If you haven’t yet voted in this year’s Niblets, stroll on over to Mormon Matters to check out the many amazing nominations. It is real treat to read or reread so many of the excellent content produced in the bloggernacle in 2008! Of course, FPR and many FPR posts are nominated, but we encourage you to vote your conscience for what you think is the best. Good luck to all!
Make Me More Interesting
I recently turned 25 and realized that there are a lot of things that I don’t know about that I would like to know more about. One of them is fiction. I rarely, rarely read fiction. Part of the reason is that I feel guilty reading fiction, like I am cheating on my non-fiction partner. I say to myself, “If I am going to be reading, I should be reading non-fiction.” However, like any good 19th c. Mormon knows, there is enough of me to go around. So I am looking for you all to set me up by recommending a few books in each of the following categories:
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Mormon Halacha and Common Law
In kosher law, wine is only kosher when it has been produced and handled by Jews. In this way this kosher law is distinctive from the LDS “Word of Wisdom” in that it is not about the substance of the drink, but how it is handled. There is one exception to this rule, however. If the wine produced by Gentiles is boiled, it becomes kosher. On its face, there is no logical principle why boiling the wine would render it ritually clean, but that is not the point. Rather, the point is that the law is such, and one determines whether or not one has observed the law by an examination of the practices involved.
Latter-day Saints have a similar prohibition against wine, but it is not with respect to how it is prepared or handled, but with its alcohol content. In this way, there is a similar exception to halachic law that once the alcohol has been purged the wine is safe to consume. Most Latter-day Saints that I know will eat a meal that has been cooked with wine, provided that the meal was cooked at a sufficient temperature to boil out the alcohol. However, I don’t know any Latter-day Saint that would cook an entire bottle of wine, and then cool it for drinking. There seems to be something wrong with the drinking of cooked wine, but not with the eating of it.
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The Formation of the Gods
I have suggested before in more oblique ways that the humanist account of the stable subject is at odds with Mormon doctrine of divinization, and in this way Mormonism has more in common with the psychoanalytic account of the formation of the subject and the Foucaultian/Althusserian account of subjectivation. I’d like to explore in brief more of this argument.
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Optimism and Naiveté for LDS Religion Scholars
I just finished Sheldon Greaves, “The Education of a Bible Scholar” in Dialogue 42:2, Greaves’s spiritual autobiography recounting both his loss of place in the LDS church in the mid-nineties and his appreciation for modern critical biblical studies. It was a fascinating, if familiar, account of the disillusionment of a LDS scholar with the kinds of questions that could be asked of sacred texts, with a view of the frustration with the tendencies of many in BYU religion to discourage, avoid, and ignore critical biblical studies.
I have written on this period of Mormon studies as devistating and entire generation of scholars in my post “The Terrible 90’s.” However, I implicitly contrasted that time with our own. I’d like to further explore this comparison.
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Guest Blogger: Chris H.
Chris H. has agreed to guest blog with us. Chris was previously a permablogger at FPR before starting his own blog at Approaching Justice. We look forward to his contributions.
Clearing up the Mystificationalizationalism of FPR
It has come to my attention that some of our dear readers are somewhat mystified by what we at FPR are doing. While we are by no means a unified group, approaching texts and problems from a variety of approaches, I think that there are a few things that one must know to properly understand what we are doing. I invite my fellow bloggers to add any items they feel needs to be said.
In my view, all you have to know, besides Ugaritic, Akkadian, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Japanese, Chinese (ancient and modern), Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and some middle-Persian, is the historical critical method (and its critiques), exegetical theory, text criticism, hermeneutics, intertexual theory, gender studies, practice theory, ritual theory, historicism, and the history of each of these disciplines. Oh, I almost forgot, and Mormon Studies. It really is not that hard, and meant to be accessible to all! I hope that clears it up. Continue reading “Clearing up the Mystificationalizationalism of FPR”
Neither Male Nor Female
Galatians 3:28 is certainly the most important biblical text in feminist and anti-feminist interpretation in the last century. This text promises that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The last pair in this list, male and female, has proven the most controversial. While most comemntators accept relatively straightforwardly that social divisions between ethnicities and economic/legal categories have no place, the division between the sexes has proven more difficult to reconcile. I offer a brief sketch of recent positions that have been taken on this text.