Author: Chris Henrichsen

I had originally intended to start a series of posts on Hugh Nibley

I have been a bit busy…and I have given up on Mormon Studies. So while I will continue to find inspiration from Nibley, it will not be a focus of my writings or research. Nor will I have time to do the project justice.

Do not despair! Over the last few months, the Nibley family has been bringing us some deep and personal insights into the real Hugh Nibley at the blog Hugh Nibley: off the record.

My favorite post so far is titled “On Religion Teachers at BYU (or Why the Called Him a Gadly)”

[Interview, 1983]

In my office at BYU they had these openings under the doors, because we had no air conditioning in those days, and in the summertime we would leave all the doors open. I always could hear across the hall exactly what was being taught in those classes because religion teachers, being of that type, usually speak in a loud voice. They are very loud and obnoxious. And they were all teaching the same sort of thing: the Book of Mormon is nothing more on earth but a tract against socialism. That’s what it is. And this was the theme they aimed at all the way through, as if that made all the difference in the world. So that was very discouraging at times, because they wouldn’t let up on that. Let it be that, as far as that goes, but you have something else to talk about, don’t you? “Oh no!”

This is very interesting. Here we are, unemployable by any academic standards, living on the welfare of the church, which has been set aside by revelation for the support of the widows, poor and so forth, and to justify ourselves we spend our days fulminating against the evils of socialism and the wickedness of the idle poor. That’s what these teachers are doing, they are living purely on the welfare of the church.

Not that we here at FPR would ever be interested in somebody taking a jab at BYU Religion faculty. 🙂

I may link over to the Nibley site on occasion, but I will leave the good fight up to them. They are doing a great job.

Kristine is a my hero.

UPDATE: I should thank Sunstone for this video. For more videos from Sunstone Symposium, check out their YouTube page.

I now live in Matthew Sheperd’s hometown. He had studied at political science Casper College where I now teach.

I never knew him, but I remember his death. I think about him often. I am only 11 days older than him.

 

 

Never forgot.

 

Never again.

John Rawls defines pluralism as the existence of many conflicting comprehensive doctrines (religious and secular) within a society.

I think my Shem (10) in this this picture is an example of what pluralism might symbolically look like.

I didn’t go to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte last month However, my friend R.C. Johnson, the chair of the Natrona County Democratic Party, was there and she was at a meeting of Mormon Democrats (see this article in the Daily Beast which features Grant Hardy). She was fighting for me and Wyoming. Notice her LDS button!

 

R.C. Johnson, above, from Casper, Wyo., while not a member of the LDS Church, came to the meeting of LDS Democrats to learn more about how people of that faith have connected with the Democratic party. “There’s a Mormon Democrat, Chris Henrichsen, running for US Congress from Wyoming,” she said, “and being here is about being informed.” As the county chair for Natrona County Democrats, she wants to build a bridge to Wyoming Mormons, many of whom are Republicans: “I want to be able to articulate a lot better the LDS-Democrat connection.” (NBC News)

The Brandon Flowers “I’m a Mormon” video got a lot of buzz and for good reason. It is pretty awesome.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/4PF0h7oqUEQ[/youtube]

Brandon and some of his bandmates also played at a rally in Fall 2010 for Senator Harry Reid and President Obama.

Here is “Read My Mind”:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AJP3azEXqxk[/youtube]

and “Home Means Nevada”:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AJP3azEXqxk[/youtube]

Like Brandon, I can say there is still a fire burning in there.

There has been a number of rather contentious and awkward conversations about Heavenly Mother on the bloggernacle. My view is that we should spend more time thinking about the role that mother’s play in our society and our relationship with the mothers in our own lives. I think that one of the great contributions of feminist theory is the emphasis on the here and now…and the need to avoid unnecessary abstraction.

In “Mother” by Roger Waters (originally perform by Pink Floyd on “The Wall” album), Waters deals with the complicated relationship he had with his own mother. The song is painful and heart-breaking.

