The Bible can be very problematic for believers, especially those that adopt an early 20th-century fundamentalist reading that transforms it into a history and science textbook. As biblical scholarship has continued to progress, many of the assumptions held by believers have been challenged. Is there a way to read the Bible that includes both scholarship and faith?
In the Oxford-published The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously, biblical scholars Marc Zvi Brettler, Daniel J. Harrington, and Peter Enns explore ways in which historical criticism can be incorporated into various faith traditions, including Jewish (Brettler), Catholic (Harrington), and Protestant (Enns). The book serves not only as good introduction to historical criticism, but a model of how to approach one’s religion “by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).
You can listen to an interview with Marc Brettler on BYU’s Maxwell Institute Podcast below:
As I’ve shared before, a few years ago my manager came up to me and asked, “Walker, you’re Mormon, right?” Living in Texas, this always sets off an alarm inside my head. I had never told him I was Mormon, so he had obviously heard it elsewhere. “Yes…,” I replied. Then, the sledgehammer: “Do Mormons have a problem with black people?” It’s important to note that my manager is African-American. He explained that we had gotten along so well and that he was surprised to hear some of the things said about Mormons and blacks and to learn that I was a Mormon. He couldn’t square the supposed racist ideology of Mormonism with his personal interactions with me. This led to a 15-20 minute discussion about the history of the priesthood ban. I ended with my personal view: “The priesthood ban was a mistake, the result of racist folklore, which was allowed to continue for an excruciatingly long time. Thankfully, that policy no longer exists today.” My manager enjoyed the conversation and seemed to understand the complexities surrounding the issue.
The history of Mormonism and race is both sad and fascinating. W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness is the book for understanding the history of the priesthood ban. Yet, it is much more than that. It is also an illuminating tale of race relations and the very concept of race in 19th-century America. Despite being predominantly white Yankees or Northern Europeans, Mormons were seen as racially degenerate. Not only did they supposedly associate with blacks and reds (Native Americans), but they also practiced the degrading, foreign barbarism of polygamy. The Mormon response to reclaim this seemingly withheld status of “whiteness” was to eventually distance themselves from non-whites, finally leading to the barring of blacks from both the priesthood and the temple.
An important and needed book in Mormon history. You can see a presentation by Reeve at Benchmark Books below:
My cynicism toward voting began a few years ago. After standing in line a mere 10 minutes at early voting back in 2012, I impatiently mentioned to my wife that we could leave and the state would still remain Red (as it has since 1980). While this Republican coloring may not always be the case due to the increasing Latino population (though they would have to increase their voter turnout), it was the case that time around. Why the sudden surge in pessimism? Boredom, for one, but also the growing realization that we do not live in a swing state (not that my vote’s instrumental value would increase much even in a swing state). The Romney/Ryan ticket was going to carry Texasdespite my vote, not because of it. After teasing my mother via text about this unavoidable fact (she was a bit more zealous about her Republican vote than I was), I finally made it to the voting booth. I sat there for a minute, staring at the names of the presidential candidates. I suddenly felt the urge to vote for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former Republican Governor of New Mexico and founder of Big J Enterprises (one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico when he sold it in 1999). This made sense considering I am more libertarian in my views than Romney and that my vote would not really change the outcome of my state (The Onion got it right). Nonetheless, having prepped myself to vote for Romney ever since he gained the Republican nomination, I followed through. However, I remained extremely skeptical of my so-called “duty to vote.”
Philosopher Jason Brennan’s Princeton-published The Ethics of Voting tackles the folk theory that says we have a duty to vote. Not only is the instrumental value of a single vote vanishingly small, but most voters are ignorant when it comes to politics: both of the candidates’ policy positions and the social science behind those policies. And this ignorance means most people should not vote. One may not have a duty to vote, but if one does vote, then that person has a duty to vote well.
