Yesterday had some synchronicity.  We are currently reading The Boys in the Boat as a family.  I posted a quote from it yesterday.  It’s a book about the collegiate rowing team that won the Olympics in 1936 but also a book about Joe Rantz, one of the rowers, struggling to achieve the perfect trust necessary for perfect rowing after a hardscrabble adolescence where he was abandoned by his dad at his stepmother’s behest during the Great Depression.  She is the classic wicked stepmother, though the author works hard to give you perspective enough to see why she fell into the trap she did.  You end up seeing her as more pathetic and meager than villainous.

Not Joe Rantz’s stepmother

Then yesterday I was linked to this mini-essay on wicked stepmothers.   The writer first makes a point that the correlation between unrelated men in the home and physical or sexual child abuse is high.  About 50x more likely if I recall (though still less likely than not).  “Unrelated men in the home” = Mom’s boyfriends or Mom’s new husband.  The Wicked Stepdad (or more commonly, the Wicked Stepboyfriend).  She then says that similarly the stepmother is much more likely than a biological mother to be emotionally abusive.  Its why wicked stepmothers pop up so much in fairy tales.  She lays out a series of mechanisms and steps which are point for point what happened in The Boys in the Boat.

Note: the statistics do not  mean that any given stepmother or stepfather, or even that stepfathers and stepmothers in general, are likely to be wicked.  People have a hard time with statistics emotionally so I think its important to point that out.  Most abusers are steps–true.  Most steps are abusers–false.

The gospel is for comfort?   Yes, but not just for comfort.   Not by half.

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A young man, mission bound, gave a talk yesterday on how to become a real expert in something and then related it to the gospel.  The answer wasn’t credentials.

His first three insights were practice, study, working in an area where the underlying phenomenon is repeatable and not just random.  These all had obvious applications to the gospel.

But his fourth suggestion for expertise was feedback.  That was less obvious how we go about getting gospel feedback.  I suppose the answer is to lean into priesthood interviews.  But also to direct your prayers that way.  I usually report in prayers and ask for help with failures and for advice on what next, but I rarely ask for an evaluation of how well I did.

Trials are the journey, not the destination.

Perfection is the destination, not the journey.

This misery will not last.  This imperfection will not last.  You are immersed in them now only so you can move beyond them.  You have to be immersed so that they can transform you enough.

We say that mortality means death–everything ends.  This is true.  But the other key feature of mortality is immersion.  We experience something called the Present as if it were Eternity.  This is an incredibly valuable opportunity to try out different things–to know good and evil from the inside the way the gods do.

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An interesting article I was linked recently about Israeli TFR (decent) has led to some speculative, preliminary thoughts on why the LDS TFR is what it is (bad).

First of all, don’t just accept everything the article says, at least when applied to non-Israeli fertility.  I’m just using it as a jumping off point to look at various explanations folks have offered for low fertility and see whether they apply to us.  This is more an attempt it is to find possible causes than it is a call for action.  Just because something is a root cause doesn’t inherently mean that it ought to be fixed or can be fixed.

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This blog will never be a popular Come Follow Me site. What people understandably want is a site that gives them cool insights when they are reading the material. But I get most of my insights in Sunday School when we are discussing the lessons from the last two weeks, or even in the days after when I am thinking about the Sunday School conversation. I believe that there is an intensification of the available spiritual insight as more and more of the Saints simultaneously turn their attention to a subject.

So here goes, thoughts and comments on the part of the Book of Mormon you are no longer reading.

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Salt Lake announced a BYU medical school.  Good.  I love the ambition.

unlike many medical schools, the BYU medical school will be focused on teaching with research in areas of strategic importance to the Church

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your speaker at Church is a hardbitten, no-nonsense type who just got back from 6 months of hardbitten, no-nonsense type highly paid contract work in an African country where the Church has no presence (and is not allowed to).  To take the sacrament, he had to get permission from a branch president in another country several hundred miles away using WhatsApp and Google Translate.  Saturday mornings he read the Bible with a 7th Day Adventist fellow contractor.  Sundays he sang hymns, blessed his own sacrament, then had “2 Apostles speek at every meeting.”  He said he had a favorite picture from his trip he wanted to show us.  It was a picture of a white plate with a rip of bread on it, a white teacup with water, both on a white napkin.  He started to cry.

