I have in the back of my pantry a file cabinet with a lot of old files. Some are notes from my college classes; some are files on Church subjects. There are files on things like New Testament, Book of Abraham, JST, Old Testament, Modern Scripture, and so forth. There is also a thick miscellaneous file of Church stuff with the captioned label. These are not active files; I haven’t added to them for probably 20 years or so. So the archivist in me was curious: What did I think was of sufficient import or interest that I decided to save it in a file? The following inventory of that file contains the answer: (more…)

This will be the Message from the Bishopric in the November ward newsletter (after being translated into Finnish, natch). Just a bit of devotional for the holiday.

I am always touched as I go past a cemetery on Pyhäinpäivä (All Saints Day) and see all the candles. I appreciate the effort so many people make to honor their dead, and I think a little about what the gospel has taught me about death. (more…)

It’s not like I’ve not been to Czechoslovakia before. Back when I was serving in the US Cavalry (and despite what my kids think I did not ride a horse and rescue settlers) we would sometimes get out of our small fast cavalry tanks and patrol the Czech boarder on foot, following old snow-covered footpaths through cold, fog enshrouded forests. We would occasionally pass white stone boarder markers, in size about six inches square and standing a little less than knee high, which marked the boundary between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At one of these markers while my sergeant wasn’t looking I stuck my foot inside the border. (more…)

Late this summer, I took my six year-old son Jeffrey on his first road trip. Headed to Salt Lake for a conference, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for bonding time before school started. It might have been quicker to fly, but seriously, road trips are a rite of passage I wanted to share with him. There would be other kids at the conference, and I would have plenty of free time. He was excited to go, and piled his pillows and toys in the backseat with puppy-like exuberance.

Ten hours and a ghastly amount of “Are we there yet?” later, we pulled into our Salt Lake City hotel. Our room was right off the pool, and I promised my tired boy we would hit the water as soon as we got dinner. We unpacked and decided to walk to a restaurant up the street. (more…)

Alfred Edersheim (1825 – 1889) was a Jewish convert to Christianity and a Biblical scholar. He is best known for his book The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883).

As part of a new series by Cedar Fort — “Spiritual Context-LDS Perspectives” — Marianna Edwards Richardson’s book, Alfred Edersheim: a Jewish Scholar for the Mormon Prophets, discusses the impact of Edersheim’s work on Mormon writers such as Roberts, Talmage, Fielding Smith, and McConkie. (more…)

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

A female student walking on East Campus Drive was hit in the back by a substance similar to chocolate pudding. The victim was unable to identify the suspects but said they may have been driving a red four-door car. The victim said the impact of the chocolate pudding hurt her back but did not require medical attention. (more…)

I had a wonderful time at this conference last year and am glad to post the call for papers.

Religions and Critical Practices
Prospects for Scholarship in the Humanities
May 8-9, 2009
BYU Provo and Aspen Grove, UT

A conference sponsored by Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (more…)

As an 11-year old in 6th grade, I filled out a worksheet that asked me to rank my Top Ten Values (from a list of eleven). This is what I came up with… (more…)

If you were to watch British television at the moment, you would see that virtually every public figure is wearing a small red poppy. Poppies are worn at this time of year as we approach Armistice Day. They are worn to remember our war dead and to raise money for a veterans’ charity. I’ll be wearing one on my lapel at work and at church until Remembrance Sunday.

Most people support this symbol and a slight majority will wear one. Remembering the war dead seems like a praiseworthy thing to do. There are a few dissenters, however. (more…)

This past week has marked the 1-year anniversary of having to flee our home due to the SoCal wildfires.

Our house is on the left edge of one of the clusters of red dots in this photo. The following are quotes from status update emails I sent to my family at the time, and some memories and reflections.
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Please post your reasons, aided by as many obscure GA quotes as possible, below.

