Prophets – Zelophehad's Daughters

Nephi’s Blunder

Ziff21 February 20246 Comments

The Lord commanded Nephi to cut off Laban’s head.
After some reluctance, he chopped and made him dead.
Murder was good: Laban was a wicked man.
Nephi and his kin got brass plates as God planned.

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

Chorus:
“I will go; I will do the thing the Lord commands.
I know the Lord provides a way; he wants me to obey.
I will go; I will do the thing the Lord commands.
I know the Lord provides a way; he wants me to obey.”

The Lord told Abraham he must kill his only son.
He took Isaac with him to get the Lord’s will done.
When ready to kill, at last his knife he drew,
Broke in then an angel: “God was testing you.”

Chorus

The Lord commanded Thomas to exclude kids of gays.
Never to baptize them in all their youthful days.
Thomas and Russell knew they were in a bind.
Finally years later, Russell changed God’s mind.

Chorus

In Church Life, GA's, Politics, Prophets

Whither Mormonism?

Lynnette17 January 20186 Comments

Two Mormon-related events in the past week have shaken me up a little. On one level, neither of them were particularly surprising—but on another, I found them both unsettling and at least a little unexpected. The first was the release of the Gallup poll which found that the Mormon approval of Trump was, at 61 percent, the highest of any religious group surveyed. The second was the decision of incoming church president Russell M. Nelson to move Dieter F. Uchtdorf out of the First Presidency and replace him with Dallin H. Oaks. I also found the comments made at the press conference about the leadership transition, especially the ones about women, to be quite jarring. And I’ve found myself asking: whatever has happened to my church? (Yes, I know that it’s not technically mine anymore, since I’ve found a new religious home. But it’s still the church I grew up in, the church that shaped me. I don’t feel all the way disconnected from it.) Read More

In Authority, Prophets, Revelation

Practical Infallibility

Lynnette2 February 20125 April 201739 Comments

We in the LDS church are fond of pointing out that we don’t believe in prophetic infallibility. At least in theory, we see prophets as human beings who sometimes make mistakes, and don’t expect them to be perfect. However, I’m not entirely clear as to what exactly what this means on a practical level. And the more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve wondered whether we don’t believe in what I might term “practical infallibility.” In other words, while we reject infallibility as a theological proposition, in practice, it is difficult to see how our approach differs from a belief in infallibility.