project mayhem

Prophets, seers, and fortune cookies

2012-01-30T18:55:00.000-08:00

Back in the day fortune cookies used to be so much more. They promised to transcend the ordinary and mundane with a privileged communication from beyond. Now, while they pretend to be wrapping themselves in the guise and name of a fortune cookie, they instead offer mere platitudes of good advice and cliches of self-improvement.

Secret Santa

2011-12-04T10:51:00.001-08:00

More here.

Rev. Robert Jeffress Is a Rectum

2011-11-13T15:56:00.001-08:00

To be clear, I am not saying that Jeffress is the last part of the large intestine, just inside the anus, where all the feces is held. When I am saying that Jeffress is a "rectum", I mean that he is a "theological rectum." I am in no way implying that he is that other kind of rectum.

Recent Reads

2011-10-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (King, Stephen)

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

The Happiest Baby on the Block

A Different God?: Mitt Romney, the Religious Right, and the Mormon Question

Who Are the Children of Lehi?: DNA and the Book of Mormon

"Swell Suffering": A Biography of Maurine Whipple

This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology

The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek)

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Short Circuits)

The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons

Latter-Day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements

One of the Heroe$

2011-09-26T20:45:00.001-07:00

From the September 20th episode of the Colbert Report

A tale of two executions

2011-09-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the Salt Lake airport thinking about what occurred in our country last night. While the news has been filled with the execution of the possibly (or even probably) innocent Troy Davis, the news is fairly silent over the execution of white supremacist Lawrence Brewer. For so many reason, both executions and make me sick and trouble me.

Racism. One execution results from a black man killing a white man. The other from white men killing a black man--and yet the cases are as different as they get. For the latter, what resulted in capital punishment was an utterly horrendous murder where the guilt of the accused was never really questioned. As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

The night he was killed, [James] Byrd had accepted a ride home from a white man he knew, Shawn Berry, then 24, and two of Berry's friends -- John King, then 23, and Lawrence Brewer, then 31. King and Brewer were later identified as white supremacists. . . .
Instead of taking Byrd home, the men drove him down a remote county road, beat him unconscious, urinated on his body, chained him by his ankles to the truck and dragged him for three miles. When the truck made a hard turn at a bend in the road, Byrd's head struck a cement culvert and he was decapitated. The three men then dumped his remains in front of an African American cemetery and went to a barbecue.

On the other hand, in the execution of Troy Davis, there has arisen severe doubt that Davis is even guilty. Most of his supposed witnesses have recanted their claims, leaving little if any evidence tying Davis to the crime--while evidence now actually places the guilt on one of the remaining "witnesses."

On one end a white man had to commit a disgusted, repulsive, and hate-filled murder to find a place in the hands of an executioner. On the other end, a black man merely needed to seem guilty with doubtful evidence to have his life ended with the support of the state.

While I join with so many in the nation who lament over the death Troy Davis and are angered over Georgia's injustice in murdering a potentially innocent person, I am almost more bothered by the death of Lawrence Brewer--because I wanted it to happen.

While reading over the accounts of Byrd's murder I found myself not only disgusted by what happened, but I found myself desiring Brewer to die. In my heart I could feel a hatred for the person. I wanted another person to die. No--not just die. I wanted him strung up to the back of a truck and dragged along a rough road, just as he had done to Byrd. I wanted him to suffer. And the sad fact is that most of you when reading the account of Brewer's crime felt the same way. We don't want him to die from some vague notion of justice and fairness. We want him to die because we feel that it will in some way fulfill an emotional need to know that another person is suffering and dying.

As many have pointed out. This isn't about justice it's about revenge.

Following Davis's execution, the family of Mark MacPhail (the victim that Davis was accused of killing) said that they were relieved that Davis was dead. Trust me, that relief won't last long. It never does. For them it wasn't about justice. If we could even grant that capital punishment actually dealt out justice, Davis's death could never qualify in any sense. At even the most common and basic notion of retributive justice, we would grant that only those who are truly guilty should be punished for a crime--and with Davis, there is no such certainty. Davis's family didn't want justice. If they wanted justice they would want absolute certainty that they had found the right person. And to be honest, they didn't even want revenge, as even revenge would make the same demands. Their desire for Davis's death, Georgia's desire for Davis's death, and, yes, every person's desire to maintain capital punishment lies in a desire for death. MacPhail's family was hurt that their son, brother, husband, and father was killed and they, in turn, felt that their emotional state could only be assuaged by the death of someone else--the death of anyone really--as long as they could tell themselves that it met some other grand purpose: "justice." And since Troy Davis was the closest and easiest person to sacrifice with the hope of saving their emotionally distraught soul, they asked the priests of Georgia to offer him up to the God of revenge upon the altar of "justice."

When it comes down to it, capital punishment is merely the killing of another person in order to fulfill an emotional desire--there is only a very thin line that separates it from the actions it is purporting to condemn and remedy.

When the state murders one of its systems in a calculated and determined manner it denies the very thing it pretends to proclaim. Capital punishment denies that all living human beings have an intrinsic and necessary right to life. Instead it makes it clear that human's have no inherent and intrinsic right. Rather it is something that is arbitrary and unnecessary, to be given and taken at will.

And so today Troy Davis is dead. Lawrence Brewer is dead. Both are sacrificial victims of a society that thrives on death. And I am bothered. Bothered that our system allows a potentially innocent person to be murdered by the state. And bothered that I am glad that a guilty person has died to somehow make me feel better.

9/11/2011

2011-09-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

Today you will be sad. You will mourn. You will reflect. It is what is expected.

You will say things like: "We will never forget."
"To all those who died."
"To all those who were affected."
"To all those who read today's 'funnies.'"
"Today is a sad day."
"I am feeling sentimental."
"This is a tribute..."
"911"

You will engage in numerology, evoking the power of 9 and 11.
"911" (can you feel it?)
"911" (it gets more powerful with each incantation)

You will look upon dozens of images of two towers. Some are still standing. Some are on fire. Some are collapsing. Some are beams of light. They will remind you that you are to be sad, mournful, sentimental, reflective.

Like today's Sunday Funnies, you will know that this is not a day to be funny. Like Sherman's Lagoon, Baby Blues, and the other 'funnies' you will also not be funny. You will instead sit and think and evoke the magic numbers. If Family Circle is even more sentimental than usual, you will know that you are to also be sentimental.

Today's opening story in the news: you are sad and mourning. The weather report: today will be sad and mourning. Bob with sports: the NFL is sad and mourning with you; today's game "is a tribute" "to all those who died and were affected." "We will never forget." "911." The shampoo commercial has figure out a way to be sad about 911.

So be sad and mournful. Hug your family and think of the magic numbers. It's the cool/America/patriotic/expected/normal thing to do. Write a blog post about how sad and mournful you are today.

Say the magic numbers and expected slogans with a subdued tone.

(with a whisper) "911"
(with a subdued tone) "We will never forget."

Note that Europe and other countries mourn with us. Oh London, Oh Paris, will you mourn with us? Will you also join with us in repeating things like "We will never forget" "To all those who died" "To all those who were affected"? Will you attribute as well?

"911" (feel the sadness).

Don't think about the hundreds of thousands who have died by our weapons of destruction. Do not think about their collapsed buildings, crying and dead children. Do not think about their hurt and pain. Think of only American hurt and pain. This is our day to mourn and be sad. Their day is... well they don't get one.

So as you eat your cereal and milk, remember to be sad. When you post on facebook today remember to use the patriotic slogans and the magical numerology. Remember that today is not a day to smile or laugh. Today is a day to mourn and reflect. Just as you have been told.

My post about what we (America) learned from 9/11

2011-09-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

. . .

Tolerating Church meetings

2011-09-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize until recently how blessed I was to be in my old Claremont ward--not just because of the fellow grad students, but also because of fairly significant number of fellow ward members who seemed to at least enjoy thought-provoking talks and lessons during our Sunday meetings. My new ward in blessed Orem is quite different. Stale talks, stale lessons, stale conversations. As I endure the meetings I find myself looking at my hands, expecting to find a tarnished stainless steel ring with a green CTR shield staring back at me. Why? Because these are the same childish lessons and ideas that I was being taught in primary.Thank God for a 3-month old who I can use as an excuse to get out.It seems like lately there are numerous blog posts from others in the bloggernacle decrying the state of our Church meetings. Clean Cut wrote one today, and this was my comment:

This post reminds me of a post on the Church's media blog a while back, where they asked for opinions on the new Gospel Principles manual. While most complained about the stupidity and overall crappiness of the manual, a few jumped in saying that it was wonderful and criticizing anyone who would didn't like a book that had been approved by "The Brethren" (TM).

There is a certain mentality among many in the Church--an Orwellian brain-washing of sorts--that makes it so that no matter how sh***y a talk (especially from on of "The Brethren" (TM)), lesson, manual, video, or whatever may be, the person will respond to it with praise and amazement of how wonderful and spiritually edifying the piece of crap was.In a similar discussion in Sunday School a year or so ago, I made the point that if the value and spiritual edification of a talk were really just up to the listener, then we should just do away with talks altogether and pass a stone around (no allusion to seerstones was intended) and just expect everyone to get the most out of it.

The sad thing is that I think a large percentage of Mormons, after passing the stone to the next person (Oh how Sunday School lessons feel like passing a kidney stone), would remark on how wonderfully edifying and spiritual the lesson was.

I realize that this is a pretty lame post. But after a 4 month hiatus, it's a start... right?

More on Moroni's promise

2011-05-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I wrote a quick blog post arguing that "Moroni's Promise" in Moroni 10:3-5 was not intended to ask readers to pray about the content of the Book of Mormon, but was rather intended to ask readers to pray about the Moroni's words that follow verse 5 (ie. his argument that miracles and the gifts of the spirit have not seized). You can read that post here.

A few days ago, an occasional reader of my blog copied that post onto a certain message board to get some responses. For the most part, the responses did not offer constructive critique, but instead either focused on me personally or exemplified a retrenchment into the traditional interpretation with pathetically forced criticisms.

The problem with the first criticism should be obvious to most anyone. A fellow by the name of zerinus wrote:

I still don't see it. Even if you ignore the earlier chapters, and just look at it in the context of Moroni 10, it still doesn't make sense:
Moroni 10:
1 Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ.2 And I seal up these records [i.e. all the BOM plates], after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you.3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things [i.e. all the plates, referred to in verse 2], if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things [i.e. all the plates],and ponder it in your hearts.4 And when ye shall receive these things [i.e. all the plates], I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things [i.e. all the plates] are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.
Verse 2 is clearly referring to all the Book of Mormon plates, and verses 3 and 4 are clearly referring to verse 2. I don't see how it can be read differently.

The obvious response to this sad criticism is that he has to assume his traditional reading in order to make this claim. With his simplistic reasoning, one could just switch things around to make a counter argument. Like this:

Moroni 10:1 Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ.2 And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you[i.e. the words that follow vs 5].3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things [i.e. Moroni's words, referred to in verse 2], if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things [i.e. Moroni's words],and ponder it in your hearts.4 And when ye shall receive these things [i.e. Moroni's words], I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things [i.e. Moroni's] are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

zerinus's criticism, of course, ignores all of the other arguments that I made in my original post, and especially recognizes the end of Moroni's mini-sermon (verse 29), where Moroni explicitly says that "And God shall show unto you, that that which I have written is true." With vs 29 in mind, it becomes very clear that Moroni is encasing his sermon by the invitation for readers to ask if the contents of his sermon are true. In other words, the sermon begins with a plea for readers to "ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true" and ends with the reminder that "God shall show unto you, that that which I have written is true." It really doesn't get much clearer than this.

Following zerinus weak criticism, a fellow who goes by USU78 made this supposed criticism that would astound most any cognitive person. He writes:

First off, assuming an Hebraic Nephite language in Moroni's days, the English translation "things" probably refers to a Hebrew word that also means "words." It is thus the TRVTH of allthings/words that are amenable to revelation as Capital "T" TRVTH.It is, moreover, the case that, since we perceive all phenomenal in the natural world via our language, that, since the TRVTH of all "things/words" conveys the TRVTH of all phenomena, the Dinge an sich as well all emanations therefrom. This being the case, we know via Moroni's promise that G-d, through the medium of His Spirit, can and will make known the TRVTH of His entire creation.This is amazing stuff, and only an inveterate and obdurate-in-the-face-of-all-evidence-to-the-contrary antiMormon would so profoundly miss Moroni's point. Why miniaturize a metapoint?

Of course his most laughable line is his pharisaic claim that I am some "obdurate-in-the-face-of-all-evidence-to-the-contrary antiMormon," but there are several other laughable things in his response.

1. His assumption that we have any clue as to what the Nephite language looked like by the time of Moroni.
2. His mysterious Hebrew word that means both "things" and "words"
3. His laughable use of "dinge an sich," as if he wanted people to think he was smart.
4. Finally, and most importantly, if this Hebrew "words/things" word existed, it wouldn't criticize my argument, but would actually support it. If we assume that Moroni was using the same word for "things" and "words" (let's use "&*%") then this is Moroni would be saying:

2 And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words [&*%] by way of exhortation unto you.
3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things [&*%], if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.
4 And when ye shall receive these things [&*%], I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things [&*%] are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

According to USU78's own silly criticism, the "things" that Moroni is referring to are his "words." Duh.

To really understand Moroni's plea, however, is to understand what Moroni's primary concerns were for his readers. If you look at his previous last sermon in Mormon 9, it becomes obvious that Moroni was heavily concerned with the people who would read the Book of Mormon would be people who did not believe in miracles. Here he gives a very similar sermon to that which he gives in Moroni 10:

7 And again I speak unto you who deny the revelations of God, and say that they are done away, that there are no revelations, nor prophecies, nor gifts, nor healing, nor speaking with tongues, and the interpretation of tongues;
8 Behold I say unto you, he that denieth these things knoweth not the gospel of Christ; yea, he has not read the scriptures; if so, he does not understand them.
9 For do we not read that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and in him there is no variableness neither shadow of changing?
10 And now, if ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing, then have ye imagined up unto yourselves a god who is not a God of miracles.
11 But behold, I will show unto you a God of miracles, even the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and it is that same God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are.
12 Behold, he created Adam, and by Adam came the fall of man. And because of the fall of man came Jesus Christ, even the Father and the Son; and because of Jesus Christ came the redemption of man.
13 And because of the redemption of man, which came by Jesus Christ, they are brought back into the presence of the Lord; yea, this is wherein all men are redeemed, because the death of Christ bringeth to pass the resurrection, which bringeth to pass a redemption from an endless sleep, from which sleep all men shall be awakened by the power of God when the trump shall sound; and they shall come forth, both small and great, and all shall stand before his bar, being redeemed and loosed from this eternal band of death, which death is a temporal death.
14 And then cometh the judgment of the Holy One upon them; and then cometh the time that he that is filthy shall be filthy still; and he that is righteous shall be righteous still; he that is happy shall be happy still; and he that is unhappy shall be unhappy still.
15 And now, O all ye that have imagined up unto yourselves a god who can do no miracles, I would ask of you, have all these things passed, of which I have spoken? Has the end come yet? Behold I say unto you, Nay; and God has not ceased to be a God of miracles.
16 Behold, are not the things that God hath wrought marvelous in our eyes? Yea, and who can comprehend the marvelous works of God?
17 Who shall say that it was not a miracle that by his word the heaven and the earth should be; and by the power of his word man was created of the dust of the earth; and by the power of his word have miracles been wrought?
18 And who shall say that Jesus Christ did not do many mighty miracles? And there were many mighty miracles wrought by the hands of the apostles.
19 And if there were miracles wrought then, why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles.
20 And the reason why he ceaseth to do miracles among the children of men is because that they dwindle in unbelief, and depart from the right way, and know not the God in whom they should trust.
21 Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the earth.

With this in mind, his words in 10:3 should be pretty clear: "Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts." The context that Moroni wanted "these things" to be read in is in the context of the miraculous workings of the unchanging God--the very topic of his sermon that he gives when he has "spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you" and the very topic that he says that "God shall show unto you, that that which I have written is true."

Seriously, how hard is it to see this?

**Update 5/16/2011**

I have been informed that the mysterious Hebrew word that is translated as both 'words' and 'things' does exist. My ignorance of Hebrew is clear enough. Oh well... as I pointed out, USU78's appeal to such a word (if Moroni actually used it) only supports my argument.

Some on that message board have complained that I have been ignoring vs. 5 and that 5 was the key to understanding Moroni's plea. However, it doesn't take much to see that vs. 5 comes more as an afterthought or addition, and is set apart from his initial plea to pray concerning 'these things.'

Marla Iyoko Ericson

2011-05-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

Marla was born 20 minutes after we got to the hospital today. Had we left our apartment any later she could have been born in our new Mazda.

7lbs 15 oz, 19.5".

She and Angela are doing great.

We were expecting a boy though, so now we're gonna have to find some girl clothes.

The Book of Mormon Musical has ripped off our beloved EFY soundtracks

2011-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

The soundtrack for the Book of Mormon Musical is available to listen on NPR here. After a quick listen it becomes obvious to any fan of the music from the Mormon Especially For Youth (EFY), that Matt Stone and Trey Parker have ripped off the latter.

Just compare the following. Can you figure out which is from EFY and which is from the new musical?

We Believe:

I Believe:

Can someone please explain the Deseret News comment moderation to me?