In my last post, someone asked about Bible translations (a question that regularly comes up), and I offhandedly mentioned that I perceive some Evangelical bias in the New International Version (NIV). Someone asked about that, so I thought I’d take a shot at explaining what I meant. (more…)

“I have a testimony that God can help us find the answers to our questions. I was trying to find out the difference between anti-neutrons and neutrons. I googled it, but the first link I clicked on didn’t really explain it. Then God told told me to look it up again when I failed the first time. So I clicked on a different link, and I found a site that had some information about them, including the difference. A neutron is made of an electron and a proton, but an anti-neutron is made of a positron and an anti-proton.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

We spent the rest of sacrament meeting giggling over silly anti-matter jokes. Like: If Nephi and Lehi lived in an anti-matter universe, what would they be?

If you’ve been waiting for someone at BCC to post an opinion of the current election, here it is. (more…)

I have a friend, Rob, an English teacher from Dublin. He’s posh in an Irish-Catholic way, which is to say that he doesn’t seem posh, at least to me but probably only because my English ears have been prejudiced to hear the Irish lilt in ways other than posh. Turns out that his dad is a VIP in Irish public life and that Rob went to a prestigious Jesuit school. He wears velvet jackets and long hair, has whole sections of James Joyce memorised, and swears like, well, an Irishman. (more…)

The ‘Galileo affair’ is often replayed as a morality tale about irrational religion vs. enlightenment science. The truth is that it was a little more complex than that. Galileo was a firm believer in God. He was a good Catholic in fact. He believed the church was true. However, he ran afoul of the Pope in some, well, not to put too fine a point on it, ways that he should have seen coming. (more…)

Five years ago today, I took a very early morning flight from London to Stockholm, and then took a train to the suburb of Västerhaninge. There, on the temple grounds, I met Vaimoni for the first time in two months, who had taken the overnight ferry from Finland with her parents. My parents had also flown in from New York, where they were serving a mission. (When I asked if the mission president gave them permission to come to the wedding, my father said, ‘We let him know we were coming.’) It was an exciting moment: my parents and Vaimoni had not yet met, and since the two sets of parents didn’t share a common language, there was a flurry of translations. (more…)

What’s happening on Saturday, Nov. 1? The best Mormon symposium in all of the Northwest. Topics include: (more…)

In late September, 1994 I enjoyed a very fun camping and fishing trip with my family.  A week later in general conference, I heard Gordon B. Hinckley recommend that fathers should raise their children with the rod — the fishing rod.  I was thrilled with this new evidence that God agreed with me, and the next month when the Ensign came out, I made an unbearable nuisance of myself to everybody I knew, first showing them the words from the Ensign, then showing them pictures of our vacation, proving, proving!, that I was indeed on the Lord’s errand.  I basked in the warm glow of my own pride, while simultaneously claiming to be a humble follower of the Brethren. It was wonderful.
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The eighth installment of our ongoing look at that most charming column of the Daily Universe. Previous installments can be read here, here, here, here and here, here, and here.

Guest Starring: Adam Greenwood. Also, Steve Evans decided to start calling himself “Stephen,” to the hilarity of all.

Suspected Gunman

The Provo Police Department called the University Police for assistance after a jogger reported a man scaling a fence carrying a gun while exiting the Provo Temple grounds on Monday at 1:36 a.m. Police searched for the suspect but could not find anyone. Police think the witness could have mistaken a security guard for the suspect.
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Consider it your chance to interrupt Kaimi having fondue with the legendary (yes, he really exists!) Greg Call. Also, to discuss same-sex marriage. Really! (more…)

It is probable that, at this point in history, Brigham Young is the most widely misinterpreted individual in Mormon history. Until relatively recently, Joseph Smith would have been a clear winner in such a contest. But as we witness the spread of the historiographical revolution regarding Smith that began roughly with the 1945 publication of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and that seems to have entered something of a lull in the aftermath of Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, it would seem that many of the least plausible beliefs regarding Smith are waning rather than waxing. Such is probably not yet the case for Young. (more…)

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Please explain your choice in the comments.