You can see some of these ideas discussed in Brennan’s lecture below:
A few weeks ago, I received an unexpected but most welcome Facebook message from Laura Harris Hales asking if I still blogged at Times & Seasons. After a brief exchange, a copy of her newly published A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History was on its way to my house for reviewing. You can read my entire review (which was quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune) at Times & Seasons, but my view of the book overall is that
it must be recognized how huge all of this truly is: a book published through a Church imprint is talking about Freemasonry, Deutero-Isaiah, etc. It should be considered a welcome addition to the growing list of Mormon pastoral works. Heavy readers of Mormon Studies may not find anything new or surprising in its pages, but they are not the book’s intended audience. It is meant as a primer; a springboard for those unacquainted with this type of information. It’s meant for the 18 or 19-year-old who just put in his/her papers. It’s meant as a tool for Family Home Evening. As Hales explains in the introduction, the purpose of the book is
to create a safe environment for exploration within a faithful framework. Even so, these discussions may generate thoughts and questions that might be surprising or even bothersome as existing beliefs are stretched. In fact, readers may grieve at the loss of perceptions held dear. Yet they can be consoled by the realization that their expanded understanding is based upon accurate teachings. The information in these essays can begin an exciting process of discovery for readers…When gospel questions arise, the antidote for uncertainty is more knowledge and more contemplation, which takes time–“even by study and also by faith.” It is the continual search for truth, both secular and spiritual, that will give us a reason for faith (pgs. xiii-xiv).
Given this mission, I think the book is a success.
You can see Laura joined by several of the book’s contributors below in their presentation at Benchmark Books:
Over the past couple years, I’ve done several conference presentations on the subject of a Mormon theology of work. Recently, I compiled much of the research from this various presentations and submitted it to BYU Studies Quarterly. I was thrilled to find out earlier this year that they will in fact be publishing it. The last section of the article looks at insights from management literature. I was fairly satisfied with it, but then I picked up Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and began kicking myself for not reading it sooner and incorporating it into my paper. Haidt explores the divide between conscious and unconscious mental processes, the social nature of reciprocity and hypocrisy, and the benefits of love, adversity, and sacredness. But what jumped out at me was his overview of the “pursuit of happiness”: happiness rarely comes from achieving goals (that emotional high is fleeting), but from striving to achieve them. It is making progress that brings up happiness. I read Haidt’s The Righteous Mind first, but I enjoyed this one just as much.
Check out the interview with Jonathan Haidt below.
I was at the zoo recently with my wife, my sister-in-law, her husband, and their baby. As we looked at the bonobos and observed their eerily human behavior, I made the comment that I needed to read primatologist Frans de Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Morality, de Waal argues, is bottom-up. Behaviors we label as “moral”–such as empathy or fairness–are grounded in our evolutionary development. Morality arises from the emotions and social rules that can be found in other primates. The book made Nathaniel’s best of 2015 list. And I happen to agree with one of his criticisms:
Merely because you can show how a thing arises through evolution doesn’t get you out of this problem. You could explain how humans came to have the ability to reason objectively, but that wouldn’t mean that logic and math were suddenly subjective. It would just prove that somehow evolution managed to get us in touch with non-contingent, objective reason. Same idea here: you can explain how humans came to behave morally or even to understand and think about morality, but it’s a colossal mistake to think that, in so doing, you have proved that morality is “constructed” or in any way subjective any more than reason or logic are. (For fun: let someone try to reason you out of the position that reason is objective. See how that works? It’s a non-starter.)
Even if the philosophy is lacking, the science is fascinating. You can see a Big Think interview with de Waal below.
I suspect that John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet will be the definitive biography of Brigham Young for the next few decades. Overall, this is a good thing.
But it may also be a troubling thing, at least for some people. I wholeheartedly recommended the recent Joseph Smith, David O. McKay, and Spencer W. Kimball biographies to all members of the Church. Sure, they are a little less sanitized than we are used to, but the picture in each one of those works is of a prophet of God who had some flaws, with far more emphasis on the “prophet” part than on the “flawed” part.
This book? Not so much. I have serious reservations about recommending it to the average church member; if you need your prophet to be larger than life, or even just better than the average bear, this book is not for you. I think there is a substantial risk that people raised on hagiographic, presentist images of prophets would have their testimonies rocked, if not shattered, by this book.