2011-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

Both times that I have tried to comment on the Deseret News' website my comments were rejected by the moderators.

Just now I left the following comment for this article about Peter Vidmar's resignation from being an Olympic team leader:

"Imagine, instead, that someone was actively campaigning to prevent Mormons from building temples anywhere, with the claim that he "is not Anti-Mormon, but simply believes that Mormons building temples is a threat to society." Would you want him as a team leader for a team you were on? What if he was actively using his free-speech to promote racism? Of course he has his free speech--however, speech and actions comes with social consequences. You have all the free speech you want if you wanted to call me names or be rude to me. However, you can't be surprised if I no longer want to be your friend."

A few minutes later I got the following generic response:

Dear the narrator,
Thank you for commenting on Vidmar's resignation as U.S. Olympic team leader disappoints on DeseretNews.com.
Unfortunately, your comment was not approved for one or more of the following reasons:
* Comment included name-calling, epithets, racial slurs or personal attacks.
* Comment contained obscenity, vulgarity and/or profanity (including symbol-replaced words).
* Comment contained over-use of punctuation (e.g. !!!, ???), ALL CAPS SHOUTING and/or was considered incoherent.
* Comment was considered commercial promotion.
* Comment was intended to provoke or inappropriately addressed other readers by name.
We would invite you to edit and resubmit your comment using the following guidelines:
* Comments should be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow readers with additional insight or counterpoints to the article
* Avoid personal attacks and other inappropriate responses to fellow readers.
* Treat other readers as you would if you were speaking to them from a microphone, looking them in the eyes, then passing the microphone cordially to the next contributor.

I cannot figure out what rule I violated. Anybody have a clue?

**UPDATE**

I resubmitted the exact same comment and this time got the following:

Dear the narrator,
Thank you for commenting on Vidmar's resignation as U.S. Olympic team leader disappoints on DeseretNews.com.
This message is to inform you that your comment on Vidmar's resignation as U.S. Olympic team leader disappoints was approved. Thank you for your participation in keeping our dialogue civil and enlightening. We hope you'll continue to engage in the online conversations on DeseretNews.com and look forward to seeing more from you in the future.
Regards,
Deseret News Editorial Team

I'm guessing that they have different moderators, some who reject any comment that disagrees with the author.

Christianity’s Perversion: Zizek and Latin American Liberation Theology

2011-05-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

Here is my last term paper at Claremont. It needs more polishing, but I'm proud of it. The second subtitle is: Or Why Osama Bin Laden's Death Bothers Me.

It is also what I wish my Easter Sermon would have been.

PDF version here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Christianity’s Perversion:

Zizek and Latin American Liberation Theology

The next to final scene in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart features several minutes of the protagonist, William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson), being beaten, choked, racked, castrated, disemboweled, and finally beheaded in front of a cheering fourteenth-century English crowd. Taken by itself, the scene would be akin to a snuff film or contemporary horror “torture-porn” (like Eli Roth’s Hostel). Instead, however, it evokes a powerful reaction from the viewer because of the context in which Wallace’s torture and death is given in the movie. For nearly three hours before this violent presentation we are shown the exploits of Wallace as he rallies the peasants of Scotland together to fight against England’s King Edward in an attempt to gain their freedom. Fearing Wallace as a threat to his power, Edward sees that he is eventually captured and sentenced to death. With this long background, the climactic scene is not just difficult to watch because of its violence, but because of that which led up to these final moments. His death points to his life and is presented as a testimony to his cause.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Slavoj Zizek concludes that the “perverse core” of Christianity is the message that Christianity is the “religion of atheism” wherein when “Christ dies, what dies with him is the . . . hope that there is a father.”[1] Though they would hardly consider themselves advocates of a religion of atheism, liberation theologians from Latin America[2] have made similar departures from the traditional understandings of the cross,[3] sharing with Zizek the view that “in theological terms, . . . it is not we, humans, who can rely on the help of God—on the contrary, we must help God.”[4] In this paper I hope to compare and contrast the departures of Zizek and Latin American liberation theologies as they both contrast themselves from the more traditional theology of the cross—a contrast that is particularly evident in a comparison of Braveheart with Mel Gibson’s other blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ.

That Wallace in Braveheart is portrayed as a Christ-figure is abundantly evident throughout the film—both are betrayed by their own (Wallace by the Scottish nobles and his disciple, Robert the Bruce; Jesus by the Jewish elite and his disciple, Judas), both are sentenced to death by representatives of the British or Roman empires, both are carried on crosses (Wallace before his torture, and Jesus following his torture), both are executed before taunting masses and solemn disciples, and, although Wallace rides into town on a horse before his betrayal, the sound of a donkey braying is added to the scene, evoking the imagery of Christ riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass. And yet the Real of the torture and deaths of the protagonists in both Braveheart and The Passion are strikingly different. According to Zizek,

It was God Himself who made a Pascalian wager: by dying on the Cross, He made a risky gesture with no guaranteed final outcome. . . . Far from providing the conclusive dot on the I, the divine act stands, rather, for the openness of a New Beginning, and it is up to humanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it. . . . [T]he Event is a pure-empty sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.[5]

In both the Middle Ages of England and (what became) the meridian of time of Jerusalem, execution by the government was a common affair—even entertainment (wherein today we go to the theatres to watch these executions reenacted on screen). How, then, were the deaths of Christ-Wallace and Christ-Jesus any different—or, how did they get their meaning?

As Zizek points out, the real meaning of their deaths, or what is posited as the Real, “is not external to the Symbolic [their torture and death]: the Real is the Symbolic itself. . . . [T]o step into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the abyss of the chaotic Real, but, on the contrary, dropping the very allusion to some external point of reference which eludes the Symbolic.”[6] In other words, the meaning of the symbol, the Real, must be understood in and through the terms of the symbol itself—instead of projecting its real meaning outside of the symbolic and even outside of language, to some ineffable, unreachable Real.

This, however, does not mean that the Real is self-evident, or that the symbolic carries or shows its meaning by itself. After describing two identical maps of a tribal village drawn by both some of the elites who live in the area more central to the temple and the less individuals who are pushed to the outskirts of town, Zizek points out that while the two maps may be identical, what those maps mean and symbolize can be very different. While one group may see an equally dispersed layout, the other may see an invisible, but present, line delineating the elites of the village from the rest. He writes,

It is here that we can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. First we have the “actual,” “objective” arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations that both distort, in an anamorphic way, the actual arrangement. The “Real” here, however, is not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of the social antagonism that distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual antagonism.[7]

He further adds that “the ‘truth’ is not the ‘real’ state of things, that is, the ‘direct’ view of the object without perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism that causes perspectival distortion. . . .” In other words, the truth of the Real is not a hard objective kernel that we attain by peeling away subjective perspective. Instead it is the truth of the reality of those perspectives. As with Wallace’s death, the truth is not the facts of his torture and death, but rather, the truth is the experience of his torture and death through the eyes of his disciples who have participated in his revolutionary battles with him. Zizek continues, “There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective.”[8] Again, for Wallace’s disciples, there was one truth of his death—the truth of his revolutionary cause—not a series of truths, each gained from differing perspectives of his death. For the disciples, the one truth denied all others.

So what then of the cross? For both Latin American liberation theology and the traditional theology of the cross there are also truths of perspectival distortions that reveal the Real symbolized in the cross. For the liberation theologian, this distortion is seen in what Gustavo Gutierrez has termed, the “preferential option for the poor.”[9] Growing out of the mid-twentieth century, liberation theology arose as a result of theologians in Latin America, primarily Catholic, asking what it is that Christ and Christianity had to do with the gross systemic poverty and injustice plaguing their countries. As Roberto Oliveros writes,

As we turn to the world of the Latin American popular masses and open our eyes to see those masses, we find ourselves face to face with the results of centuries of institutionalized injustice. Millions upon millions of persons are subjected to an inhuman, demeaning poverty. We run up against this unjust poverty with every step we take, and the collision deeply shakes the hearts of Christians of goodwill. . . .

What seminal experience and intuition has given the rise to the theology of liberation? Purely and simply, the daily experience of the unjust poverty in which millions of our fellow Latin Americans are obliged to live. In and from this experience emerges the shattering word of the God of Moses and of Jesus: this situation is not the will of that God.^{^[10]}

Taking literally Jesus’s announcement that he is the anointed one to “bring good news to the poor, . . . to proclaim release to the captives . . . , [and] to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18), liberation theology contends that the gross reality of poverty and oppression requires that we understand the Christian message through a hermeneutic or perspectival distortion of relieving the poor. This means that all aspects of Christ, the Gospel, and Christianity need to be understood through this perspective in terms of how it addresses the plight of the poor—including Jesus’s life, the Cross, and resurrection, soteriology, ecclesiology, evangelization, scripture, sacraments, and community.

Thus, through this distortion to understand the meaning of the cross—the Real of Jesus’s suffering and death—one must understand the cross in terms of Jesus’s work for the poor. As mentioned earlier, the meaning that Wallace’s torture and death for his disciples at the end of Braveheart was not in the violence itself—the object without perspectival distortion—but must be understood in terms of the revolutionary life that led to his death. In similar terms, Ignacio Ellacuría argues that the meaning of the cross must be understood in terms of the life that led to Jesus’s death. According to him, the question “‘Why did Jesus die’ is inseparable from the [question] ‘why did they kill him.’”[11] To this latter question he answers that Jesus “is killed . . . because of the historic life he led, a life of deeds and words that those who represented and held the reins of the religious, socioeconomic, and political situation could not tolerate.”[12]

Like the Christ of Ellacuría’s liberation theology, Wallace upset the social order and made his death nearly inevitable. By rejecting the offers to join with the Scottish nobles, he made enemies with both the English royalty and the Scottish nobility, and frustrated the latter’s plan to insert their own oppressive reign and control over the poor under the guise of mitigating the English rule. Though Wallace’s death did not happen out of logical necessity (he could have chosen to join with the nobles, or not fight at all), by earning the threats from both the English and Scottish elites Wallace made their conjoined efforts against him unavoidable.

It is this inevitability of death by the hands of the oppressors that Ellacuría calls the historic necessity of Christ’s death. According to Ellacuría, “We may admit that the death of Jesus and the crucifixion of the people are necessary, but only if we speak of a necessity in history and not a merely natural necessity.”[13] Christ’s death by natural necessity would mean that the world was such that his death by the hands of the rulers would have occurred by some sort of causal law. This, Ellacuría argues, “would entail both eliminating the responsibility of those who kill prophets and those who crucify humankind, thereby veiling the aspect of sin in historic evil.”[14] Rather than appealing to some sort of abstract evil that inevitably acts in the world, for Ellacuría, Jesus’s death was a historic necessity that resulted from his free acts in a world where historic persons also acted: “Necessity in history, on the other hand forces us to emphasize the determining causes of what happens.”[15] Just as Wallace’s fight against the English oppressors and his rejection of the Scottish nobility would result in his death, for Jesus the “resistance of the oppressive powers and the struggle for liberation in history brought [him] persecution and death.”[16] For Ellacuría, a historic necessity of Jesus’s death can only be seen “after the fact. Neither his disciples nor he himself saw in the beginning and not through the reflection on scripture, that the proclamation and victory of the Reign had to go by way of death.”[17] This view of the present as free but the past as historically necessary in retrospect is what Zizek calls “the existentialist “common place,” which he argues must be inverted:

One should thus invert the existentialist commonplace according to which, when we are engaged in a present historical process, we perceive it as full of possibilities, and ourselves as agents free to choose among them; while, to a retrospective view, the same process appears as fully determined and necessary, with no room for alternatives: on the contrary, it is the engaged agents who perceive themselves as caught in a Destiny, merely reacting to it, while, retrospectively, from the standpoint of later observation, we can discern alternatives in the past, possibilities of events taking a different path.

Perhaps this inverse of Ellacuría is evident in Javier Jiménez Limón’s claim that “martyrdom is an important reality. . . . People are not being killed through hatred of the faith.” Instead, the world “kills those who try to make the faith genuine, by truly following Jesus Christ, in transforming solidarity with the poor, by prophetic unmasking of oppression and idolatry.”[18] In this sense, death for acting out on behalf of the poor is an inevitable result of true Christian faith, an avoidable destiny for some who try to follow Jesus—a sentiment that was clearly felt when Ellacuría and five of his associates were gunned down in their church by the Salvadoran military. On the other hand, in retrospect it is easy to see how this historic necessity could have been avoided, to see how free we really are—after all, if Ellacuría had chosen the life of a priest only concerned with transcendent sin, then he could easily be alive today. And in retrospect, Jesus could have easily avoided the cross if he had chosen to live another type of life (this is, of course, the plot of Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, where Jesus sees what his life would have been like if he had gotten married and started a family instead of living the life that led to the cross).

Against liberation theology’s perspective of the cross as signifying the life of Jesus, is the one depicted in The Passion. Like Gibson’s other movie, we are again treated (entertained?) by a depiction of the protagonist—Jesus, this time played by Jim Caviezel—being mocked, beaten, whipped, choked, nailed, pierced, and dying from exhaustion on a cross before a Roman and Jewish crowd. However, unlike Braveheart, where Wallace’s torture and death comprises of only a short scene at end of the extended portrayal of his life, Jesus’s torture and death is the content of the entire film—leaving one critic to call it “a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie—The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.”[19] In fact, beyond a few short flashbacks depicting brief scenes of Jesus’s life, such as him playfully interacting with his mother, forgiving the prostitute, and teaching his disciples at the Last Supper, nothing is shown concerning Jesus’s life to give the viewer any understanding as to why the Roman and Jewish elites would want to inflict such violence on him.

To be fair to Gibson, his depiction of Jesus’s death seems to be exemplary of many Christians’ perspective of the cross—where Jesus, as a happy, hippie-like dispenser of kindness and transcendent aphorisms, is beaten and killed for just being too kind. Reflecting on the perplexing notion of the Roman Empire and Jewish elites’ concern and effort to kill such a hippie-Jesus, Ellacuría’s friend, Jon Sobrino, writes,

Persons who preach an exclusively transcendent Reign [Kingdom] of God do not get themselves murdered. People who preach a Reign that is only a new relationship with God, or only “love,” or only “reconciliation,” or only “trust in God,” are not murdered. All these things may be legitimately regarded as elements accompanying the message of the Reign of God, but they alone do not explain Jesus’ death, and therefore they alone cannot be the central element of the Reign. The Reign of God must have had some bearing on the historico-social, not only the transcendent.[20]

According to Ellacuría and Sobrino, God as Jesus did not come to earth simply to be hung on the cross to absolve persons of some sort of transcendent or metaphysical sin with a transcendent or metaphysical grace. Rather than coming to earth to die, God came to earth to live a life that both confronted sin and taught his followers to do the same. By this, the cross is not a symbol of violent sacrificial death for the sake of sacrifice. Instead, to them the cross is signified in the question “why did they kill him?” It is when we ask this question that we come to realize that Jesus was not capitally punished for simply teaching of love and transcendence, but he was rather murdered for confronting oppressive systems and trying to liberate the oppressed from their suffering. The value of the cross is that it symbolizes, points to, and embodies the life that Jesus of Nazareth lived. Thus, Jesus was not only the transcendent God made immanent, but in his imminence, he did that which either the transcendent God could not—or would not—do.

Opening his book, Zizek ask, “What if eternity is a sterile, impotent lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence? What if God’s descent to man, far from being an act of grace toward humanity, is the only way for God to gain full actuality, and to liberate Himself from the suffocating constraints of Eternity?”[21] In other words, if to truly be free is to be able to affect material reality (as all humans can do), and if to be truly transcendent is to be wholly apart from material existence (and thus unable to touch and affect the material world), then in order for God to truly be free he had to dispose of his transcendence. Thus, Zizek writes, “true love is precisely the . . . forsaking of eternity for an imperfect individual.”[22]

For Ellacuría, the type of life that led to Christ’s death was a life of what he calls “historic soteriology.” This is a life that “seeks human promotion or human rights from the side of the oppressed, on their behalf, and in struggle against the side of the oppressors. In other words, his action is historical and concrete and goes to the roots of the oppression.”[23] Like Wallace, who was fighting with the oppressed Scots to gain their freedom from their oppressors, Ellacuría’s Jesus is foremost concerned with the historical and tangible suffering of the oppressed. It is they who are in direct and urgent need of salvation from their pains. Just as Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible was concerned with the historical and concrete enslavement and imprisonment of the Israelites, so too is Jesus foremost concerned with the historical oppression of others. To attempt to spiritualize their historical nature is to strip them of their importance. Ellacuría writes,

It would be a mutilation of the Hebrew scriptures to try to take from them only their religious spirit without their historical flesh; and to try to keep the spirit of the Christian scriptures without their historicity, or to use their sense of historicity only to support their spirit. In both testaments spirit and flesh, God and history, are so inseparably tied that the disappearance of one would disfigure or even destroy, the other.[24]

And just as salvation must remain historical, so must the sin which salvation is directed upon. It also “cannot be studied abstractly” for it is also “concretely present in subtle forms that require more careful theological analysis.”[25]

Thus Ellacuría writes that “We must ask in all seriousness what the sin of the world is today, or in what forms the sin of the world appears today.” And to this he answers that “the sin of the world is sharply expressed today in what must be called unjust poverty.”[26] In other words, sin is not some transcendent Real or opposing Other that lies behind poverty and oppression, but is encountered through the very mask or material experience of such injustice. As Zizek puts it, such recognition is “to become aware that there is no mystery, no hidden true content, behind the mask (deceptive surface) of the Other.”[27] This is the same today as it was in the New Testament where “the poor themselves, impoverished and oppressed by injustice, have become the preferred locus of benevolence and grace, of God's faithful love.”[28] It is in this manner that the depiction of Wallace exemplifies how the historical sin of poverty and oppression and the historical salvific acts of seeking liberation are essential to Ellacuría’s discussion of Christ, in that both Wallace and Jesus were not concerned with fighting some ultimate sin that existed beyond oppression, but in the oppression itself.

