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.

Community of Christ's Holy Week

26 March 2024 - kudos:

I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year. I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents.

rejecting one fundamentalism to accept another

23 June 2023 - kudos:

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post about an important part of RLDS history that I mostly love but also get slightly annoyed by. In short, Wallace Smith, who was then prophet-president of the RLDS Church, was put on the spot by a local seminary professor, who asked the following question: If our mutual studies of Christianity and the RLDS Church were to discovere that there was a discrepancy between what Jesus taught and what Joseph Smith taught, which would you accept?

Doctrine & Covenants feat. Doctorow: An unexpected paired text

29 January 2023 - kudos:

As I’ve written elsewhere, I am currently giving Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway another try after bouncing off of it a while ago. Because I bounced off of it so hard the last time, I’m surprised by how much it’s resonating off of me as I give it another go. This past week, I’ve been listening to a lot of Walkaway on top of doing a lot of religious reading: assignments for the Ministry of the Disciple class I’m taking through the Community of Christ Seminary’s Center for Innovation in Ministry and Missino, Gérard Siegwalt’s Reinventing God’s name [La réinvention du nom de Dieu], and various scriptures for today’s liturgical readings.

thoughts on Joseph, Jesus, and fundamentalism

12 July 2022 - kudos:

Over the past several months, I’ve been slowly working my way through Mark Scherer’s three-volume The Journey of a People, the most recent quasi-official history of Community of Christ. The first volume was interesting, since it covered an era of Mormon history that I’m familiar with from a perspective that I’m not familiar with. I found the second volume a bit harder to get through—some individual sections were fascinating, but it seemed to lack an overall throughline or narrative.