Author Profile: John Hamer
Author Archive for John Hamer
Before the world was, so say the prophets and prophetesses, our spirits dwelt in a heavenly sphere. As the world was to be made, the two eldest spirits came before heaven’s host assembled and presented two grand plans for our future mortality. The vision of the first was one of unity, a chorus of souls bringing glory to God through perfect obedience, from which there could be no deviation of individual will. By contrast, the vision of the second appeared to be cacophony. Mortal souls, empowered by agency, would be free to act, in turns, more righteously, and less. But out of that cacophony would come true harmony of independent voices, and it was clear that the exercise of agency had the potential to bring glory to God far beyond what its abdication could ever achieve. In simple terms, the unity plan would produce only Terrestrial Glory. The harmony plan, by contrast, would result in multiple degrees. Unfortunately, in addition to Terrestrial Glory, a lower Telestial Glory would be introduced. But without the lesser, the greater Celestial Glory would be impossible. A war of sorts ensued, as the host weighed the visions. Ultimately the second plan prevailed, and through the eternal principles of angelic democracy, agency became the foundation of the future world’s constitution. Continue reading…
I’ve finally finished my review of Michael Marquardt’s Early Patriarchal Blessings volume for the next JWHA Journal. This fascinating new resource is a compilation of patriarchal blessings given by Joseph Smith Jr., Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, and William Smith. I’ve posted previously about how Joseph Sr.’s blessings illustrate his continuing preoccupation with buried treasure and spiritual gifts that we today would consider magical. Continue reading…
A number of the bloggernacle’s luminaries descended on the party town of Sacramento, California, last weekend for the 2008 conference of the Mormon History Association (MHA)—a theme many have blogged about.
If you missed all the fun, there’s no reason to be bitter because there’s always next year! And if you thought they couldn’t top Sacramento, hold onto your stove-pipe hats…next year, MHA’s going to Springfield…(wait for it)…Illinois! Continue reading…
When the Church of Christ was organized on April 6, 1830, none of its members were professional clergy, but all its adult male members were endowed with “priesthood.” For millennia, Christians had wrestled with defining the roles of lay people and the clergy in expressing piety. If the sacraments were the preserve of the clergy, how should pious lay people channel their devotion to God? The Mormon answer to this question would be straightforward: in the restored church, laymen were the clergy. Continue reading…
One of the interesting panel discussions at last weekend’s Restoration Studies Symposium was entitled “The Future Status and Use of the Book of Mormon in the Community of Christ.” The essential question raised is: if you aren’t sure (or don’t believe) that the Book of Mormon is a literal history, do you have to throw the book out with the bath water? (Community of Christ leaders apparently don’t think you have to…)
This discussion got me to thinking about scriptures in general and I came up with an analogy that I wanted to bounce off folks. I think that the Book of Mormon’s relationship with the Old and New Testaments of the Bible can be compared to the relationship between the Aeneid (the great Roman epic) and the earlier Iliad and Odyssey (the great epics of ancient Greece). Continue reading…
Outside of my own library and the virtual community I’m connected to through the internet, Mormondom has very little impact on my immediate environment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The LDS Institute has a prominent place next to the university, but the LDS chapel is across the river in a part of town we rarely visit. The Community of Christ chapel is in the Old West Side historic district across the street from the home of our closest friends and there’s a Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite) branch out past Target. Once every six months or so we have a missionary sighting. And that’s it. Continue reading…
Nauvoo was a mistake. At the close of the Missouri Mormon War in the winter of 1838-39, the Saints crossed the icy Mississippi. The people of Quincy, Illinois, were aghast at their condition and opened their hearts and their homes to the refugees. A new gathering place needed to be planted and the church soon found a hopeful location upriver from Quincy — approximately at the border between Illinois, Missouri and the Iowa Territory. Continue reading…
Meeting together in person to exchange ideas, you ask? Haven’t you heard of the “internets” John Hamer? Hasn’t the awesome nature of the MormonMatters Blog made attending a Mormon studies conference IRL (in real life) as obsolete as reading a printed book?!
As incredible as online connections can be, you can’t imagine the fun you’re missing at a real life Mormon studies conference until you’ve been to one in person. I went to my first Mormon History Association conference in May of 2003 and I got hooked. Like the guy in the old Gillette commercials, “I love these things so much, I bought the company” — or my case with JWHA, it might be phrased: “I got roped into being responsible for the association.” Continue reading…
Since news first broke that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or FLDS church) was building a new Zionic city in western Texas, I’ve been excited to watch history unfold (and perhaps repeat?) At first there was little more on the site than three large dormitories masquerading as “hunting lodges.” However, it didn’t take long before aerial photos began to show an expanding grid of roads. The grid reminded me instantly of Joseph Smith’s “Plat of Zion,” after which so many 19th-century Mormon towns were patterned.
I was in the offices of the new Kirtland Temple Visitor Center last Thursday when the call came through. According to the mayor’s office, Bill Clinton was coming to Kirtland on Saturday — to hold a rally and to tour the Temple. This would make Clinton the first US President to tour the Temple since James Garfield.
The Temple staffmembers were excited, but skeptical. If Clinton were coming, wouldn’t they have heard from the secret service directly? Continue reading…
The Earth we perceive with our physical eyes is billions of years in age. Life began to inhabit this sphere eons ago and evolved to fill the world through a process of natural selection. Several millions of years ago the ancestors of humankind diverged from our nearest surviving cousins and our basic physical form was achieved perhaps 200,000 years ago.
Unlike some of their religious contemporaries, early Mormons did not reject or fear science; they embraced it. Their cosmology (view of the universe) expanded the Biblical scope of creation to include souls on worlds without number. Their cosmogony (explanation for the universe’s origin) embraced contemporary science which held that matter could not be created ex nihilo. (The contemporary scientific “law of conservation of mass” contradicted the Genesis account but was perfectly attuned to the creation described in the Book of Abraham.)
Let me propose that Mormons today needn’t be locked into a world-view that embraces science up through 1844, and rejects subsequent advances in our understanding of geology, astronomy and biology. The understanding of the universe can be elastic, because a veil runs through it.
When I was 6 and my sisters were 5 and 3, we read the Book of Mormon with my parents as a family. I was already very geographically minded and the book cries out for a map. So make a map we did.
I think we’ve now achieved consensus in the United States that without regard to race, everyone should have an equal opportunity to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A century ago, however, our ancestors and the country fell far short of achieving that ideal. 1910 was in the middle of a particularly poor era. In the South, reconstruction had been abandoned and the policies of segregration and disenfranchisement of blacks had been established. The first great wave of black migration from the South to the North had begun. In the North, African Americans found industrial jobs, but they also encountered significant discrimination — often as pernicious as what they’d left, albeit subtler.
But remarkably, 1910 was the year that a black man was called and ordained to be an apostle. His name was John Penn and he was the first African American apostle of the Restoration Era. Continue reading…
There’s a lot of talk in the media and across the ’nacle to the effect that Romney’s Mormon identity was the critical factor that torpedoed his candidacy. The argument is that a large percentage of Republican primary voters have anti-Mormon sentiments that kept them from supporting the candidate who, by the numbers, shared all the values positions that mattered to them most. The comparison has specifically been drawn with Log Cabin Republicans: Are Mormons a second group in the GOP’s big tent that find themselves despised by their fellow Republicans?
If that’s where Mormons find themselves, we should ask: What lessons can they learn from Log Cabin Republicans? Continue reading…
The wires are alive with the story that Romney is dropping out of the race. More as the story develops.
See Breitbart, TIME and CNN for the story. Romney is quoted saying:
This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters … many of you right here in this room … have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming president. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country
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