On the other hand, the state of the poor and oppressed and their need for historic salvation play no role whatsoever in The Passion. Instead of symbolizing and giving truth to the plight of the poor and the revolutionary spirit, this latter movie instead portrays Jesus’s torture and death as the means by which transcendent sin is overcome. Whereas Braveheart begins with a depiction of King Edward’s ruthless oppression over the Scots, The Passion opens with Jesus being confronted by the androgynous Satan, taunting him: “No man can carry this burden, I tell you. It is far too heavy. Saving their souls is too costly.”[29] The implication here is that by being tortured and killed, Jesus will overcome transcendent sin. This sin is not the material, historical sin of poverty and oppression, but is rather the wholly other transcendent remnant of sin—a formless sticky residue that is beyond. Like Satan, whose own gender can’t be pinned down, this sin, also, lies behind all of its material variations.

Thus to subdue this transcendent sin and bring about peace, Jesus is offered as a violent sacrifice to bring about peace, the message being that true peace is achieved through true violence. “The ultimate fake of Christianity,” Zizek writes,

is that it sustains its official message of inner peace and redemption by a morbid excitation, namely, a fixation on the suffering, mutilated corpse of Christ. The very term passion here is revealing—as if the only thing that can arouse passion is the sick spectacle of passive suffering.[30]

The emphasis on the peace through violence is made quite explicit in The Passion. In an interview about the film Gibson said, “I don’t think other films have tapped into the real force of this story. I mean, have you seen any of the others? They are either inaccurate in their history, or they suffer from bad music or bad hair. This film will show the passion of Jesus Christ just the way it happened.” He adds, “There is no gratuitous violence in this film. I don’t think anyone under 12 should go see it—unless they’re a very mature 12-year-old. It’s pretty heavy. I think we have gotten too used to seeing pretty crucifixes on the wall and we forget what really happened. I mean, we know that Jesus was scourged, that he carried his cross, that he had nails put through his hands and feet, but we rarely think about what this means.”[31] The “real force,” of course is the grotesqueness in which Jesus’s suffering has been betrayed. And as Gibson implies, the passion can only be truly meaningful if it is as violent as possible—other depictions fail in that they don’t show enough blood, mutilated flesh, dislocated limbs, and severed eyeballs. The absurdity and gratuitous nature of Gibson’s depiction of Christ’s passion is evident, however, when one compares the treatment of the other two crucified persons as they remain rather unscathed as they carry only cross bars to Calvary—compared to Jesus who, already bloodied and beaten, is continually whipped and hit as he carries the entire heavier cross. (Ironically, in the director’s commentary accompanying the DVD release of Braveheart, Gibson notes that Wallace’s torture and execution scene was toned down because they felt it was too violent).

Midway through The Passion, Pilate (who is portrayed as an almost moral person—in that he is willing to command Jesus’s brutal torture to almost death, but does not want to actually command Jesus to death) has a conversation with his wife in which he asks: “What is truth, Claudia?. . . Do you want to know what my truth is, Claudia? If I don't condemn this man, I know Caiphas will start a rebellion. If I do condemn him, then his followers may. Either way, there will be bloodshed. Caesar has warned me, Claudia. Warned me twice. He swore that the next time the blood would be mine. That is my truth!” Like with Gibson, the truth for Pilate is also violence—either I inflict violence on Jesus or Caesar (Rome’s “Son of God”) will inflict violence on me. And like the Christian veneration of the violence of the passion, Pilate idolizes violence as the one true truth.

And while Gibson and Pilate (and much of Christianity) may venerate the idol of violence, according to Zizek there is a deeper idolization underlying the Christian passion: “the ultimate idolatry is not the idolizing of the mask of the image, itself, but the belief that there is some hidden positive content beyond the mask.”[32] With this in mind, what greater idolatry is there than the belief that there is a transcendent sin—the androgynous Satan—that even God must appease. Is not this the message of The Passion: that not even God could overcome (simply forgive) the demands of the transcendent sin, but had to instead offer himself up as a sacrifice to meet its demands. After all, if an enemy, stranger, or friend sin against me—even committing the most violent, vile, and betraying acts—it is within my power to forgive that person. However, with this transcendent sin, rather than sin succumbing to the demands of God, it is God who must succumb to the demands of sin. It is not God that is omnipotent, but rather sin that wears this crown. Sin/Satan determines how the game is played: either humanity or God’s son must suffer. And thus, while Jesus’s death is followed with Satan’s scream of disappointment (or is it a scream of victory?) it is God’s failure to beat Satan (his impotence) that is made manifest in the single tear dropping from heaven at the moment of His son’s death.

If one is going to say that God has beaten Satan, it is not in overpowering Satan, but in tricking Satan into believing that s/he is getting the better deal. Concerning sacrifice, Zizek writes, “one sacrifices not in order to get something from the Other, but in order to dupe the Other, in order to convince him or it that one is still missing something, that is, jouissance.”[33] In this sense, Satan’s cry at the end of the movie is a burst of frustration in realizing that s/he had been conned by God (or rather, was taken in by God’s marketing skills). While Satan wished for humanity, God flirted before Satan what s/he did not already have: the pleasure of watching God’s Son suffer with the hope of Him giving in. Just as with God’s earlier Old Testament bet with Satan over Job, the terms are the same: despite the vast amount of evil that can be afflicted, the chosen servant/Son will stay true to the transcendent divine Other and not give way to the transcendent sinful Other. That Satan finds pleasure in Jesus’s suffering is made clear in The Passion, as Satan is repeatedly shown in the background watching the violent scenes with his/her own passionate pleasure.

Seeing that God is incapable of simply overcoming the transcendent sin, the Christian viewer is asked to join in God’s con against Satan. In doing so, the Christian believer implicitly says: “Yes. Inflict whatever violence and pain upon Jesus, for he will not curse God’s face. After all, better He than me.” And thus, the believer takes in a hidden pleasure in watching Jesus suffer. There is a love and passion for his suffering as this suffering absolves the believer from all of his past, present, and future sins. The violence on Christ enables the believer to ultimately be untouched by the residual transcendent sin—despite the historical material sin that they may live in and actively support daily. According to Zizek,

far from being the religion of sacrifice, of the renunciation of earthly pleasures . . . , Christianity offers a devious stratagem for indulging our desires without having to pay the price for them, for enjoying life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day. If we go to the limits in this direction, it would even be possible to maintain that this is the ultimate message of Christ’s sacrifice: you can indulge in your desires, and enjoy; I took the price for it upon myself!

While many Christians would certainly balk at this—what Zizek calls “the perverse functioning of Christianity”—it is nevertheless the argument given against governmental welfare by many among the conservative Christian right (the intended audience of The Passion): that the welfare system removes accountability and incentivizes persons to be lazy and not work.

In an episode of Mr. Deity (an online series of short comedies depicting God creating the universe and implementing his plans), a meeting between God and Jesus is portrayed where God offers Jesus the opportunity to suffer and die for everyone’s sins. After receiving trite answers to the immediate problems that he sees in God’s plan (“Why can’t you just forgive them?” “If the rest of the people aren’t half-God, how is it fair for them to have the same expectations to not sin?” etc), Jesus nods his head: “I see. I finally understand… Haha. This is a good one… I’m being PUNKED! Where are the cameras? You can all come out now!”[34] The question, of course, that this begs us to ask is that if it is not Satan in The Passion that is being punked—or conned—but actually Jesus who is it at the butt of the scheme. In response to Jesus’s question, “Why is it that you can’t just forgive people?” Mr. Deity replies, “Well it’s just that sin thing.” If transcendent sin is the hidden idol behind the mask of material sin, and if Jesus’s torture and death is to appease that sin, then the joke is that Christians are sacrificing their God to a false idol.

For Zizek, this joke is the perverse core of Christianity: that when Jesus was on the cross and wondering if God had abandoned him, the reality was that God, as the omnipotent transcendent Other, was never there to begin with:

Christ’s “Father, why has thou forsaken me?” is not a complaint to the omnipotent capricious God-Father whose ways are indecipherable to us, mortal humans, but a complaint that hints at an impotent God: it is rather like a child who, having believed in his father’s powerfulness, discovers with horror that his father cannot help him. . . . In short, . . . it is God-the-Father who, in effect, dies, revealing His utter impotence.[35]

With this, Jesus’s death on the cross was not a meaningful exchange between a transcendent ineffable God and transcendent ineffable sin. Comparing Jesus’s suffering to that of Job’s, Zizek argues that the revelation on God in the account of Job’s tribulation is one of silence. When Job is at the ends of despair and wishing that he had never been born, God can only boast of his own strength. He offers nothing to provide Job with a meaning to his suffering. Zizek writes, “So what we get is neither the good God letting Job know that his suffering was just an ordeal destined to test his faith, nor a dark God beyond the Law, . . . but rather a God who acts like someone caught in a moment of impotence . . . and tries to escape His predicament by empty boasting.”[36]

Thus, this impotence of God is also the great revelation of the cross—not that Jesus is God, but rather that God (Jesus) is man. According to Zizek, “This final reversal by means of which the founding Exception (God) falls into His own creation . . . is what is unique to Christianity, the mystery of incarnation, of God (not only appearing as a man, but) becoming a man.”[37] Far from showing us that God is the omnipotent divine transcendent Other who, by becoming like man, was able to conquer the sinful transcendent Other, Jesus shows us that God is incapable of saving humanity from the violence of the world (historic sin)—and is even a victim of it.

That God is impotent and unable to save humans from historic sin drives theologians to defend God through theodicies which, again, point to varying transcendent realities. One can imagine a kidnapped teen who, while being raped and tortured by her predator, calls out to God and asks: “Why me? Why is this happening to me?” (“Why hast thou forsaken me?”) In answer to her prayers, a philosopher of religion comes to her and answers: “God is allowing your suffering because he doesn’t want to interfere with this man’s free-will. While your pain is great, it is much more important that this man is able to do as he chooses.” Or perhaps the philosopher of religion tells her: “You are suffering unbearable pain. God certainly has the power to help you, but there is a greater good or some soul-making value that your pain and suffering is going to make possible for someone else.” Or perhaps, “This is terrible, but it’ll all be better in heaven.” Or perhaps, he puts it simply: “If you saw the big picture—God’s eternal plan— you would realize that you are merely one of millions that God has allowed to suffer for his ultimate goal. It is all for good.” Here the real, historic, suffering is countered with transcendent ideals and ineffable justifications: freedom, experience, the eschaton, and God’s invisible plan. Because God’s impotence prevents Him from compensating our temporal suffering with temporal sustenance, it must instead be a compensation of the wholly Other. It is for this reason that Zizek writes, “The real task is not to get compensation from those responsible, but to deprive them of the position that makes them responsible. Instead of asking compensation from God . . . , we should ask the question: do we really need God?”[38]

Instead of our asking the omnipotent God for help, it is the impotent God that must ask help from us. “What this means in theological terms, is that it is not we, humans, who can rely on the help of God—on the contrary, we must help God.”[39] For Zizek, God needs help because he, as it has been revealed by the cross, is nothing: “So what is revealed in Christianity is not just the entire content, but, more specifically, that there is nothing—no secret—behind it to be revealed.”[40] Because there is nothing, no omnipotent Other to rely on, it is instead on humans to rise to the occasion.

In Braveheart, just before his betrayal and death, Wallace begins to take on a godlike status as rumors and legends about him spread throughout Scotland. His torture and death revealed exactly what the British wanted to reveal—that behind the rumors and legends was nothing. However, while his death may have revealed the void behind his legendary status, it also revealed the revolutionary spirit that drove his labors. Contrasting against Jesus’s final words, “It is accomplished. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” is Wallace’s cry of “Freedom!”—his revolutionary spirit, as it were, not sent to God but to his fellow Scots. This last word performs two functions. First, it denies the false and oppressive sovereignty of the English rule. The magistrate governing over his torture and execution expects Wallace to plea for mercy—a plea which would falsely acknowledge the English power as a source for salvation from suffering—and Wallace’s shout denies their desire. (Further contrasting The Passion, where it is Jesus’s death that brings about mercy, during Wallace’s torture it is the crowds’ call for mercy which ultimately brings about Wallace’s death.) Second, and more importantly, far from announcing any accomplishment or end goal, this shout points back to his life of fighting for the salvation and liberation of the oppressed, and points forward to the work that is yet to be done.

It is this last point—that his death marks a continuation of the work—that is made explicit in the final moments of the film. Although there is no physical bodily resurrection, a narrated voice-over describes that, while Wallace was dismembered and his limbs were displayed as a warning to others, “It did not have the effect that [the English] planned.” The final scene of the movie shows Wallace’s Scottish followers armed for battle against the English. Robert the Bruce, the Scottish noble who had previously betrayed Wallace, stands with them holding a cloth that symbolized Wallace’s historic push for the salvation of the oppressed Scottish. Addressing his fellow Scots he asks, “You have bled with Wallace. Now bleed with me,” and with that the Scots rush the English to fight for their freedom.

According to Ellacuría, “Jesus’s death is inseparately connected to the eschatological and historical coming of the Reign [Kingdom of God], and for that purpose the resurrection means not only a verification or consolation, but the assurance that this work must continue and that He remains alive to continue it.”[41] Unlike Braveheart which depicts the resurrection of Wallace as a continuation of the reality of oppression and the work of those who are trying to liberate the oppressed, The Passion ends with a final scene that solely depicts the resurrection as a physical bodily resurrection, where, besides the nail prints, his naked body is perfect—including his trimmed beard and brushed hair. Along with the shrill of Satan which followed his death, this depiction of the resurrection (with its triumphant accompanying score) allows people to “live with the false assumption that the struggle against sin and death is over with the triumph of the resurrection.”[42] Such a triumph “would leave unfulfilled Jesus’s message which predicted persecutions and death for those who were to continue his work.”[43] Rather than calling for a continuation of Jesus’s spirit, it assures the viewer that God’s work has been accomplished—and to not worry because all suffering turns out good in the end.

For Ellacuría, Jesus’s embodiment was not just in flesh, but

was incorporated in human history. . . . One could say that the true historical body of Christ, and therefore the preeminent locus of his embodiment and his incorporation is . . . the poor and the oppressed of the world. . . . [T]he church by its very nature is the church of the poor and that, as church of the poor, it is the historical body of Christ.[44]

Because the true historical body of Christ is more than just his physical body, but is the poor and oppressed who are working for the salvation of others, the true resurrection of the body of Christ is also more than the continued life of his physical body, but is the continued life of the historical body of Christ as the poor and oppressed who are proclaiming and working for the Kingdom of God. As Sobrino puts it:

If resurrection is life in its fullness, it can only be love in its fullness, it can only be love its fullness. How can one live in fullness in this life? The answer is simple: by repeating the following of Jesus in the spirit of Jews on this earth. The one who lives in this way lives even now as someone raised to life amid the very conditions of history.[45]

As Zizek points out, the apostle Paul’s witness of Christ was not in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth, but instead his witness was that of the cross and reality of Christ’s resurrection. Because in much of Christian tradition it is Paul who replaces the betraying Judas as Jesus’s apostle, it is important that the person who heralds the Christian community does so in the betrayer’s place. And thus, just as a betrayer carries on Wallace’s revolutionary spirit, it is Paul—in Judas’s position—who carries on the revolutionary spirit of the cross:

Paul more or less totally ignores Jesus’s particular acts, teachings, parables. . . . What matters to him is not Jesus as a historical figure, only the fact that he died on the Cross and rose from the dead—after confirming Jesus’s death and resurrection, Paul goes on to his true Leninist business, that of organizing the new party called the Christian community.[46]

So rather than being concerned with the traditional stories of Jesus, Paul is instead “a thoroughly engaged fighter who ignores distinctions that are not relevant to the struggle.”[47]

While Zizek and liberation theologians would differ on the importance of the historical figure of Christ, the latter would agree with Zizek that what emerges from the death of Christ “is the Holy Spirit, which is not Other, but the community (or, rather, collective) of believers: the ‘neighbor’ is a member of our collective.”[48] This

“Holy Spirit” designates a new collective held together . . . by a fidelity to a Cause . . . that runs across and suspends the distinctions of the existing social body. . . . [H]is universe is no longer that of the multitude of groups that want to “find their voice,” and assert their particular identity, their “way of life,” but that of a fighting collective grounded in the reference to an unconditional universalism.[49]

From the perspective of liberation theology, this unconditional universalism is the option for the poor, the call that none should live under the oppression of poverty. And like Paul’s new community, liberation theology’s “crucified people” “transcends any embodiment in history that may take place for the sake of its salvation in history. . . . The crucified people thus remains somewhat imprecise insofar as it is not identified, at least formally, with a specific group in history.”[50]

For liberation theology, to have the spirit is to participate in the liberating spirit of Christ. As Jon Sobrino notes, “The spiritual life is not something ‘regional,’ and still less does it stand in opposition to another, ‘material’ kind of life. . . . No, spirituality is the spirit with which we confront the real. It is the spirit with which we confront the concrete history in which we live.”[51] This spirit, like Zizek’s Holy Spirit, is not a transcendent Other, but is rather the spirit of liberation as understood through distorting perspective of the preferential option of the poor. As such, while liberation theologians would not directly concur with Zizek’s conclusion that Christianity is the “religion of atheism,” they would agree that atheism—or at least certain types of atheism—are not precluded from Christian liberation. To the contrary, according to Pablo Richard,

What is really present and immediate to the great masses is what we call revolutionary atheism. This is the political, militant atheism of those who do battle for justice and are involved in the liberation practice. This type of atheism profoundly challenges Christian faith, but does not normally appear as an enemy of Christians. Indeed, believing and nonbelieving revolutionaries meet in a common practice, in a common historical project, and regard each other as comrades. Both revolutionary atheists and committed Christians, different though they may be in language and motivation, entertain a critical attitude toward religion.[52]

Adding to Richard, Sobrino notes that “the option for the poor is the heritage, not of Christians and believers alone, but of many other human beings as well.”[53]

For Zizek, his ultimate conclusion is in line with the critical attitude toward institutionalized religion. Closing up The Puppet and the Dwarf, he writes:

[I]t is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of tis specific religious experience). . . . That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.[54]

It is here that the theologians of liberation would depart from Zizek. This is not to say, however, that they are not critical of the institutionalized—Catholic—Church, as they see the Church and traditional Christianity as part of the oppressive forces that liberation theology confronts. According to Ellacuría, the historical institutional church, far from being symbolic of the crucified people and the Kingdom of God, has largely been a force for the rich and oppressive. He writes: “the historical world and the church’s institutions have been universalized from a preferential option for the rich and powerful. . . . [T]he church has become worldly. That is, it has . . . shaped its message and even its institutions more from the standpoint of a power that dominates and controls than from that of a ministry that serves.”[55] However, far from calling out to kill the Church—to sacrifice it as Christ sacrificed himself—liberation theology instead seeks to transform the church to carry on what they believe that the cross of Christ pointed to: a life that sought to dissolve the emphasis of a higher transcendent salvation and replace it with an emphasis on the temporal salvation of the poor and oppressed.

