So I spent the weekend watching the LDS General Conference. Every six months the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a conference in which the leaders speak and members and other interested people watch, either from their TVs, at stake centers, or now on the web. I usually watch/sleep through at least most of it, and I usually find that I'm uplifted and strengthened by the talks.
A speaker who is consistently one of my favorites (and not just mine) is Elder Jeffrey R. Holland. When my husband was a student at BYU Elder Holland was the president of the university, and I enjoyed hearing him and his wife speak from time to time. Now he's a member of the church's quorum of the twelve apostles, one of the highest positions in the church. In terms of conference, this means that he now speaks in every conference.
One of the things he does in his talks that I really love is that he gets into a scriptural story or concept and really explores the wording and motivations and context to make it more meaningful and powerful, and he updates some of the language to make it more accessible. I am often amazed and thrilled at the insights I get from listening to him speak, and yesterday was no exception (I hope that link works; right now it loads a template page).
This talk was about faith, and Elder Holland shared the story from Mark 9, beginning at verse 14, where a father asks Jesus if he can do anything to help him and his son, who is possessed by evil spirits. He discusses the anguish and faith of this father (Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Mark 9:24) and the compassion of Jesus, who cast out the spirit and raised up the son. As always when I listened, I was excited and inspired. And I finally figured out why: Elder Holland does critical discourse analysis on the scriptures!
Critical discourse analysis is a branch of linguistic analysis that I have always had mixed feelings about. It's usually done to uncover bias or discrimination in texts, and it's a valuable and important sort of analysis, but when I do it I always find a dark cloud hanging over me. It's incredibly depressing, because you're always looking for the negative. In general I'm a pretty positive person, so once I realized this I decided to stay away from it. But here is a situation where the technique of examining language, power relations, and society is used to highlight the positive and redeeming nature of Christ's loving response to a man who was willing to trust, to exercise his faith. Wow! Now that I can get excited about!
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