Elder Rasband’s talk in the recent General Conference is, for the most part, a distillation of Elder Bednar’s “Tender Mercies” talk from a few years ago and Elder Eyring’s similar talk from last October. At its heart is a call for us as members to examine our own lives for evidences of God.

I do not want to be seen as mocking the Lord’s anointed, but it strikes me that Elder Rasband gets an awful lot of traction in this talk out of one of the vaguest stock phrases in the patriarchal blessing playbook, as it were. (more…)

In my notes from last year’s Sunstone Symposium, I gave a list of ten principal differences between Fundamentalist and Mainstream Mormonism as given by Brian Hales. See comment 93 of this thread.

While those are the biggies, there are other, more subtle differences that would mostly be lost on a journalist, yet will be meaningful to a person immersed in either tradition. This list derives from a friend who used to be involved in the Apostolic United Brethren and is now mainstream (some of this may be specific to the AUB and not necessarily applicable to the FLDS). The below is shared with permission. (more…)

I wish to honor my mother, the professor’s daughter who married into the collapse of the American dream. The woman who coaxed weavils out of home-made granola, cultured yogurt in Kerr jars in a water bath in our dilapidated oven, and tried forty-five different ways to hide goat meat in suppers; who withstood accusations of Satanic possession or insufficient faith to protect her family from her partner’s mental illness through divorce; who took calls from threatening neighbors angry that I would walk to school in winter without a coat (I hid it by the door as I left each morning); who held me as I cried about schoolyard bullies, whom I held as she cried about the monstrosity of desperate poverty and her defunct marriage; whom I proudly carried on my shoulders when I turned twelve and was taller than she; who was God’s messenger to her agnostic son in 1990, the human mediator of my conversion; who authored my favorite devotional phrase (”God is not a vending machine”); who taught me by example to love the printed and spoken word; who married again, badly, and divorced again, well; who creates life and survives tornados in America’s middle section; who scolded me for giving my only winter coat to a homeless man one Christmas then apologized years later as she helped me understand the complex valences of charity and Christ’s love; who has one of the most creative and wide-ranging minds I know; who is the beloved mother-in-law and granny to the people I love most in the world; who is more Hermes plus Athena than Gaia, and who is me and I her.

God bless you, Mom, for all that we are and clumsily strive to be. I am of all men most blessed.

When people learn I studied linguistics in college, they are generally unimpressed to discover that I frittered away my four years studying theoretical syntax–c-command, head movement, control theory, and a host of other words and word combinations whose meanings I no longer remember or frankly understand. What they had hoped to hear more often than not was that I had studied how people use language to shape and interpret their world, what the “meanings” of words are, something like the academic discipline of sociolinguistics, perhaps merged with popular semiotics. I confess I had a great time as a Chomskyan linguist, but this decade-or-so later, I feel the same fascination non-linguists do with how language can be used rather than with the formal structures of meta-syntax, as intriguing as they are (with apologies to my former teachers). (more…)

By a show of hands, how many of you have started each day intending to do good, only to realize upon retiring to bed that the world was probably worse off for your efforts?

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As Taryn and I walked through the residential streets near downtown Evanston, it began to rain. Late March is still winter here; there were no leaves on the trees and no green in the grass as yet. The rain began to leave streak marks on Taryn’s glasses. We admired the eminently practical hat of a passing mail carrier, which suspended a small umbrella above her head. The early stages of Taryn’s labor continued as we walked; it was all terribly romantic. (more…)

And when he had spoken unto them, he turned himself unto the three, and said unto them: What will ye that I should do unto you, when I am gone unto the Father? And they sorrowed in their hearts, for they durst not speak unto him the thing which they desired. And he said unto them: Behold, I know your thoughts, and ye have desired the thing which John, my beloved, who was with me in my ministry, before that I was lifted up by the Jews, desired of me.

Therefore, more blessed are ye, for ye shall never taste of death; but ye shall live to behold all the doings of the Father unto the children of men, even until all things shall be fulfilled according to the will of the Father, when I shall come in my glory with the powers of heaven. And ye shall never endure the pains of death; but when I shall come in my glory ye shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality; and then shall ye be blessed in the kingdom of my Father. And again, ye shall not have pain while ye shall dwell in the flesh, neither sorrow save it be for the sins of the world; and all this will I do because of the thing which ye have desired of me, for ye have desired that ye might bring the souls of men unto me, while the world shall stand…

And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words, he touched every one of them with his finger save it were the three who were to tarry, and then he departed.

Discuss.