Thus, rather than abandon the Church and its sacraments altogether, liberation theology seeks to understand them and symbolize them through the perspectival distortion of the preferential option for the poor. Recognizing that an emphasis on transcendence and eternity over imminence and temporality does, in fact, act as Marx’s opiate for the masses, Ellacuría urges that by reversing these emphases, “the Christian faith, far from becoming an opiate—and not only a social opiate—should establish itself for what it is: a principle of liberation.”[56]

In 1980, Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador and mentor of Ellacuría, gave a sermon in which he reflected on his work for the poor and the threats of violence that he was receiving for his work. He said, “I have frequently been threatened with death. I must tell you that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death, but in resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. . . . Martyrdom is a grace I do not think I deserve. But if God accepts my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon become reality.”[57] Like William Wallace’s dying words, these became his call for freedom from his cross as he was assassinated two weeks later while administering mass—a fate Ellacuría and several of his associates would experience nine years later.

The final lines of The Passion are from Roman soldiers reacting to the quaking earth which followed Jesus’s death in Matthew’s Gospel: “Cassius! Hurry! . . . He’s dead! . . . Make sure!” This “Make sure!” takes on a different meaning from different perspectival distortions from both Zizek and liberation theologians. Zizek’s response, along with the Roman soldiers, is to say “Yes! Make sure he is dead. Make sure the transcendent God is dead! And make sure that his Church dies as well! Replace him!” To the contrary, liberation theology cries out: “No! Make sure he lives—not in his physical body—but through his spirit in us! Make sure that his death was not in vane! Make sure that his fight for the poor lives on!”

[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 171.

[2] There are numerous liberation theologies that have arisen both along with and influenced by Latin American liberation theology—such as black liberation theology, feminist liberation theology, and queer liberation theology. For the purposes of this paper I use the term “liberation theology” to refer exclusively to the liberation theology of Latin America that developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Unless otherwise noted, all cited liberation theology articles are from Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, eds., Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).

[3] For the purposes of this paper I use ‘traditional theologies of the cross’ to refer to what Zizek calls the “two main interpretations of how Christ’s death deals with sin; sacrificial and participatory.” Zizek, Puppet and Dwarf, 102.

[4] Zizek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 137.

[5] Ibid., 136.

[6] Ibid., 69.

[7] Ibid., 75.

[8] Ibid., 78-79.

[9] Gustavo Guierrez, “Option for the Poor,” 235-50.

[10] Robert Oliveros, “History of Liberation Theology,” 4; emphasis added.

[11] Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Church of the Poor,” 547.

[12] Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Crucified People,” 588.

[13] Ibid., 586

[14] Ibid., 587.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 586.

[17] Ibid., 588.

[18] Javier Jiménez Limón, “Suffering, Death, Cross, and Martyrdom,” 714.

[19] David Edelstein, “Jesus H. Christ: The Passion, Mel Gibson's Bloody Mess,” Slate Online, February 24, 2004. http://www.slate.com/id/2096025/ (accessed April 29, 2011).

[20] Jon Sobrino, “Central Position of the Reign of God,” 366.

[21] Zizek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 13.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ellacuría, “The Church of the Poor,” 557.

[24] Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Historicity of Christian Salvation,” 256.

[25] Ellacuría, “Historicity of Christian Salvation,” 276.

[26] Ibid., 278.

[27] Zizek, Puppet and Dwarf, 138.

[28] Ellacuría, “Historicity of Christian Salvation,” 279.

[29] This is from the English subtitles of the film, whereas the movie itself is all spoken in Latin and Aramaic. Gibson’s original plan was to play the film without subtitles, implying that the truth of the film was beyond language.

[30] Zizek, Puppet and Dwarf, 97-98.

[31] “Mel Gibson’s Great Passion: Christ’s Agony as You’ve Never Seen It,” Zenit Online. March 6, 2003 http://www.zenit.org/article-6723?l=english (accessed May 1, 2011).

[32] Zizek, Puppet and Dwarf, 138.

[33] Ibid., 51.

[34] “Mr. Deity and the Really Big Favor,” Mr. Deity, season 1, episode 2. http://mrdeity.com/s1ep2.html (accessed April 30, 2011).

[35] Zizek, Puppet and Dwarf, 126.

[36] Ibid., 124-25.

[37] Ibid., 138.

[38] Ibid., 169.

[39] Ibid., 137.

[40] Ibid., 127.

[41] Ellacuría, “The Crucified People,” 584.

[42] Ibid., 585.

[43] Ibid., 584.

[44] Ellacuría, “The Church of the Poor,” 546.

[45] Jon Sobrino, “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus, 696. This does not, however, mean that liberation theology completely denies the material bodily resurrection of Jesus. See Carlos Bravo, “Jesus of Nazareth, Christ the Liberator,” 436-38.

[46] Zizek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 9.

[47] Ibid., 112.

[48] Ibid., 138.

[49] Ibid., 130.

[50] Ellacuría, “The Crucified People,” 602.

[51] Sobrino, “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus,” 680-81.

[52] Pablo Richard, “Theology in the Theology of Liberation,” 155.

[53] Sobrino, “Central Position,” 374.

[54] Zizek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 171.

[55] Ignacio Ellacuría, “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America,” 303.

[56] Ellacuría, “The Church of the Poor,” 560.

[57] Qtd in Javier Jimenez Limon, “Suffering, Death, Cross, and Martyrdom,” 715.

FoxNews.com confrims braking news: Usama Bin Landen Dead

2011-05-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

I took the following screen capture from FoxNews.com's website tonight:

Besides the utter cuteness of FoxNews spelling like my 4 year old nephew, I wonder why FN chooses to use "Usama" instead of "Osama." I have not been able to find any other news sources that use this spelling, including the London Times and Al Jazeera. My only guess is that they use this because this is how bin ~~Landen~~ Laden's name is spelled on the FBI Most Wanted list--the only other place I could find that uses this.

It is nice to see that it has been ~~confrimed~~ confirmed though.

*UPDATE*

Apparently some local Fox affiliates are having some trouble too:

An engineer and a phenomenologist walk into an elevator...

2011-05-01T18:05:00.000-07:00

On facebook I posed the following question that has baffled me every time I have waited in an elevator:

"Do 'Door Close' buttons in elevators really work, or are they just there to give us the illusion of control?"

I received two very different answers.

From Alexander Miles, the inventor of the automatic elevator door:

"They interrupt a wait time and begin the closing procedure which is not immediate."

From Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology:

"They interrupt a wait time and begin the closing procedure which is not immediate."

The REAL reason why Obama took so long to release his birth certificate

2011-04-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

Well, it has finally happened. After much complaining from the birther movement, which had started to influence a majority of voting Republicans, Barack Hussein Obama as finally decided to take some time away from stepping on the constitution to finally make his long-form birth certificate public.

So why did it take so long? Despite what the State of Hawaii has claimed, access to someone's long-form birth certificate is as easy as getting lunch from the manapua man. In fact, I am pretty sure that you can actually get your long form birth certificate from the manapua man, along with some spam musubi. (Those from Hawaii will understand).

After some closer inspection, it has become pretty clear to me why Obama took until now to release it. Look closely:

Can't see it? Look more closely:

Still not? Look closelier:

Now even look more closelier:

As you can see in this hi-resolution zoom, there has been some editing done to the original document. Here they are circled:

As you can plainly see, it seems very clear that Hussein Obama (or someone in his administration) used white-out--and even the wrong colored ink--to hide the fact that OUR PRESIDENT HAS A TWIN BROTHER!

So what does this mean? I'm not entirely sure. Could it be that we actually have two President Obamas--one who passes more legislation in his first two years than most presidents and another who does absolutely nothing? Could we have both a Muslim Obama and a Christian Obama? Or could it even be that the elected progressive "Change We Can Believe In" Obama was killed and replaced by his conservative "Let's Keep Doing the Same SH*% as Bush" twin brother?

I don't know what the answer is, but at least we know to start looking for one.

Easter Sermon

2011-04-24T08:30:00.001-07:00

Here is a talk I'm giving in an hour. A bit disjointed. Not my best. But it begins with Braveheart....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mel Gibson’s Braveheart ends with a scene of violence and death as the film’s protagonist is tortured and murdered. For those of you who have not seen it, the movie (which certainly isn’t for everyone) tells the story of the Scottish revolutionary, William Wallace, and his attempt to liberate the Scottish people from their British oppressors. While difficult to watch, the scene is nevertheless powerful because of the context in which it occurs. For nearly three hours of this movie we are told of the exploits of Wallace as he rallies the Scotts to fight off King Edward in an attempt to gain their freedom. Fearing Wallace as a threat to his power, Edward sees that Wallace is eventually captured and sentenced to death. With this long background, the climactic scene is not just difficult to watch because of its violence, but because of that which led up to these final moments. His death is meaningful and powerful because it points to his life and stands as a testimony to his cause. His death, however, is not the final scene of the movie. While King Edward and the British oppressors thought that stopping Wallace would put an end to the revolutionary cause, the film actually ends by showing that Wallace’s sacrifice—his life and death together—encouraged the Scotts to continue to fight for their freedom, and eventually winning it.

So what does William Wallace have to do with Easter? Compare this movie to another by Mel Gibson: The Passion of the Christ. While receiving high praise from Christians—and Mormons—this movie tells about the final tortuous days of Jesus’s life, beginning with his suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and ending with the dark closing of his tomb—with the very final moments of the film briefly revealing a reopening of the tomb and the risen Christ. Besides short flashbacks—such as a brief scene depicting the last supper—we are given very little of the life of Jesus. It is as if the movie is saying: “Jesus’s life is good, and it has some interesting moments—but it is his death—his suffering and death—that is really important.”

Now compare this to the movie Braveheart. Imagine that instead of an epic film depicting the life of Wallace—the life that led to his death—we are instead treated to 3 hours of watching Mel Gibson mocked, beaten, choked, whipped, and murdered, with small flashbacks of Wallace saying nice things, laughing with children, and helping widows thatch their roofs. Such a movie would make little sense—like watching only the middle of a three act play. We would probably find it odd, revolting, and even perverse, and wonder what we were to make of it.

Perhaps this is why we, as Latter-day Saints, tend to shy away from discussion of the violence thrust upon Christ by the hands of Roman soldiers and by the cross on Calvary, and instead wish to focus on the Garden of Gethsemane. However, our scriptures—both the Bible and the Book of Mormon—force us to look to Christ on the cross. In Nephi’s vision of the savior, there is no Gethsemane, instead he writes:

And it came to pass that the angel spake unto me again, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld the Lamb of God, that he was taken by the people; yea, the Son of the everlasting God was judged of the world; and I saw and bear record. And I, Nephi, saw that he was lifted up upon the cross and slain for the sins of the world. (1 Ne. 11:32-33)

Or listen to the words of Christ as he visited the Nephites in their land:

Behold I have given unto you my gospel, and this is the gospel which I have given unto you--that I came into the world to do the will of my Father, because my Father sent me. And my Father sent me that I might be lifted up upon the cross; and after that I had been lifted up upon the cross, that I might draw all men unto me, that as I have been lifted up by men even so should men be lifted up by the Father, to stand before me, to be judged of their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil--And for this cause have I been lifted up; therefore, according to the power of the Father I will draw all men unto me, that they may be judged according to their works. (3 Ne. 27:13-15)

Recognizing these verses, we don’t completely ignore Jesus’s death on the cross—but in doing so we tend to come to the same problem that Mel Gibson’s Passion and even our own Church films, such as Testaments or the Lamb of God. We end up with stressing Jesus’s death for the sake of death, with the resulting resurrection. Or in other words, we say, “Yes. Jesus had to die. He had to die so that he and the rest of us could be resurrected.” But if that is simply the case—if he just needed to die—then why not death by old age? Would death by a carpentry accident atone for the sins of the world? I don’t mean to sound blasphemous, but if death in itself was all that was needed, then why not death by any other means? Why the cross?

According to the late Ignacio Ellacuría—who was gunned down in 1989 along with five other Jesuit priests for speaking out against the Salvadoran government’s oppression of the poor—instead of just asking the question “Why did Jesus die?” we need to also (and more importantly) ask “Why did they kill him?” His point is that the story of Jesus’s death cannot be approached as if it were in a bubble by itself. Jesus’s death wasn’t just a death. And it wasn’t just the death of the Son of God. He didn’t just die. Rather, Jesus was killed—or murdered—by persons in power in order to protect their power.

According to Ellacuria, we fail to fully understand the death of Christ when we separate it from the life that led to his death. In other words, to fully understand his death—too fully understand what his death on the cross means—we need to view it in the context of Jesus life. Thus, the sacrifice of Jesus isn’t just his death, but the whole package. His sacrifice was his life, death, and resurrection.

In fact, the very word “sacrifice” does not mean to kill, but means to “make holy.” For the ancient and early Jews, sacrificial offerings were not about killing an animal, but were about sharing a meal with God. Just as today, but even more so then, meals were a social event that showed who was in good favor with each other. That you were invited to a meal meant that you were in good favor and a relationship with the other person. This is why Jesus’s parables often centered on meals and invitations to those meals; and this is also why Jesus was ridiculed for eating with publicans and sinners—by eating with sinners, Jesus was extending love and relationships to those who were normally scorned and outcast by society. Thus, to sacrifice part of your flock wasn’t about killing the animal, but about making a holy meal to share with God, where part is burnt and symbolically sent to God and the rest is eaten by the offerer or by proxy through the priest. Like a husband who has forgotten his wedding anniversary, and then makes a candlelight dinner to beg his wife for forgiveness, the sacrificial offering (or the holy meal) is a plea to be back in communion with God—it is to say “I’m sorry. Will you please allow me back into your favor and share a meal with me.” And if not to ask for forgiveness, it is to ensure that one is still in communion with God. It is significant then, that Christ replaces the traditional sacrificial meal with a different sacrificial meal (what we call ‘the sacrament’ today, or what most other Christians more appropriately call ‘communion’), where instead of us bringing the meal to God, it is God or Christ who offers the meal (himself) to us.

So if Christ’s sacrifice was more than just his death—but was the making holy of his life, death, and resurrection—what does the cross have to say about his sacrifice? Or in other words, what does the cross say about his life? According to most historians who study Jesus’s time, execution by the cross was reserved for two groups of people: political rebels and chronically defiant slaves. As Jesus clearly wasn’t a defiant slave, what the cross shows is that he was given the death of a political rebel to the Roman empire. In fact, the term that is translated “thieves” in our Bible to describe Barnabas and the two who were crucified along with Christ is a term used to denote political rebels.

So what was it that Jesus was doing that led to his death on the cross? What was it about his life that caused others to want him dead? Typically we want to say that Jesus was killed for claiming to be the Messiah and such. And while that may have frustrated some of his fellow Jews, persons claiming those things at that time came a dime a dozen (or a talent a dozen?), were of no concern to the Romans and were largely dismissed by leading Jews.

Unfortunately, our Gospel accounts give us relatively little of Jesus’s life and activities, but as we are closing up Holy Week, we can look back on a couple of events in Jesus’s final days that hint at why the leading Jews and Romans would want to end his life. The first is on Palm Sunday, five days before the crucifixion, and a week before the Easter resurrection. As two historians put it:

Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year. . . . One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class. . . .

