Amazon and Goodreads review:
A poetic attempt to promote liberal mormonism
This book is a decent contribution to the liberal mormon tradition, and as such, it should at least be read by folks in leadership in the church. There is nothing trailblazing in the book, but the author has been a lifelong voice and support in the struggle to help the church be the best it can be. His words are worth considering at the least.
Regarding the structure, there is a light bibliography in the back as well as an "acknowledgements" section that lists all the essays, etc from which the author drew for this book. The text is also interspersed with poetic and creative "interludes". A couple chapters are adapted from previous publications.
Regarding the style, this book is very much a devotional work. It uses insider-coded language, or what I consider "virtue signaling", to fit many of its thoughts and inspirations within a mainstream "mormon" framework.
Regarding content, the book sometimes promotes shallow, mainstream-type answers to how to make the church better, such as "accept callings and then magnifying them" (page 66), and also negative views against outsiders or those leaving the church - "Abandoning the Church because of something broken in it is like leaving a house because the plumbing isn't working well" (page 72). At the same time, it promotes many liberal causes -- elevating heavenly mother within our discourse, moving past our racist and anti-LGBTQ past and present, being stewards of the earth, etc.
Personally, I prefer much more academic rigor, and you will not find that here. The writing sits on the verge of mysticism and "creative misinterpretation", both of which I find to be harmful misuses of the imagination. The author wishes to appropriate what might be called the "midrashic" impulse in behalf of the churhc, whereas I would prefer careful and deliberate deconstruction and nuancing of our perspectives rather than letting our imaginations play with and run roughshod over truth.
Additional notes:
This book takes an approach at odds with my own sense of how to improve the world. Rather than subject our beliefs to a skeptical and reasoned scrutiny, it showcases the possibilities open to us when we suspend our disbeliefs and instead purposefully engage in creative misinterpretation, or in Rees's word, "reimagination". For some reason this always seems to entail requiring the reader to accept as "truth" propositions untenable to critical scholarship that aims to get as near to universal "truth" as possible. It seems Rees would agree wholeheartedly with Joseph Smith's 16 June 1844 statement (as reported by Thomas Bullock) that a man won't be damned for believing too much, but for unbelief. Yet, Rees seems only capable of imagining things which correspond to current church culture, and never grapples with an accurate understanding of the past as found in abundance in present-day scholarship.
In the intro, Bob Rees uses pointed reasoning and instances of others misinterpreting scripture (eg, Hosea 12:10 on page 2) to find tenuous support for his project of "reimagination," or in my words, creative misinterpretation.
Chapter 1, on Christ. Of Luke's birth narrative, "I believe, that he may even have tracked down shepherds who were in the field that glorious night" (page 8). Really? Even ignoring the many problems that arise when you try to reify Luke's infancy narrative, it defies any kind of sense to think that this account, composed about a century after Jesus' birth, relied on eyewitnesses. Where and how would the refined, urban Greek-speaking author of Luke have obtained fellowship with these apparently amazingly long-lived anonymous rural Aramaic-speaking shepherds? Nephi "was commanded to behead his own relative" (page 9). Um, citation please? This makes Laban sound like near kin. Also, "We can surmise that Nephi knew of Nazareth" because Nephi sees and names it in 1 Ne 11:13. He supports this claim with a dubious reading of Matthew. Sorry, but all archaeological evidence points to Nazareth being a late Hellenistic period settlement -- it didn't exist in Nephi's day. Then he quotes 1 Ne 11:21 and doesn't bother to note that the 1830 text read, "behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father!" Lost opportunity to "imagine" what was going on when JS "reimagined" that passage and added "Son of" to the text. Apparently the heavenly council in the preexistence included "the Father and Mother" (page 11), and the celestial kingdom means living in "the presence of our Heavenly Father and Mother" (page 13. see also pages 22, 24, 91, 156, 164, all of chapter 3, etc). I guess he's "reimagining" the Mormon vision of a Father and many Mothers -- let's not forget about eternal polygamy!
Chapter 2, on Joseph Smith. Flowery phrases like "how absolutely profound, transcendent, and life-changing seeing the faces of the Father and the Son must have been for Joseph" (page 18). Ugh, please engage with scholarship -- "show me the receipts" and stop engaging in eisegetical misreadings of the historical record. Later on the same page he calls the "Jewish midrash" "the Rabbis' imaginative expansion of scripture". Yet he refuses to even get near the idea of the Book of Mormon and other revelations and a similar kind of midrash. On pages 19-20, he reads the vision of God as recorded in D&C 76 as if it was a photographic recollection rather than a mismash of scriptural tropes ranging from Jesus' baptism to Stephen's vision of God in Acts 7. He likewise on page 20 interprets D&C 110:3-4 as a literal description of seeing Jesus rather than seeing it as a rehash of the vision found in Revelation 1. Someone is drowning in the koolaid: "if we each carry the physical DNA of our earthly parents and other ancestors, why wouldn't our spirits, which are refined matter, carry the DNA of the parents of our spirits?" *Sigh*. Why not read Jonathan Stapley's musings on "Tripartite Existentialism" from way back in 2009 on the By Common Consent blog? Or any decent history of Mormon theology to see how these ideas were invented wholecloth in the 20th century and don't even go back to Joseph Smith.
