Like many of you, I’ll be attending Sunstone this year. I’m looking forward to many of the panels. Kristine and Janet and Jana and Bored in Vernal will be speaking. Armand Mauss and Claudia Bushman and John Dehlin and John Hamer and Lorie Winder and Paula Goodfellow and Newell Bringhurst. _Nobody Knows_ will show. Really, the only thing that worries me is the moderation. (more…)
“He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention…” 3 Nephi 11:29
but…
“Contend thou, therefore, morning by morning; and day after day let thy warning voice go forth; and when the night cometh let not the inhabitants of the earth slumber, because of thy speech.” D&C 112:5
I first learned what a mikvah was when I was on my mission. The Church came out with some (short-lived) discussions directed to Jews, and I got a copy. There was a glossary volume, and one of the things it explained was the mikvah. The word mikvah is Hebrew for a collection (of water) and is a ritual purifying immersion (something we can relate to, with ourown ablutions, such as baptism and various temple washings). I was reminded of this by an article in today’s Chicago Tribune (be sure to check out the video). (more…)
I heard from a friend of mine from NYC a couple of weeks ago, who I learned is now putting on a solo play she wrote. Here’s the description:
Mother May I?
A Mormon girl’s journey to independence from the tag-team of Mom and Jesus.
Little Joy wanted to be like Mom so much she had to leave the pre-existence (a Mormon green room for babies) and beg to be named after her. You would too! Mom has the best friends (Jesus is always over for dinner), the biggest heart (she’ll take down a bus load of 4th graders), and a way with money (her visions stretch the food stamps and make for some divine swindling). Joy finally gets her wish – and her own mission from the Lord – and ends up in NYC trying to change the world and live it up Mom style. When all hell breaks loose … what will little Joy do? Choose Mom? Jesus? Or end up in Outer Darkness? Find out in “Mother May I?”
*Plus Door Prizes and Home Made Cookies
Putting on a solo show you wrote yourself strikes me as something particularly creative and brave, and so I asked Joy for an interview, which appears below the fold. (more…)
This morning, in the MTC Relief Society, we sang “The Spirit of God.” I was struck by the lyrics, “The knowledge and power of God are expanding.” In the past, I’ve interpreted those words to refer to the rather controversial idea of God’s own progress—even if the progress refers to his children’s immortality and eternal life, his “work and glory.” But surrounded by missionaries, I heard it differently today. “The knowledge of God is expanding” and “the power of God [priesthood?] is expanding.” In other words, many are coming to a knowledge of God, and many are receiving His priesthood.
I’m curious about how LDS bloggers interpret these words. Your interpretations?
This post is a follow-up to something I wrote ages ago about the lack of patriotism in the international church. (more…)
What have been some of the major themes of General Conference talks the last few years? We can easily rattle off a list: morality and pornography, social issues, debt, and raising the bar on missionary work, to name a few. But there is one other theme that is rarely mentioned because, often, it makes us uncomfortable.
Money. We’re being warned about our attitude toward it, and that often makes us defensive. We’re warned, but since the Church can’t simply place a limit on our assets, we may not be sure what the ideal position is. But if our leaders have seen fit to bring it up, we ought to think about it and realize we may need to make some changes. This is a sensitive subject, so let’s be clear on the purpose of this essay: not to accuse anyone of anything, but to serve as a guide for self-analysis in an area that we may often ignore exactly because it is so sensitive.
At the October 2004 General Conference, two general authorities gave consecutive talks denouncing materialism among the Latter-day Saints. (more…)
Welcome to the first installment of Police Beat Roundtable, where an invited panel convenes via instant message to review selected items culled from the “Police Beat” column in BYU’s student newspaper, The Daily Universe.
Today’s panel includes Steve Evans and GST (both BYU men), and Cynthia, for an outsider’s perspective.