Today is our first elderberry harvest. These tart, tiny berries flourish in our area, feeding mostly birds and the occasional human with the inclination to make juice or jelly from them. The bushes are wild and twisted, more like a colony of sinewy trees than a bush of berries. After bunches of berries are plucked, the process of separating them from their stalks begins. As I rubbed the berries, which range from a blue-nearly-black to a white like a luminescent blueberry, from their stalks (they are too small to grasp individually), I experienced a moment. Self-help books encourage us to “live in the moment,” a phrase that to me conjures more Amway, nutraceuticals, Bahamian beaches, and first-class air travel than Henry David Thoreau mooching off his mother in the woods beside Walden Pond. Today the moment came, as they so often do for me, in a nostalgic web of moments. (more…)

A good friend just told me about a bishop’s training meeting at which they were instructed, based on counsel given by a Seventy, that they are not to ask or suggest to “do not contact” members that they write a letter of resignation to remove their names. They were further taught to “check up” on these members about once a year. This raised for me a whole host of questions on the subject of do not contact lists and name removal. The purpose of this post is to solicit your opinions and experiences (especially given that these types of things often vary geographically). I’ll try to outline the issues I’m interested in below, but really anything related to the topic of name removal is on-topic for this thread. (more…)

I am now going to ask what appears to me to be a reasonable question. It comes from the deeply ambiguous feelings I have regarding the whole Prop 8 thing in California and similar legislation.
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Despite being a Mormon feminist, I confess there are times when I have been glad that our church does not demand of women what it sometimes does of men.  I believe in service and in the transformative power that comes from the life experience gained on a mission.  But I still have ambivalent feelings about proselyting, particularly about convincing others that our beliefs offer more than theirs, so I was glad when my gender allowed me to avoid the question of whether or not I would serve a mission.  My younger brothers, however, have no such luxury.  Although they share my ambivalence, a refusal on their parts to serve a mission entails a loss of their standing as good members and risks alienating friends and family.   They cannot wait, as I can, to serve a mission when I feel ready.  They must serve at age nineteen.

One of my brothers has now completed a mission, but the other still must decide if he will serve.  Since I have not served a mission, I feel that I am poorly equipped to respond to him with the empathy and understanding that I believe his questions demand.  But as I watch them struggle, I am convinced that it is important that they feel supported and not banished to a closet with their concerns.  So, I am writing this post as an open invitation for people to share their thoughts on how they would approach a full-time mission and on how they would reconcile their beliefs with mission goals and imperatives that are sometimes at odds with them.  I am beginning this thread by sharing a few insights that I have culled from conversations with those near me. (more…)

My conception of the planned Strangite Temple at Voree. (more…)

Three years ago, I sat in a nice café with Kris and her husband John. By the end of the dinner, it was evident that Kris and I shared a complimentary passion for Mormon history and an interest in its particulars. This week, the first fruits of our (if I may say) fabulous collaboration hit my mailbox in the form of the Fall 2008 issue of Journal of Mormon History. I am planning to do a non-critical review of the issue in the near future; but I thought I would throw up a brief outline of “‘They Shall Be Made Whole’: A History of Baptism for Health.” (more…)

A couple of months ago I was asked to give a lecture at Northwestern University as sort of a community outreach to the students there (not as a proselyting event). This was sponsored by the local LDS singles branch, and I was suggested as a speaker by my fellow blogger RT. They suggested three subjects, and I at first picked “polygamy,” thinking that if the goal was to attract a lot of non-LDS students that would be the surest draw. But the powers that be got cold feet for that particular topic, and I can’t say that I blame them. They came up with the captioned subject instead, which was fine with me as it was actually an easier preparation for me than polygamy would have been. (more…)

I found the following at a website for a Magazine called New Moon Girls. It is written by and for girls age 8 to 14 and this was in a section called “Ask a Girl.”

Dear Ask a Girl,
I’m 13 and I think I’m bisexual. I’ve liked boys before, but now I have a crush on a girl. This girl keeps me awake at night and I can’t seem to keep myself from thinking about what others would say if I asked her out. I know she supports homosexuality, and so does my family. I adore her so much it hurts sometimes! I would really like to ask her to be my girlfriend, but I am so worried about what she’ll say or do. This has been going on for two months and the headaches and stomachaches are getting worse! HELP!
Claire, 13

You can imagine my reaction! This was for preteen girls! And you are correct if you guessed I immediately pulled out (more…)