- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
GB and everyone else, let me try to be clearer than I obviously have so far. I thought I had said something upfront that I must not have said clearly at all. 1) I know what I described is not what people in Joseph Smith’s time would have said. I never said it was.
2) Joni asked if there was a way to present the story without it teaching what it normally is used to teach.
3) I said the ONLY way I see to do that is to treat it as if it was an actual event from the time in which it is said to have occured and analyze what the wording would have meant in that time period. This means explicitly and intentionally NOT treating it as though the Book of Mormon was something Jospeh wrote on his own but rather as a historical record. I know many or most people here don’t believe that, but it is the only way I can see to teach the story in a way that is not screwed up.
4) Thus, I have not tried at all to address how Joseph and his contemporaries interpreted the passage (or how it is commonly interpreted currently in our culture) but rather what the words would have meant to a people steeped in “the learning of the Jews” and “the language of the Egyptians”. Centrally, this means looking at how “virtue” is used in the Old Testament – which makes Proverbs 31 directly applicable, for example.
5) I know this is a different way to look at it than has been taught broadly in our history, but, in response to Joni’s question, I don’t think it can be taught any other way without perpetuating the incorrect ideas contained in how it has been taught in the past.
/bowing out again
😳 Hawkgrrrl: Quote:The Book of Mormon is no place for women.
I don’t want to derail too much, but I would love to hear more about how you interact with the book in light of this. This is one of the things that heavily tips me towards a non-historical BOM. In the book and in Joseph’s life, I think women were in his blind spot.
Yeah, that is one of those sections I believe should NOT be in the Book of Mormon. My wife literally skips that part whenever we reach it during family scripture study. That scripture is shocking, and folks like attention. They believe if they have your attention, then they are good teachers. But it is not effective in teaching chastity. What would be a good BOM story, but one I rarely see used, is of Corianton. He slept with a prostitute, and broke the law of chastity (which is most abominable above all else). What’s more, is because of his example, others wouldn’t listen to the gospel. Corianton felt sorry, repented, and became one of the most effective missionaries, bringing “continual peace… and exceedingly great prosperity in the church.”
For what it is worth, Moroni chapter 9 is skipped completely in the GD lessons this year. Tender mercies…….. ………
Old Timer wrote:Joni, a better way to frame it might be that chastity in ancient times was defined as virginity – and that absolutely can be taken away.
Actually, the modern interpretation is that a rape victim may still define him- or herself as a virgin if that person has never engaged in
consensualsex. We define virginity more in moral terms today than in anatomical terms – ie. it has nothing to do with the hymen. While
virginitycan never be regained (because it can only be given up willingly), what about virtue? The Miracle of Forgiveness says that virtue can never be regained once it’s been lost or taken, but that book is out of print and likely doesn’t reflect current thinking. Can a rape victim regainher virtue through the value experiences listed in the Personal Progress manual, such as prayer, scripture study, and writing in her journal “the promised blessings of being sexually clean and pure and [her] commitment to be chaste”? I’ve spent a lot of time reading the Personal Progress manual, both as a YW leader and the parent of a YW, and it’s not all at clear whether or not these projects are supposed to work retroactivelyto restore virtue to a young woman whose virtue has been taken fromher. And it’s not simply a rhetorical question, either. The statistic that I was quoted in a seminar on preventing child sexual abuse was
1 in 10. I don’t know how they calculate that – if 1 in 10 children will be sexually abused between birth and age 18, or if 1 in 10 children is being sexually abused right now. Either way, that is a shockingly high number. And we have 25 girls in my ward’s Young Women program, which means that statistically speaking, somewhere between 1 and 3 of those girls has already had her virtue taken away from her. As a YW leader, what should I be teaching those 1-3 girls about virtue that’s differentfrom what I’m teaching the other 22-24 (ie. is the process of regainingvirtue differentfrom the process of acquiring and maintainingit)? And what must it be like for those 1-3 girls to stand up every week and pledge before God that they will strive to live the Young Women value of virtue, knowing that their virtue was already taken from them by force? Hawkgrrl
, thanks for the BCC link. I actually had no idea when I started this thread that there was already a parallel discussion taking place in the Bloggernacle. (Tender mercies, I guess.) I read through the comments and one that really jumped out at me – I think it was from Loursat – was that when we say ‘virtue’ we largely DO mean ‘chastity,’ or even ‘virginity,’ because we want to talk about sex without actually talking about sex. That’s a linguistic tic that I’ve noticed before in the Church (ie. nobody except the Mormons was calling it ‘same-gender marriage,’ it took us a while to get comfortable with the phrase ‘same-sex.’) I think, as regards my own daughter, my best approach is to point out that the Book of Mormon depicts a terribly, terribly sexist society. My kids already know what the Bechdel test is, and that the B of M doesn’t pass it.