Peter LLC grew up in the Mojave Desert, not far from the world’s first Del Taco in Barstow. He now lives with his wife in Vienna, Austria where he ekes out a living paying close attention to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues. When not fighting with the French and Russian delegations for a seat in the back row, Mr. LLC enjoys noodling on the guitar while watching dubbed re-runs of CSI: Miami, pushing his mountain bike through the Vienna Woods, choking on Ronan’s dust on hikes in the Alps and eating bulgogi. 

BCC has kindly consented to host his guest posts for the next two weeks. He reckons he will begin with something of a vignette of life in Vienna as an introduction.

Just when you thought you knew your neighbors–better the devil you know, after all–they go and turn the tables on you.

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I was talking to my brother the other day, as I do, and I was trying to get at what bothers me about the shenanigans in Texas. I think that the manner in which the FLDS church has established its beliefs and the manner in which they express them are manifestly evil. Forcing girls into unwanted marriage, driving away boys because they might win the hearts of the girls, and parceling out families and salvation as gifts to the sycophants all strike me as patriarchal behavior at its absolute worst. It is obviously wrong and that is, I believe, why Texas has so mishandled it. (more…)

Some of you may be familiar with the Genesis newsletter. For an article in that newsletter, we’d like to get responses to three questions. Comments in this thread may appear in the forthcoming article.

1) Where were you on June 8th, 1978? (If you don’t know what this refers to, then you are probably too young to answer these questions.)

2) What was your reaction?

3) What changes have you seen in the Church since that time?

BCC’s weekly romp through the best of the Bloggernacle, hosted this week by Steve, Brad, and MikeinWeHo. Featured posts/sites: (more…)

Stop me if this sounds familiar. I’m indebted to the always-handy BYU 100 Hour Board, as well as the LDS Church History site’s exhibit on Primary. (more…)

From my mum, Anthea. (more…)

In March, Natalie posted about ways of reading The Book of Mormon, especially close reading. I’ve tried applying the close reading skills I teach as a high school literature and composition teacher — a sort of basic formalism, which involves coming to conclusions about the author’s intentions based on the text and the techniques used by the author. (more…)

I realize this is an old subject; see for instance this prior discussion. For those who have been living in a cave, starting I believe in 1967, women were not allowed to give the opening prayer in sacrament meetings, apparently on the theory that such meetings were “priesthood” meetings and had to be opened by priesthood authority. I think there may have been a letter rescinding this position within about six months or so, but it was definitely done away with by 1978: (more…)

In London, we had dinner with a group of young married American couples who made up about half of the active population of our ward. Someone told the story of how they got engaged –it involved a scavenger hunt around Utah Valley — and other couples picked up the theme, telling of the elaborately romantic gestures involved in popping the proverbial question. There were horses and orchestras and airplanes involved in these stories, with weeks of planning and a fair amount of money. I mean, how cheap can it be to rent a suit of armor?

Someone asked how we got engaged, and my wife laughed. I told them the story.

We were at H’s apartment on a Monday night watching The Matrix on TV. During a commercial, H was in the kitchen, and as I saw her through the door, I said, ‘Hey, we should get married.’

And she agreed. (more…)

None of us lives context free. We live the gospel in worlds driven by other values and other practices. While the separation from the rest of the world has lots of traction within Christianity, as a means of legitimizing faith, still the things we draw on to emphasize the separation leave much room for context. It is hard to imagine a completely gospel driven society of any size.

Since I am in Peru let me use a Catholic example. (more…)

I received a question recently from a young man at a prestigious university: (more…)

Forty-five years ago, Americans were shocked at the news reports and TV footage from Birmingham, Alabama.

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So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.

(Joseph Smith: History 1:14)

Discuss. (warning: language!)

In Boise? The Idaho Black History Museum will present Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers Darius Aidan Gray and Margaret Blair Young, on Friday, May 9, 2008 at the BSU Special Events Center at 7:00 p.m. The event is free. The filmmakers will also be at the Idaho Black History Museum for further discussion of the film on Saturday, May 10th and 11:00 a.m.

I was looking over Elder Nelson’s talk from April Conference and I ran across this quote:

In God’s eternal plan, salvation is an individual matter; exaltation is a family matter.

We often hear people repeat the cliche, “Heaven wouldn’t be heaven without my family.” Here, Elder Nelson apparently raises it to the level of doctrine. (more…)

Stapers’ and Mark’s talk of bacon got me thinking… (more…)

One of the great things about being a Mormon is that you stand a very good chance of sitting close to small children in church meetings.  Over the years, I have made many friends among the under five set by discreetly going cross-eyed, pulling faces, wiggling my ears, and not ratting them out to their parents when they take second helpings from the tray of bread as it passes by.  Paper Rock Scissors is a lot more fun when you need to play it so as not to be detected by authority figures.

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