On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire.

Far from just a welcoming of the Savior into Jerusalem, Jesus’s entrance was a demonstration against the oppression of the Roman rule. In fact the very names “Son of God” and “Savior” were names used to describe Caesar by the Romans. So in this Palm Sunday procession Jesus, the true Son of God and Savior, whose people were the poor, was set against the false Son of God and Savior, whose empire thrived on keeping the poor oppressed.

Jesus, however, did not just set himself against the Roman oppressors, he but also spoke out against the leading Jews, who colluded with Roman leaders to maintain their power as they also oppressed the poor. The day after Palm Sunday Jesus went to the temple at Jerusalem and spoke out against the leading Jews who ran it. As Mark’s gospel describes it:

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.

And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves. And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.

And when even was come, he went out of the city. And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. (Mk 11:13-20)

This passage is typically read as Jesus condemning the money changers. However, when we look at these verses more closely, we can see that it is not the money changers that Jesus is condemning, but the temple itself—or at least those who are running it. During this time, the money changers and animal sellers served an analogous purpose as the clothing rentals in our temples today. Pilgrims traveled for miles and days to worship at the temple and could not bring their own animals with them for sacrifices. When arriving at the temple they needed to be able to exchange their foreign coin and purchase suitable animals for their worship. Just as we need special clothing to use the temple, they needed special sacrificial animals. Thus, for Jesus to shut down the changers and servers was to shut down the temple itself.

So why would Jesus shut down the temple? To understand this, we need to recognize that in doing this, Jesus was quoting and replicating the actions of the prophet Jeremiah at the temple several centuries earlier. From Jeremiah, chapter 7:

THE word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, “Stand in the gate of the LORD's house, and proclaim there this word, and say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD. . . Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these. For if ye throughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye throughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour; If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt: Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.

Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations? Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD.’”

Jesus, like Jeremiah, was not condemning the money changers as doing thievery in the temple, but was accusing the leading Jews of turning the temple into a den of thieves by believing that their work in the temple would cover their sins. A den of thieves is not where thieves do their work, but where they go to hide. Like perhaps many of us today, many of the leading Jews at this time felt that they were justified in walking past the poor, kicking out immigrants, and ignoring the sick and elderly because they were doing their work in the temple. Jesus was telling them that because they failed to help those in need, they had no right to the temple.

Emphasizing this point, Mark encases this story with the fig tree, symbolizing Jesus’s frustration by discovering the lack of fruit coming from the temple and their recognition that because of the Jews’ ignoring of the poor and oppressed, the temple (or the fig tree) was now dead. And with this, as we see, “the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him.”

With these two events, and dozens more throughout the scripture, we can see that the cross points to far more than just a death that brought about our resurrection. It points back to the sacrificial life of Jesus—the life he made holy by not just showing us how to live, but actively fighting for those who need help. The cross points to a love, not just to a generalized love of humanity, but to a special love of the poor, oppressed, sick, immigrant, and different. As Bishop David H. Burton put it: “to “be kind to the poor,” feed the hungry, clothe the naked, minister to the sick, and visit the captive . . . is the sacred work the Savior expects from His disciples. It is the work He loved when He walked the earth. It is the work I know we would find Him doing were He here among us today.”

But there is more. As the cross shows—as Christ on the cross shows us—the true love of Christ is not always easy, and it is not always rewarded. It is a love that can make us vulnerable and uncomfortable. I do not believe that it necessarily requires us to put ourselves at risk as others have, such as Joseph Smith, Ignacio Ellacuría, or Martin Luther King. In fact Apostle Paul warns us not to do more than we are safely able. However it does require us to extend our selves, to reach out, and to speak out in ways that may be new and uncomfortable.

Just as the cross on Calvary points back to the life of Christ, it also points forward to the resurrection—in both the literal body of Christ (which announces or literal resurrection) and the figurative body of Christ, which calls for us to continue that which Christ was doing. Pilate and the Jewish elite thought that by ending Jesus’s life that they would end what he had started. His resurrection signified that they could not end it, and the growing body of Christ showed that they did not. It is for this reason that we are not asked to look upon the cross, but are called to take upon the cross as well. As Christ taught, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8:34)

I believe that Bishop Burton was calling for all of us to take up the cross when he said in this last general conference:

No matter how many temples we build, no matter how large our membership grows, no matter how positively we are perceived in the eyes of the world—should we fail in this great core commandment to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees,”or turn our hearts from those who suffer and mourn, we are under condemnation and cannot please the Lord.

In fact, in modern revelation we are taught that “he that will not take up his cross and follow me, and keep my commandments, the same shall not be saved” (D&C 56:2).

On this Easter—and in every day—as we reflect upon the cross of Calvary. May we think about the sacrificial life of Jesus Christ and how we might join, follow, and emulate our Savior. As we rise up as the body of Christ, let us extend ourselves beyond our comfort zone to reach out to those who need some lifting up. Let us extend our love, help, and our means to the homeless, the mentally ill, and the struggling drug addicts. Let us open our hearts and friendships to the strangers and those who are different—to people of different faiths or no faith at all, to immigrants and persons of different races and nationalities, and to our gay, lesbian, and transgendered brothers and sisters. Let us forgive those who have hurt us and stand up for those who have been hurt.

We are called to be saviors on mount Zion. We are called to not just be like Christ, but to be a Christ to others. So let us take up the cross and be saviors to those who are in need, for “whosoever doeth this shall be found at the right hand of God, for he shall know the name by which he is called; for he shall be called by the name of Christ” (Mosiah 5:9).

Michael Otterson and the Mormon equality of men and women

2011-04-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog post, Michael Otterson tried his darnedest to show that, despite the gender inequality in the Church, Mormon men and women are in fact equal.

Through my connections at the Washington post, I was able to get his original article before it was edited and cleaned up. Here are some portions (with the deleted passages restored).*

Women in the Mormon faith regularly preach from the pulpit to the congregation and lead prayers during Sunday services (except that they rarely close as speakers, cannot preside over meetings, and generally cannot hold callings that lead both men and women). As a result, today’s Latter-day Saint women tend to be well educated and confident (in the home). Most have experience in speaking in public, directing or presiding over organizations, teaching and leading by example (over other women). Brigham Young University turns out more female than male graduates (despite our emphasis that their education is less important than their husbands).

Men and women are equal in the eyes of God, equal halves of a divine pair and equal partners in his work, which includes the raising of families (and by equal, we mean that the woman is subordinate to her husband). Inside the family, men and women are obligated to help one another (with their specific gender roles). Women are honored as possessors of the ultimate divine gift: the potential to create and nurture new life (and thus women unable to have children aren't that important--and of course, men are incapable of nurturing). And Mormons have unique beliefs that men and women need one another to return to live with God (especially the woman, who needs her husband's priesthood).

Everyone, male and female, adult and child, has equal and direct access to God through prayer for inspiration, personal guidance and forgiveness of sins (but, of course, men with their priesthood have even better access--cuz seriously, what good is the priesthood if it doesn't actually do anything).

He closes:

A couple of weeks ago, one of the members of the Twelve Apostles of the Church (all of which are men), addressing a worldwide conference of Church members, quoted author Wallace Stegner. Stegner was not particularly kind to the church, but he did acknowledge one thing: “Their women are incredible,” he said.

He was right. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would not be nearly the organization it is today without the women who comprise more than half of its adult membership (cuz without their incredible birthing power, the Church would hardly be able to sustain itself).

*Not intended to be a factual statement.

A Tale of Three Networks - Obama's budget plan

2011-04-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

Obama just released his new budget plan. CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and FoxNews.com have their different ways of describing it. Here are their headlines at actual size.

From CNN.com:

From MSNBC.com:

From FoxNews.com:

********UPDATE*********

FoxNews has already changed their headline a bit. I'm guessing that with all of their accusations about Obama and the left trying to ignite class warfare they realized that they were being a bit hypocritical :

********UPDATE 2***********

After realizing that their attempt to cover up their attempt to ignite class warfare was not grammatical, they changed their headline yet again:

“Would God That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets”: Liberation Theology and Scholars as Prophets for the Oppressed

2011-04-09T14:20:00.000-07:00

(Here is my SMPT presentation that I just presented. PDF here.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Would God That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets”:

Liberation Theology and Scholars as Prophets for the Oppressed

Loyd Ericson – Claremont Graduate University

April 2011

Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, BYU

This conference poses the question: “Does philosophy and disciplined theological reflection have a place in a [prophetic] church?” In my paper I will turn this question around and argue that the very place for philosophy, theology, and other scholarly pursuits is in an active prophetic role—to be prophets to (not for) the Church and the world on behalf of the oppressed. This is a prophetic role as understood in the tradition of liberation theology that differs from that held by those sustained in the Church as prophets, seers, and revelators. While the latter is authoritative for the Church by virtue of priesthood hierarchical authority, the former has no ecclesiastical authority.

The paper will consist of five parts: a synopsis of liberation theology—primarily from the perspective of Latin American liberation theologians—and the role of prophets and prophecy in liberation theology; a look at extra-hierarchical prophets in the scriptures, with an emphasis on Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon; an expanded definition of this distinct prophetic role and its relationship to the authoritative prophets of the Church; an overview of modern-day extra-hierarchical prophets within and without the Church; and finally, a call for further prophetic voices from philosophers, theologians, and scholars in the Church.

In the preface to Mysterium Liberationis, a collection of essays on Latin American liberation theology, Jon Sobrino writes that the purpose of theology is to “give a voice to the voiceless, to combat lies and injustice, and to foster truth and community.”[1] Growing out of the mid-twentieth century, liberation theology arose as a result of theologians in Latin America, primarily Catholic, asking what it is that Christ and Christianity had to do with the gross systemic poverty and injustice plaguing their countries. As Roberto Oliveros writes,

[Like Moses and Egypt] . . . the brutal facts of the slavery and poverty of the Latin American masses has been decisive in our reflection upon reality in the light of the God of Jesus Christ. . . . In order to proclaim and live the Good News of the Reign of God, we must acquire a new consciousness of the being and the task of the church. . . .

Taking literally Jesus’s announcement that he is the anointed one to “bring good news to the poor, . . . to proclaim release to the captives . . . , [and] to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18)—as well as his declaration that the primary recipients of his good news were the poor, hungered, injusticed, and meek—liberation theology contends that the gross reality of poverty and oppression requires that we understand the Christian message through a hermeneutic of, what Gustavo Gutierrez termed, the “preferential option for the poor.” This means that all aspects of Christ, the Gospel, and Christianity need to be understood in how it addresses the plight of the poor—including Jesus’s life, the Cross, and resurrection, soteriology, ecclesiology, evangelization, scripture, sacraments and community. In approaching the question of sin, Ignacio Ellacuria writes:

We must ask in all seriousness what the sin of the world is today, or in what forms the sin of the world appears today; this sin is different from personal sins but is often conditioned by them and continues or prolongs them. . . .

If we look at the reality of the world as a whole from the perspective of faith, we see that the sin of the world is sharply expressed today in what must be called unjust poverty. Poverty and injustice appear today as the great negation of God’s will and as the annihilation of the desired presence of God among human beings.[3]

If unjust poverty is the sin of the world, then Christ, who came to save us from the sins of the world, is foremost concerned with liberating captives (the poor) from unjust poverty. Salvation, thus, is salvation from temporal suffering and oppression.

Like Christ, sin, and salvation, prophecy (or what it means to be a prophet) must also be interpreted through this hermeneutic of poverty and oppression. According to Ellacuría, “Prophecy is understood [in liberation theology] to be the critical contrasting of the proclamation of the fullness of the Kingdom of God with a definitive historical situation.”[4] In other words, prophecy primarily consists of pointing out where our current situation fails to meet the divine standards of justice and equality. Thus, in light of the preferential option for the poor, the greatest contrast between the idealized Reign or Kingdom of God (what Ellacuria calls “Christian utopia”) and the current historical (or real) situation is seen in the plight of the economically oppressed. For Latter-day Saints, a similar contrast between God’s ideal Christian utopia and historic poverty is made explicit in LDS scripture where Enoch’s Zion utopia in the Book of Moses is such that “there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18) and the Nephite utopia in the Book of Mormon is a state in which “there were no rich and poor, bond and free” (4 Ne. 1:3). Simply put, prophecy declares that the reality of poverty marks a failure of humanity to realize the equality that God demands. (Compare this to D&C 49:20, which states that “it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.”)

It is with this understanding of prophecy that Gilberto da Silva Gorgulho, writes that “the most radical prophecy [in the Hebrew Bible] . . . is uttered as defense of the rural population and of the rights of the poor.”[5] This radical prophecy is exemplified in nearly all of the writings of the Hebrew prophets, who placed liberation and salvation of the poor foremost in their prophesies. It was embodied through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. And it is expected of Christians today who take up the Cross and prophesy and act in behalf of the poor and oppressed. Just as Joseph Smith taught that the spirit of prophecy was the testimony of Christ, liberation theology adds that a testimony of Christ is a testimony to help the poor, suffering, and oppressed. As such, prophecy plays a crucial role in liberation theology in both past scriptural events and current prophetic voices and action. It is for this reason that Gorgulho writes that followers of Christ are to be “people of prophets.” In an affirmation of continuing revelation from God—something that Latter-day Saints affirm—he notes that the Book of Revelation does not mark the end of prophecy and revelation—as understood by much of Christianity—but is instead loved by liberation theologians because it is “a book whose purpose is to encourage and maintain the prophetical praxis of the new people—this priestly, royal, prophetic people. The meaning of the life of the Church . . . proceeds from the need to ‘prophesy again’ (Rev. 10:11). It is in prophetical witness that this people finds its living liberty.”[6]

This prophetic role—as making explicit where our situation of poverty and suffering differs from the divine ideal—is repeatedly found throughout all of the scriptures. According to John Dominic Crosson, “Biblical prophecy was not just about ‘speaking before,’ about ‘fore-telling’ the future, but about ‘speaking for’ God, especially as an indictment against those who failed to observe the covenant of distributive justice at the heart of Israel’s Torah.”[7] While there was no “church” in the Hebrew Bible—and I think it is fair to say that there was no corporate “church” in the New Testament either—it is important to note that many of the prophets in scripture existed outside the leading priesthood equivalent of our contemporary Church hierarchy. In other words, despite their lack of priesthood stewardship, they were nevertheless divinely called to be prophets to the Israelites. For example, the Hebrew prophet Amos described his own prophetic calling as a lay person. He said, “I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit: And the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and the LORD said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel” (Amos 7:14-15). This is not to say that priest and prophet were mutually exclusive categories—for example, Ezekiel seems to have been a leading priest when he spoke as a prophet to the Israelites. Rather, what this does show is that in the Bible, the prophetic role is not strictly limited to the leading priesthood hierarchy, and includes, at times, women—such as Deborah, Miriam, Esther, and Anna in the New Testament.

Not only were many of these prophets not a part of the leading priesthood, but they were also often critical of the chief and high priests, lambasting them at times for corruption and for supporting the elite upper class’s oppression and neglecting of the poor. For example, Jeremiah (who was actually born into the priestly lineage) criticized those ordained to run the temple, declaring that they were turning the Temple into a den of thieves by supposing that their work in the temple justified their neglect of the poor and oppressed. Jeremiah tells them that they are under condemnation until they “truly act justly one with another, [and] do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow” (Jer. 7:5-6). It should be noted however—and this is important—that in most cases, while they might have been critical of the leading priests, they recognized and did not critique the authority that these men held to perform the ordinances and rituals of the temple.

For Latter-day Saints the place for extra-hierarchical prophets is also affirmed in the Book of Mormon. In fact, the first prophet of the Book of Mormon, Lehi, was a contemporary of Jeremiah, but unlike the latter, was not descended from the priestly lineage. Later in the Book of Mormon, Abinadi—who was clearly not recognized as one of the leading priests of Lehi-Nephi—criticizes Noah and his priests for their abominations, which included amassing wealth by oppressing the poor. And yet after Abinadi’s death, it was one of Noah’s wicked priests, Alma, who after repenting of those sins, was still recognized as one with authority to baptize those who accepted Abinadi’s message, eventually taking on a role of both priest and prophet for all of the Nephites.

Another extra-hierarchical prophet in the Book of Mormon is Samuel the Lamanite. Unlike Abinadi, who spoke against a corrupt priesthood leadership, Samuel’s prophesying came when Nephi (the son of Helaman) was a righteous priest and leader who had, years earlier, been given the power to seal others to heaven. And yet, although the Nephites in Zarahemla had a righteous prophet-priest to lead them, a prophet clearly outside their recognized leadership—a Lamanite stranger even—was sent to prophecy against the Nephites.

