Nancy's Musings

I very recently blogged about miracles. I'm very adamant about my belief in miracles. And yet just the other day I read an article titled "'By Small Means': Rethinking the Liahona" in which the authors posit that rather than the ex nihilo wonder we have accepted as true, the Liahona was both a common astrolabe, and a dowry from Ishmael to Lehi's family. I don't see that it's outside the realm of possibility, but I did not find the paper unproblematic. From a scholarly standpoint, its Book of Mormon exegesis was acceptable, if not compelling. It was perhaps dismissive of passages, choosing which ones it favored because they supported the argument. That's shaky logos, but a necessary part of putting the idea into the historical conversation, and it's an idea that shouldn't be dismissed simply because the more spiritual passages of scripture seem to favor a more "magical" explanation. The problem I had with the article begins...

Once upon a time there was a country divided into (more or less) two factions (with very fuzzy edges). The country was full of frequently self-serving people who nevertheless still strove to increase the good in the world. Both sides agreed that with the abundant resources of this very wealthy nation, much good could be done for the want and need of people inside the country, and for the benefit of the whole world. The country had a big, if bureaucratic, heart. At first, the two factions merely disagreed about how best to make the world better. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting optimism. It was a little frustrating, come election time, to decide which of the old white men to vote for since they both sounded mostly the same and were both too fuzzy on the details to be pinned down. And then, to solve this problem of vague homogeneity, along came the marketers, publicity analysts, and professional rhetors (also, probably Satan) to give the people what they thought they...

The God I worship is a God of miracles. It becomes difficult, the older I grow, to believe in miracles. One of the few benefits of age in our youth-worshiping culture is that we develop strong intuition for patterns. Our life experiences and education implant in us an instinct for how things will turn out. When I was babysitting the other day, I had the privilege of explaining to a very bright child that one of the reasons that babies play with their food is because they're learning. Their muscles are learning how to respond to electrical signals from the brain, and their eyes and fingers are learning about textures and consistencies and weight and gravity. Also, it's fascinating to watch cheerios scatter. But sometimes our experiences do not serve us well. For instance, people with PTSD have learned incorrectly to anticipate assault, and they become (usually unnecessarily) hypervigilant long after the danger has passed. Anxiety, depression, abuse, and other long-term...