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Please justify your choice below. Don’t be ashamed of it either because the circle of our love, it goes forever. Take your time, we will wait for you.

Although it won’t come off this way, this is me at my least self-righteous. (more…)

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Please post your reasons for your answers below (also, ideally, pictures from the reception).

A minor rant. (more…)

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Please explain your choice below. Also, we deliberately rejected tomorrow as an option in the poll so consider all possible Obama jokes to have been made.

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Please post your reasons, aided by as many obscure GA quotes as possible, below.

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Please explain your choice in the comments.

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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Please explain your choice below.

Please post your comments below. Also, if you are a priesthood bearer, please put on a white shirt first if possible.

Please post your comments below. Also, keep it clean, people!

I generally expect one talk that will knock my socks off, two or three that will become important to me once the Ensign comes out, one or two that I will find silly for some reason or another (pickle analogy, I’m looking at you), several that don’t interest me terribly much but that will seem relatable when I read them later in the year in the Ensign.
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Today, if you will indulge me in a quirk, I want to talk about why we aren’t animals. (more…)

I was reading a post at Times and Seasons today and several people were commenting on how they believed that the war chapters were placed there for our own needs, specifically saying that they thought they would come in handy in the next few years. Apparently, these folks are reading the Book of Mormon for military tactics. This strikes me as a particularly bad way to read it.
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Generally speaking, in discussing Alma 32, we forget to focus on the good parts. (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…)

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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So, I am sure that you are all anxiously awaiting a report on our ward’s girls’ camp. It turns out that, at the last minute, the location was changed, it rained throughout, the location was changed again when everyone’s tents leaked, and finally many of the girls got stomach flu. So, a good time was had by all. (more…)

Over the course of the FLDS-Texas debacle it became somewhat common to hear commentators finding in LDS support for the civil and familial rights of the FLDS a kind of holy envy. Much as reformed Jews are often characterized as having deep respect for the Orthodox who keep all the mitzvot, we were occasionally portrayed as having some sort of buried respect and nostalgia for the patriarchy and pedophilia of the FLDS (which, in turn, may cause one to question the nostalgia of our detractors, but that is another topic).

I would suggest that our vigorous objections to the manner in which Texas Child Protective Services behaved comes from several sources, not a one of which consisted of our collective secret desire for unclipped hair. (more…)

I am not being snarky with this. I am genuinely interested. In the church, we often draw distinctions between how the world seeks to undermine the family and the church seeks to promote it. My question is “What exactly do we teach about the family that is contrary to some commonly held scholarly, social, or journalistic teaching about the family?” In this, I am not talking about morality in general (teen pregnancy and all that); I am specifically interested in the differences between what the world teaches and what the church teaches regarding family. Please elaborate them specifically for me.

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…)

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…)

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…)

So, I am only just now listening to the Zeitcast. And I have a question regarding the efficacy of Patriarchal blessings.

If you are all like me and, therefore, have a spotty record on the whole following the prophet’s commands regarding R-rated movies issue, then you have probably have seen the Matrix. (more…)

The winner of the play in game was Sterling McMurrin who beat Clarissa Williams 61-39, obviously indicating that the church in the next century will devote less money to helping the helpless and more to pursuing a systematic understanding of Mormon Doctrine and belief.

On to today’s combatants! (more…)

Today’s play-in game is between Clarissa Williams and Sterling McMurrin.

Sister Williams was in the General Relief Society Presidency from 1901 to 1928, serving as the President from 1921 to 1928. She was active in the creation of funds and programs for the care of the underprivileged in the church and the handicapped. She was an able leader and a graceful woman, by all the accounts available in 5 minutes of internet research. For more information on Sis. Williams, please go here, here, and here.

Brother McMurrin was an LDS intellectual whose attempted excommunication has become the stuff of legend. Brother McMurrin wrote The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (which is sometimes discussed in the bloggernacle), clashed with the brethren over the doctrine regarding blacks and the priesthood, and was briefly President Kennedy’s Commissioner of Education.

Whoever wins will go on to challenge Sis. Okazaki, so I don’t necessarily believe either is long for this earth. (more…)

After careful deliberation, we give you the bracket for this month’s tournament. Please remember that the question we are seeking to answer is: “Which 20th century person has had the most influence on the 21st century church?”

You can see the bracket (in xls format) here. Please feel free to discuss it amongst yourselves and make some bold predictions regarding outcomes. The tournament itself will begin with a play-in game next Tuesday (Mar 18th) between Sterling McMurrin and Clarissa Williams beginning at noon.

Thank you for your participation.

[The bracket has been fixed. Although, shouldn't we all be expecting historical inaccuracies from me by now?]

You may have known that it is impossible to access YouTube at the BYU (a tragic loss brought home every time Bro. Evans tries to send me a link to some offensive video).

But did you know that the following is on the custom block list for BYU:

A Google search for the terms “temple endowment”

Please discuss.

It appears that I was mistaken as several other people had no problem. This is not my first screw up in pointing out oddities at BYU. This post appears to have mistaken a computer glitch for a campus-wide policy. Please continue to go about your business.

There has been some recent controversy regarding influence on the church in the twentieth century. Rather than arguing the historical facts, the doctrinal shifts, and the devotional adjustments, I say that we use the power of the internet to decide.

To that end, I am proposing 20th Century March Mormon Madness. A webpoll tournament to decide who the most influential 20th century Mormon is. I (and my crack team of Mormon bracketologists) will take your top 64 suggestions and pit them against one another. We promise fabulous bragging rights to the person with the most accurate bracket (when we promised a prize last time, I don’t think we followed through). The question that will be asked of each candidate is “Which 20th century person has had the most influence on the 21st century church?”

You have until Friday to submit your suggested influencers. The bracket will be developed over the weekend and the first rounds will be conducted next week sometime, I think, maybe. In any case, get excited!

it is not my fault. It is not your bishop’s, your parents’, your friends’, or your teachers’ fault. It isn’t because of a book you read, a study you studied, an article you perused, a blog post you questioned, or a scripture you examined. It isn’t because you have been lied to your whole life, you were abused as a child, God gave your mom cancer, or Bill Clinton became president. It isn’t because of blacks and the priesthood, women and the priesthood, the priesthood, tithing on gross vs. net income, porn, sex, boy scouts, homosexuality, or double standards. It isn’t because the church is imperfect, the church members are imperfect, the church is on average worse than other churchs, the church believes itself to be the “only true and living” church, or your mission.

You lost your faith because you lost your faith. That’s all. You made a choice. You can choose one thing or choose another. This you chose. You are not a victim in this; you are where you are. That I (or another) have made different choices doesn’t really matter in this. I cannot give you faith just as I cannot take it away. My blogging, such as it is, is an expression of my testimony, such as it is. As such, it may inspire, disgust, baffle, enlighten, or bloviate. It may or may not work for you; it always works for me. C’est la vie.

So, to recap, your testimony is a product of your interactions with and expectations of God. I don’t have control over it. What you do with it is your decision. And that’s just fine.