Earlier this week, I got to meet with Margaret Olsen Hemming to record an episode of the Dialogue Out Loud podcast about my recent article in Dialogue on rethinking sexual ethics through Jacob’s temple sermon. It feels like a real accomplishment to have something theological published in this journal, and being interviewed by someone I cite in the article only makes it more surreal. It was a good conversation, and I’m happy to see that it’s already available for listening!

I’m very pleased to share that the latest issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought includes an exegetical essay (available here as webpage, PDF, and audio recording) that I wrote arguing for reading Jacob 2 in the Book of Mormon as an example of reinterpreting scripture and rethinking sexual ethics. I’ve published in Dialogue before, but with my secular social scientist hat on, and it feels like a personal accomplishment to have published something more theological in nature.

Reviewing reference works that I largely skimmed always feels silly, but it’s my website, and no one can stop me.

I’m not a historian, but this historical context was really useful for me for a paper I’m writing on Ellulian perspectives on “media events” in early Mormon history. I appreciated having easy access to documents related to events I was writing about, and as I eventually expand the paper, I expect that I will come back to this volume.

I’m working on a couple of projects right now (one professional, one personal) that have me asking the question that makes up the title of this post. While working on one of those projects last night (the personal one), I came across the verse that is Alma 5:5 in Community of Christ versification and Alma 7:12 in LDS versification. For this project, I’m reading out of the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon, as captured on WIkisource, and when I read over the verse, something felt off to me:

Wow, wow, wow. I was intrigued by what I knew about this book when I first bought it but am only now getting to it, five years later. It’s a beautiful book and quietly radical, using the story of Mormon to develop a theology of the world ending around us. Miller explicitly invokes the climate crisis at the end of the book and calls for disciples to be willing to sacrifice all things instead of simply waiting to lose all things. Even outside of that context, Miller’s quasi-mystical reading of Mormon has so much to offer—and is pleasantly aligned with some of the theologies I’ve heard in Community of Christ. This is a good one.

This book starts off strong, with a very interesting exploration of Christology in the Book of Mormon. There are some other interesting observations, too (including a frank-to-the-point-of-productive-discomfort evaluation of race in the Book of Mormon). If I were only reading the conclusion, I’d likely give it full marks. A few things keep me from doing that for the book as I read it, though.

I admit that some of those things are entirely my fault. As with the last two books in the series, I’ve read this one too quickly to appreciate the arguments it’s making. Furthermore, I confess that I have personal biases against a couple of the authors cited even though I don’t know much about those authors—it’s the laziest kind of bias, and while I might still dislike those authors after a thorough evaluation of their work, it’s not solid ground for grumping about their appearance in this book.

Ever since blogging twice about the Liahona and Jacques Ellul’s technique six months ago(!), I’ve been thinking a lot about this story in the Book of Mormon as a possible starting point for a Book of Mormon-based theology of technology. As I first wrote then, I think this story is particularly interesting for the implicit tension in the story: Why would an all-powerful God need a mechanical(?) device in order to communicate their divine will to their followers?

Wow! Sure, coming from outside the LDS tradition, I have some theological quibbles with parts of this book, but what an amazing example it is of what I love about this series. It uses a close reading of the Book of Mormon—and some of the most obscure and overlooked parts of the Book of Mormon—to draw lessons that I can really get behind. It makes me want to already revisit the book and to the passages that it’s working with.

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.

I remembered liking this book a lot when I first read it five or so years ago, so it was actually kind of disappointing to reread it now. There was a lot of it that didn’t feel relevant to me or that I felt I disagreed with. That said, I appreciate Spencer’s work a lot, and there are some great observations in here, so I’m trying to give it some grace in my rating.

Yesterday afternoon, I was explaining (poorly) to some friends that I had been thinking about what the story of the Liahona in the Book of Mormon has to teach readers of that volume of scripture about (generative) AI. So, that connection was naturally on my mind when I was reading more of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World over breakfast.

I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellul’s writing feels for today. Presence in the Modern World was first written in 1948, and even if you consider that the translation I’m reading is based on a 1988 second edition, that’s still enough time to earn the description “prescient.” (I’ve been reading Ellul in a mix of translated English and original French, depending on what’s more practical for the book in question.) Here’s a passage that particularly stood out to me this morning:

This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!).

