Author: TT

No, not Roasted Tomatoes! We are pleased to welcome our own RT, a long time friend of the blog. RT is a life-long member of the Church, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and has a special interest in the history of Israelite religion. We are really looking forward to his contributions!

So, I recently had to do this thing where I had to talk about something that doesn’t really interest me and I don’t really know that much about. This is basically what I came up with.

For me, the question of science and religion is not whether they are in fundamental conflict, or can be reconciled in some way, but rather how we come to define these two terms as distinct from one another. From the standpoint of the study of religion, how “religion” is defined by its proponents and opponents is they key matter of inquiry. The same can be said for how science gets defined. In this way, I’d like to examine the discourse of science and religion. Consider a few familiar examples in our cultural discourse about what science is and what religion is–definitions that are often take for granted by scientists and practitioners of religion: Science is rational and objective, while religion comes to occupy the space of the non-rational, or even irrational. In another version, science is the how, and religion is the why, making science a sort of technical knowledge that is somehow free from ideology or philosophical reflection, while religion is fundamentally about a kind of cognitive, reflective meaning–in this view religion is not something people do, but something people think. In these examples, science is completely ceded the ground to be an objective, rational enterprise, while religion is fundamentally subjective.
Continue reading “Science and Religion”

Famously, the Gospels recount that the first witnesses to the resurrection of Christ were his female followers. Less famously, Paul’s account of Christ’s resurrection appearances record no women among those who witnessed these events in 1 Cor 15:1-7. Why this discrepancy? There are two apologetic explanations commonly invoked: the accounts of the female witnesses were suppressed by Paul because Jews don’t trust women, and as a Jew Paul doesn’t trust women.

This explanation holds that the Gospels, though written later (by Jews!), report the fact that women were the first witnesses, while Paul, claiming that he received this tradition within a few years of the actual event, suppresses this fact. This apologetic argument wants to insist on the necessary accuracy of Paul’s claims with respect to the resurrection and post-resurrection appearances, while admitting that they are factually inaccurate with respect to the female witnesses.
Continue reading “Women at the Resurrection”

How are we to evaluate rituals? What is their symbolic content? What clues can we look to in order to interpret them?

In one ancient Babylonian ritual (the Akitu festival) taken as archetypal by the Myth and Ritual school, the king of Babylon is ritually humiliated. The king ascends to the prescense of the god (Bel) before the high priest in the sanctuary of the temple. His scepter and symbols of his rulership are removed from him. Then, the priest strikes the king’s cheek, drags him by his ears, and forces him to the ground. Then, the king swears that he did not destroy Babylon or its temple or forget its rites. He is then exalted by Bel, and his scepter is returned to him.
Continue reading “The Political and the Temple Ritual”

My illustrious blogging career has reached a certain milestone of 200 posts. I started blogging in my current incarnation sometime in the Spring of 2006. On July 16, 2006 I started a blog called “Urban Mormonism.” I had been blogging for a number of years before that under various names, and finally decided to start a group blog with some other friends in the same situation. A little less than a year later, we joined forces with the bloggers at FPR.

In some ways, 200 posts in 5 years isn’t all that many. On average, it is a little more than 3 posts a month. I have had some time to browse over what I’ve written about in the last 5 years. In some ways it is like reading your own journal. I am often surprised by what I found, sometimes impressed, and sometimes a bit embarrassed. Some of those posts are simply announcing a guest blogger or some other minor matter of business, but the overwhelming majority are substantive reflections on topics I have cared about.

I have collected a few posts that on this review remain important to me. The list is a bit long, and I honestly left out many posts, important posts with many many comments, that were also quite good, but for whatever reason didn’t speak to me as I was putting this together.
Continue reading “200 Posts”

I’ve recently been haunted by Kathleen Flake’s statement from last month: “Mormonism is a pre-modern religion full of miracles and grand providential acts of God.” My concern with the status of Mormonism in the modern and postmodern world is one of the main topics of my blogging. The assessment of Mormonism as a premodern religion strikes fear into my heart, not because it isn’t (partly) true, but because I really don’t want it to be in the future.
Continue reading “My Private Obscene Secret”

I have to confess that I am not really a fan of the prophets. No, its not the modern ones. My main gripe is actually with the Deuteronomic Historians, but it extends to pretty much the rest of the prophets as well. The issue is that they espouse a premodern view of historical events that I think is generally pretty problematic. Specifically, they teach a version of divine providence where God is the only real agent, and wars and calamities, like famine and disease, are the result of God’s specific interventions. This theological view of history strikes me as problematic at best, and dangerous at worst.
Continue reading “Me, the Prophets, and History”

I recently realized that I lead multiple different lives. I have by professional life where I toil at VCR repair and talk about it with other professionals in my field. I have my church life, where I teach and attend meetings and work with members of my congregation. I have my neighborhood life where I socialize with the families that live around me. I have at least three different online lives. On Facebook, I keep it pretty light with some jokey status updates and liking friends’ pics and links. I have my personal family blog that is deliberately not linked to my Facebook profile and is not publicly searchable. It isn’t exclusive or anything, just if you know it, you know it; if you don’t, you don’t. And then of course I am TT. Each life I live is contained to a particular silo, and almost no one really knows all of those lives.
Continue reading “Pseudonyms and the Siloed Life”

The prophet Samuel famously rebukes King Saul’s desire to offer sacrifice to the Lord with the following words:

“Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as obedience to the Lord’s command? Surely, obedience is better than sacrifice.” (1 Sam 15:22)
Continue reading “Genocide is better than Sacrifice”

Latter-day Saints often discuss the merits of thinking about the Book of Mormon as a “pious fraud” or a “pious forgery.” It might be surprising to know that this term was not initially used with respect to the Book of Mormon. Rather, biblical scholars like Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht de Wette used it to describe the book of Deuteronomy. Interestingly, the idea that Deuteronomy is a pious fraud forms the backbone to many contemporary apologetic claims about the Book of Mormon’s historicity. What is at stake in making the case that the Book of Mormon is historically authentic at the expense of admitting that Deuteronomy is a pious fraud?
Continue reading “The Original Pious Fraud”