September 2019 – Zelophehad's Daughters

Book of Mormon Story Titles, Very Slightly Revised

Ziff24 September 2019

Earlier this year, I wrote a post where I rewrote familiar Mormon titles by adding, subtracting, or changing a single letter, and then briefly wrote what the resulting story would be. For example, The Work and the Glory became The Work and the Gory, a dramatized version of early Mormon history, with special focus on the Danites. I thought it might be fun to try this with Book of Mormon stories too. As these stories could be given many different names, I used the chapter names from the Church’s Book of Mormon Stories for children as a starting point. I broke my one-letter rule a couple of times, but mostly I stuck to it. Please add your revised Book of Mormon story titles in the comments if you’d like.

Lehi Warms the People — Rather than jumping right into condemning them for their wickedness, Lehi opens his preaching to the people of Jerusalem with a few jokes.

Lehi Leavens Jerusalem — Before leaving Jerusalem, Lehi adds leaven to all the residents’ Passover bread, and brings down their wrath on him even more than his preaching had.

The Brass Pilates — Concerned that his family will get flabby while trekking in the wilderness, Lehi sends his sons back to Jerusalem to recover the secret of an ancient physical fitness system, the details of which are engraved on metal plates.

Lehi’s Ream — Lehi’s family makes it out of Jerusalem with 500 sheets of precious papyrus that they plan to keep records on. Unfortunately, they have to change plans and use metal plates when Laman and Lemuel wickedly use all the papyrus to make spitwads and papyrus airplanes.

Building the Shiv — When Lehi and Sariah’s family find themselves imprisoned in the land Bountiful, Nephi receives a series of revelations that allow him to build a shiv, which he uses to behead enough prison guards that the family is able to escape.

eOS — While hunting beasts in the forest, Enos prays for many things including the forgiveness of his sins, and for God to watch over his people. All of his desires are granted except for his wish to develop an operating system that will unseat Apple’s flagship OS on their own hardware.

Bling Benjamin — An aging king wants to give a farewell address to his people, but their numbers are so large that his voice cannot reach them all. He sends written copies of his speech out so his people can know his words, and he also delivers the speech from the top of a tower while wearing as much bling as his aging body can manage, so that even people far away can see him shimmering in the sunlight.

In GA's, General Conference

Stay

Ziff17 September 20192 Comments

I’ve heard it said a lot in fringe and ex-Mormon spaces that General Authorities are spending more time now than they used to talking to and about people who leave the Church. This has been my impression as well. It occurred to me just recently as I was looking through some Conference talks that checking this impression out might be as simple as looking for how often they use one word: stay.

In the past couple of decades in Conference, we’ve been exhorted to stay by the tree, stay on the path (twice!), stay on the high road, and of course, in I think the talk of this type I’ve seen discussed most, to stay in the boat. And these are just the talk titles! It does make sense to me that GAs would use this word a lot if they’re concerned about people leaving. You stay instead of leaving, going, exiting, ending, or finishing. But it also reminds me of commands we use to train dogs. Sit, stay, heel.

Stay isn’t my favorite word because it seems to me that it values the past over the future. Progress that’s already been made is fine, but stay with what you’ve done and don’t continue to move. GAs worry that moves we make will be regressing, but I wonder if they sometimes misidentify progress as regress if it doesn’t fit into the sometimes rigid life paths they prescribe.

Anyway, I looked up use of the word stay in the Corpus of LDS General Conference talks to see if it has been used more recently than it had been before. Here are the results since 1950. The lighter line shows the yearly usage rates per million words, and the darker line shows the five-year moving average, which smooths out some of the yearly bumps and makes for something that’s easier to look for patterns in.
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In Church Policy, GA's

Discussion of the Name of the Church in Conference

Ziff13 September 20196 Comments

Last fall, after President Nelson made it a point of emphasis that he didn’t want the Church to be called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church, or for its members to be called Mormons, I wrote a post where I asked what this quick turnabout on the “Mormon” label meant for decision-making in the Q15. The theory is that they’re supposed to be unanimous, but this change, particularly so (relatively) soon after things like the Church’s “Meet the Mormons” movie and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign suggested to me that decisions are made by the Church President, and the others just serve as rubber stamps. I wasn’t alone in writing about this, of course. Many other people on the blogs brought up, for example, that Elder Nelson had given a talk on this issue in 1990, to which President Hinckley responded the very next Conference where he gently contradicted Elder Nelson and explained that he had come to peace with the common use of the nickname, and he simply hoped that Church members would strive to make it have positive associations.

After this 1990 back-and-forth, I thought the issue had pretty much lain dormant until President Nelson brought it up last fall, first in an announcement before Conference, and then in a Conference talk. But I’ve been reading through some Conference talks for an unrelated project, and I found that I missed a few related follow-ups.

First, then-Elder Nelson didn’t entirely drop his point after President Hinckley’s talk. In a 1993 talk given at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (that someone must have thought was pretty important, because it’s listed with the October 1993 General Conference talks), he said near the beginning,

I would like to speak of the organization I represent. I would like to speak of the institution and of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the “Mormon” church. That is not its correct name, as many of you may know; it is only a nickname

And again, two years later in a Conference talk, he clearly wanted to bring the issue up again, but, unwilling to openly challenge President Hinckley, he instead slipped in this relatively large footnote to a pretty much wholly unrelated point in his talk. (The footnote is number 37, right after the phrase “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Speaking of correct names, we are reminded of a proclamation given by the Lord: “Thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (D&C 115:4). He did not say, “Thus shall my church be named.” He said, “Thus shall my church be called.” Members have been cautioned by the Brethren, who wrote: “We feel that some may be misled by the too frequent use of the term ‘Mormon Church’” (Member-Missionary Class, Instructor’s Guide, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1982, p. 2).