You are singing Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee and idly check the notes in the footer.  Translated in the 1800s from a medieval text by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  The weight of years comes crashing down you, hundreds of years between you and the translation, hundreds more years to the monk in his cell, and a thousand years from him to Christ, like you are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

* It’s odd how casually and offhand we get a few verses in Chapter 28 mentioning a horrific war with bodies piled up all over.

Read carefully the switch to the reign of the judges was a disaster.

the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges is ended.

10 And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

11 And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth; yea, and many thousands are mourning

This is a fact. The fact does not mean that the switch was wrong or that Monarchy is the One Perfect System. But it is a fact and when or if we turn to the Book of Mormon for political insights, it is a fact we need to take into account.

Nephite Modernity–https://www.jrganymede.com/2024/06/12/32551/

(If you do decide to use the reign of the judges to guide your beliefs about politics, you should also take into account that the reign of the Judges was not The Republic of the United States except with more feathers and turquoise).

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There are two frames I’ve found for understanding the Mosiah-Alma transition in the Book of Mormon and all the political and social change that comes fast and heavy until Christ appears to them.

1. Nephite modernity
2. Nephite cultural conquest —  the Nephites effectively brought the Lamanites into their cultural sphere at this time. With a little help from the priests of King Noah, the Amalekites, and other Nephite dissenters.

It’s striking that Ammon and the 4 Sons of King Mosiah were able to convert Lamanites at this point which had never really happened before.   This is less an act of cultural conquest and more a result of it already happening.  It’s interesting that in Alma 22 Mormon stops describing all the Lamanites as idle nomads and only describes “the more idle part” that way.  In contrast, there is a newly urbanizing population that is also Nephitizing that seems more susceptible to conversion.

Which brings us to

3.  Partly as a result of 1 and 2, the Lamanites are also going through some kind of state formation transition around this time.

The Book of Mormon is for our day.

Modernity and cultural conquest are defining elements of our own era.

One of the original appeals of looking for chiasmus is that it is a form of poetry that would survive translation, even arguably if the translator didn’t know there was a poetic structure there.

And obviously that is true or we wouldn’t know about it.

That said, we sh0uldn’t overrate our ability to always discern a chiasmus.  A lot of the poetic art is going to lie in taking an established form where people *expect* what’s going to be coming next, but then replacing it with something unexpected.  In other words, the chiastic form allows for metaphors (equating two dissimilar things) without explicitly saying so.

There would likely also be a repertoire of established metaphors, things we don’t consider to be in the same category but that the ancient writer would have, which we know nothing about.

Some of this we might be able to figure out, using judgment and intuition (both alas fallible).  Some not.

There is a very interesting shift from the kings to the judges that  involves a shift in religious authority and an outbreak of religious entrepreneurialism.  Grant hardy’s ethnic breakdown thesis may be correct but I think it obscures more than it reveals.

Nephite modernity; Lessons from Nephite history ; Nephite civilization cycles

Let’s take a look at some more of the interesting questions and insights from this period.

• Did Abinadi have authority?

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Curse words get all their power from us. Any one who uses them is derivative of us. And to think they make fun of us for it? Its like making fun of the farmer for selling some of his food instead of eating it all himself. It’s like making fun of the generator for transmitting all its electricity.

What is the significance of the Nephite monetary system in Alma 11?

We cannot say for sure. Perhaps Mormon was just male-brained and liked esoteric trivia for its own sake (the system he describes does not seem to have been his own). However, we should probably assume that it has symbolic significance.

Why should we assume that?

The Book of Mormon is an extract from a copious collection of sacred and historical records. Our default assumption should be that everything was selected with a purpose by the editor. In fact, the section on the monetary system has every appearance of Mormon adding it in personally.

Recall that ancient societies were almost all massively more inclined to symbolism than ours is.

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