Written by Aileen

Aileen is a frequent commenter and erstwhile Seattleite.

It was two years ago this December, my youngest, our fourth, had just been born. I was returning to the rituals of sitting on the couch every 2 hours to feed his hungry mouth. This was a pattern I knew well. Book in hand, boppy pillow and baby, I plopped down. The book that started this babe’s ritual with me was Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. You may know it. I didn’t. The cover caught my eye with promises of homicide and religion – the makings of a good story – but, better yet, it was true. I was fascinated. (more…)

I feel blessed in that the testimonies in my ward are usually pretty good. We don’t have that one crazy person most wards have who gets up every month and dominates the meeting with absurd ramblings. We have our fair share of the typical formularity (”I know X is true”), but usually these assertions are grounded in stories of personal experience, which makes them both interesting and moving to me. (more…)

Mormons are unusal among Christians for being aware of a fairly obscure Jewish tradition to the effect that there was an expectation not of a single messiah, but of two, one the Messiah ben David (ben means “son of,” in this case in the sense of “descendant of”) and the other the Messiah ben Joseph. Mormon interest in the Messiah ben Joseph tradition has focused on various ways in which Joseph Smith can be described as fitting into that tradition. Lots of Mormon writers have written on this topic, including Skousen, Madsen, Tvedtnes, and many more. (more…)

A good (LDS) friend recently pointed out a common Christian belief that the word Christian means little Christ. He explained that friends of his had urged this meaning on him, that this explanation is everywhere, and he wanted to know whether there really was a sound Greek basis for it. I was stunned, because I’ve never heard such an idea, but when I googled

greek christian “little christ”

I got over 1200 hits, and just perusing the first couple of pages it is clear that this idea is absolutely ubiquitous. It is also absolutely wrong. (more…)

At Women’s Conference this year, Sister Elaine S. Dalton, the General YW President issued a challenge to the conference participants, which she also reiterated at a recent youth conference in my region. (more…)

That’s the number connecting me to Eve and Adam — at least by one count on one line. When I was a kid, our ward had a large chart entitled THE ROYAL LINE hanging on the wall near the library. The chart traced lineage from Adam to Judah through European kings like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great to modern leaders including Queen Victoria, George Washington, FDR, and the prophet Joseph Smith.
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Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons will be shown on Tuesday, Sept. 16, at the Varsity Theater in Seattle. Seating is at 6:30, with the screening starting promptly at 7:00. Margaret Young and Darius Gray will be on hand for a question-and-answer session afterwards. Please arrive early to ensure seating. See the image below for details.

On the train coming home from work yesterday, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Wordgasm game for adults builds vocabulary skills.” It was about a woman who created a dvd series called Wordgasm, using racy poems, saucy songs and sex to help adults build verbal prowess. (more…)

I’ve recently returned from working in a conflict zone for the past two years. This is the first in a series of posts about how the heck I’m supposed to live in America now….I’m generally befuddled.

There’s not a whole lot to do at night when you live in an aluminum container converted into living quarters. You can take a shower, brush your teeth, surf the ‘net occasionally when the link is up, and watch your dvds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over and over again. Then you’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities. So to stave off boredom and to relieve a certain amount of job stress, I actually developed a good habit, which frankly surprises me and is somewhat out of character. Anyways, extreme conditions call for extreme actions, so I started exercising. Nothing too intense, but I would walk around the track surrounding our compound for about an hour every night. I’m quite sure that the guards snickered when I was passing and were taking bets about when I’d give up, but I just cranked up the Metallica and chose not to care. Here’s the surprising part, which I’m sure some people have discovered, it feels good to exercise. See, there are these things called endorphins and they make you feel groovy. Also, and this is shocking, exercise leads to weight loss, decrease in stress, and general heart health. I felt like a genius–in on a little secret that only a few people know…the beautiful people.

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Many have highlighted the LDS Newsroom’s very interesting coverage of the discussions surrounding Proposition 8, in particular the document entitled, “The Divine Institution of Marriage.” The analysis of this document and the arguments and doctrine it contains I leave to more talented and audacious bloggers than myself (suffice it to say that like any other political document, it contains things that I find convincing and things I do not), but what I find infinitely more interesting than the immediate squabble over Prop 8 is the nature of the Newsroom itself and this document in particular. “The Divine Institution of Marriage” gives us an opportunity to revisit and microwave one more time that most rewarmed of topics, that of defining and delineating our notions of what constitutes doctrine. (more…)

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some before-school-starts conversations with my colleagues in the English department. One of them said that his best students had always been from Southern Idaho. “Nobody had ever told them there were things they couldn’t do,” he said. “So they’d just do them. Of course, that has changed. Television and the internet changed all of that.”

