Sandwiched in the Education Week catalog between “The Mind of a Faith-Filled Disciple” and “Lessons from the Doctrine and Covenants and Modern Revelation,” the description reads

Note: This class includes a live demonstration and is designed to acquaint the participant with the types of muzzle-loading artillery, how to load and fire them safely, and how to make the ammunition (blanks only).

Frankly, I think this is a great way to reach the youth, but then, what do I know?

It turns out to be part of a series of lectures and demonstrations on the Mormon Battalion, but with blanks. Disappointing indeed. What hath correlation wrought? (Shakes head sadly…)

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Due to my teaching schedule, I was only able to attend the second day of the conference. Tanya has already summarized the content of the presentations (which should appear on-line in the near future), so I’ll take a slightly different tack.

I generally don’t consider myself much of a people person. That said, one of my favorites things about conferences is seeing and meeting people. At the FAIR conference which ended yesterday, I had plenty of opportunity to see friends, put faces to names of people I’ve only known via message-board or email, and meet other new interesting people of various backgrounds and persuasions.

For example, I rubbed shoulders with Kerry Shirts, David Bokovoy (who recently won a Hebrew Bible teaching award at Brandeis), co-blogger and cousin Tanya Spackman, Mike Parker, Brant Gardner, John Dehlin, Kevin Barney, Brian Hauglid, Mark Wright (the lone up-and-coming LDS Mayanist, who had some fascinating insight into Alma 5), Lou Midgely (who had to leave the conference midway to go interrupt the Tanners having fondue), Juliann Reynolds, and others.

I had a brief chat with Brent Metcalfe, met Dan Vogel and Michael Marquardt, who came at the end to hear Brian Hauglid’s KEP discussion.

I had one very international conversation about the non-availability and need for LDS material in foreign languages with three people, a brother from Brussels, a bishop from Germany, and Jonathon Curci who is an Italian lawyer currently at BYU, but also knows his Hebrew quite well (as well as English, Italian, German, French, and a few others, I suspect.)

I rode home to Provo with Daniel Peterson and his wife Deborah.

It’s a great place to meet LDS authors, people from the bloggernackle or LDS message boards, BYU profs, FARMS folks, FAIR folks, as well as those who disagree with their views. Look for brief coverage of the conference in the Deseret News, as well as the Church News.

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Who can identify the translator and passage without Googling?

“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

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It was our old scoutmaster’s fault. I wasn’t there, but he told the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal (pronounced ba’al, not bale). Except, he told it at night. With props.

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I’m once again in Utah for the summer, teaching and mostly enjoying it. Anyone throwing a bloggersnacker? This is the only summer ever that all three of my brothers and I will be on campus together. I’m teaching, there’s a freshman starting, one graduating and moving to DC, and one in the middle. It’s great fun. On the other hand, my wife hasn’t been able to accompany me here, and that’s not so much fun.

Last Monday, one of the faculty sat in on my class to evaluate me. I went back to his office afterwards, and his positive evaluation made me quite happy. On returning to my cubicle in a state of jubilation, I learned that my cousin Allison, previously diagnosed with leukemia and doing quite well, had died suddenly following a major relapse. She leaves behind a husband in law school and a 1-year old. I cried.

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I like France as much as the next guy. More, even, since I lived there and have been back to visit several times. A recent survey on LDS attitudes about war asked for names of less-than-ideal leaders, and this is the list that appeared (or at least, that the writers chose to list in their discussion of results.)

Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Jacques Chirac.

Really, Chirac wasn’t THAT bad

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A CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“Faith and Knowledge: Latter-day Saints in Religious Studies”
A Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion
Yale Divinity School, Yale University
February 2007 (exact dates TBA)

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Since General Conference just wasn’t available in Troye France, my wife and I didn’t hear any of it. Instead, we attended Mass with a Catholic family we know, which led to a very interesting Gospel-related conversation. In any case, you can’t tell the following from listening to Elder Hinckley’s talk, only reading it.

I was reading through the Conference edition of the Ensign this evening and noticed Elder Richard Hinckley, in his talk on Repentance cited a Hebrew meaning for something. I looked at the footnote- Anchor Bible Dictionary!

Why is this significant? Much of the scripture scholarship that is cited in the Ensign or Institute manuals tends to be old, out-dated, and highly conservative. By contrast, ABD is not for the inerrantist nor one seeking devotional materials. For those not familiar with it, ABD is *the* scholarly Bible dictionary; 6 volumes and 7200 pages of extensive discussion with a bibliography for every topic. ABD includes 23 entries written by LDS scholars, such as S. Kent Brown, John Hall, David Seely, Stephen Robinson, and Stephen Ricks.

Is this in his Dad’s library? His? Who knows? He’s familiar with it, and I think that’s great. It reminded me of the time Elder Nelson quoted from the Coptic Discourse on the Abbaton. (In a general conference talk somewhere, he quotes from something similarly ancient and arcane as well as some kind of upper level math or physics book with a complicated name. I couldn’t find that reference, though.)

You can find the ABD at Amazon, but available cheapest at Christian Book. There’s also a CD-rom edition that’s very useful.

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Those of us in academia but without tenure tread carefully. With few exceptions I can think of, everyone in the category of LDS, professionally unestablished, and online has shifted to an alias or first-name only basis.

And now, so have I. I’ll just be going by “Ben” from now on, and my bio has been appropriately changed (though the text is doing funny things. You may have to scroll down, then back up to see it.)

More importantly, my webpages have been moved to a brand-spanking new home (thanks to J. Stapley) that won’t appear when I’m googled by search committees.

Yet, it’s my hope that these pages will continue to rank high on google so that LDS can find good information. If you linked to the old ones, please change your references so it links to the new one. Please comment there instead of here…

Many thanks!

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There have been plenty of navel-gazing posts about how much time we spend/waste on-line. This is not one of those posts.

Rather, this is a request.

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