The Mormon Monk

Toward the end of last week’s Gospel Principles class on “The Restored Church,” our teacher read in the manual from a list describing distinctive features of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, including the statement that “Children do not need to be baptized until they are accountable (eight years old)” ( GP 99). A non-member attending for the first time who had not spoken all class raised his hand and asked, “Where does the number eight come from?” Anyone who has ever seen a non-member ask a doctrinal question in a room full of relatively knowledgeable and experienced church members knows that we all began to respond at once. The immediate consensus was that the answer to his question could be found in Moroni 8, and we quickly flipped to that chapter, where we read: “Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God. Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, l...

. . . returned Mormon missionaries are like Israeli youth compelled to serve in the army . Dan Senor and Saul Singer's book, Start-Up Nation , points out that Israel is the country with the highest ratio of technology entrepreneurs per capita in the world. Senor and Singer attribute this to the leadership and international experience that Israeli youth gain while serving in the army; I suggested that their descriptions of Israeli youth sounded remarkably like returned missionaries. Now, BYU Magazine has provided evidence that my comparison has an empirical basis: "For 14 years BYU [and its legions of returned missionaries] has been ranked first in the nation for start-up companies per million dollars of research" (Spring 2010, 61).

In response to my latest offering on the ways in which love enlarges your soul (and mental capacity) , the Monk's oldest sister asks the intelligent question, "Do you think any of this shared connection contributes to similar features as we age? Son to father, and husband to wife?" So glad you asked, Jo Jo. “In a landmark study on the appearance of married couples, Robert Zajonc, a psychologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues asked twelve married couples to send two sets of individual portraits of themselves, one set taken in their first year of marriage (newlywed photos) and the other after twenty-five years of marriage (old-timer photos). The researchers put the newly-wed photos together in one pool and the old-timer photos in another, and recruited nearly eighty participants to guess which men and women were married and looked alike. It turned out that matching the newlywed couples was impossible—the raters were no more accurate than they’d be by dumb chanc...

This is what the Doctrine & Covenants teaches--that "No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul" (D&C 121:41-42). I've argued elsewhere that this expansion of the soul (which Alma links to "redeeming love" [Alma 5:9]) is connected to the bridling of one's passions , but today I just want to briefly explore some of the science behind the ways in which love literally makes your soul (or at least your brain) expand. "According to cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop , two people in love internalize each other and create a shared state of mind that overlaps and EXPANDS their individual personalities. In essence, you form a 'we'--a merger of your partner's attitudes, tastes, habits, experiences, knowledge, go...

The subject of Jesus Christ’s resurrection is one that has often caused me to wonder, especially at Easter time as I am reminded of his victory over the grave. It’s not that I wonder whether he was resurrected—I know he lives with a divine surety. Rather, I wonder about the process of that first resurrection. My mind ( as previously noted with regards to the issues of sanctification and justification ) likes order, and the scriptures that describe Jesus Christ’s victory over the grave are not orderly; they seem to disagree with each other as to how the resurrection was accomplished. Take, for instance, the words of Paul: “And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power” (1 Cor. 6:14). Elsewhere he writes, “But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 15:57). The agency here is clear: Heavenly Father (God) resurrected Jesus Christ. But the gospel of John presents an apparent contradiction; Christ teaches that “...