While the recorded portion of Samuel’s prophesying does not make an explicit reference to the status of the poor, his preaching outlines several points pertinent to both liberation theology and a place for extra-hierarchical prophets today. First, Samuel’s condemnation of the Nephites begins with a criticism of their accumulation of wealth and treasures. This is pertinent in one regard, as it highlights the belief among liberation theologians that, while preference might be given to the poor, liberation theology—Christian liberation—is universal. Ellacuria writes,

In another sense, we are speaking of a universal liberation. It is an integral liberation expressed not only in terms of economic or political problems, but also a universal liberation. The poor must be liberated from their poverty, but the rich must also be liberated from their wealth; the oppressed must be liberated from their condition of domination, and the oppressors from their dominant condition. And so on.[8]

Just as the poor must have means to live in order to be free, the addictions of wealth and power not only bind those who might have the means to help, but those addictions strengthen the structures and systems that are the source of poverty and oppression. As Ellacuria puts it: “Enticed by the allure of wealth, of wealthy persons and peoples, one loses the marks of one’s own identity. To seek one’s own identity in the imperfect appropriation of these foreign models leads to dependencies and mimicries that impede one’s own self-creation.”[9]

While alone, it might be interpreted as a mere condemnation of pride and dependency on riches, in the context of the scriptural (and especially Nephite) prophetic tradition and Mormon’s description of the historical situation preceding Samuel’s prophecy in Helaman 4 and 6, it becomes clear that the condemnation is directly tied to the plight of the poor and oppressed. Of the Nephites wealth, Mormon writes that the pride of “those . . . who professed to belong to the church of God” was due to the “exceeding riches” brought on by “their oppression to the poor, withholding their food from the hungry, withholding their clothing from the naked, and smiting their humble brethren upon the cheek” (Hel. 4:12). Mormon further notes that the Nephite leaders “did trample under their feet and smite and rend and turn their backs upon the poor and the meek, and the humble followers of God” (Hel 6:39).

Second, Samuel points out that the Nephites—those “who professed to belong to the church of God”—were inverting the prophetic role. Rather than understanding prophets as those who brought attention to the poor and oppressed and pointed out the failure of God’s children to reach for the Christian utopia of equality, the Nephites instead hailed as prophets those who supported their economic inequality and oppressive pride, showering them with gold, silver, clothing, and substance. According to Samuel:

If a prophet come among you [the Nephites] and declareth unto you the word of the Lord, which testifieth of your sins and iniquities, ye are angry with him, and cast him out and seek all manner of ways to destroy him; yea, you will say that he is a false prophet, and that he is a sinner, and of the devil, because he testifieth that your deeds are evil. But behold, if a man shall come among you and shall say: Do this, and there is no iniquity; do that and ye shall not suffer; yea, he will say: Walk after the pride of your own hearts; yea, walk after the pride of your eyes, and do whatsoever your heart desireth--and if a man shall come among you and say this, ye will receive him, and say that he is a prophet. Yea, ye will lift him up, and ye will give unto him of your substance; ye will give unto him of your gold, and of your silver, and ye will clothe him with costly apparel; and because he speaketh flattering words unto you, and he saith that all is well, then ye will not find fault with him. (Hel. 13:25-28)

Third, both fulfillments of Samuel’s key prophetic fore-tellings of Christ (concerning his birth and death) were followed by peace (3 Ne. 1:23) and utopia (4 Ne. 1:2-3). According to Ellacuria, prophecy has a necessary relationship to Christian utopia, not just in the contrasts between the current historical situation and the idealized utopia, but also in that prophecy foretells the consequences of accepting and living, or denying and setting aside, the prophetic message. Prophecy comes with the promise of utopia: the promise that acceptance will enact the transformation from the present historical reality to a historicizing of Christian utopia, and the contrary promise that a failure of acceptance results in a deepening of the status quo. “Thus,” as Ellacuria puts it, “prophecy, which initiates this contrasting, is able to predict the future and go toward it—assuming indeed that there is the general vision of the Kingdom previously alluded to, which God’s revelation has been making known to humanity in various ways.”[10] In Samuel’s prophecy we not only see his prophecies concerning the continued desire and attachment to riches bringing upon self-destruction, but in the narrative of the Book of Mormon we also see a fulfillment of his prophecies that accepting the Christian message can bring peace and historicized utopia and that denying that message results in self-destruction. Thus, Samuel’s prophecy, in the context of the Book of Mormon, both makes the prophetic claim and testifies of its truthfulness.

Fourth, as I pointed out earlier, Samuel was not the Nephites’ ordained hierarchical priesthood leader. In fact, it seems that no background information is known about Samuel at all, other than that he was a Lamanite and a foreigner. Instead it is Nephi the son of Helaman who is portrayed as the authoritative religious leader of the Nephites. He is implicitly ordained by his father, is given the sealing power from God, and repeatedly assumes authority over the Nephites. In contemporary nomenclature we would say that Nephi had stewardship over the people of Zarahemla. This is perhaps why even though Nephi and Samuel gave similar prophetic messages to the Nephites, Samuel is violently rejected by the people of Zarahemla, and Nephi, though largely ignored, is able to continue with his role. Furthermore, when Samuel is finished prophesying he does not begin baptizing the Nephites, but instead it is to Nephi that the people go to receive this priesthood rite—(though one could argue that this is perhaps because Samuel was chased out of town).

The story of Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon shows that in Mormon theology (or at least in Mormon scripture) there is a place for extra-hierarchical prophets outside of the traditional priesthood who can speak to the Church and the world (and not for the Church), and bring to light the contrasts that exist between the Kingdom of God and our historical situation. Contrary to the contemporary view of many Latter-day Saints that prophecy can only be given for those for which a Church leader or parent has stewardship over (for example President Monson can receive revelation for the whole Church, a bishop can receive revelation for a ward, and a parent can receive revelation for her family), Joseph Smith taught that revelation and prophecy for all was available to all, but could only be given by commandment (or be binding upon members) by Joseph Smith. Initially directed to Oliver Cowdery, Doctrine and Covenants 28 declares:

[B]ehold, verily, verily, I say unto thee, no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses. . . . And if thou [Oliver Cowdery] art led at any time by the Comforter to speak or teach, or at all times by the way of commandment unto the church, thou mayest do it. But thou shalt not write by way of commandment, but by wisdom. (D&C 28:2-5)

What this revelation shows is that the ability to be directed by God and prophecy to all is available to all, but such a prophecy cannot be made binding on the Church. In other words, it is possible for Jacob Baker to be directed by God to tell Latter-day Saints—or the world even—that they should sell all of their luxuries and donate that money to the poor, but what he cannot do is make obedience to this prophecy a requirement for membership to the Church or for a temple recommend, nor can he discipline Latter-day Saints for a failure to follow his claim. Put simply, extra-hierarchical prophecy is possible for all, but only those within the priesthood hierarchy can make it commandment for the Church.

As Sobrino notes, both the priest and the prophet—or the Church administrator and the spirituality/prophecy of liberation—are necessary. He writes,

Surely doctrine and administration continue to be necessary and important. But of themselves alone they will not be enough. . . . [T]he important thing is the emphasis on something called spirit [or prophecy] rather than only on theory and praxis—or, of course, only on doctrine and administration. . . . [F]or these and other, more specific, reasons—theology, too, has taken a serious interest in spirituality.

And just as Sheila Taylor pointed out yesterday, Sobrino adds: “A purely doctrinal theology . . . ha[s] become irrelevant.” Instead theology must needs be something that “wishes to take account of, and constitute a response to, concrete, historical church reality, with its real cries and real hopes.” [11] (I am reminded of a favorite quote of mine from Joseph Smith: “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite.”)

This theology—or this prophecy—however, does not have to exclusively focus on the poor. While liberation theologians in Latin America have emphasized the poor in their theology, liberation theology and the prophetic role of contrasting the Kingdom of God and our current situation can and must extend beyond the economically oppressed. In pushing for a “broadening of the conception of ‘the poor,’” Clodovis Boff writes that

Liberation theology is the theology of the liberation of the oppressed—the liberation of their whole person, body, and soul—and all the oppressed—the poor, the subjugated, those who suffer discrimination, and so on. We cannot attend exclusively to the purely socioeconomic aspect of oppression—the aspect of poverty itself—however basic and determining it might be. We must also look at the other levels of social oppression: racial . . . , ethnic . . . , and sexual.[12]

Just as the Book of Mormon teaches that the Lord “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remebereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile” (2 Ne. 26:33), the prophetic call of liberation theology is to bring to attention where our historical situation differs from these divine ideals—where others are discriminated against because of race, economics, gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity. (And I would even add where the land is environmentally threatened.) Thus doing theology and prophesying are one in the same, in that they “mean something real and palpable” in the life of the poor, discriminated, and oppressed.

Let me be clear when I say that one certainly need not be a philosopher, theologian, or scholar to play this prophetic role (as most prophets in the scriptures certainly were not). However, liberation theology has shown that philosophers, theologians, and scholars can have certain skills, talents, and knowledge that enable them to be both acutely aware of the oppressive structures in the world and able to communicate these problems to others. Philosophers can use theories and models provided by Rawls, Marx, Smith, Kant, Badiou—and the list goes on—to offer social critiques and promote resolutions. Theologians can mine the scriptures and authoritative revelations to provide theological bases for awareness, social change, and new revelation. Sociologists, historians, and students of gender, race, sexuality, violence, economics, science, and the environment can use their knowledge and talents to be prophets bringing to light the contrasts between Zion and our present situation. While not having authority to speak for the Church, in each of these, extra-hierarchical prophets are able to convey to the Church and to the world important revelations that remove veils often hiding and obscuring oppressive and discriminatory structures. In doing so, they supplement (and perhaps even, at times, prompt) traditional prophets who authoritatively lead the Church.

In just over the last century, modern-day prophets such as Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Ghandi, Bishop Oscar Romero, and Mother Teresea stand out as extra-hierarchical (and extra-Mormon) prophets who have both revealed discriminating and oppressive contrasts between the Kingdom of God and our historical situation, and made important steps in helping the world come closer to a Christian utopia. Within Mormonism, there has also been extra-hierarchical prophets—modern day Samuel the Lamanites, standing on the wall and bringing the contrasts to light—who have used their talents to inject a prophetic voice into our awareness. Some of the many examples include Hugh Nibley (or more recently Grant Hardy and Jim Faulconer), who have used their understanding of scripture, history, and culture to highlight economic disparity and environmental degradation; Eugene England, who added a prominent voice for those who might suffer from war and violence; Armand Mauss and Lester Bush, who documented racial struggle and problems of the priesthood ban; and Lavina Anderson, Margaret Toscano, and Claudia Bushman, who began to reveal the struggles of women in a predominantly patriarchal Church and culture.

Because of the hierarchical structure of the Church and the rhetorical tradition of referring to the president of the Church as “the Prophet,” Mormons often fall into the confusion of thinking that there can only be one prophet in the world at a time (forgetting that there are at least fifteen men sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators). A different extra-hierarchical understanding of prophets, as those who bring to light the oppressive and discriminating structures of the world, enables space for new prophetic voices to enter our theological and social discourse—a place for non-authoritative, but nevertheless divine, prophecies to extend beyond the traditional boundaries of “stewardship” and help build the Kingdom of God by revealing/unveiling structures that oppress and discriminate against God’s children. Instead of just being a people with a prophet, liberation theology has shown us that we can and must be “people of prophets.”

Last Sunday in general conference, Bishop H. David Burton prophetically spoke about our need to help those in need. He said,

“Does philosophy and disciplined theological reflection have a place in a [prophetic] church?” Yes. As liberation theology has taught, we have a duty as philosophers and theologians to raise a prophetic voice in behalf of those who are seeking liberty from the bondages of poverty, discrimination, alienation, and oppression. As with Moses, when told that others were prophesying, we need not side with Joshua with the view of forbidding them. Instead we can and must join with Moses in declaring, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:26-29).

[1] Jon Sobrino, “Preface,” xi.

[2] Robert Oliveros, “History of Liberation Theology,” 4; emphasis added.

[3] Ignacio Ellacuria, “The Historicity of Christian Salvation,” 278.

[4] Ignacio Ellacuria, “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America,” 292.

[5] Gilberto Da Silva Gorgulho, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” 137.

[6] Ibid., 146.

[7] John Dominic Crosson, God and Empire: Jesus Againt Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperOne 2007), 74.

[8] Ellacuria, “The Historicity of Christian Salvation,” 285.

[9] Ellacuria, “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America,” 311.

[10] Ellacuria, “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America,” 292.

[11] Jon Sobrino, “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus,” 678-79.

[12] Clodovis Boff, “Epistemology and Method of the Theology of Liberation,” 77.

General Conference Priesthood Tweet Session

2011-04-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

For all the ladies (and faithless men) out there, I did my best to record the Priesthood session via twitter. Because of the character limitations imposed by twitter, most are just interpretations through my Hermeneutics of Cynicism (TM).

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Opening

I will be live-tweeting the PH GC for all you ladies who aren't masculine enough to go to the boys-only club meeting.
The Jazz season seems to be taking a toll on Pres Monson.
Doctrine count (D) begins at 1 with the open prayer.

Elder Neil L. Anderson

Anderson. Like the last 8 generations, we are generation saved for the last days.
Anderson. The new zealand all blacks rugby team is NOT racist.
A. Jimmer needs to serve a mission. Got that Jimmer?
A. If Jimmer went on a mission they would have won it all. Also if Davies didn't have sex.
A. Jesus is coming back with this generation. For realz this time.
A. "The sun doesn't set where missionaries testify of Christ." The summer artic elders are busy.
A. You're never too old to serve a mission, unless you are 27.
A loves the painting with a blonde Jesus. The one that God saved.

Elder Steven E. Snow

Steven E. Snow. Hope is like rain. Somehow.
S. We need the Audacity of Hope (TM)
S. (I'm waiting for Snow to lead a Yes We Can chant)
S. Hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope...

Elder Larry M Gibson

Larry M. Gibson. Begins with story about breeding rabbits. Relates it to parenting. Somehow.
G. The deacon president has 'keys'. They are 'real'. They go on a 'key chain'.
G. Missionary duties don't begin at 19. (That's right. I was 18 when i went to the MTC )
G. (this is actually a good talk for spiritually empowering deacon president. Other deacons don't matter though)

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Uchtdorf. Begins with a story. Will probably find a phrase that he will repeat through the rest of the talk.
U. He's so handsome.
U. Such a great tan.
U. And jaw line.
U. And hair.
U. Such beautiful hair.
U. The accent is pretty great too.
U. "Some believe but don't know that they believe." (I didn't know U was so philosophically rich)
U. Obligatory reference to flying and parable of planes.
U. The phrase = 'living below our privilege'
U. Such a handsome smile too.
U brings the D to 5.

President Henry B. Eyring

Eyring is starting pretty funny. People being in prison is hilarious.
E has AIDS. Is offering to share.
E. No fighting in quorum meetings. Need more love between men.
E. Every quorum needs a Gary Hernandez.
E. Old nearly dead people are kept alive in their sad sad state and not allowed by God to die so that we can serve them.
E.... Or to baptize young lady nurses.
E. Obligatory choking up and near tears.
No D from the E.

President Thomas S. Monson

Monson. Old people are funny.
Monson. World is filthy.
Monson. Filthy filthy world.
Monson. Porn is filthy.
Monson. Alcohol is filthy.
Monson. Drugs is filthy.
Monson. Testimony is not filthy.
Monson. Church is not filthy too.
Monson. Being unmarried is filthy.
Monson. Up late crying partly because Mormons aren't getting married early enough. [This text didn't get sent from my phone for some reason]
Monson. Hurry up and get married.
Monson. Divorce is filthy.
Monson. "Choose your love. Love your choice." Unless you are one of the gehys.
Monson. Spousal abuse is filthy.
M's facial expressions make me chuckle.
No D from the M. Maybe doctrine is finally going out of fashion.

Closing

Closing prayer by a black man.

The Challenges of Mormons Defining Mormon Doctrine for Mormons; or, Is It Mormon Doctrine that Mormon Doctrine Is True? A Rejoinder

2011-03-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

The following is a part of a very rough draft of a rejoinder to responses to a previous article I had published in Element. You can read the original here. Thoughts anyone?

The Challenges of Mormons Defining Mormon Doctrine for Mormons;

or, Is It Mormon Doctrine that Mormon Doctrine Is True?

A Rejoinder

Just Teachings?

In his response Millet stresses that “doctrine means teaching.” This is, of course, a straightforward definition of the term and is perhaps the appropriate use when responding to observers of Mormonism who simply want a list of the contemporary LDS Church’s teachings. Thus, if a simple list of teachings was all that was being delineated, then no real justification would be needed other than an appeal to common sense and common usage—or as Millet puts, we could simply appeal to “a description of present Church practice,” which Oman calls “sensible rules of thumb for discovering church doctrine.” In light of such a view, Oman’s theory of doctrine as authority offers a plausible theoretical basis for the practice.

With the perspective of doctrine as teachings, the question “What is LDS doctrine?” would be analogous to the hypothetical question, “What does Professor Xavier teach at the School for Gifted Youngsters?” Like Millet’s criteria, in order to give a careful description of what Professor X teaches we would simply need to listen to Professor X’s lectures, read his syllabus and self-authored course manual,[i] and participate in his lab activities. We would, of course, also have to be careful to note when Professor X is speaking off-the-cuff and offering his opinion, exclude what he says among friends at an after-school party, and check to see if he is continuing to teach what he had taught in previous semesters. Furthermore, because Professor X is both highly knowledgeable in his field and in bit hard-nosed in his self-assurance, Oman’s theory of doctrine and authority could adequately describe the relationship between Professor X’s teachings and his students. Just as “the concept of authority . . . is not so demanding that church doctrine must be identical with the truth,” a similar concept of professor-student authority does not demand that Professor X’s teachings be identical with the truth. Even though it is possible that some of his teachings may be wrong, students “are justified in letting the authority of [his teachings] override their own . . . best judgments so long as they believe that [Professor X], like a doctor, enjoys an epistemological advantage.” Furthermore, regardless of whether Professor X is right or wrong on a particular matter, the authority of his teachings requires that students affirm his teachings in tests and quizzes and not publically contradict him in class in order to receive passing grades.

