I Take Requests

By now it should be obvious what this blog does--it discusses topics of books and religion (mostly) in ways that I hope are interesting to you, my devoted readers. However, if you have questions about books and/or religion and or general topics that you would like me to address, I would be happy to take requests in an effort to better please you, the reader. I have plenty to say without your help--but I also have a vested interest in providing material that you'd like to read. So send in your suggestions if you have a question you want answered, a book you want discussed, or a pressing need to criticize my syntax. I write for you (mostly)!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus at Harvard, Mormons at Waco?

In reading Marcus Borg's  Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time , I can't help recalling the last occasion when I met Jesus for the first time--the last time I saw Jesus of Nazareth with new eyes, as a foreigner, someone I didn't already recognize. Six months ago I finished reading  When Jesus Came to Harvard , in which Harvey Cox characterizes the Christ as a political operative. When Jesus teaches his Sermon on the Mount, Cox argues, it is with one eye on heaven and the other eye on Rome. "Blessed are the peacemakers," Jesus teaches, "for they shall be called the kingdom of God" (Matthew 5:9). These words, Cox argues, "were a direct challenge to the ruling Roman ideology. . . . The empire's main claim to fame and legitimacy was that Rome and Rome alone was the peacemaker. It sustained the  pax Romana  under the magnanimous auspices of Caesar Augustus, a divine ruler. One of the imperial titles of the divine Augustus was that of 'peace-b
Read more

On Priesthood Blessings

Image
Priesthood blessings have been on my mind recently, for a number of reasons. My mother-in-law is feeling poorly and has been for at least a week. On Monday night, she requested that I give her a blessing. Since neither Alana nor I had firm plans for our Family Home Evening lesson that night, we decided to teach my two-year-old son Gabriel about priesthood blessings. He folded his arms reverently three times: once when I consecrated oil for the healing of the sick, once when Donald Gilreath (my mother-in-law's home teacher) anointed her with the oil, and once while I gave her a blessing. He listened patiently while Alana and I explained how priesthood blessings can make us feel better and help us learn what Heavenly Father wants us to do. Then, he ran to me and said very seriously, "I want a blessing, Daddy." I, of course, was glad to oblige and touched that he wanted a blessing. This is the blessing he received: " Gabriel Ogarek Hutchins, by the power of t
Read more

Pre-Contact Amerindian Christianities?

As I recently read Eric Andrews's excellent new book,  Native Apostles  (Harvard UP, 2013), I was struck by his report that Native New England peoples who converted to Christianity identified their new religious beliefs as "a rebirth of spiritual knowledge that the ancestors possessed but had long been forgotten by later generations. An oral tradition taken down in the seventeenth century reminded audiences that far from introducing novel concepts and cosmologies, Christian missionaries were simply picking up where the ancients had left off. . . . Christianity was, according to this narrative, an ancestral Indian religion that needed to be revitalized" (36-37). As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who believes in the Book of Mormon as a largely reliable historical source, this was tremendously exciting, so I checked out Andrews's sources. Turns out Andrews was relying on the book  Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklor
Read more