Category: Uncategorized

It was recently announced that Frank Gehry, an icon of postmodern architecture, will be designing a mixed-use development in Lehi, Utah. Gehry is famous for his radically shaped buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. His plans for Lehi will surely break the mold of conventional Utah urbanism. Postmodern architecture is rare in the Beehive State. However, this announcement is not altogether surprising given the success of other recent developments such as the Gateway in Salt Lake City and the New Urbanist community in South Jordan (Daybreak). It seems that the predominantly LDS population of Utah is finally generating a demand for alternatives to the ‘cookie cutter’ homes which have, unfortunately, prevailed in Utah’s sprawling neighborhoods.

It is ironic that just as Utahans are embracing the aesthetic appeal of New Urbanism and postmodern architecture, the LDS church is in the middle of an ambitious building program with ‘cookie cutter’ temples as its focus.

The church has good reasons for building recent temples from a single model. By using identical architectural plans for each new temple, the church keeps building costs low and maintains a sort of equality among its members. However, there are also drawbacks to these matching temples, not the least of which is their drab uniformity.

There is a general fascination with the church’s earlier temples that would be difficult to generate for its new ones. People recognize the Salt Lake Temple, even if they don’t always understand its significance. For example, one vendor in London sells the oddest belts – they are blue with small images of European architectural icons, including the Coliseum, the Eiffel Tower, and … yup… the Salt Lake Temple. Earlier temples have a “spooky charisma,” in the words of Christopher Hawthorne, an architecture critic with the Los Angeles Times.

While it is not practical for the church to use the famous castellated gothic style in its new temples (and neither is it economically sage to build ornate buildings in remote places) there is a sort of vibrancy that the new temples lack. A temple does not have to be large or even follow a particular design theory to generate excitement; and, of course, God can be worshiped anywhere. But why not allow for more variety in the temples’ design?

Does the church’s architectural development over the years represent an increased drive for standardization? Perhaps there is something significant in the fact that leaders of the RLDS church (now Community of Christ) chose a postmodern design for their temple, whereas the LDS church has consistently used classic modern designs for recent temples.

While at BYU I often wondered why “dress and grooming standards” were subsumed under “the honor code”. Can someone please explain this to me?

Why isn’t dress and grooming standards in a category of it’s own? I guess the reason I’m bothered by this was because, as circumstances would have it, I occasionally went off to class having forgot to shave, and was warned a few times about violating “the honor code”. I couldn’t help but feeling that in essence my personal “honor” was being challenged. Was my 5 o’clock shadow somehow marking me as a “dishonorable” person?

Of course some of the root issues at play here are the relation between appearance and morality, the mediation of appearance between the inner-self and outter society, the social construction of meaning in symbols, and many others.

To see BYU’s honor code go here: http://honorcode.byu.edu/The_Honor_Code.htm

This relates to a post I started before going on Christmas break on the topic of idol worship. I do intend to fully respond and revive that particular issue, but in this post I would like to know others thoughts on the related topic of communal judgment. In other words, in the Bible there seem to judgments made against entire groups of people: Sodom and G., the people during the time of Noah, and many of the non-Israelite tribes in the Old Testament. In the New Testament Jesus curses a series of towns, and predicts the fall of Jerusalem. I’m sure we could find similar examples in the BoM.

I think we, as Mormons, still believe in communal judgment, yet how do we make sense of it in light of our sympathetic understanding of other civilizations/cultures/people?

Over the past year I have heard three members (in three different states) relate hurricane Katrina to the wickedness of N.O. Personally I stay far away from such statements, and I think most reading this post do as well, but in light of statements such as, “Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets,” from the Proclamation how do we hold to notions of communal judgment withoutlinking something such as the natural disaster to the wickedness of the community it effects?

I’ve thought a little about this in the past but I was reminded of it again when I ran across a couple in our ward who had gone through the temple for the first time and when I asked how it went they remarked, “Temple prep sure didn’t help.”

There is obviously a gap between what we are preparing new inductees for and what they experience. Now, I don’t necessarily have many numbers to support such a statement, but having gone through it myself, taught it, and then watched many others go through it themselves, I can’t help but notice there is a problem.

So, three questions:
1. Is this problem real, or is it just me?
2. If it is real, where does the problem come from?
3. What can be done to solve it?

