If you’re new here, you may want to sign up for email alerts or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!As someone recently quipped, “I’m so glad Nibley’s not letting a little thing like being dead slow down his publishing schedule!”
Another volume in the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley series is being officially [...]
The scholarly world is aflutter over the latest discovery of a 3-foot tall tablet being called “Gabriel’s Revelation,” “Hazon Gabriel,” or the “Vision of Gabriel.” It contains 87 lines of Hebrew text written in ink on stone, and has been dated to the first century BCE. The tablet was found near the Dead Sea in [...]
I think many times our culture produces preconceptions or stereotypes about words, images, cultures, forms, meanings, etc., that may not actually be true. I have found this to be the case with the word mysticism. Oft times I think we associate this word with gypsies, palm readers, fortune tellers, monks, or other so-called strange or [...]
Someone recently asked me the following:
Perhaps you can explain how a person who finds the [temple experience] to be … troubling should express those feelings.
This was my reply, with additional edits:
A member of another faith asked me the following question:
In the [LDS] service that I attended, the speaker said that service to the Temple is the most important service that we can provide. Is this opinion common across members of the LDS church? Why is service to the Temple held in higher regard than, say, [...]
I had contemplated entitling this post “A Change in Temple Sacrifice Following Christ,” but since today is Father’s Day, I thought this title was more appropriate.
From the time they left Jerusalem until the time of Christ’s ministry among his descendants in the Americas 600 years later, Lehi and his family offered sacrifice and burnt offerings [...]
One of our readers, Dr. Kathy Larsen, pointed out a scripture yesterday that intrigued me. It is Leviticus 21:10:
And he that is the high priest among his brethren, upon whose head the anointing oil was poured, and that is consecrated to put on the garments, shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes;
There [...]
Some of our critics have been quick to contend that our modern temples and practices have no relationship whatever to the temples of ancient Israel. This is a quick judgment indeed. If one is willing to open their eyes that they may hear, and their ears that they may see, then many marvelous [...]
I was first introduced to Cyril’s Catechetical Lectures by Hugh Nibley in his phenomenal work The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri. Cyril of Jerusalem is a prominent early Christian theologian, and is considered a saint by many. His most famous writings are set of twenty-three catechetical lectures which he delivered around 347 [...]
One of the criticisms leveled at the LDS (Mormon) practice of temple worship is the seemingly dissimilar forms of the ordinances when compared with those found practiced by ancient Israelites in the Bible. It is true that the forms of the ordinances and sacrifices are different, but their meaning and symbolism remain the same. [...]
A group of researchers has just begun a two-week excavation at the well-known Stonehenge site in England in an attempt to discover, once and for all, the meaning behind the mysterious ruins. According to current scientific dating, Stonehenge dates back to about 3000 B.C., but it has perplexed archaeologists for years as to the [...]
William Shakespeare once wrote a sonnet about love, probably the best-known among the 154 he wrote - Sonnet 18. I heard a beautiful song on YouTube this morning sung by David Gilmour and put to the words of this sonnet. It inspired me to write this reply:
What would thy [...]
This last week I finally swung by Seagull Book and picked up Dr. Andrew Skinner’s new book Temple Worship. I had heard about it before from ads, and from an excellent interview that Carol Mikita had with Dr. Skinner.
I’ve been impressed with the depth that Dr. Skinner approaches the temple subject, and the new [...]
The word orant, or latin orans, is a noun form of the verb orare, to pray, and describes an early mode of prayer practiced by the first Christians. From Wikipedia we read:
Orant is a type of gesture during prayer in which the hands are raised, set apart, and the palms face outward. It was [...]
There is an interesting doctrinal discussion on a post by KC Kern over at Mormon Matters entitled “The Reason for the World.” In it, KC compares the lyrics of the song “The Riddle” by the group “Five for Fighting” to Mormon theology. It is an intriguing comparison in which he analyzes the song’s [...]
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship website has shared a quote from Hugh Nibley on their homepage today:
The word atonement appears only once in the New Testament, but 127 times in the Old Testament. . . . In the other Standard Works of the Church, atonement (including related terms atone, atoned, atoneth, atoning) [...]
This first scripture is, no doubt, the most read scripture in all the Church, and possibly the most read from the LDS canon outside of the Church. Members of the Church have all read this scripture over and over as they begin reading the Book of Mormon and recommit to daily scripture study and finishing [...]
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