If doctrine was merely just a set of official teachings, then I would join with Oman in stating that church doctrine had no direct relation to truth and was primarily about authority. I could further join Millet in saying that the best way to know what is and is not contemporary LDS doctrine is to simply look at the criteria in his doctrinal parameters. The problem, however, is that, within Mormonism, doctrine is simply more than just a list of official teachings. As Millet puts it in his original essay, “There is power in doctrine, power in the word, power to heal the wounded soul, power to transform human behavior.”[ii] Millet is not alone in defining doctrine as such, and by both Millet’s and Oman’s models for defining doctrine, it seems to be a clear and unambiguous doctrine that doctrine is more than mere teachings. The Church-produced teaching manuals constantly encourage teachers and students to testify of the truthfulness and power of church doctrine.[iii] A quick search on the Church’s website brings up hundreds of example from general conference talks from just the last decade or so that define and use the word “doctrine” in a manner that denotes truth and power, not merely “teachings”—in one talk alone, Elder Henry B. Eyring uses the word 45 times with this meaning.[iv] In fact, given its occurrence and use in contemporary Church-produced manuals, general conferences, Church statements,[v] and scripture, there is perhaps no doctrine of the church more pronounced than the doctrine that church doctrine is true.

This should hopefully make clear the primary problem I hoped to address in my original article. As I have entitled this rejoinder, the challenges are not simply in defining the contemporary teachings of the LDS Church. Rather, they are the challenges of Mormons defining Mormon doctrine for those within Mormonism. Even though more than the last third of my article was attempting to make this point clear, Millet virtual avoids the issue of doctrine of truth altogether in his response and Oman simply side-steps the issue by declaring that church doctrine is not directly about truth.

Without recognizing the heavy emphasis in church doctrine about church doctrine’s truthfulness, the challenge of defining church doctrine becomes as interesting and simplistic as a student trying to find out what she needs to study for Professor X’s mid-term exam. The challenge arises not when one wishes to know what the LDS Church teaches in its manuals and what how members are to relate to those teachings, but when Mormons try to ascertain what the doctrines of truth and power are—that the Church has a primary (though perhaps not exclusive) claim on truth is, after all, one of the primary doctrines of the restoration. If it is the case, as Millet and Oman agree, that the doctrines of the Church can and do change, and if the doctrines of the restored Church are true, then how should Mormons understand the truthfulness of these changing doctrines? Is truth relative? Does truth change with time? Is the Mormon corpus of true church doctrine smaller than we might initially think—and if so, what are those doctrines?

Or, is the church doctrine of church doctrine’s truthfulness not true?

[i] While the corollaries of Professor X’s lectures, syllabi, etc. to Millet’s criteria may be clear, I specifically chose “self-authored manuals” to be a corollary to Church-authored manuals. Just as it would be incorrect to state that Professor X teaches the particular things in a text he uses for a course, it would be incorrect to say that the contemporary LDS Church teaches everything found in the LDS Scriptures (see my example above with the Word of Wisdom). Because scripture needs to be interpreted, it seems that there will always be a layer of interpretation (perhaps through a Church manual or statement from Church leaders) that would always separate the Church’s teachings from scripture.

[ii] Millet, “What Do We Really Believe?” 265.

[iii] See for example, “Lesson 3: The Teacher’s Divine Commission,” in Teaching, No Greater Call: A Resource Guide For Gospel Teaching (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, XXXX), XX-XX.

[iv] Henry B. Eyring, “The Power of Teaching Doctrine,” Ensign, May 1999, 73.

[v] For example, the Churches official statement on doctrine states that “members are encouraged to independently strive to receive their own spiritual confirmation of the truthfulness of Church doctrine.” In “Approaching Mormon Doctrine,” LDS Newsroom, May 4, 2007, http://newsroom.lds.org/article/approaching-mormon-doctrine (accessed March 6, 2008).

Recent reads

2011-03-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, Book 4)

Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present)

The Great Brain Does It Again

The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5)

The Great Brain Is Back

War and Peace in Our Times - Streaming video available

2011-03-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

All of our conference from over the weekend is now available at http://vimeo.com/album/1556999

Or you can just watch it here:

If you just wanted to see my presentation, here it is:

Session 7 - Loyd Ericson, "Eugene England's Theology of Peace" from LDS WarPeace on Vimeo.

Disneyland animations

2011-03-16T09:42:00.001-07:00

I made these at Disneyland on Monday. Not sure what they say about me.

God saves Mormon missionaries in Japan while allowing thousands to die or suffer unimaginable loss

2011-03-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

From the area presidency in Japan:

地域会長会からのお知らせ
愛する日本の兄弟姉妹，

わたしたちは日本のすべての宣教師の所在と安否を確認できたことを皆さんにお知らせします。安否が確認できずにいた最後の二人の宣教師の所在も土曜日の夕べに確認することができました。わたしたちはこの度の地震の発生から，宣教師の安否を確認するために継続して働いてくださった建岡伝道部会長に心から感謝しています。また，この働きに協力をしてくださった多くの会員たちに感謝しています。多くの教会職員が管理本部に夜を徹してとどまり，土曜日もほとんどの時間を割いて，この緊急事態に支援を提供してくれました。彼らの奉仕に心から感謝をしています。わたしたちは今後，日本のすべての会員の所在と安否を確認するために全力を注いでいきます。会員たちの状況について知っていることがあれば，皆さんの神権指導者にお知らせください。地域福祉部長のダーウィン・ハルヴォーソン兄弟が，これまでのほとんどの働きを調整してくれました。引き続き，ハルヴォーソン兄弟が地域全体の福祉の必要を確認し，調整していきます。

これまでの働きは，主によって結集され，奇跡的な結果をもたらしました。このような結果をもたらしたすべての出来事を目の当たりにし，わたしたちは心を鼓舞されています。天の御父が注いでくださっている憐れみと祝福に感謝し，日本全土の会員の所在と安否を確認できるよう祈っています。

ゲーリー・E・スティーブンソン

崔崙煥

青柳弘一

Notice from the Area Presidency

Dear Brothers and Sisters of Japan,

We are pleased to inform you that we have now confirmed that all of the missionaries in Japan have been found and are safe. The last two missionaries in Sendai were located on Saturday evening. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of Pres. Tateoka who has worked continuously since the earthquake to account for his missionaries. We also thank the many members who have helped in this effort. We had a large number of church employees who stayed in the Area office building overnight and most of Saturday to help in this time of emergency and we greatly appreciate their service. We will now make every effort to locate and evaluate the condition of all of our members in Japan. Please inform your priesthood leaders of any information you have on the condition of our members. Brother Darwin Halvorson, our area welfare manager, coordinated much of the effort today and will continue to evaluate and arrange for welfare needs throughout the area.

The outcome today really is a miraculous result orchestrated by the Lord. We have been uplifted to have observed all that has taken place leading to this result. We give our thanks to Heavenly Father for his mercy and blessings this day and pray that we now find our members throughout Japan alive and well.

Gary E. Stevenson
Yoon Hwan Choi
Koichi Aoyagi

Nice to see that God isn't just concerned with paintings of Jesus.

Yes, the Church still officially discourages interracial marriage.

2011-03-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

Wow. A friend of mine just pointed this out to me. From the current Aaronic Priesthood Manual:

“We recommend that people marry those who are of the same racial background generally, and of somewhat the same economic and social and educational background (some of those are not an absolute necessity, but preferred), and above all, the same religious background, without question”

To be fair, this is a quote from a speech by Spencer W. Kimball in 1976 (the year of my parents' interracial marriage) when the Church still had a racist priesthood ban and was still supporting an antiquated notion of race--but what is it doing in a Church manual in 2011.

The context for this quote makes it even more clear how stupid and how wrong it is for our youth to be pushed these racialist/xenophobic belief:

Explain that choosing a companion for eternity is an extremely important decision but is sometimes based on a very narrow understanding of love. A person who responds only to infatuation or romantic love might overlook many important qualities when choosing someone with whom to spend eternity.

• What characteristics of young women are socially and spiritually appealing to you?
Write the young men’s answers on the chalkboard, such as—

1. Is unselfish.
2. Shows respect for me.
3. Has initiative.
4. Is considerate of others.
5. Shows patience in stressful situations.
6. Is an active Church member.
7. Has a testimony of the gospel and obeys the commandments.
8. Maintains a healthy outlook toward life.
9. Possesses values and goals similar to mine.

Ask each young man to select what he thinks are the three most important attributes on the chalkboard. Take a vote to determine which areas the young men consider most important. Discuss why they voted the way they did.

Compare the results of the vote with the following statement by President Spencer W. Kimball.

Notice that in this lesson, the expected answers from our youth do not include: 10. Of the same race; 11. Of the same rich/poor/middle-class; 12. Of the same ethnic background; 13. Of the same educational level. No, youth today do not and should not think in these terms. Rather, this manual proposes that they need to accept a racialist/segregationist view of the world, and see race as on par with characteristics such as having faith, being considerate, and being unselfish as characteristics that one should want in a marriage.

Now I recognize that new challenges may arise when a couple from vastly differing backgrounds (whether it be racial, ethnic, geographic, economic, political, etc) choose to be married. However, this is something that should be discussed by them and between them, and never used to discourage them from getting married.

And our impressionable youth should never--I mean NEVER--be taught that God discourages them from marrying outside of their race.

Perhaps I take this a bit personally because I come from interracial parents, my brother is interracially married, my sis-in-law has interracial parents, my bro-in-law has an interracial marriage, and another sis-in-law has in interracial marriage.

"Moroni's promise" was not about the Book of Mormon

2011-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most commonly cited passage of the Book of the Mormon is the three verses near the end of the book commonly referred to as "Moroni's Promise." From the tenth chapter of Moroni it reads:

3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.
4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

Traditionally, these verses are read as request by the book's final editor, Moroni, to pray about the Book of Mormon as a whole--to ask if the Book of Mormon "is true." However, if we look at the context of these words from Moroni we can see that, contrary to tradition, Moroni is not asking readers to pray about the 529 printed pages that preceded these verses (the whole Book of Mormon), but is actually asking the reader to specifically pray about the 2 pages that follow his request (specifically verses 8 through 26).

The final chapter of the Book of Mormon contains a final plea from Moroni following Moroni's inclusion of two letters from his father Mormon. The chapter begins:

1 Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ.
2 And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you.

Moroni begins by declaring that he has some important final words that he is about to write and then moves into the next two verses where he is asking readers to pray about the words he is about to give. Here are the verses again without Moroni's tangents:

Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites. . . .And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you. Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things . . . that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

So what are the words that Moroni wants the readers to pray about? A preface to what he is primarily concerned about can be found in these verses. Moroni asks that while reading his final words people "remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things" and that God "worketh by power, according to the faith of the children of men, the same today and tomorrow, and forever." In other words, Moroni wants to remember two things as they are reading his final words: that God has worked miracles in the past, and that God does not change.

After his preface, Moroni then jumps into his final sermon (which is largely a plagiarism of Pauls first letter to the Corinthians). His first sentence sums up the bulk of his final words: "Deny not the gifts of God" (vs. 8). Moroni's final concern, his final words, are a plea to modern day readers that they do not deny that miraculous gifts--the gifts of the spirit--are still alive with true believers in Christ. After exhorting readers to not deny the gifts of the spirit that come from "the same God who worketh all in all" (vs. 8), Moroni then gives a summary of the gifts (vss. 9-18), a reminder that those gifts "cometh of Christ" (vs. 18), and then repeats what he wants the readers to remember: "that [God] is the same yesterday, today and forever, and that all these gifts . . . never will be done away" (vs. 19).

Moroni then offers some words about faith, hope, and charity (vss. 20-23; a paraphrasing of his earlier plagiarizing Paul in chapter 7), and then, again, warns about a day when "the gifts of God shall be done away among you . . . because of unbelief" (vs 24), warning that those who "do these things away . . . [shall] die in their sins, and . . . cannot be saved in the kingdom of God" (vs. 26).

He then finishes off his exhortation on gifts with how he began: a call to "remember these things . . . which were written by this man [Moroni]" (vs. 27), with a reminder that "God shall show unto you that that which I have written is true" (vs 29). He then gives one last call to "lay hold upon every good gift" (vs. 30).

Here are the verses again with just the bare parts of his message. Notice how the call to pray about the truthfulness of his words act as bookends containing his sermon on gifts:

1 Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites;
2 And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you.
3-4 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, . . . that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.
7 . . . Deny not the power of God; for he worketh by power, according to the faith of the children of men, the same today and tomorrow, and forever.
8-18 (Sermon on gifts)
19. . . Remember that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that all these gifts of which I have spoken, which are spiritual, never will be done away, even as long as the world shall stand, only according to the unbelief of the children of men.
20-23 (comments on faith)
24-26 . . . If the day cometh that the power and gifts of God shall be done away among you, it shall be because of unbelief. . . . And wo unto them who shall do these things away and die, for they die in their sins, and they cannot be saved in the kingdom of God; and I speak it according to the words of Christ; and I lie not.
27 Remember these things; for the time speedily cometh that ye shall know that I lie not, for ye shall see me at the bar of God; and the Lord God will say unto you: Did I not declare my words unto you, which were written by this man, like as one crying from the dead, yea, even as one speaking out of the dust?
29 And God shall show unto you, that that which I have written is true.
30 And again I would exhort you that ye would come unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift, and touch not the evil gift, nor the unclean thing.

Allow me close by adding that this post is not to say that a person cannot pray about the truth of the Book of Mormon (whatever that means), but only that this is not what Moroni was asking readers to do. I am merely pointing out that rather than asking readers to pray about the Book of Mormon, Moroni was actually asking readers to pray about the reality of the gifts of the spirit--which were commonly denied in the 19th century (or even in the 21st century).

“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives” -- Claremont Graduate University

2011-02-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives”

Claremont Graduate University

March 18-19, 2011

Under the sponsorship of

The LDS Council on Mormon Studies

and the

Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies

at the University of Notre Dame

The program will address the critical issues of war and peace from a variety of Mormon perspectives. Elder Lance Wickman, former member of the First Quorum of Seventy and a Vietnam veteran, will deliver the keynote address on Friday evening, March 18.

Complimentary dinners and lunches will be provided for those who register by March 11.

Register by emailing information to: ldswarpeace@gmail.com. Please include your name, email address, institution or place of residence, and whether you want dinner, lunch, or both.

Program Schedule

(Subject to change)

Friday, March 18

Albrecht Auditorium, Claremont Graduate University, 945 Dartmouth Ave, Claremont, CA

1:00 - 1:15 Welcome

· CGU representative

· Richard Bushman

1:15 - 2:30 Session 1 – The Book of Mormon, I

· F. R. Rick Duran, “Pax Sanctorum: From the Plates, a Pacifist Manifesto”

· Joshua Madson, “A Nonviolent Reading of the Book of Mormon”

· Robert Rees, “Children of Light: How the Nephites Sustained Two Centuries of Peace”

2:45 - 4:00 Session 2 – The Book of Mormon, II

· Morgan Deane, “The Narrow Strip of Wilderness in the Modern Age: Strategic Lessons from the Book of Mormon”

· Graham St. John Stott, “Reading Gaza in the Book of Mormon”

· J. David Pulsipher, “The Ammonite Conundrum”

4:00 - 4:30 Plenary discussion of Sessions 1 & 2

4:45 - 6:00 Session 3 – Doctrine & Covenants 98

· Ron Madson, “Section 98: The Immutable ‘Rejected’ Covenant”

· Gordon Thomasson, “‘Renounce War and Proclaim Peace’: Reflections on Mormon Attempts at Peacemaking”

· Kerry Kartchner, “The Lord’s Promise to Fight Our Battles: A Commentary on D&C 98:33-37”

Friday Evening

Hampton Room, Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Ave, Claremont, CA

6:30 - 7:30 Dinner

8:00 - 9:00 Keynote speaker – Elder Lance B. Wickman, Emeritus General Authority and decorated Army veteran

Saturday, March 19

Balch Auditorium, Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Ave, Claremont, CA

9:00 - 10:15 Session 4 – Historical Perspectives

· Jennifer Lindell, “Fall from Grace: Mormon Millennialism, Native Americans, and Violence”

· Mark Ashurst-McGee, “Zion as a Refuge from the Wars of Nations: Cultural Resource or Impediment?”

· Robert Hellebrand, “General Conference Addresses during Times of War”

10:30 - 11:15 Session 5 – In Defense of Peace

A panel discussion led by Eric Jensen and Kerry Kartchner

11:30 - 12:45 Session 6 – Prominent Voices

· D. Michael Quinn, “Pacifist Counselor in the First Presidency: J. Reuben Clark, 1933-61”

· Boyd Petersen, “‘The Work of Death’: Hugh Nibley and War”

· Loyd Ericson, “Eugene England’s Theology of Peace”

1:00 - 2:45 Lunch

View and discuss film Trouble in Zion

3:00 - 4:15 Session 7 – News from the Front

· Chaplain Kathryn Stucki, “The Physical, Mental and Spiritual Impact of Serving in the Military and in War on Modern Day Mormons”

· Eric Eliason, “Latter-day Saint Views on Current Conflicts: An LDS Chaplain’s Perspective”

· Major Jonathan Petty

4:30 - 5:45 Session 8 – International Perspectives

· Jesse Fulcher, “Nonviolent Responses and Mormon Attitudes: Reasons and Realities”

· Ethan Yorgason, “Negotiating War and Peace in Korea: A Comparison of U.S. Military and Korean Latter-day Saints”

· Chad Ford, “From This Place: International Worldviews of War and Peace at BYU Hawaii”

5:45 - 6:30 Closing plenary discussion, with introductory comments by Kerry Kartchner, Richard Bushman, and Patrick Mason

Joseph Smith's Re-Vision-ing of the First Vision

2011-02-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

I don't have a lot of time to thoroughly flesh this out write now, so it is just going to be a series of notes and thoughts.

