I am posting up a few interesting rumors I have heard in the last 24 hours which pertain to the church.

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Guest post by Kent White

Mormonism offers a worldview which gives meaning and purpose to my life. I love the gospel I find in the Mormon scriptures and I believe that the way I understand that good news has led me to choose two basic axioms which filter my interpretations of my experiences and desires in this life:

1. I am here to be of service, not to seek to be served.
2. All these things shall give me experience and shall (eventually) be for my good as a result of:
   1. Christ’s power to heal all the pain I feel
   2. Christ’s power to heal all the pain I’ve caused others but can’t fix myself

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Kent (MC) is the online moniker of Kent White, the creator of MormonConferences.org (hence the “MC”). He also created and maintains the sites smpt.org (The Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology) and BlakeOstler.com.

While serving a mission in Mexico, Kent happened to read Hugh Nibley’s “Approaching Zion,” which changed his life forever. As a result of Nibley, Kent took a Hebrew class and ended up graduating from BYU in 2000 with a degree in Near Eastern Studies and a minor in Spanish (though his Hebrew is now in pretty sad shape). He thought he would teach seminary until he realized that he hated kids. He now has five children with his wife of nearly twelve years and works for a charitable organization that helps children. He cites as those authors who have been the greatest influences in shaping his current world-view (in addition to the prophets): Hugh Nibley, Orson Scott Card, Terry Warner, and Blake Ostler. (more…)

Currently, I believe we can lump the challenges our faith faces to it’s modern acceptance as a legitimate faith choice by outsiders into the following categories: Issues regarding Race, Issues regarding Traditional Family Values, and issues regarding Christian doctrine.

Below I will enumerate these issues and discuss them. 

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So ten years ago, when I joined the church, it suddenly became slightly uncomfortable to me that despite having 11 years of catholic school education, I had never read the Old Testament. So I randomly picked a book of the OT to read, as a way of getting started. It was Nehemiah. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over too well. So I then began reading one chapter of each of the Standard works every day. That lasted for about 20 days, and then I lost my Bible in a car accident.  (I bought a new bible, but alas the habit was broken).  So another 9 months passed, I read the D&C and PoGP for the first time, and went on a mission. (I read the Book of Mormon 2 or 3 more times too) and I started at the OT again. This time I made it to Chronicles, then gave up. When I got married, My wife admitted she also had never finished the OT, and we read together, and made it to Leviticus once, then the end of Genesis, then the middle of Exodus, etc. etc. Then we tried backwards and made it to Jeremiah. So last May I bought the Old Testament on CD. It’s the ‘Inspired By’ TNIV edition, with a dramatized rendition by an all African-American cast.  And last week I finished it.

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As a mother I know that it is my sacred duty to help my children navigate through this thing we call life. I try to gift them with little pearls of wisdom every chance I get and I know that they are taking these shiny gems of advice and tucking them away in their hearts.

As I was growing up my own sweet mother would often bestow little nuggets of wisdom upon my humble head. She had one in particular that was her favorite and this is how it would usually go:
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Questions like this one don’t create any anxiety for me these days. I blame it on my creeping universalism.

By creeping universalism I mean this: I just can’t bring myself to believe in permanent divine punishment anymore. I know some people believe in it and I don’t begrudge them their beliefs — I just think they are wrong. Don’t misunderstand — I believe in divine justice. That is largely why I don’t believe in permanent punishment. If our souls are eternal I just don’t think there is anything we could do in 70 years here that would warrant infinite punishment. So I think people pay in some fashion for every sin they refuse to repent of; I just think that process won’t take forever. So when someone asks if I will end up in the highest kingdom of heaven (whatever that means) I feel confident in saying “yup”. I just think y’all will end up in the same condition too. (Heck, I now vaguely suspect we may have always been in that condition before our sojourn here on this planet as well…) That is what I mean by my creeping universalism. (more…)

If you choose the first answer, please use the comments section to tell us how you fill in the blank.

So I finally signed up on Facebook this month. I did it reluctantly, but after Kristen signed up and immediately started getting interesting updates from various family members and old friends I was persuaded that it might be worth checking out.

It was worth checking out.
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So I spoke in Church yesterday.

Here are some comments I got after my talk.

“Hillarious, as always!” – Teenager

“Do you do stand up, you should do stand up, your speech was just like a stand up routine.” – Sweet Old Widow

“Dude, you are a great public speaker” – Guy who dressed as a whoopy cushion for Halloween.

“Why didn’t you give the talk you wrote!?!” – Spouse

My talk was on the Book of Mormon being for our Day. I went a bit off of my topic, but I remember talking about:

• A brief comment that the children were not doing well with the switch to afternoon church, and missed their naps (as did their fathers) as an Ice breaker.
• The Old Testmant not being written for our day, and being worse than an R or X rated movie
• Jeffrey R. Holland’s Master Thesis on the over 3,000 textual changes in the different editions of the book of Mormon (including the change last year)
• The Expansion Theory of Book of Mormon translation, and Alexander Campbell’s “delusions”
• The Book of Mormon pointing to Modern Revelation, Jesus being the Christ, and Prophetic Authority
• The Book of Mormon being a guide that points us to the value of the Church and the need to participate in the church community
• A passionate argument my wife and I had while reading “3 Questions for a Frantic Family” where we decided that the core purpose of our family was “working together to be happy and become like God”, which I believe is also the purpose of our church family.

Not sure what was funny about any of that in hindsight.  Sometimes I worry about being funny.

What is a spirit? Joseph Smith talked a good deal about spirits and minds, but he never clearly articulated his view of what constitutes a spirit. This leaves us in an unfortunate position of trying to piece together what he must have believed about spirits from other things he said. On one hand, he was clear and consistent in asserting that spirits are co-eternal with God and have existed from all eternity. On the other hand, he used language that suggests an ontological dualism in which mind is a different sort of thing than matter. (more…)