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I recently sat down with Craig L. Foster via email and we discussed topics relating to two of his recently published works. (more…)

Bloggernacle voices (and I’m one of them) often point out that church structurally disadvantages women in a number of important ways. Women are denied the formal leadership structure of the Priesthood; limited in other official roles; subjected to a variety of messages. Indeed, an outside observer might think, from reading bloggernacle posts alone, that women would be fleeing in droves from this anti-feminist church, leaving behind only a foul-smelling, unshaven, male-populated shell of an organization.

They would be wrong. In fact, women seem to consistently be the most active church members. This is perhaps the trickiest conceptual problem for the Mormon feminist: Explaining the appeal of this anti-feminist church to so many actual women. If the church is such a bad place for women — and conversely, such an unfairly good place for men — then why are women so much more likely to attend church? (more…)

Everyone, please join me in giving a big big welcome to our newest permablogger, Rebecca J. We started begging her to join after her wonderful guest posts, and eventually she accepted — if only to get us off her back. All hail Rebecca!

Last year Elder Ballard told graduates of BYU-Hawaii to use new media to spread the gospel, and the exhortation was repeated to all church members in a cover story in last month’s Ensign. Among other things, members were encouraged to "create videos that illustrate aspects of your membership in the Church and post them on video sharing sites like YouTube."

In the grand tradition of Bloggernacle presumptuousness, I’ve presumed to take it upon myself to compile a preliminary progress report for Elder Ballard. Humbly submitted: the good, the bad, and the ugly of Mormons on Youtube. (more…)

Modern instruction seems simple enough when it comes to keeping our covenants.  Consider the following suggestions, chosen for their typicality, that appeared in my Sunday school today:

“When you seek entertainment such as movies, television, the Internet, music, books, magazines, and newspapers, be careful to watch, listen to, and read only those things that are uplifting.  Dress modestly.  Choose friends who encourage you to reach your eternal goals.  Stay away from immorality, pornography, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs.”

I can’t blame you if you skipped the above - this advice is by now overly familiar.  But, I want to suggest that while this advice is sound, even worth being reminded of, it is troublesome that it dominates current discussions of what it means to keep the commandments. (more…)

When I was a Beehive (the first class in Young Women’s back in the 1960’s), my teacher was an adorable newlywed named Cindy Clark. She simply sparkled. She and her husband, Steve, eventually had a gaggle of equally sparkly and creative children (one of whom took a class from me and brilliantly, delightfully broke every rule I gave).

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If you have ever been to Nauvoo, the chances are very good that you have visited the Scovil Bakery.  The original owners were Lucius and Lucy Scovil (sometimes written as Scoville), and it is located on the west side of Main Street, south of the LDS visitor’s center.  If you were lucky, the missionaries at the bakery gave you a gingerbread cookie. (more…)

Note: this is the first installment of a planned three-part series on the interaction between the body and the spirit. Today’s essay deals with the effects of external biological factors on moral agency and personality; future installments will deal with our bodies’ effects on the same, and the effects of both on our relationships with God.

How much of what we often consider essential parts of our characters - personality, intellectual capacity, or moral inclinations, for example - is truly, essentially us? How much is neurochemistry, or hormone function, or even interaction between brain structure and the environment? In other words, where does the body leave off, and the spirit begin?

About four years ago, a doctor put me on an antidepressant to treat my lifelong chronic insomnia and depression. The medicine worked like gangbusters; suddenly, I could sleep, and the nearly constant despair and dissatisfaction with which I had always struggled disappeared. According to my physician, my body has some sort of major dopamine shortfall; the medicine provides that dopamine, or something close enough for government work. (more…)

The third installment of our ongoing look at that most charming column of the Daily Universe. Previous installments can be read here and here.