Some of the premises I want to begin with are:

1. Joseph and his contemporaries' understanding of visions and "seeing" did not necessarily mean seeing with physical eyes (stimulus of the retinas with physical light)--seeing with one's "spiritual eyes" or "mind's eye" were just as real to them as seeing with physical eyes.

2. Joseph's revelations in the D&C involved Joseph putting his impressions into a first person voice. They were not dictations of an audible (sound vibrations entering the ear) voice. In other words, the primary content of the revelations were not the dictated words, but were rather impressions. The first first person voice was Joseph's projection of those impressions.

3. Joseph did not live at a time when one's past words, acts, and images are readily available for review and maintenance of one's memory. Today we constantly have written notes, photos, facebook walls, journals, etc to help us remember things we experienced, saw, and said. Joseph did not have most of those things, and much of what he recorded wasn't actually written by him. Furthermore, there is no evidence that he did any serious systemic theological contemplations. Rather his revelations and explorations seem to have been rather off the cuff, without attempts to merge them with previous (especially older) theological claims.

4. We make a much bigger deal about the First Vision than Joseph ever intended, forcing certain assumptions on him and his experience.

Some explanations:

1. In the folk-magic world of Joseph, it was fairly common for people to see things with their "mind's eye" or "spiritual eyes." I imagine it was something similar to when I picture my wife's face "in my head," when someone asks me to spell something and I "see" the word in front of me as I read off the letters, or if someone describes a tall tree standing alone in a wide open park and I "see" that tree in my imagination. Whatever the case, it is clear that for Joseph and his contemporaries it was perfectly normal to "see" things that were not seen with one's physical eyes. D&C 76 is a record of Joseph and Sidney Rigdon "seeing" many things, while others watched them staring at a fireplace. Consider the language of Lehi's vision in 1 Nephi: "And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God." Later he equates visions with dreams: "And it came to pass that while my father tarried in the wilderness he spake unto us, saying: Behold, I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision." While today we might readily distinguish things we see with our eyes and see with our heads, for Joseph and many of his contemporaries they were just viable ways to see things. In fact, Martin Harris reportedly claimed that his witnessing of the golden plates were done with his spiritual eyes and not physical eyes, and were thus even more valuable as a witness.

2. In looking at the recently published Book of Commandments and Revelations (in The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books), it has become readily apparent that the revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants were not dictations of an audible voice (as Grant Underwood puts it, Joseph was not a fax machine), but were rather Joseph's attempts to give a voice to the spiritual impressions he was receiving. This is even more apparent when one considers the fact that Joseph went through and made several edits and changes to those revelations--which would have been a bit odd if those were actual dictated words of God/Jesus. If Joseph is giving (and "hearing") words that are his own projections from spiritual impressions, is it that different from him giving (and "seeing") images that are his own projections from spiritual impressions?

3. Much of what I write, say, and do are remembered by me because of my written record, philosophical contemplations, and photographed images. Without those things my memory would be much more malleable and subjective to new experiences and lapsing memories (my wife can attest to this already). Without many of these aids, how aware was Joseph of his own past theological claims, accounts, and revelations? How fixed were they? I contend that they were not that fixed--not only that, but on occasion he would claim something was fixed when we can historically show that they were not (see, for example, his claim that he has always taught the plurality of gods). This is further problematized when what is remembered is not a physical experience, but something more akin to a dream.

4. It wasn't until the early 20th century that the First Vision had the foundation role for the Church that it has today. While it was fairly well known by the end of mid-late 19th century, the story for Mormonism still largely began with the visitation of Moroni. Today Mormons treat the FV as if Joseph Smith left the grove knowing that the Father and Jesus were two distinct embodied personages and that Joseph had a fairly clear grasp of what he would later teach and do. Historically, this does not seem to be the case. Joseph, himself, said little of the experience and, even after briefly mentioning the FV, still told his own prophetic story beginning with Moroni's visit.

And now some conclusions/speculations I am drawing from these premises:

1. Joseph did not physically see God (or anything). If someone happened upon Joseph Smith when he received the vision, they would have seen a 14 year old boy staring up into the trees. Rather than seeing the divine with his physical (natural) eyes, he saw them with his spiritual eyes, with his "mind's eye," and in his head--something that would have been completely natural for him and his contemporaries--and just as real as seeing them with his physical eyes.

2. Just as Joseph's dictated revelations were his putting a voice to a spiritual impression. His vision was his putting an image to the powerful spiritual experience he had in the grove. His seeing God and/or Jesus was not the content of his spiritual experience, but rather his seeing--his vision--was a projection or vision-ing of a deep spiritual experience.

3. Just as with my own spiritual experiences, Joseph's understanding of what happened, and what he visioned, in the grove was not fixed. There was no photograph, recorder, or journal record to solidify his experience. He apparently didn't even tell many of the experience, but instead kept it to himself. Without talking about and recording a memory it remained malleable. The malleability of the experience is further complicated when it is not a memory of something physically seen, but a memory of a spiritual experience and internal vision. Because at what was at the heart of Joseph's experience in the grove was a spiritual experience and not a visual experience, how he would later vision (or re-vision) that experience would change and evolve with experiences and new spiritual impressions that changed and evolved his understanding of God and his own mission. When Joseph was primarily concerned about his own and his family's salvation, he visioned the experience as a communion with Jesus and a confirmation of his forgiveness; later when he was concerned with his role in the Church and had a new understanding of God he re-visioned his experience as a meeting with two persons and a confirmation of his prophetic duties. Different accounts of the vision occur because they are simply different visions projected from a common experience.

4. We unfairly place expectations and demands on Joseph's First Vision. While our use of his 1838 account may represent how he understood that experience at that time (though there is evidence that he did not write it himself), we cannot force his other visions of that experience to comply with this one. Each account is its own vision (his own re-vision-ing) of a powerful experience he had as a teen in a grove of trees. How did he vision it that day? Did he vision Jesus forgiving him of his sins? Did he vision God? Did he vision two personages with a plan for him? Did he vision God, Jesus, and angels? Or was it just a pillar of fire? Whatever it was that he visioned, it at least seems clear to me that he left the grove with a powerful private knowledge that he was loved by God--and perhaps that is all that should really be at the heart of his first visions.

Books of 2011

2011-02-12T15:22:00.000-08:00

This is a work in progress...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race *HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen

A Christmas Carol (Sterling Classics)

The Hyphen : Between Judaism and Christianity (Philosophy and Literary Theory)

The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present)

The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, Book 3)

Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be: Everything Dads Need to Know about Pregnancy, Childbirth and Getting Ready for a New Baby (Your Pregnancy Series)

Kafka

Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, Book 4)

Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present)

The Great Brain Does It Again

The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5)

The Great Brain Is Back

The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (King, Stephen)

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

The Happiest Baby on the Block

A Different God?: Mitt Romney, the Religious Right, and the Mormon Question

Who Are the Children of Lehi?: DNA and the Book of Mormon

"Swell Suffering": A Biography of Maurine Whipple

This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology

The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek)

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Short Circuits)

The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons

Latter-Day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority

Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements

google searching images of Joseph Smith.

2011-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

Do a google image search for "joseph smith." Limit the search to images over 2MP. Scroll down to page 14.

Why is Joseph Smith taking a bubble bath?

Quoted in a Foxnews.com article

2011-01-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

Here.

And if you haven't yet, join the grass-roots movement to boycott Broadway and let them know that they shouldn't support anti-Mormonism.

A couple scriptures to think about:

2011-01-24T20:38:00.000-08:00

Luke 18:18-23:

18 And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
19 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.
20 Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother.
21 And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up.
22 Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Whatever you do, do not distribute unto the poor, cuz that will seriously screw them over, and it's totally socialist: and come, follow me.
23 And when he heard this, he was very happy: for he was very rich.
24 And when Jesus saw that he was very happy, he said, How happy shall they that have riches be when they enter into the kingdom of God!
25 For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a poor man to accept welfare and enter into the kingdom of God.

Mosiah 4:16-25

16 And also, ye yourselves will succor not those that stand in need of your succor; ye will not administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.
17 Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—
18 But I say unto you, O man, you are totally right. You earned your money fair and square, and that beggar deserves what is coming to him. In fact that beggar hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that laziness that he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God. Cuz if you want interest you need to save and invest, but those beggars are just spending what little money they have on food and other things that we just get so easily.
19 For behold, are we not all free? Did we not all work for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?
20 And behold, even at this time, ye have been calling on his name, and begging for a remission of your sins. And has he suffered that ye have begged in vain? Nay; he has poured out his Spirit and wealth upon you, and has caused that your banks should be filled with money, and has caused that your mouths and bellies should be fed that ye could not find utterance, so exceedingly great was your joy, all because you chose freedom over socialism and didn't give in to Satan's desire that you would help the poor and see that all are provided for.
21 And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye deserve of the substance that ye have.
22 And if ye judge the man who putteth up his petition to you for your substance that he perish not, and condemn him, how much more will he be willing to get off his lazy butt and get a job instead of wasting the country away by choosing to remain poor and uneducated.
23 I say unto you, wo be unto that poor man, for his lack substance is clearly his own fault. And if he can't afford health insurance because he is in school, then he should just set aside his education and work a menial minimum wage job that provides the very basic benefits for his survival; and now, I say these things unto those who are poor as pertaining to the things of this world.
24 And again, I say unto the rich, ye who have and yet have even more than is sufficient; I mean all you who deny the beggar, because ye are against socialism; I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but because that is socialism.
25 And now, if ye say this in your hearts ye remain guiltless, otherwise, well, you are still guiltless, cuz the only guilty ones are the poor who are clearly in their situation because of their own doings, or lack thereof.

"001100010" - Mormonism in Jon Stewart's Earth (The Book)

2011-01-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

During my bubble baths, I usually lay back and read from Jon Stewart's Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race.

This book is as funny as it gets and perhaps one of the best social critiques offered in print. While the book's information on Mormonism could have used a little help from Wikipedia (ex. it has Joseph Smith taking the Mormons to Salt Lake), the humor it uses has been spot on. Page 167 however, had me totally confused. On it's section on religious dietary taboos it uses Da Vinci's "Last Supper" with the faces of famous persons from religious groups photoshopped over the faces of Jesus and the apostles. With each face is a list of a religion, their dietary rules, and a silly made-up quote. For example:

Hilarious. I know.

But the quote for Mormonism has me completely confused:

Can anyone explain what "001100010" is supposed to mean? Or what connection it is supposed to have with Mormonism and/or Mitt Romney?

Oh and everyone should buy The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race. It is totally worth the $14.42 on Amazon.

How I spent my Christmas vacation

2011-01-20T19:56:00.001-08:00

On Angela & Loyd.

Dan Peterson and the FARMS Review reviews ... me.

2011-01-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was skimming through Daniel Peterson's introduction to the most recent issue of the FARMS Review, "An Unapologetic Apology for Apologetics," and something caught my eye. He writes (quoting a couple anonymous writers):

Some Latter-day Saints who object in principle to the apologetic enterprise may hold to a slightly different faith—or, at least, affirm the faith a little differently—than do most members of the church. A hypothetical situation was proposed to one such objector, and his response was revealing. "Suppose," a questioner wrote,
that a friend or family member approaches you and says "I am beginning to have doubts about my testimony. There are things from the history of the Church which I never knew about, but which concern me. For example, my friend said that Joseph Smith stole the temple endowment from Freemasonry. I was told the endowment was revealed by God, and now I am really having some confusing doubts."

What would you do? Would you say, "Well, your problem is that you are using 'reason' to assess the claims of the gospel. I think what you need is more faith. If you just have faith and pray about it, it will be okay." Would you say something else? What would you do? 18
In response, the objector said that he would answer that,
yes, Joseph Smith used Masonic rites to develop his endowment ceremony. If they want to ask more questions, I'd give them more answers: No, I don't think they are based on actually ancient rituals. Yes, I find them beautiful and meaningful nonetheless. No, I don't think they are magically efficacious. Yes, I believe that God uses them to bind us into communities to build the Kingdom of God, etc.19
The appropriate way to respond to our critics, he continued, "depends on the criticism."
Sometimes the proper response is: Yes, you are right. Sometimes the proper response is to point out poor argumentation (which could be equally done by a non-believer). Sometimes the response is "I don't know." Other times the only response is: Perhaps, but it doesn't matter.

When I read this the last couple quotations reminded me of something I had read elsewhere. After doing a quick google search I realized that it seemed familiar because it was something that I had written on a message board several months ago. Upon further skimming of the article I noticed that nearly each section of Peterson's article was quoting and responding to other comments I had made on that thread, as well as to a paper I had written on Mormon apologetics for a class I had with Richard Bushman last spring.

Needless to say, I am a bit honored that Peterson took the time to publish a response to quick comments that I had made in an informal (and awful) message board and a 12-page paper for one of my classes. And because Peterson and I had once been friends I appreciate that he avoided the traditional snide remarks and personal jabs that are often a trademark of the FARMS Review--even throwing in a couple compliments in my direction.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T07:45:00.001-08:00

This has been my favorite Christmas song this year. Enjoy.

God saves reprint of Jesus while allowing children to die in fires.

2010-12-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of excitement on blogs concerning the MIRACULOUS saving of this reprint of Harry Anderson's second coming of the Aryan Jesus in the Provo Tabernacle fire. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Now I'm all for trying to find meaning and lessons in life in almost anything. It's fine to look at this and use it to teach something (such as this blog does). However, to claim that this was God's work is just offensive to me. Doing so implies that God is more concerned with saving a simple stock reprint than he is of saving children, adults, and peoples' homes. I would rather go to hell than spend eternity with such a deity.

If you really believe that God saved this painting of Jesus, peruse this short google search and tell that to the parents of these dead children.

Oh, and MERRY CHRISTMAS! (in case I don't blog again before then).

Recent Reads

2010-12-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

This should close up my list for 2010.

The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

After God (Religion and Postmodernism Series)

Religious Pluralism and Civil Society (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Series)

Pluralism

The Return of the Great Brain

Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930

The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek)

Modern Mormonism: Myths & Realities

Introducing Angeloyd

2010-12-14T10:06:00.001-08:00

Testimony of a Modern Day Prophet

2010-12-09T09:54:00.001-08:00

If I heard something like this in general conference, it would be easier for me to say that we have prophets in the Church today who are just like those in the scriptures.

For more on the need for modern-day prophets, see this post.

Nester, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

2010-12-04T23:47:00.000-08:00

I found a copy of this shorter and lesser-known Christmas special by Rankin and Bass, and thought I would put the full thing on Youtube. It's only about 10 minutes (much shorter than their other movies, such as Rudolph, Frosty, and their several specials about Santa Claus.) Enjoy.

A Christmas Story

2010-12-03T17:57:00.001-08:00

Sit back an listen. It's only a couple minutes.

project mayhem

Prophets, seers, and fortune cookies

Secret Santa

Rev. Robert Jeffress Is a Rectum

Recent Reads

One of the Heroe$

A tale of two executions

9/11/2011

My post about what we (America) learned from 9/11

Tolerating Church meetings

More on Moroni's promise

Marla Iyoko Ericson

The Book of Mormon Musical has ripped off our beloved EFY soundtracks

Can someone please explain the Deseret News comment moderation to me?

Christianity’s Perversion: Zizek and Latin American Liberation Theology

FoxNews.com confrims braking news: Usama Bin Landen Dead

An engineer and a phenomenologist walk into an elevator...

Top 25 Google Searches

The REAL reason why Obama took so long to release his birth certificate

Easter Sermon

Michael Otterson and the Mormon equality of men and women

A Tale of Three Networks - Obama's budget plan

“Would God That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets”: Liberation Theology and Scholars as Prophets for the Oppressed

General Conference Priesthood Tweet Session

The Challenges of Mormons Defining Mormon Doctrine for Mormons; or, Is It Mormon Doctrine that Mormon Doctrine Is True? A Rejoinder

Recent reads

War and Peace in Our Times - Streaming video available

Disneyland animations

God saves Mormon missionaries in Japan while allowing thousands to die or suffer unimaginable loss

Yes, the Church still officially discourages interracial marriage.

"Moroni's promise" was not about the Book of Mormon

“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives” -- Claremont Graduate University

Joseph Smith's Re-Vision-ing of the First Vision

Books of 2011

google searching images of Joseph Smith.

Quoted in a Foxnews.com article

A couple scriptures to think about:

"001100010" - Mormonism in Jon Stewart's Earth (The Book)

How I spent my Christmas vacation

Dan Peterson and the FARMS Review reviews ... me.

Merry Christmas

God saves reprint of Jesus while allowing children to die in fires.

Recent Reads

Introducing Angeloyd

Testimony of a Modern Day Prophet

Nester, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

A Christmas Story