Nephi's violence as 'commandment anxiety'

26 September 2024 - kudos:

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.

reinterpreting scripture and rethinking sexual ethics in Jacob's temple sermon

8 July 2024 - kudos:

This essay began as a Twitter thread in 2020, and in recent months, I’ve really wanted to flesh out some of the thinking I first wrote about there. I started slowly drafting this essay as a blog post in October 2023, but when I learned that Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology was being rebooted, I decided to try submitting this there as a scholarly essay instead of just something that would sit on my website.