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Review of Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism

Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism (Series Editor Kathleen Mulhern), available in e-book formats for $2.99. For details, see this website.
Reviewed by Kevin Barney
Remember when you were in high school, and you were assigned a five-page paper? Oh, how you struggled to reach that goal of five pages! If you got desperate enough, perhaps you played with fonts, margins and line spacing in an effort to cross the finish line with some hopefully-not-too-obvious space padding techniques made possible by the computer age. What a relief it was when you finally achieved the assigned length. Maybe you would even add an extra paragraph, so it wouldn’t look too obvious how much you were straining to get to five pages of text.

Theology as Poetry

Theology as Poetry A review of Adam S. Miller’s Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 132 pp. Robert A. Rees “If I read a book and it…

Board member Mike Austin looks at The Book Of Mormon Musical

Trouble, Right Here in Sal Tlay Ka Siti
“I always think there’s a band, kid.” —Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man
By the time that I figured out that I hated The Music Man, it had been my favorite musical for more than 20 years. When I was ten, my mother took me to see Tony Randall as Professor Harold Hill at the Tulsa Little Theatre, and I was hooked. I listened to the LP for hours at a time, and, when the Robert Preston/Shirley Jones movie came to HBO a few years later, I watched it almost every day for two months. I have seen five stage versions and two film versions of the play a total of probably 30 times. I probably have most of the lines by heart.
I was in my 30s before I figured out that the ultimate message of The Music Man—that exciting lies are better than boring old truths—is one that I find morally reprehensible. When Harold Hill comes into River City and convinces people that he is going to build a boys’ band, everybody gets excited. People are nicer, more confident, and happier than they were before. So the whole town more or less colludes with Marian Paroo to keep the deception alive. If you want to be happy, The Music Man insists, just find a good-looking lie and pretend hard enough until it comes sort of true.
Which brings me to The Book of Mormon, which I saw last week in Dallas.

Review: Christopher Higgs, Becoming Monster

higgs-cover
Cross-posted at By Common Consent by Blair Hodges
What is a human?
David Grandy called my attention to Richard Dawkins calling attention to G.G. Simpson’s assertion that “all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the year Darwin published Origin of the Species] are worthless and . . . we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”[1] Pay no attention to the human behind the definition of “human,” we’re told–or perhaps, warned. After all, paying close attention to the ways the human has been defined historically will certainly upset Fundamentalist-minded atheists and Christians alike; the folks who fear the liminal, the shifting, the outer rims, the ungraspable, the uncontrollable, the monster.

Review: Stephen H. Webb’s Mormon Christianity

By Blair Hodges
Cross-posted at By Common Consent

webbcover-198x300What if Joseph Smith’s vision of God really does have something important to say to all Christians today?“
— Stephen H. Webb

The recent “Mormon moment” exasperated theologian Stephen Webb. It wasn’t that Mitt Romney’s presidential run lent undue legitimacy to the LDS Church, or that Webb thought the media went too soft on the religious background of the Republican nominee. Although he is not a Mormon himself, Webb was unnerved by shallow discussions about Mormon underwear and other apparent trivialities. According to Webb, such conversations fail to pay due attention to Mormon metaphysics—the way Mormons understand the nature of matter, humans, God, and existence. His new book, Mormon Christianity, explores the development and coherence of this core belief taught by Joseph Smith: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes…” (D&C 131:7). Mormons make no ultimate distinction between spirit and matter, the natural and supernatural, which largely sets them apart from the broader Christian tradition. ”The Mormon imagination is solidly grounded in material reality,” writes Webb, “but it takes the physical world to new and unheard-of heights” (10). Webb believes Christian lungs can benefit from the rarefied air of these heights.

A Religion of Peace

Cross-posted at By Common Consent.
By Board Member Michael Austin.
I read the Qur’an often because it speaks peace to my soul.
I know that sounds kooky, but I promise I’m not a hippie or anything. I don’t burn incense or wear sandals. I wouldn’t even call it a spiritual experience. It’s more like a calming effect. I love to read the text, and I love to listen to the recitations of a talented qāri’ (which I am doing even as I write). It’s not the meaning of the words that does the peace-speaking; it’s the words themselves. I have long been deeply affected by the way that the Qur’an represents the voice of God.
The divine voice that I encounter in the Qur’an is one of the most comforting things that I know. It reminds me of my own father’s voice when I was very young: calm and powerful, impossibly distant yet completely intimate, and supremely confident in who and what he is. Whatever this voice may be saying to other people, what it says to me is, “You can feel safe in my home because I’ve got everything under control. I’m not going to let bad things happen to you because you are mine.” This is how I need God to sound when it hurts.
This is why I become defensive when somebody says, “The Qur’an is an inherently violent book” or “Islam is a religion of hate.”

Book Review: Mr. Mustard Plaster and other Mormon Essays, by Mary Bradford

Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent

Mary Lythgoe Bradford. Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2015. 185 pp.
Reviewed by Joey Franklin
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”1 This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.2  Tradition, to Eliot, was the deep well of Western literature. Studying the personal essay in school, tradition for me meant the work of the genre’s luminaries—Montaigne and Bacon, Hazlitt and Lamb, Woolf and Didion, Baldwin and White.

Mormon Dissent in the Age of Fracture

When fifteen hundred progressive Mormons attended Sunstone Symposium in August 1992, they did so in protest. The symposium had become a center point in the growing battle between Latter-day Saint leaders and activists, especially as…

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2021): 1–50
While much has changed for women in the Church over the last half-­century, much remains the same. Women consistently make up less than 3 percent of quotations in general conference. They are still described in terms of their appearance and relationship status; sermons about how they should live are the domain of male authority; their own representatives in the Church spend much of their time at the pulpit repeating male leaders’ words.