Historian of Religion, Science, and Biblical Interpretation
My post on inerrancy generated… a large amount of traffic and conversation. I read a great number of comments on Facebook, Twitter, and forums and message boards, across the spectrum of LDS commitment and faith. I want to take this opportunity to revisit, clarify, and add. I can’t do it all here; some will require another post.
I recently had a conversation1which was eventually deleted by an administrator in a public Facebook group about the “printing error” in the 2020 Book of Mormon manual. I raised some substantial concerns, filled out with a number of links to my own research and posts about cursing in scripture (e.g. here and in my posts on 2 Nephi 1-5, here and here). Two S&I/COB2Seminaries & Institutes; Church Office Building employees responded to me by bearing fervent testimony of the Curriculum and Correlation processes and berating anyone who dared hold any other opinion.
These testimonies constituted de facto witnessing of inerrancy (not the first I’ve seen) and also violated Elder Ballard’s directive specifically to S&I teachers;
“Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue.”
I even called them out on avoiding the central issues, which received no response. Continue reading
There’s a large group on Facebook for Seminary teachers, where they ask questions, share ideas and lesson plans, etc. I’ve been a (sometimes not-very-detached) observer there, and recently participated in a live-streamed interview with Jenny Smith about various things around teaching seminary. I’ve uploaded it to youtube for wider watching, below with some notes. Continue reading
Philemon used to be covered with Philippians and Colossians, and consequently, it went ignored. (Do you remember the last time Philemon came up in Gospel Doctrine?) However, Philemon merits our close attention. It’s short and it offers a great discussion point for something really relevant and important. So, I’ll go long on Philemon (and the bottom has some old-post leftovers about Philippians and Colossians.) Continue reading
My 2019 FAIRMormon Conference presentation is up now, here. There’s a lot in the footnotes as well.
The takeaway is this: Many LDS have unsustainably fundamentalist assumptions about the nature of revelation, prophets, and scripture. The conflict these cause sometimes leads to a loss of faith, instead of recognizing and reexamining the assumptions. Continue reading
I presented a short paper at the Joseph Smith Papers conference a few weeks ago, a spin-off from my Genesis 1 manuscript. (I presented an expanded version at the 2019 FAIR Conference.)
My basic argument was this. Certain common conceptions of revelation, which I term “absolutist,” cannot account for the major textual, doctrinal, and other differences between Genesis, Moses, Abraham, and the temple; this suggests we need to think and teach about revelation differently and in more depth. Continue reading
This post is a follow-up to my essay on the nature of nature of prophetic knowledge. Although I’ve quoted Stephen L. Richards at length before, it turns out I’ve never posted this important excerpt. Continue reading
Ben contemplates his words, at Petra.
Regardless of what you think about evolution, it poses a problem. In the past, the issue might have been framed as “since we know scripture is true, the science behind evolution must be false. How do we make sense of this?”
Today, the hypothetical teenager might wrestle with this question from the other side. “Since we know human evolution is true, and God knows all truth, why don’t God’s earthly proxies like scripture and prophets seem to know it?” Continue reading
Creation of the Sun, Sistine Chapel
You might have noticed an op-ed on Mormonism and evolution in the Salt Lake Tribune by me, responding to discussion of the place of evolution in Utah science standards. I’m a historian of religion/science with some scientific training, not a scientist, so I generally leave detailed argument and refinement to the actual scientists.
But history can tell us a lot here. I’m convinced that evolution and faith in God can coexist. The short version is, Mormonism has no official position on evolution, BYU unapologetically teaches human evolution, but no one has (yet) offered a good way of squaring this with scripture. Watch this space 😉 Continue reading
My old bookshelf
In this post, I’m not going to go into justifications of this vs. that, just recommendations of five basic books that will make anyone’s Old Testament experience much more rewarding. If you do want more detail, options, and justifications, look at the more detailed posts linked at the bottom.
(Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links) Continue reading
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