All items are taken verbatim from “Police Beat.” (more…)
I remember sitting in the living room with my dad, watching the 1968 Olympics, which were taking place in Mexico City. (I was thirteen.) Dad was a track and field man, and loved to see the runners break records. I think I just loved to watch him get excited and yell, “That’s a world record! A world record!” (more…)
I have often joked that my freshman year of college at BYU was the greatest year of my life, and that it has been all downhill since then. While that’s not quite accurate, I think it’s fair to say that freshman year was the funnest year of my life. (more…)
If one were to offer sweeping generalizations and a broad periodizing scheme regarding dominant intellectual movements in Mormon Studies, one might suggest that the “New Mormon History” was the focal point of excitement and energy from perhaps the late 1960s until the middle of the 1980s. Its successor, from the middle of the 1980s until probably the present, is the “Faithful Scholarship” project. The two movements differ in a number of ways, but perhaps most explicitly in that Faithful Scholarship attempts to present a specifically Mormon and explicitly believing account of Mormon history and society, while the New Mormon History attempts to analyze Mormonism in terms that are acceptable to both Mormons and non-Mormons. (more…)
As activities go, I usually find reading the letters to the editor found in the Daily Universe both entertaining and educational. As an example, in the most recent batch [they're on page 4], you will find two letters written in response to an earlier letter that expressed some form of disagreement with the church’s public stance on SSM. In both letters, the obedience of the author of the original letter was questioned, primarily on the basis that one cannot disagree with the leadership of the church and be considered a member of good standing in the church. Now that is just silly and we all know it. (more…)
At this time of year when Latter-day Saints remember their cherished heritage of devotion and sacrifice from the pioneers, I hope we keep in mind another aspect of our cultural history: literacy.
One of my favorite books is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death (surprise!), and in chapter four he does an astounding job of describing the climate of nearly ubiquitous literacy in 19th century America. A major part of that culture was oratory, about which Postman lovingly cites anecdote after anecdote, including a paragraph that summarizes some of early America’s most popular areas for oratorical conventions, or, as Postman calls them, “conference centers.”
Gee, where in American society today do we have a Conference Center? (more…)
Recently I was singing for a Protestant church service, and particularly noticed the way the congregants were addressed by the minister during the liturgy. At several points he addressed them as “Beloved,” or “Beloved in Christ.” I was still thinking about this form of address later that afternoon in my ward’s Sacrament Meeting, when the first speaker stood up and said “Sisters and…, I mean, Brothers and Sisters.” Leaving aside for now (with a heavy sigh) the distressing implications about gendered priority implicit in that little stumble, I wanted to think about what difference it might make in our thinking to have the congregation addressed in these different ways. (more…)
For those of us who consider ourselves to be believers in the basic claims of the Restoration and the authority claims of the LDS Church, I offer the following query:
In your opinion, what would constitute a signal that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had drifted into institutional apostasy? (more…)
So I was cleaning out a drawer that had not been opened in a long time. In a back corner, I found a small plastic bag of white stones. I bought this bag in 1985 from a couple of adolescent girls sitting in the doorway of the Basilica of the Virgin of Copacabana in Copacabana, Bolivia while I was doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. Although a chapter in my dissertation is built around the stones, I am amazed I still had that little bag.
The stones were called “Su platita de la virgen” which means “the Virgin’s silver”. Pilgrims to her miraculous shrine were told to buy them, place them with their money, bless both with holy water regularly, and their money would grow.
Once, at an Elders Quorum Presidency meeting, I shared some of the notes I had scribbled in my journal the day before after going to the temple. I had gone looking for ideas for improving our work as priesthood leaders. I came out with a treasure trove of instruction. Some of the (obviously more generic) points that came to mind are: accept and cheerfully magnify all assignments, stay involved with those to whom you minister, and bring further light and knowledge into people’s lives.
One of my counselors at the time was blown away. (more…)
I am a huge fan of the Mormon pioneers. Our story of exodus is compelling, and you don’t have to live in Utah or be a descendant of the pioneers to appreciate them. This week, on Thursday, the 24th of July, Salt Lake City will remember the occasion as it always does, with the Days of ‘47 parade. If you are within 100 miles of SLC it is worth attending, if only to see President Monson wear a cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat (white, of course).
Our prayers and our tears are with Artemis from FMH tonight. Words fail.
