And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.

11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?

12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

13 But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

-Matthew 9.

I didn’t set out this time through the gospels to have more sympathy for the Pharisees, but I am finding it anyway.  Its not that I am discovering they were right all along.  That would be absurd.  I am discovering the natural human tendencies they fell into like traps (at least, the better ones among them, people like Paul and Gamaliel).  For example, see this post on Collective Guilt for Killing Christ. (more…)

Someone asked me what value the Book of Mormon has for us now.

Here is the answer I gave.  I don’t pretend it’s the only answer or that the value in my answer can only be achieved via the Book of Mormon.  Only that this is the answer I gave and it was my true answer and it was and will continue to be a true answer.

1. The Bible gives us the spectacle of a people surrounded by foreigners. First other tribes and then the Romans. That is not our situation.   Wickedness and persecution come from people who may not be part of our church but they are our people.  Or they may be part of the church (Lord, is it I?).  The Book of Mormon scene is much more like that.
2. Part of the point of the Book of Mormon is that scripture doesn’t ultimately matter. Yes, its very important.  But if every copy of the Book of Mormon were burned tomorrow and blotted from every mind, God could recreate it in an instant, or other scripture, or something even more marvelous.  God is the thing.
3. Captain Moroni. So many distortions and perplexities about Christ’s wonderful New Testament message end when you consider that “if all men were etc.”  The best doctrine is the stories of the most righteous.

• What does it mean to “give glory to God”?
• Why stone Achan’s family?
• What was the cost of Canaanite cheap labor?

(more…)

Isaac Newton said that he was a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. He meant so many basic discoveries that we all take for granted were genius, or even miraculous in their time. Things like the concept of the zero.

You also stand on giant shoulders. (more…)

I am going to walk you through an odd line of reasoning.  It may be a little shaky, I’m not too sure about it, but it ends in an interesting place.

Non-Protestants will often argue that you need to subject private interpretation of the scripture against “the tradition” or you might end up way off base.  (I believe this argument may map to what we say about personal inspiration and prophetic authority, or to secular experts appealing to “the consensus.”).   This argument is correct but it goes too far.  It means you can’t be more correct than that tradition either.  It reminds me of the secular efforts to smooth out the business cycle.  You avoid sharp declines at the expense of explosive growth.  I fully expect our Catholic and Orthodox friends to disagree, but to me it sounds like an appeal to safety that will put off the man of spirit.

A better argument for the person who wants to reach their personal heights is Newton’s statement that he was a dwarf standing on the shoulder of giants.  To the man who asks why he should be chained by these dead figures the better response might be that he will go much further personally by engaging with them than by trying to recreate everything from the ground up.

Your mind goes interesting places as the miles roll past you.

But what occured to me is Joseph Smith had the best response of all for why you need to commit to the Church.  “We without them cannot be made perfect.”  It’s not just more likely that you will get there as part of the group, its essential. Measuring how high you can go on your own misses the point.

This week you want to read Brother McConkie’s talk from last General Conference.  Its about the man sick of palsy whose friends got him down through the roof to the Lord, Mark 2:1-12.

(more…)

Conan, the mighty ruler of Aquilonia, sat atop his throne, his sharp gaze piercing through his subjects as they presented their grievances to him. The Barbarian King wasted no time in delivering swift and decisive justice to those who deserved it.

(more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

The happy buzz, people greeting people, your old patriarch offering you firewood driftwood from his wash.  The padded seats.  The Spirit as you raise your hand to sustain.

The light on the horizon at 6:00 AM on this late February morning brought a song back to mind. The summer before last (2021), the Killers put out the album Pressure Machine. At some point maybe I will write an analysis of it, which will be titled “Eleven Songs about Nephi, the town in Juab County.” The album is well worth an uninterrupted hour set aside to hear it continuously in order from end to end. My favorite of those eleven songs is the fifth, “Sleepwalker.”

Back from dropping off a son at seminary, I went into the backyard to take care of a small task suited to the time available before the sun would rise. And I pulled up a 1996 BYU speech from Elder Neal Maxwell, and in the way that sometimes happens when a thought has already entered the mind, I found in Maxwell’s words reminders of what I like in “Sleepwalker.”

I am so grateful for these intertwinings of our lives. I could say the same with regard to Elder Eyring. The manner in which our lives have intersected has been such a great blessing to me, and it is likewise so with Bruce Hafen and with so many more. It is a marvelous thing when the Lord gives us these experiences, and, of course, you have them as well.

(more…)

Pray like the blond beast.

Be scripture the abyss into which you stare.

Last week I ran a Sunday School idea by you folks.  Now I want to tell you what we did and how it went. (more…)

1.  You can make the bed together; the wife can make it; the husband can make it, maybe he’s learned that crisp military style or something; the wife can make it some of the time and the husband can make it some of the time; some of these options are better than others; but they are all hugely better than one spouse making their half and leaving the other half for the other.

2.  (a) For men, having good tools and being willing to ask male relatives and neighbors can substitute a lot for not being handy.  (b)  Yes, it can be daunting.  If it weren’t, she wouldn’t appreciate you for taking it on.  (c) Deciding you can’t fix it after trying isn’t a failure.  Even the extremely competent guys you imagine in your head get to that point a lot.

Rather than see my wives and daughters ravished and polluted, and the seeds of corruption sown in the hearts of my sons by a brutal soldiery, I would leave my home in ashes, my gardens and orchards a waste, and subsist upon roots and herbs, a wanderer through these mountains for the remainder of my natural life.

-thus Brigham Young

In June 1858 a disgusted Johnston, as ordered, marched his men through abandoned Salt Lake City past Utah militiamen with torches at the ready in case of a federal misdeed.

Last night I had a dream.

In 202X, federally-sanctioned accreditors come to BYU to investigate rumors that the institution has been insufficiently compliant with the Current Thing.  The accreditors have mentioned that insufficiently complying with the Current Thing will probably lead to BYU losing its accreditation.  After all, it is 202X.

They come to an empty campus.  The only people present are students wearing hard hats.  They are demolition teams from the College of Engineering.    The buildings are all wired with explosives.  The boys from the engineering college stand by the plungers, grinning at the accreditors.  One pats his plunger when the accreditors pass by.

The accreditors are abashed.

(more…)

For whosoever shall save his life, shall lose it

Some guy who was an adjunct professor at BYU explains what he thinks is going wrong at BYU.

Caveats: (a) this is just one guy who was an adjunct professor at BYU’s opinion and (b) we only have his word for it that he was an adjunct professor at BYU (though I think he’s pretty credible).

The first link takes you to the first tweet in the series (no twitter account necessary).  The second link has all the tweets combined into one document.

Okay, here it is, the beginning of the epic "What's going on at BYU?" thread. pic.twitter.com/XONBn00CwM

— J. Whitebread (aka J. Hewitt, Travis Lee Clark) (@JWhitebread1) February 20, 2023

The combined thread

Summary and comments below.

(more…)

I was out of town this weekend, so I attended a different ward. Different, and yet so much the same. It was Fast Sunday there. (more…)