I hope this essay will be helpful for dealing with honest questions and for helping others who are dealing with honest questions related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many of the things I write will apply equally or almost equally to faith journeys within other religions as well. When people leave the Church, I would suspect that their questions about doctrine and history are not usually the main issue, but in many and probably most cases, they are one of the issues. And I think such questions can be more productively dealt with in a Church culture where there is, perhap ..read more

As I begin to write about defending Nazis, it occurs to me that humanity is altogether more wonderful and more terrible than we commonly imagine it, more angelic and more diabolical. And the mundanity and the moral and intellectual mediocrity of most lives is not the native and inevitable condition of the average human soul, but rather an impasse between vast forces of good and evil and immense impulses towards life and towards death. From this conflict we seek refuge in numbing routine and stultifying dogma, content for the most part to experience the battle at a safe remove, transmuted into ..read more

I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. It is worth reading, but it was a very mixed emotional experience for me. Politically, it was interesting, insightful, and personally affirming, while philosophically it was interesting, insightful, and personally aggravating. The basis of the book is that Haidt has done extensive research on the differing moral intuitions of conservatives and liberals. (He claims, and I agree, that morality is usually intuited rather than arrived at through rational judgment.) His research confirms ..read more

Those who argue against the existence of a benevolent Christian deity will often site as a centerpiece of their belief the inexplicability of suffering in the world. This happened again recently in the New York Times. While there is some suffering caused by other people which can be explained by an appeal to human agency, there is also suffering (perhaps a far greater amount of suffering) caused by mindless, lifeless, natural forces. Hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, famine, pestilence. Millions of people, in pain, just for living on the earth. These forces, they will say, since they ..read more

Dear Friend, You have expressed, by your words and/or your actions, that you feel no need to go to church. You don’t see how it would benefit you and your family (as I believe it would). I appreciate the frankness with which you shared how you feel, and I will also be frank even though that will entail explaining why I think you should feel differently than you do. In explaining this, I want to be clear that I don’t think you are a bad person for thinking as you do. But I do think you are mistaken on this point, and I consider it a point of sufficient importance that I want to explain why I t ..read more

Scripture as Myth: A God Who Comes Alive Again Myths and archetypes echo across the pages of scripture just as they echo across Hebrew and non-Hebrew cultures. C. S. Lewis has a great deal of wonderful things to say about this—ideas that come together most beautifully and most powerfully in his greatest novel, Till We Have Faces. For now, I will simply relate that, before his conversion, C. S. Lewis was an atheist who loved myth—who loved it because (among other reasons) it evoked in his soul what he calls “sweet longing.” His initial appreciation of Christianity was mythic—as yet another ins ..read more

Image Credit: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/2015/11/12/in-praise-of-polyvocality/ Scripture, taken as a whole, is not straightforward and simple, but rather elaborate, polyvocal, heteroglossic, and ambiguous. This suggests to me that the truth about God and man resists capture by human language. Jesus never attempted to set forth the whole truth in plain prose. Perhaps this is because it cannot be done. Jesus instead taught using stories and wordplay and metaphor. The kingdom of God is like a pearl of great price—and then again, it is like a lost coin—or leavening—or a mustard seed ..read more

So far, we’ve had two babies. Both boys. I’ve seen them come into the world, wet, followed by placenta. The nurse unfolded the slimy mound and showed it to me. “Look,” she said, “the tree of life.” It actually looks like a tree, the blue blood vessels forking like branches from a trunk. The way the nurse spoke, with rapture, it was clear she was not feigning her amazement. This was an authentic placenta fan. She had me run my finger across the oozy membrane. Like a fish, or ray, or some other deep ocean organism. My wife was less interested.  And that was not surprising. Her body was ful ..read more

I recall sitting in church on the lap of my Grandpa Sabey. I cannot recall the time of year, but it was presumably cold outside that morning, because I recall how warm and comfortable I felt in the chapel, despite wearing a tie. Grandpa whispered “sweet nothings” in my ear during sacrament meeting–his own phrase, not mine, though “sweet nothings” is an apt descriptor, because the particular words are nothing while the sweetness of kind attention is all. Except that the particular words did matter in my case, because it was the whispered “s” sound that made a delicious tickling in my ear, and ..read more

Scripture as Subversion: A God To Wrestle With The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is perhaps the greatest of all subversive stories. It profoundly subverts the authority of the Jewish rulers and of the Roman yoke. It brings into question the justice of criminal law. It subverts reliance on the righteousness of Peter or the other apostles who abandoned their Lord to the mob. It even subverts reliance on any perceived right to feel close to God if one is doing his will, for Christ felt himself abandoned. It casts down the idols of man’s authority, justice, righteousness, and peace (among others ..read more