I fully expected to write a review of The Dark Knight at some point, a review that weighed in on the superior acting merits of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, and especially Gary Oldman, but having just seen it with my wife for our date night, my ideas have taken a markedly different turn.
I remember when The Crow came out in 1994, its first posters carried the tagline, “Darker than the bat.” That was a badge of honor, you see. The highest compliment our popular lexicon can now bestow upon anything is that it is dark. When was the last time you saw something lauded in the media that wasn’t termed edgy?
The “bat” that The Crow was comparing itself to, of course, was Batman, and the newest installment of that series is the apotheosis of our society’s obsession with darkness. I knew that this movie would be about identity, and I wasn’t surprised to see a commentary on the nature of heroism, with its corollary of the demarcation of good and evil, develop; but I feel like I’ve been shocked out of a stupor by the “lessons” that The Dark Knight wishes to convey on those subjects.
(more…)
It’s Summer, and we are doing a fair amount of travelling. I’ve attended meetings in a different place for four consecutive Sundays, and it has caused me to do some thinking about the way we define community.
Complaints against the machinations of culture today have become as poisonous as the things complained of. This is not surprising. Resentment and indignation are feelings dangerous to the possessor and to be sparingly used. They give comfort too cheaply; they rot judgment, and by encouraging passivity, they come to require that evil continue for the sake of the grievance to be enjoyed. –Jacques Barzun
It seems to me that many debates over hot-button issues in Mormondom–women’s roles, intellectual freedom, civil rights for gays, and many others–may fall into the trap Barzun points out. (more…)
Going through my library the other day, I found an old paperback of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. In the inside front cover I had written the following:
Purchased on Saturday 16 September 1995 at the American International School in Vienna, Austria during a school picnic in which we furnished a display about the Church and whose only success for us was a little boy who wanted to buy an Articles of Faith card and a girl from Israel who took a Joseph Smith pamphlet and who, due to Church policy regarding citizens of Israel, we cannot teach anyway.
Einfach spass, gell? [Fun, eh?]*
Elder RJH
16/9/95 Austria Vienna Mission
__________
*Actually, I think it was fun, despite this early example of Ronanic sarcasm. At the very least we had a day off from knocking doors. The weather was good. We ate hot dogs and drank root beer. And we got to spend the day with some cool sister missionaries,** IIRC.
**One of whom is now KenJen’s sister-in-law. But she was cool before that.
Last week saw another round of back and forth between the LDS Church’s public relations department and the Principle Voices Coalition, an inter-denominational group advocating the awareness and rights of “fundamentalist Mormons.” It should be noted that Principle Voices is made up of independent fundamentalists and has associations with the Apostolic United Brethren (the Allred organization), the Work of Jesus Christ (the Centennial Park organization), and the Davis County Cooperative Society (the Kingston organization), but has no ties with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Colorado City/Hildale organization).
The LDS PR folks are again arguing that the word “Mormon” can only be properly applied to the LDS Church and its members, while Principle Voices maintains that the term applies to everyone whose faith derives from the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. (more…)
How much do Mormons really know about the Book of Mormon? Have we immersed ourselves in the text to the point where quotations from it are immediately recognizable, like long-lost friends? Or is our experience of the text more like attending our spouse’s family reunion, where we have a handful of very close connections but a much larger number of people who may be vaguely familiar but to whom we still need to be introduced? (more…)
I have two recurring dreams. They are both Mormon related. Dear Dr. Freud, what do they mean? (more…)
On NPR the other day, a reporter was interviewing a monk from a monastery in Austria who makes Youtube videos of himself and the other monks doing Gregorian chants. The monk said that these beautiful songs are just their routine morning prayers. So the reporter asked, “What are you praying for?” (more…)
I would like to make a proposal for the bloggernacle. If you are going to condemn someone for being a “bad Mormon,” please provide specific examples of bad behavior and the specific commandments being violated. Of course, it would be better to just shut up since, generally speaking, you ain’t their bishop and are in no position to judge them. But if you insist on so doing, please be specific.
I would tentatively outlaw comments about the following that do not feature peer-reviewed evidence or evidence that is substantiated in some other trustworthy manner:
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