I apologize in advance if this post is mostly anecdotal, but I have been concerned for a while about the business practices of some Mormon run companies specializing in door-to-door sales. I have several friends who have taken positions in companies selling a range of things, from pest control services and alarm systems, to knives. For the most part, their experiences have been terrible.

The companies of which I am aware tend to recruit male returned missionaries as their sales force. When they get enough people to sign employment contracts, everyone relocates somewhere for the summer (except for the knife salesmen who are encouraged to sell among family and friends). Then they begin selling. The work days can run anywhere from 8 to 12 hours depending on the salesperson. There is no direct supervision; however the salesmen are usually in competition with one another. Those who make more sales often receive random prizes like Plasma TVs and Ipods in addition to the extra money they make from commission.

Given the incentive to sell, many employees begin to lose their moral compass. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about these companies report that the salesmen are encouraged to lie. Sometimes, the ‘team leaders,’ themselves returned missionaries, will use gospel-oriented motivations, like explaining that more money from sales equals a larger tithe for the church.

What’s amazing is that it seems to work. One person I know makes between 35 and 40K – just selling over the summer! His brother, a partner in one of the companies, has made well over a million dollars over the last few summers. However, for every success story, I have heard of several people who quit or are forced to resign, either because they don’t make enough to pay their rent, or because they dislike having to mislead people in order to make sales.

I know that unethical behavior is practically ubiquitous in many sales based organizations and, therefore, it shouldn’t matter if some Mormon companies engage in the same dodgy practices. But I worry about what it will mean to the church if in ten to twenty years these salesmen begin to assume leadership positions.

Has anyone else had experience with Mormon run summer sales companies? What about multi-level marketing, pyramid and matrix schemes? Ever get a call from an ex mission companion asking you to meet for a “reunion” in Provo?

A refreshing post at BCC asked bloggers what they were going to do for New Year’s, given that New Year’s Eve falls on Sunday. (Refreshing because rather than debate the requirements of Sabbath observance they actually talked about what they were doing.) This got me thinking again about a question that came up in a class on Christian use of the Hebrew Bible.

The professor, who is a well-known expert in Judaism and early Christianity, said that Christian application of Sabbath regulations to Sunday didn’t occur until the Puritans in the 1600s. While obviously Sunday (the first day of the week) as a day of worship was an early idea, the transferrence of “Sabbath” to “Sunday” didn’t occur until this particular group of people started grounding their law and society in norms expressed in the Hebrew Bible.

We, of course, are heirs to this tradition, and our vocabulary shows it. It’s gone so far that it’s not uncommon to talk about the Jews having “their Sabbath” on Saturday. Although I’d like sometime to get into the larger question of our haphazard appropriation of laws of the Hebrew Bible (e.g. we use Leviticus to condemn homosexual acts but not the killing of those who engage therein), today I wonder about the implications of the transfer of Sabbath to Sunday. Is our interpretation and use of Sabbath law generally done by reference to the perceived “spirit” of OT Sabbath norms? My feeling is that we are somewhere between the severity of the Hebrew Bible and the recognition of our distance from this tradition. What say ye?

This time of year Isaiah gets more airtime than at any other point in the calendar, thanks in no small part to GF Handel. One passage used by Handel is taken ultimately from Isa 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call his name EMMANUEL, God with us.” Careful readers of scripture will note that this is not exactly as Isaiah has it: “God with us” is a gloss explaining the name Immanuel, which gloss appears fully in Matthew 1:23. In fact, as is well known, the “virgin” is also slightly inaccurate, since in Hebrew “‘almah” (‘young woman’) is used instead of “betulah” (‘virgin’), the concept of ‘virgin’ entering via the Greek use of ‘parthenos’ (‘virgin’) in this verse.

The question I have is whether this verse need be read as Messianic at all. Without Matthew, would this ever have been read as referring to a Messiah? Is there any indication besides our later lenses that Isaiah meant anything Messianic? The verses from Isaiah that immediately surround this section are decidedly non-messianic, and refer clearly to the geopolitical conflict of 734 BC and not to events seven hundred years later.

To this question a response containing the term “dual fulfillment of prophecy” is usually applied: Isaiah was at once referring to Christ and to some child that was to be born in the immediate future. But was he?

