by Kenneth L. Cannon II is an entry in the Signature Books brief biographies series focused on one of the most influential and best-known Latter-day Saints in the 19th century. As a missionary, publisher, representative for Utah Territory to the United States Congress, businessman, apostle, and long-term First Presidency member, he accomplished a lot during his lifetime. The brief biographies are essentially a Latter-day Saint version of the Penguin Lives series that was published by the Penguin Random House and Viking Press–short, accessible biographies of notable individuals. At 250 pages (plus index material), this George Q. Cannon biography pushes the bounds of “brief”, but the subject led such a big life and left so many records of his efforts and accomplishments that it is understandable why it didn’t fit into 100-150 pages.

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News and Politics

Latter-day Saint Book Review: Seizing Power, The Strategic Logic of Military Coups

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  Seizing Power by political scientist Naunihal Singh is the preeminent scholarly work on coups d’etat. In it, Singh pairs in-depth investigations of coup attempts in Africa and Russia with a quantitative analysis of correlates of successful coups worldwide. He finds that coups can largely be characterized as coordination games, where military commanders often join the side that they think will win. If they choose correctly their power increases, if they choose wrongly they will probably be executed or imprisoned, so perception becomes everything and both sides of a coup have an incentive to exaggerate their level of support within the state apparatus. This is all fascinating but, to paraphrase Elder Uchtdorf, “what does this have to do with the Church?”  Below are several episodes in Church history where the themes discussed in Singh’s work were at play. As a disclaimer, I am NOT comparing Spencer W. Kimball or (most of) the others in this list to military coup leaders, and I do not want to overdraw the comparison between the Church and an unstable government. Rather, the point here is the principles involved even if the contexts are vastly different.  Attempted Take Over of the Kirtland Temple  With that disclaimer, this episode is the one that could probably be accurately described as an attempted coup. During the Kirtland Safety Society debacle, The Martin Harris/Waren Parish splinter group literally tried to occupy the Kirtland temple with weapons. Singh discusses how…

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Church History, From the Desk Co-posts

Remember the “F.” And seniority.

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I know I’ve talked a bit about Joseph F. Smith (JFS) lately, but the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk recently shared another interview about him. This time around, Dennis Horne spoke about Joseph F. Smith’s succession to the presidency of the Church, but it also covers other info about this pivotal president of the Church. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with quotes and some commentary by myself).

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General Doctrine, Guest Bloggers

Redefining Apostasy: Building Bridges, Not Barriers, in the Face of a Faith Transition

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The following is a guest post by Randall Davis. Amidst the tapestry of human experience, religious freedom–the right to worship in accordance with one’s own conscience–is a deeply-valued principle that forms the bedrock of much goodness in our world today. Having associated with people of various faith traditions over the years, I have seen the enriching influence of religion in their lives, and from our discussions, they recognize that religious freedom carries both duties and responsibilities that honor the sanctity of other beliefs.

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News and Politics

Latter-day Saint Book Review: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

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Regrets of the Dying The Top Five Regrets of the Dying was a bestselling book by a palliative care nurse who spent a lot of time with patients as they were passing away. I’m not going to recommend it as a book; the writing isn’t the best and it gets kind of repetitious, but the idea sparked an interest in me on taking an end-of-life perspective, which seems like one of the more accurate lenses through which to view things big picture. Here I’ll go through each regret with commentary on how it interrelates with the gospel and gospel living. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This one is common in leaving Mormonism narratives, and it definitely has something to it. I’m an orthodox member, but for adults who simply don’t believe but are ensconced in heavily Latter-day Saint circles I totally get it. I do feel like the pressures are much less now with the great opening up of the world with the Internet. Patent non-believers typically don’t go on missions anymore, for example, when that wasn’t unheard of, say, 20 years ago. For believers, a purely distilled deathbed faith, stripped of any concern whatsoever of what Bishop, President, or Elder so and so thinks of us seems like the ideal to strive for in our day to day walk with God. However, the single-minded focus…

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20th Century History, Book of Mormon, Mexico

Mormonism in Mexico, Part 12: Bautista’s Lamanites

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While efforts to gather converts from central Mexico failed and the mission in central Mexico closed, there would still be future successes. Among the earliest converts in the 20th century in Mexico, the Bautista family would go on to have an impact on the Church for years to come, including the development of an indigenous-affirming perspective on Lamanite identity.