…So, here’s the Readers’ Digest version of my review: this book is a real treat, but it might completely destroy your testimony if you can’t handle a fallible, bawdy, often mistaken, sometimes mean, and generally weird prophet.
The book truly is incredible, doing for Brigham Young what Richard Bushman did for Joseph Smith. However, I agree with Julie that “the main weakness of this book” is the fact that “you are not left with any reason as to why people would have made the enormous sacrifices that were part of believing that Brigham Young was a prophet.” To fill in these gaps, here are the reported words of Turner from my friend Carl Cranney on Young’s appeal:
Why did people follow Brigham? He admitted to me and the others in the study group a few weeks ago that he felt he could have handled this question better. He pointed out three things, specifically, that Brigham had done before he became the de facto church president, and later actual church president, that garnered him a lot of good will from the members. First, many of the church members were from the British Isles, and Brigham had led the British mission. So many members of the church had fond memories of him as the leader of the missionaries that brought them into the church. Second, he finished the Nauvoo temple and endowed thousands of Mormons before they abandoned the city. The sheer amount of man-hours this took would have staggered anybody but the firmest believer. Brigham Young was a believer, and it showed to the people that he worked tirelessly for in the temple. Third, he was the “American Moses” who dragged a despondent group of church members from their Nauvoo the Beautiful to the middle of nowheresville, Mexico, to create a civilization literally out nothing in a sparsely-populated desert wilderness. He worked hard to preserve the church and to get its members to safety. So, after doing these three things he had garnered a lot of support and a lot of good will from the members.
Despite this oversight, the book is fantastic and the go-to biography of Brigham Young.
Check out John Turner’s lecture on the bio at Benchmark Books below:
In honor of the Easter season, I read through The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. As I mentioned at Borg’s recent passing, I don’t always share his and Crossan’s interpretations. However, their strong emphasis on the political nature of Jesus’ ministry is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the midst of today’s hyper-individualized, over-spiritualized Christianity. One cannot and should not separate the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus from his life and ministry. Christ’s actions that resulted in his death are what discipleship is all about. And one has to understand the historical and political context of Jesus’ last week to fully understand what discipleship looks like.
However, my friend and co-editor here at Difficult Run Allen Hansen recently captured my thoughts beautifully on Facebook on the need to combine the political nature of Christ’s ministry with the reality of his resurrection:
The late Marcus Borg was a purveyor of a liberal Christian popular theology. By all accounts a generally thoughtful and considerate individual, Borg was oddly and dogmatically insistent upon a dichotomy between things literal and things spiritual/symbolic/meaningful. There was, according to him, no material, bodily resurrection. The tomb was not empty, but remained full. Instead, we should see it as a parable on meaning, Christ living again is as a dynamic experience, ascribing anything beyond that, say, an actual, divine being with a material body who is as alive now as he ever was before his death, is to trivialise the story. Nevermind that any 1st century apocalyptic and pharisaic Jews would have been bewildered by such an incomprehensible sentiment regarding resurrection. We’ll cut Borg some slack for theological rather than historical musings on earliest Christian theology. To my mind, reducing the atonement, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ to a parable on meaning is to trivialise it. I don’t yet have a fully articulated or consistent model for how the atonement worked and I may never have one, but a God willing to let his son suffer and die for us is no trivial god. Likewise a god freely choosing such suffering and humiliation for himself for our sakes. A god who can intervene on our behalf in history and nature, who can shatter the bonds of death and sin keeping us captive. A god who is able to lift us to his level, unlocking our eternal potential, thus making us everything that we should be rather than just another crappy metaphor reminding us of what we are not now, and never will be. The reality and power of the atonement is something that I have personally experienced. Because I have had that spiritual witness is why I am Christian rather than Jewish despite often feeling closer to the latter. To deny the possibility of bodily resurrection is to trivialise the new possibility which is Christ. It is almost a sneer at the hope of millions for a time in which everything that is wrong, unfair, imperfect, and evil is made right. It is affirming that life is nasty, brutish and short, but we can make it a little less depressing by telling stories that are true even though they are not nor ever will be actually, literally true. If you believe in that you are welcome to it, but I cannot agree that holding to a belief in a material, bodily resurrection is a trivial interpretation. Still, Borg got quite a bit right. It is just that what he got right is more powerful when considered as aspects of a bodily resurrection of the son of God.
