GUEST POST: THE 80/20 CHRISTIAN

I’m cheap with graduation presents. My daughter, who posts as TH, just completed her Doctorate in Organizational Psychology — and all she got was this lousy guest post!

TH is also a High Priest in the Community of Christ who frequently challenges my thinking by perpetually asking, “Why?” I suspect she’ll be back at this blog in the future.

Here she draws on her academic expertise to discuss some practical insights into “why” and “how” we often need to reexamine priorities in living as Christians.

THANKS TO MORMON WAR (THE BLOG, NOT THE CONCEPT)

Over at Mormon Heretic I made a suggestion about interpreting numbers in military units (like the Sons of Helaman).  Initially skeptical, Morgan Deane at Mormon War issued a post this weekend more supportine of the idea.

Morgan also is looking to put together a conference of scholars with interest in the study of what military history can tell us about interpreting the teachings of the Book of Mormon. I urge my “myriads” of readers to look at his post Myriads of Soldiers (linked above) and the other insights he offers on his site. If you are a student of the Book of Mormon, Morgan will suggest some background you may never have suspected might be present.

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GAPS IN MY FOSSIL RECORD

My least favorite science is biology. It probably has to do with being introduced to it during a school year in which I spent a number of weeks in the hospital with doctors doing things to me to get my juvenile diabetes under control. When I got out, I then had to spend most of the rest of the school year staying after school dissecting various little creatures who had never done anything to me. At that point I half suspected that it was the animals, not the doctors, who had really been on my side.

HOT JUPITERS AND PRIVILEGED SCRIPTURAL FRAMES

The Community of Christ has a very good theory of Scripture, comfortable to mainstream Protestantism. But the theory has been validated basically on one case: the Bible.

Astronomers had a very good theory of solar system formation, but it, too, had been validated on only one case — the system we live in. When new technology found other systems, we discovered our theory contained a hidden assumption, and was leading us astray about many astronomical mysteries in our own backyard.

Does our theory of Scripture also contain hidden assumptions that can only be revealed by confronting them with the challenges of other Restoration Scriptures taken seriously on their own terms?

SCIENCE TRIBES

The Community of Christ is reconsidering its identity as it struggles with its early history. But historians and theologians are not the only disciplines with relevance to that debate and can not decide solely the “rules of evidence” on which conclusions will be drawn. The world has absolutely no need for another Protestant denomination.