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Church History, From the Desk Co-posts, Joseph Smith

Carthage and the Nauvoo Expositor

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The Joseph Smith Papers recently released a final podcast series, the Road to Carthage podcast, focusing on the final days and immediate aftermath of Joseph Smith’s life. It was an explosive time, filled with tension both within and outside of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, podcast host Spencer W. McBride talked about the events that led to Joseph Smith’s death in 1844. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion). An important piece of the picture when it comes to events leading to Joseph Smith’s death is the way that information was shared at the time and place and the impact that had on public opinion. As McBride explains, the mechanism mostly focused on a network of local newspapers: There was no national newspaper that reached readers throughout the country. Instead, local newspaper editors borrowed liberally from each other, reprinting articles wholesale. This meant that really interesting news and opinions in one part of the country could eventually receive national coverage through this exchange network of newspapers. So, there was great potential in operating a newspaper, even far away from the country’s centers of population and power. Two newspapers in particular played a key role in the story: The Warsaw Signal was the premier venue for anti-Mormon editorials in Illinois. That paper stirred…

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News and Politics

Early Utah Was Relatively Egalitarian

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In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of the census responses for the 19th century at once. As you can imagine, this is a fairly large file, but if you subset Utah it is much more manageable. The wonderful IPUMS folks have harmonized the different questions asked across time so that you can make comparisons across decennial censuses. In a previous post I discussed race in early Utah. In this post I’ll discuss what the Census Bureau data has to say about inequality (or equality, as we’ll see) in early Utah. As far as I can tell, the IPUMS data doesn’t have much in way of economic variables that extend all the way from the 19th into the 20th centuries. The exceptions are occupation scores, these are numeric socioeconomic scores that are assigned to particular occupations based on 1950s data. Here we use the Duncan Socioeconomic Index in particular. There is some controversy about these measures that I’m not terribly well read up on, but I see them enough that I assume they have some validity. I’m sure cross-century comparisons also complicate some things, so here I’m including various additional states as a…

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Church History, General Doctrine, Latter-day Saint Publications, Latter-day Saint Thought, Mormon Studies, Race and the Priesthood, Scriptures

Idiosyncratic ranking of the “Let’s Talk About” series from Deseret Book

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This is, I think, the best thing to come out of Deseret Book in a long while. I somewhat wish these books had existed when I was much, much younger, but the expertise (and, frankly, spiritual maturity of many members) likely didn’t really exist in the right forms until recently. What follows is my totally idiosyncratic, personal ranking of the series. Every book is excellent (how often can you say that about a book series like this?), so this is not “best to worst” but more “what Ivan enjoyed or found most useful”  This may or may not help you. Also, some volumes have either not been released or I haven’t read them, so they are absent from the list:

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News and Politics

The Active Afterlife of the Restored Gospel

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Vietnamese depiction of the Pure Land, the Mahayana Buddhist paradisiacal afterlife Egyptian depiction of the Field of Reeds, the ancient Egyptian paradisiacal afterlife While I’m open to the idea of “sacred envy,” where we see things in other faith traditions and communities that we wish we had, that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing places where we feel our own faith gets it right where most don’t; it is the faith we have chosen after all. Some of the big ones here for me are: Heavenly Mother, collapsing the ontological distance between divinity and humanity, and an active afterlife.   I have a casual interest in artistic, cultural, and religious depictions of the afterlife and paradise (and, as a related note, in the fact that Near Death Experiences often tap into the person’s religion-dependent version of the afterlife, but another post for another day). They can be genuinely inspiring; for example, Gladiator’s depiction of the Elysian fields or The Northman’s depiction of Valhalla and yes, Touched by an Angel. A defining characteristic running through the paradisiacal depictions of classical faiths is largely one of rest, and I get it. In societies where the vast majority of the population is scrapping by along the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, having ground that brings forth fruit spontaneously without weeds makes sense as the most ideal existence imaginable, and a long time of blissful rest especially makes sense when I think of people I know who…

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