Despite these criticisms, I highly recommend the book. You can see Borg lecture on Holy Week below.
Regular readers of Difficult Run know that research on marriage and family structure is a hobby horse of mine. It’s something I try to keep up with, which is why I was excited when political scientist Robert Putnam’s book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis was released. Putnam explores the growing inequalities within America by focusing on children and their family and social backgrounds. The book provides a useful narrative by fleshing out empirical evidence with interviews and anecdotes. It joins an increasing number of impressive books that demonstrate the powerful influence of family structure on the outcomes of children’s lives.
See Putnam discuss his book on an AEI panel with Charles Murray and William Wilson below.
We’re a group of heavy readers here at Difficult Run, but we’ve mainly expressed our love of books over the last couple years through sporadic lists. As bibliophiles, we take an interest in what others are reading. We often buy or rent books based on the suggestions of others. However, we also research the books under consideration to determine whether or not we want to invest our limited time and energy into reading them. We consult reviews, interviews, and lectures based on the book. Even when the decision is made to not read the book, the research is often informative and enlightening.
Given that many DR readers are fellow book fiends, we will be posting video clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books we read throughout the year. Think of it as our video Goodreads list. You can find the list of books along with the post date below:
Feb. 26, 2016: Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
March 5, 2016: Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
March 9, 2016: Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
March 11, 2016: J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
March 18, 2016: Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
March 28, 2016: Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
April 13, 2016: John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
April 21, 2016: Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).
April 29, 2016: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom(New York: Basic Books, 2006).
May 19, 2016: A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016).
May 19, 2016: Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
May 22, 2016: W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
May 26, 2016: Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, Daniel J. Harrington, The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
May 27, 2016: Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
May 28, 2016: James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).
June 6, 2016: Adam S. Miller, Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).
June 15, 2016: John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You: Expanded and Updated Edition (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2005).
June 20, 2016: Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (New York: Free Press, 2011).
July 10, 2016: James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
July 21, 2016: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York City: Harper, 2015)
July 30, 2016: Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Hopoken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
Aug. 7, 2016: Jack Harrell, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).
Aug. 12, 2016: Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst (New York: Business Plus, 2010).
Sept. 13, 2016: The Economics of Immigration: Market-Based Approaches, Social Science, and Public Policy, ed. Benjamin Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Sept. 17, 2016: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012)
Sept. 29, 2016: Peter F. Drucker, Rick Wartzman (ed.), The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).
Oct. 18, 2016: Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record(Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).
Oct. 28, 2016: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).
Nov. 12, 2016: N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperOne, 2016).
Nov. 17, 2016: Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).
Dec. 7, 2016: Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Dec. 7, 2016: Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
Dec. 11, 2016: Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Dec. 17, 2016: Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part One (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).
Jan. 7, 2017: Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Jan. 7, 2017: Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016).
Jan. 8, 2017: Barry Schwartz, Why We Work (New York: TED Books/Simon & Schuster, 2015).
Feb. 4, 2017: Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
Feb. 9, 2017: Christine Porath, Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).
Feb. 23, 2017: James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).
Feb. 23, 2017: Roger E.A. Farmer, How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
March 9, 2017: David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).
March 15, 2017: Michael Austin, Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
March 16, 2017: Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).
March 16, 2017: John L. Esposito, Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007).
March 17, 2017: Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
May 7, 2017: Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
Oct. 1, 2017: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
The Bible can be very problematic for believers, especially those that adopt an early 20th-century fundamentalist reading that transforms it into a history and science textbook. As biblical scholarship has continued to progress, many of the assumptions held by believers have been challenged. Is there a way to read the Bible that includes both scholarship and faith?
As I’ve 
I was at the zoo recently with my wife, my sister-in-law, her husband, and their baby. As we looked at the bonobos and observed their eerily human behavior, I made the comment that I needed to read primatologist Frans de Waal’s book 
In her 
In honor of the Easter season, I read through 
Regular readers of Difficult Run know that research on marriage and family structure is a 