Here is a recent cover of that song by Pearl Jam. I think the Pearl Jam does a beautiful job.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/kAh1jH5F_i4[/youtube]

I work Pink Floyd references into many of my church talks. Once when assigned to speak on Mother’s Day. the ward clerk was in the room and he asked, “How are you going to fit Pink Floyd into that one.”

“You have no idea how easily I can,” I responded as I immediately thought of this song.

There was no Floyd in that talk…though there was Antigone, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Latin American human right movements.

I was once a conservative activist. When I tell this to people, they rarely believe me.

Thanks to my aunt, I now have some archival evidence. This comes from a letter my mother sent to my aunt at the end of my freshman year at Ricks College.

Dated April 16, 1995

Christopher will return April 30. We are looking forward to seeing him again. He has accepted an internship with a research group that corrects inaccurate statements in the media. They are quite conservative, so he will fit right in. The guy who owns the place is in our ward and Rick thinks that he considers Christopher to be his “alter ego”, because Christopher is so openly “to the right”. I remember a testimony meeting when one of the sisters got up and said she was an active woman in the church, inspite of the fact that she was democrat […] Christopher got up, hymn book in hand and he stated in front of the entire congregation that he wanted Sister Freeman to know that all her questions would be answered in the scriptures, He then opened his song book and made this point:” Choose the right, when a ballot is placed before you, choose the right etc. etc. People were absolutely in stitches, it was so funny. It was episodes like that which endeared him to many of his fellow conservatives, It will be good to have him home.

I am still friends with Karen Freeman, the sister mentioned in the story. I am also still friends with Don Irvine, the brother I worked with that summer. I am just not so much “to the right.”

BTW, the event mentioned in this letter changed me quite a bit. After church that day, Larry Rickertsen, who had been one of my youth leaders came up to me and expressed his disappointment in what I had done. God was neither a liberal or conservative, he told me. I deeply respected Brother Rickertsen. I have not made partisan comments at the pulpit since.

NOTE: I previously posted this at a now defunct personal blog.

BCC is doing a couple of posts on my campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Check it out!

I met Boyd Peterson at Utah Valley State College in the the Summer of 2004. We were both in a week long faculty seminar on ethics-across-the-curriculum.

I had recently read Boyd’s biography of his father-in-law Hugh Nibley. Having never attended BYU, I had not had many opportunities to discuss Nibley and I was excited to meet Boyd.

In our conversation, Boyd mentioned something that has stuck with me. He said that Nibley fans fall into two categories: 1. Approaching Zion Nibleyites and 2. Temple and the Cosmos Nibleyites. The thing that struck me about this is that I considered myself to be in both categories. I still do.

Approaching Zion (AZ) is Nibley’s great work of egalitarianism. It is a scathing critique of the greed and pride of the 1970s and 1980s. The critique very much applied to the 1990s and beyond. Nibley draws upon ancient scripture and modern prophets to tackle what has become a dominant school of thought in American socio-economic thinking…Social Darwinism.

The Temple and The Cosmos (TC) is a collection of Nibley’s essays and talks on the temple. To be honest, TC is farther from my area of expertise than is other Nibley works like AZ and Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints (BB). While I cannot comment on the academic merits of Nibley’s writings on the temple, they have helped me gain an appreciation of the temple. Mostly it has done this by teaching me to approach the temple through both a spiritual and interpretive lens. This approach has led me to love the temple, something which I had struggled to grasp.

Both of these strands of Nibley’s thought are important. They are both of great value to me. They are also complex and nuanced.

Years ago, SmallAxe challenged me to take back Nibley from the zealots. These zealots tarnish the legacy of Hugh Nibley.

So, this begins a series. In the U2 live album Rattle and Hum, Bono takes back the Beatles song Helter Skelter. Conceding Nibley to the anti-intellectuals does a disservice to not only the legacy of Nibley, but also to Mormonism. I am taking him back.