Matthew
joespencer
Robert C.
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BrianJ
douglashunter
Kevin Barney
Jim F.
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cherylem
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NathanG
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kirkcaudleWhat follows is mostly ridiculous. That is not to say that the content is ridiculous (though that may be true), but that the length of the discussion of this lesson and the detail to which I ended up attending are ridiculous. As it turned out, an assignment in my ward got me studying this lesson a month in advance, and these notes materialized over the course of a couple of weeks. Having that much time to work on it, the notes grew and grew. But the length and detail of what follows can be taken as an indication of what has become my conviction that we, as Latter-day Saints, have not done a whole lot of serious thinking about the doctrine of agency. As such, what follows inevitably hovers between (1) a terribly inconclusive theological reinvestigation from the ground up of what the scripture, combined with the prophets, have presented as the “doctrine of agency” and (2) an exposition of the material in the manual, aimed at providing food for thought for those preparing to teach the lesson. My apologies for the complexity and particularly the length, but I think there is a good deal of work that needs to be done in our thinking about agency. Read the rest of this entry »
RS/MP Lesson 4: “Freedom to Choose” (Gospel Principles Manual)
Posted by joespencer on February 8, 2010
Posted in Lessons:RS / MP | 4 Comments »
RS/MP Lesson #3: “Jesus Christ, Our Chosen Leader and Savior” (Gospel Principles Manual)
Posted by NathanG on February 7, 2010
My reaction when reading this lesson for the first time was “why?” Why do we use this material to introduce Jesus Christ? Why is it important for us to know these things about Christ? Do I view the premortal life of Christ differently from those who lived before Christ was born and only had his first coming to look forward to, as opposed to me looking back at his first coming, and forward to the second coming?
Posted in Lessons:RS / MP | 3 Comments »
OT Lesson 7 Study Notes: Abraham 1:1-4; 2:1-11; Genesis 12:1-8; 17:1-9
Posted by Jim F. on February 7, 2010
Abraham 1
Verse 1: Why does this work use the name “Abraham” for the person in question when we know from Genesis that his name was as yet still “Abram”? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lessons:Sun. School | Tagged: Abraham; Moses | 2 Comments »
Seeing Cain as a Fugitive in Ourselves
Posted by kirkcaudle on February 6, 2010
While reading the Book of Moses this week (5:35-42), some new thoughts and insights came to me that I have not previously stumbled upon regarding Cain and his curse. As always, I do not offer up my interpretation of scripture as the “correct” way to read the text, but I hope it will add in some way to your own understanding.
After Cain kills his brother, the Lord sets a curse upon him. I read the curse as Cain becoming “a fugitive and vagabond” (v36). Becoming a fugitive is “greater than [Cain] can bear” (v38). Which got me thinking, what exactly is a fugitive, and what is so bad about it? A fugitive is one who runs from the law. A fugitive is running, but can only run so far. His negative outcome is inevitable. Justice is never far behind.
Posted in Misc., Scripture topics | Tagged: cain, curse, justice, mercy, repentance | 11 Comments »
Towards a Thinking of Remnant Theology in the Book of Mormon
Posted by joespencer on February 5, 2010
As part of a larger research project, I’ve been doing some reading on remnant theology. (Allow me to recommend Gerhard Hasel’s The Remnant, so far as I can find the only full-length study of the theme, and he traces it only until the time of [First] Isaiah.) What first interested me in the theme was the employment of Micah by Christ in Third Nephi. Importantly, everything Christ quotes from Micah deals with the theme of the remnant. Arguably, the entire book of Micah is built around this theme: each of its several sections is structured around a discussion of the remnant. At any rate, in the work of sorting out what is at work in Micah on the remnant theology, I’ve been struck by how ridiculously present the theme of the remnant is throughout the Book of Mormon. My plan here is to begin to sort out something of what’s going on in the Book of Mormon with the question of the remnant—here in broad terms, and in a follow-up post starting into the detail by beginning, of course, with Nephi. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Scripture topics | 4 Comments »
What Are “Lawyers” in the Book of Mormon?
Posted by joespencer on February 2, 2010
Along the trajectory of a series of podcasts on Alma and Amulek that I’ve been working on (which can be downloaded here), I’ve stumbled on a question I’d never thought to ask before: What are “lawyers” in the Book of Mormon? Glancing around the obvious sources (Nibley’s writings, the Book of Mormon Reference Companion, FARMS’s various journals and resources, Signature publications that might at least shed some light on the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, etc., etc., etc.), I’m beginning to think that nobody has really raised this question in print (I did find about two pages dedicated to the subject in Jack Welch’s recent book on Legal Cases in the Book of Mormon). So I’m going to use a blog post shamelessly to generate a bit of discussion that might help me sort out the options and possibilities. What follows, then, is a brief discussion meant to provoke others to contribute their thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Scripture topics | 10 Comments »
I Really Don’t Get the Whole “Tree of Knowledge” Thing
Posted by BrianJ on January 31, 2010
There, I admitted it. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Scripture topics | 15 Comments »
OT Lesson 6 Study Notes: Moses 8:19-30; Genesis 6:5-22; 7:11-24; 8:1-22; 9:8-17; 11:1-9
Posted by Jim F. on January 30, 2010
Moses 8
Verse 9:
The Hebrew of Genesis 5:29 shows us that Noah’s name means “rest.” How does his father, Lamech, explain the name? Is Noah’s name significant to the story of the flood? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lessons:Sun. School | Tagged: Genesis, Moses | 4 Comments »
OT Lesson 5 Study Notes: Moses 5-7
Posted by Jim F. on January 30, 2010
As always, remember that these are questions for studying the reading assigned more than for planning the lesson itself. Even then, you are certainly going to find more questions here than you can deal with in one study session, though not, perhaps, more than you can deal with in a week. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lessons:Sun. School | Tagged: Moses | 6 Comments »
_The Ignorant Schoolmaster_, Chapter 4: “The Society of Contempt”
Posted by joespencer on January 30, 2010
From Ben:
[Note: for unknown reasons, the online text jumps from page 75 to page 82, and I have no way of finding out what the missing section is. Thus, I fear we are missing a crucial part of the chapter’s argument. Also, I do not focus on many of the key points in the chapter, only those that especially caught my fancy; please feel free to discuss other key points in the comments.]
I especially enjoyed this chapter, because it is one about application; specifically, how application applies to mindset. After focusing primarily on abstract principles of intelligence and inequality, Ranciere offers a somewhat jolting first sentence to beginning chapter 4: “There is no such thing as a possible society. There is only the society that exist” (75). This is significant for Ranciere’s approach to intelligence, because, as has been repeated many times thus far, it is better to work from a principle than towards it. In a rhetorical tweak of Platonic dualism, European idealism, and Jacotot’s contemporary Romanticism, Ranciere argues for a collapse between the immediate and the vision, the dream and the reality. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in On teaching | 10 Comments »