I’m having a hard time seeing this as anything but Matthew’s being a good first-century interpreter of scripture, and every Christian reading Isa 7:14 accordingly ever since. I find no evidence in Isaiah 7 that Isaiah meant anything besides his and King Ahaz’s immediate context, and it strains the sense of the chapter to read with Matthew.

The reason I raise this issue is not to spread a little Christmas doubt, but to get at how we understand prophecy and scriptural authority to work. Furthermore, I have the sneaking suspicion that the concept of ‘dual fulfillment’ of prophecy is one we have invented to justify our appropriation of scripture, and it crosses an important line between texts being applicable to more than one situation and prophets speaking directly, intentionally to more than one situation. I rather think it’s a concept that tends to impede our understanding of scripture, because it usually prevents scripture being read as anything other than it’s “ultimate” fulfillment. This is why I’ve heard BYU profs say things like “Yeah, sure, Isaiah spoke to his time, too, but what he really meant was Christ.” The problem becomes then, of course, that in Isaiah 7 we have one verse that makes sense and the rest is gibberish. Who are the two kings? Who is king Ahaz? What is “the land that thou abhorrest?” This chapter is quite specifically grounded in its historical context, and when read in any other way one encounters insurmountable difficulties. No wonder Isaiah has come to be described as a ‘hurdle’.

The lesson in priesthood this past Sunday was on signs of the second coming (based on the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church book on W.W.). It was a fairly uneventful lesson until we started talking about how to interpret the signs and one good elder shared the experience of his brother who lived in Sri Lanka shortly before the Tsunami. He commented, “My brother told me about how ripe the place was for destruction. With all the idol worship going on and all, it was no wonder what happened when it did.”

I usually try to tone down my thoughts a notch or two before letting them escape my mouth, and fortunately in this situation someone else had their hand up befor me, so by the time it came for me to speak, I had translated the thought “I’m swimming in a Tsunami of ignorance” into something much more cordial.

Now, I think most of us would agree that such a comment is utterly ridiculous, but it did get me thinking about a few other issues that are relevant to raise here. The first is about idol worship. How do we make sense of idol worship given the injunctions against it in the Bible on the one hand, and our inclusivness of other religions on the other (most people believe in a supreme being, yet call him by different names)? Should we dismiss the Bible as culturally insensitive? Reinterpret “idol” to mean something else that qualifies the Biblical warning and yet disqualifies other sincere religious belief as “idolotrous”? Or maintain a position that much of the world are worshiping “false gods”? Or another alternative?

Someone I know very well is prone to a religious form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, called “scrupulosity.” He worries obsessively over proper religious practice, especially the internal aspects such as prayer and thinking pure thoughts. He feels an unusual amount of anxiety over his thoughts and therefore engages in certain mental rituals to clear them of “sin.” Ironically, these rituals often compound the problem since they add to his anxiety, making it more difficult to control his thoughts instead of easier. Prayer is a very powerful healing technique, but as a compulsion it looses much of its transcendence. He is accustomed to spending hours praying and worrying.

Like many suffering from scrupulosity, he would never act on the odious thoughts that pop into his head. OCD is likely a biological disorder – it is certainly not a spiritual malfunction, even though it may seem that way to patients. This has me thinking: is there an unintentional bias against church members with mental illness?
We associate the Spirit with peaceful, happy, familiar feelings. As a result, we often focus our attention inwards to gauge our spiritual wellbeing, concluding that if our emotions do not match the “fruits of the Spirit,” something must be amiss in our behavior. This may be a normal and healthy part of religion, but for someone who is clinically depressed emotions are often poor indicators of God’s loving approval. Therefore, I think we should place less emphasis on “feeling” as part of our religious experience.

It seems to me that church members with all different forms of mental illness are seldom accommodated. For example, when speakers get up to give lessons on purity, happiness and other feel-good topics, they rarely consider the implications that their comments could have for members who are mentally ill. My friend is a convert to the church; and while he enjoyed the conversion process, it was extremely difficult for him to cope with all of the church teachings on thought control.

I have suggested that we focus less on feelings and thoughts in our discourse. What else could be done to help those who are struggling with mental illness feel at ease in church?