And must we be forever lost in creative misinterpretation and hagiography? I think one of the greatest services we can do to our past and the dead is to uncover them and see them as clearly as we can. Some of these chapters were an exercise in doing the opposite.
Chapter 3, on Heavenly Mother. Honestly, authors like Carol Lynn Pearson do such a better job grappling with the hard questions and not simply imagining how our doctrine's should be without grappling with them as they are. They refuse to even acknowledge, much less grapple with, the ways in which the present institutional church has stifled discussion of Heavenly Mother. How can we really make progress if we don't engage with the actual present and past?
Chapter 4, on Mary. Rees gets close to Brigham Young's imagination that God the Father literally fathered Jesus with Mary, imagining her "ravaged by a divine being" (page 87) and that "So much light floods into her that she feels as if the sun itself is inside her" (page 55). Eww. He doesn't even get close to the scholarly consensus that Joseph was the father of Jesus and that the miracle birth stories were a later invention. His imagination does leave Mary "Alone in her room at night" as "she reads and rereads the words of the prophets" (page 55). This peasant girl from a backwater town is literate, has her own set of scripture scrolls, candles for reading, and her own bedroom. Meaning she knows Hebrew along with her native Aramaic, and must be considerably wealthy. Who knew? I feel like Rees really wants to write his own infancy gospel like they did in the early days of Christianity. Is this kind of impulse really healthy for us?
Chapter 5, Repairing the Church. He has to stress so hard that admitting that the church is broken and trying to mend it doesn't make him a critic or an "ark steadier". Doesn't this need to spend so much space preempting criticism itself say a lot? He lists a lot of legitimate problems with church culture (many of which he himself reflects throughout this book), and a lot of common tropes found in the "liberal mormon" cultural sphere. He mentions secondhand knowledge of many "mission presidents not reporting turthfully on conditions in the mission field for fear of being blamed" (page 67). Folks ought to read Daymon Smith's "Book of Mammon" if they really want to know more about that kind of stuff. But then he goes and spends most of his space blaming the members and excusing church leadership. What are the solutions? "It begins by being willing to accept callings and then magnifying them" (page 66). Wow. What a "just read your scriptures, pray, pay your tithing, and go to church" kind of answer. He criticizes those who would just leave the church - "Abandoning the Church because of something broken in it is like leaving a house because the plumbing isn't working well" (page 72). He also criticizes those who complain about the church but who don't give 100% to it, "who don't show up on Saturday mornings to clean it for Sunday services or on Tuesday evenings to work with the youth" (page 72 -- but see the footnote where he at least gives lip service to the possibility that church itself might be blamed a bit too). I have to say, I'm a much bigger fan of Ursula le Guin and her short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". I'd rather side with those.
Chapter 6, a tribute to Lester Bush. This is decent. Rees laments about how the church and world would have been better if only Brigham Young hadn't insisted on racist church policy and doctrine. I think it's unfortunate that it's not better understood that Joseph Smith himself was also quite racist. "Fixing" Brigham Young wouldn't really quite have been enough.
Chapter 7, on intentionally "feminine" readings of scripture. He spends a lot of time defending a (shallowly understood, appropriated and jerry-rigged for his own purposes) "midrashic" approach to scriptural interpretation -- as opposed to "fundamentalist, literal, and privileged approaches to the scriptures" (page 84). He asks us to creatively reimagine and even intentionally distort (page 89) scripture and gives several examples. For some reason, his "good Samaritan" rereading involves a woman who is "physically and sexually assaulted" (page 88). I'm not sure turning negative things relating to women into rape stories is productive rather than just sensational. Also, in the "prodigal daughter" story of interlude 4a (page 95), it's kind of telling that he finds the need to make the husband a central part of the story. Is just telling a story centered on just women that hard to do? He also turned it into a rape story. I also don't think papering over the uncomfortable within the past in order to invent readings that "work" for modern mormons necessarily does us or anyone justice. If only we were to recognize the Book of Mormon as midrash, we would also be better positioned to see how it prioritizes its own misreadings of history over the real histories and experiences of the american indians... no luck getting close to that here, though.
Chapter 8 - LGBTQ members. Decent chapter. A weird paragraph on page 110 quotes Irene Bates, "Myths... can never serve as pillars of our faith". Um, what has this whole book been about again, besides generating faith-enriching myths? There is a lot of virtue signaling towards mainstream members of the church in this chapter as well as the rest of the book.
Chapter 9 - holy week. A decent celebration and remembrance of past celebrations of holy week and a desire for the church to do more with it.
Chapter 10 - environmentalism. In between okay discussions of environmental stewardship and copious referencing of other work, he quotes someone using the phrase, "wave field of bio-emotional energy" (page 139). Plunging into Deepak Chopra territory here...
Chapter 11 - forgiving the church. Surprisingly decent, besides being structured using a somewhat arbitrary "spiritual evolution" model of life. I think this kind of teleological thinking is self-serving and procrustean in its application.
Chapter 12 - imagination and mormonism. A call for a more "liberal" mormonism. A good summary of the author's central concerns and hopes.
Throughout the book Rees tends to adopt modern liberal-ish positions. For instance, on page 66, right after saying that the church culture has too many people "committed to the values of our political parties than to those of the gospel", he praises a bishop who refused to follow church directives during the Proposition 8 debacle.