Joni, I feel like we are saying the same thing: The only one way to present this chapter in any way that is acceptable is to define the terms differently than they are defined now – like you did with “virginity”. You focused on a new definition of virginity (which absolutely was not the definition anciently); I focused on an ancient definition of virtue (which, unfortunately, no longer is the definition in our current society). We did the same thing, only in reverse, in order to teach something we can accept.
I have no problem changing the meaning of virginity to exclude non-consent, since there can be power in doing so, but it obviously is a change in historic understanding of that word. You are seeking to empower the concept of virginity by changing its definition, and I applaud that effort. I am trying to empower the concept of virtue by returning to one former definition of it, focusing on that definition, and making that definition the new norm.
In practical terms, we are doing the same thing.
I agree, Ray. Words and definitions have changed a lot over time, which makes some passages of scripture easier to swallow. The problem is that the Personal Progress manual doesn’t make any attempt to distinguish between ‘virtue’ (archaic definition) and ‘virtue’ (modern definition). The manual literally instructs girls to read Moroni 9:9 and then write in her journal a commitment to remaining sexually pure. It doesn’t do any good to switch between multiple meanings of a word without giving any indication that a switch is happening. In the absence of historical or linguistic context, teenage girls, many of whom have already been sexually abused, may be forgiven for thinking that ‘virtue’ (the thing a rapist can take from you) and ‘virtue’ (the value you stand up every week and promise to espouse) are the same thing. If the manual is causing misunderstanding or harm – even inadvertently – then it can and should be changed. It’s even possible to remove the ‘Virtue’ section altogether, since (as this discussion illustrates) there is not by any means a single universally accepted definition of the word. Even if ‘virtue’ is only relating to sexual purity. it doesn’t HAVE to be in there. I came up in a Young Women program which only had 7 values instead of 8, and I still had a pretty good understanding that sexual purity was important.
I’d be interested to see how my teenage daughter, who is both gung-ho about Personal Progress and a budding feminist, relates Moroni 9:9 to chastity and sexual purity. I’d also be interested in seeing how, if at all, this verse is used to teach Young Men about the importance of sexual purity.
Amen – to all of that. The Church just removed the verse from the manual. :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: Old Timer wrote:The Church just removed the verse from the manual.
:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: Amen and amen!
Is the COB a lurker on this site? :think: :clap: :clap: :clap: http://www.sltrib.com/home/4399443-155/lds-feminists-applaud-as-church-removes One reason I’m cautiously optimistic about the pace of the BYU Title IX/Honor Code thing is that I like to think the topic is being addressed up and down, and across the board – BYU policies, manuals, YW program, etc.
That is fantastic news. I wonder how they are going to disseminate the change. I’m guessing it would be cost prohibitive to print all new hard copies of the manuals. It’s already been updated in the app, but I’ve noticed that even these tech savvy teenage girls tend to use the hard copies of the PP manual because you have to have things physically signed off. Do you think they will send a letter to all YW leaders instructing them to cross out the Moroni 9:9 reference in that particular value experience? (That’s what I will have my daughter do.)
Much like the clarification to the November policy change, if you don’t read the Bloggernacle or the SLTrib, you may not know about these things until a new manual is printed.
Ha! Ann, I was just making roughly the same comment on the other thread. I think we saw the same impetus here: BYU’s Title IX scandal and Elizabeth Smart’s excellent follow up work. Joni wrote:Basically, what I am saying is that however you define virtue, it raises questions with regards to how we teach it to Young Women.
Yeah. This.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.