What do you do to observe General Conference?

One of the important gifts that the restored gospel provides Latter-day Saints is a return to ritual.  Mormon rituals give our religious experience bones to hang on, and while the presence of ritual can lead to anemic spirituality, it also provides a method to keep in practice.  Thus, we are to pray daily, to read scriptures and ponder them daily, go to meetings on Sundays, partake of the sacrament, go home teaching, attend the temple--the list is rather long.  I think perhaps the strength of LDS doctrine lies in so many ways of applying it to practice, often by ritual.

One of those rituals is General Conference.  In typical LDS fashion, Conference is a pretty practical ritual, stripped mostly down to its essential parts: Church leaders get up and talk for a while in front of a floral arrangement, and we all listen.  In many ways, its simplicity is its genius, because we can each hear the Spirit's whisper without the interference of peripheral aspects of the ritual.

Proving Contraries--Of Paradoxes

Or: An observation about God's omniscience that I really appreciate, now that I stopped taking it for granted.


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"Part of the Prophet Joseph's moral and spiritual heroism is focused for me in his growing insight (and willingness to risk all, including his life, on that insight) that tragic paradox lies at the heart of things and that life and salvation, truth and progress, come only through anxiously, bravely grappling with those paradoxes, both in action and in thought."

-Eugene England, author's foreword to Dialogues with Myself

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The restored gospel focuses a great deal on "the agency of man," or our opportunity and responsibility for choosing, in ways that Biblical scripture doesn't.  (I suspect that is in part because it was taken as granted that people are responsible for their own actions, but in our age, the question of agency appears to need to be spelled out.)  Of particular note is 2 Nephi chapter 2, in which Lehi explains that agency necessarily requires the possibility of evil, suffering, and the like--or else we would have no way of knowing what goodness felt like (vv. 11-12.)  No less cosmically important are the statements in the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great price concerning agency, among which is repeated the idea that joy and goodness could only exist with an alternative available (D&C 29:39-40); that our agency is perhaps the central characteristic of our being (D&C 93:29-30); and that we exercised it before we ever came to this earth (D&C 29:36-37).

The theoretical conflict between the agency of man and God's omniscience is a topic that those who like to delve into mysteries typically like to wander about in.  (Don't worry, I'm not going to... not today, anyway...*)  While reading Elder Maxwell's book, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience, I finally picked up on something important about all such theological questions: while we may have no idea as to the mechanism, we cannot doubt the effect, and that is that God is omniscient and we are wholly free to choose.

Should Mormons Care for Art?

This last summer, at the very time when I might have had the most time in my life to commit to writing fiction, I experienced something of a crisis of belief in art as a worthwhile pursuit.  Here I was for the first time in the real world with a little time on my hands, enjoying lovely weather in Southern Germany while my wife was finishing up her BA in German, surrounded by beautiful nature and architecture, in essentially the position to begin a my dream career (or at least hobby) in literature--and I found myself wondering whether literature was even worth reading, let alone creating.  I couldn't even read the novels I'd bought in Russia with such enthusiasm.  I did eke out a short story in the end, and that was good practice, but the wind was out of my sails and I was dubious of the worth of my project beyond self-amusement, no worse for passing the time as solitaire.  (Which is not to say I didn't love my time in Germany, because it was possibly the most magically adventurous time my wife and I have ever had!)

In part, I blame my bad feelings about on my education.  A lot of modern literary study leads nowhere--not to a dead end kind of nowhere, but the bewildering "dark and dreary wilderness" nowhere, where you hardly know north from south, and all you want is a sip to drink.

Simply resisting what I felt was a nihilistic worldview peddled by some of my literature professors as dogma drained my enthusiasm for the whole exercise of reading made-up stuff.  Also, importantly, studying literature closely revealed something about art that I had been afraid to own up to all my education: even at its best, art is a flawed description of reality and always will be.  If it's not flawed, then it's something else--scripture, perhaps.  So what good is it to spend my time with people wandering in what was generally admitted by many of my contemporaries as a roadless, forbidding, utterly exposed desert?

First Principles: An Introduction

And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.

Doctrine and Covenants 88:118

Welcome to And Also By Faith.  I hope you came expecting unsolicited opinions on questions concerning the LDS community and culture, its interaction with the culture at large, and ultimately concerning the hunt for that most elusive of objects--truth--as best we can see it.  In particular, my background is in literature and stories, the analysis of which will take up a good portion of this blog, but I hope to meander to all things in the heavens, and on the earth, and under the earth, for all truth is one great whole.

I begin with a little trepidation.  Given the quality and amount of Mormon blogging available, it's taken me a long time to build up the courage to put my own observations out there.  In the end, however, the desire to join with you in discussing words of wisdom from the best books overcomes my timidity.

I'm looking for partners in discussion on all sorts of subjects, but particularly about the intersection of ways of knowing within Mormon culture.  My education has been in literature, so art will make a regular appearance, but so will science, music, social sciences, and amateur philosophy and ethics.

Before that, though, I hope you'll indulge me in a short aside explaining why I think blogs like this one contain value for the LDS community.