A white male was noticed standing nude on the east side of the tennis courts Tuesday at 1 p.m. Some female students noticed him and called the police. He ran away upon being noticed. Police are still investigating. (more…)

In an admittedly brief meditation on issues associated with an earlier post in which I asserted that certain youth programs bear much blame for having young people leave the church, I began mulling over two big ideas: 1) epistemology, or how we know, and 2) ontology, or who or what we are. One of the great intellectual battles of the 20th century was fought over which philosophical perspective was of greater priority. With the extraordinary achievements of science and technology, the apparent certainty of their knowledge and its universal applicability, epistemology seemed to have carried the day. One reason we want to know something with certainty is simply to know in the same way that physicists or mathematicians know their stuff. So, when we want to sound certain or to express certainty, we usually find ourselves using an epistemological vocabulary or trying to adapt or mimic such a method. I might therefore say, I aver that Socrates lived in Athens in the 5th century. I can say this with some confidence because the relatively meager evidence of Socrates’ life fits the general method I employ. (more…)

There was a guy in the ward where I grew up who was a half-generation older than me. He was extremely cool, a handsome man, smart with a great personality, and we younger boys all sort of idolized him. (He later would be my SP and do a term as an AA70). From time to time he would mention a phenomenon that he claimed occurred at BYU, which he called senior panic. Senior panic is when you’re cruising along at the Y having a great old time and all of a sudden you realize it’s your senior year, and you haven’t managed to get married yet. And, knowing full well what the young adult singles scene is like back home (not much there), you begin to panic and get a little bit desperate to find someone to seal the deal with. (more…)

This is adapted from a journal entry in spring 2002, about six months after I had moved to Helsinki. Names and details have been changed, but the mixed feelings I had at the time about my own mission and missionary work generally have been left intact. Any efforts to alter those feelings are several years too late.

So I went on a teach with the missionaries last night.

They are the kind of missionaries that I disliked on my mission — humorless, scanning everything for its righteousness quotient, earnest to the point of callowness. They know the missionary book forward and backward, but they don’t seem to know anything else. Needless to say they’re ZLs. (more…)

Mormons are, generally speaking, afraid of bars. This is because people drink alcohol in bars and we do not. It is because we want to avoid the appearance of evil. It is because we want to stand in holy places (really drunk old men are not holy), and it is because we don’t like to look like total dorks who don’t know how to navigate the society of the bar. This leads others to believe that we are self-righteous, uptight and boring. This is not true, as evidenced by our impressive skills at boardgames, relay races (where one might carry an egg in a spoon) and charades.

It is my mission to help us feel a little more comfortable (and a little less nerdy) when we are occasionally obligated to be in a bar with others who drink.

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Mormons from all over the U.S. come to BYU the last part of August to get some education. Speakers are approved, and classes offered in everything from ancient scripture to advanced scrapbook techniques. (more…)

Perhaps not unlike our current Church President, Heber J. Grant was fond of telling stories in Church meetings. He told of the time when Eliza R. Snow blessed him at least five times in General Conference that I have found; and I have run across journal entries that described him telling the story at various stake conferences. It seems that he was also fond of a particular humorous story on politics and repeated it at General Conference at least four times that I have seen: (more…)

Trying to decide what to tell your kids, if anything, about suicide is horrible. My husband’s brother took his own life Thursday. And I’m still waiting for the blast waves to wash over this already fragile family of mine. My husband and his mom are flying to bury their brother/son; the ache and sadness are beyond words. It’s coloring everything I see and feel- including the sunrises I’ve been watching because I cannot sleep. I just cry and cry, and I wasn’t even close to this sibling. It’s unfathomably sad he felt suicide was his best choice. Those left behind are fractured and devastated. (more…)

I am not a fan of fasting. I like my food. Still, I fast once a month on Fast Sunday. I didn’t when I was pregnant or nursing, which means that for about ten years I fasted maybe a grand total of six times. One of the reasons I was apprehensive about weaning my youngest was that I knew I would have to start fasting again, and boy-howdy, I do not like to fast. I was looking forward, however, to my husband not being the big fasting martyr of the house. That routine gets old–but I digress. (more…)

Recently at a gathering of Saints surveys were distributed with the following question: “What do you consider to be the most vexing/difficult criticism of the Church?” There were 71 responses. My own, decidedly unZiffian tabulation of the results follows. (Many respondents listed more than one, so the numbers won’t all add up to 71.) The numbers in parentheses are the number of people who mentioned the issue. The envelopes, please: (more…)

The world of Mormon books is a bizarre landscaped marked by all sorts of characters. There are different subsets of the market to be sure – everything from consumer schlock to handcrafted scholarly masterworks. The Joseph Smith Papers Project offering of limited leather-bound volumes in addition to their regular cloth-bound editions (which were recently raised to $50 from $40 a volume) is one manifestation of that. Get one signed by Esplin and certified to have been in the possession of Dean Jessee and you might have yourself a little nest egg. While it is true that digitization has thankfully changed things, there is still a tremendous desire to have the book in our hands (perhaps a lingering nostalgia for our golden plates). (more…)