If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!) could make the case just as well and with fewer digressions.

Despite what my recent Star Trek comics binge might lead you to believe, my Star Trek fandom is actually kind of spotty in its coverage. It’s not so complete that I’ve ever actually seen Star Trek V (though I hear I’m not missing much), but it’s absolutely complete enough to be familiar with its most famous line. A being claiming to be the ultimate, galaxy-wide monotheistic deity asks for transport on the Enterprise, prompting a skeptical Kirk to ask “what does God need with a starship?”

Today’s Community of Christ lectionary passage is from 1 Corinthians 10, and includes this, from verse 9 (NRSVUE):

We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.

This is one of a few different stories that Paul evokes in 1 Corinthians 10 that all rub me the wrong way (I’m not a big fan of any punitive God), but this one stands out in particular because it reminds me of how the “serpents” story (originally in Numbers 21) gets evoked twice in the Book of Mormon. Here they are, from Community of Christ’s Revised Authorized Version:

Taking a moment to remember that the Garden of Enid webcomic is a pinnacle of Mormon arts.

After six years and over 6,000 miles¹ of bike commuting without any real incident², I took a corner too fast this morning, hydroplaned, and slid a few feet on the road before picking myself up to get back to the sidewalk and out of the way of the cars whose path I was blocking. It wasn’t a huge wreck: I didn’t hit my head, my bike seems to be fine³, and three scrapes (one bigger than others) and some torn-up clothes are the worst of the damage. I rode back home, cancelled class, cleaned myself up, and am figuring out how to adjust my work day.⁴

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

I have recently been (slowly) getting back into my exploration of what a modernized Book of Mormon might look like, which has meant spending some time in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon and some commentaries on that chapter. One of the most interesting things about I Nephi 1 (by the original and Community of Christ chapter breaks—LDS editions split this into 1 Nephi 1-5) is that the reader is almost immediately forced to deal with a tension between our protagonist and narrator Nephi’s insistence that he is a good guy of whom God approves and Nephi’s willingness to murder a passed-out drunk to steal his clothes and con his way into taking control of some of his property. One of my favorite things to come out of critical readings of the Book of Mormon is trying to understand this episode: not to dismiss it or to justify it, but to wonder how there might be more to the story than our narrator might be letting on.

This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing.

When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).” The point of the exercise was to demonstrate just how central Jesus is to the volume of scripture, and early on in my service, I decided that I would give it a try.

For the past few years, my family has been getting into the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which is a lot of fun. In the three years that we’ve watched it, at least one of us has always been cheering for Switzerland. This is perhaps because of my own personal bias toward Switzerland, having spent some time there, but it’s also that the songs stand out to (at least one of) us. I was bummed in 2021 when Tout l’univers narrowly lost out (though Måneskin’s winning song has grown on me), and my kid was a big fan of 2023’s Swiss entry, Watergun, even if the rest of us (including the Eurovision judges and audience) weren’t huge fans.

Austin’s book was already on my ’to read’ list, but this interview really convinced me. There are some really interesting arguments in here, and while I want to evaluate them in more detail, they’d provide fascinating readings if they hold up.

Fascinating perspective. I’d never learned this before.

About a week ago, I felt like I was going through an audio drought—I wasn’t listening to any audiobooks, my podcast consumption has continued to go down in recent months, and I just wasn’t listening to anything while doing the dishes or whatever. This wasn’t necessarily a problem (it’s been good in terms of mindfulness, for example), but it had gone on long enough that I decided that I wanted something to listen to. In particular, I decided that it was as good a time as any to revisit Thomas Römer’s excellent lectures on the bible, which the Collège de France makes freely available in podcast format.

A week and a half ago, I wrote a post arguing that the Bible is actually more of a weak point than the Book of Mormon for fundamentalist, literalist attitudes toward Latter-day Saint scripture. That post—like this one—was inspired by an Introduction to Scripture class that I’m currently taking through Community of Christ’s Temple School. The first lesson did a lot of work to play up the Bible as the main scriptural foundation of Community of Christ and is doing some respectful but firm downplaying of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants.

Interesting Book of Mormon reading here.