DiaBLOGue

In his 2005 commencement speech, the late novelist David Foster Wallace provided an unexpectedly frank description of American adulthood for the recent graduates of Kenyon College. Listing painfully familiar annoyances associated with what he calls the “day in day out” of middle-class America—including a hilarious retelling of the common supermarket experience—Wallace urges his audience to fight against their “natural, hard-wired default setting” that tells them they are “the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

Across centuries and cultures, the origin of the human soul has been a subject of deep interest and yearning, often finding wondrous expression in theology, philosophy, science, and art. Ruminating on the profound mystery of earthly existence, the noted medieval Ṣūfī mystic Jalāluddin Rūmī (d. 1273 CE) pondered: 

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. 
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea. 
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, 
and I intend to end up there.

Tonight I want to challenge some of the conventional axioms of Mormon religion and culture and to propose a more progressive Mormonism. Let me begin, however, with a tribute to my dear friend Eugene England. In the introduction to the festschrift I edited in his honor titled Proving Contraries (which is an apt summary of Gene’s life), I wrote, “Outside of some in the general Church leadership, perhaps no Latter-day Saint of our generation enjoyed such wide and deep affection and respect as Gene did.”I imagine that when some scholar writes the history of modern Mor monism Gene will be seen as one of our most enlightened and influential teacher/scholars. My hope is that what I have to say tonight illuminates some of the ideas that animated his discipleship and exemplifies some of the virtues that governed his life. It has been an enormous loss these past fourteen years to have been deprived of his intellect and spirit. Gene had a good heart. Like most liberals, it was a little to the left.