Settling an old one

As you may or may not know, the Lion House was one of Brigham Young’s homes, but it is now run by the Mormon church as a reception center, and it has a restaurant. I don’t know how long the image will be live, but this link shows an image of the daily menu for the Lion House Pantry (the name of the restaurant) for this past January. Note that one of the entrées is [drum roll] Coca-Cola pork.

I’m glad that the church has embraced cola beverages, so we can stop arguing about caffeine and start arguing over important things, like whether women must wear nylon stockings to church or not.

Bless those hands!

Why do we so often pray before meals and ask God to “bless this food, that it will nourish and strengthen our bodies”?* I mean, we’re supposed to be thankful for our food, but instead we ask for it to be blessed.** So: Why?

* I’m deliberately ignoring the folks who pray for God to “bless the hands that prepared it”, ’cause it always leaves me wondering what’s wrong with my hands that they need such a targeted blessing.

** This is especially fun when it’s something that one might not ought even call food, like the pound cake and red Kool-Aid that was once served after a baptism i attended.

What do you want from life?

The following is an excerpt from a conversation last evening between Jeanne and our 11-year-old daughter. They’d made a social visit to a woman who Jeanne’s assigned to as a visiting teacher, and she (the woman they visited) shared some cookies she’d just baked with them. On the way home, the conversation apparently turned to goals, and what our child wants to be like when she grows up:

	11-year-old:	Those cookies were really good.
	Jeanne:	Yeah, she bakes really well.
	11-year-old:	One day i want to be just like that.
	Jeanne:	You want to learn how to bake?
	11-year-old:	No. I want to visit teach someone who makes good cookies.

Teaching our children priorities and goal-setting: We’re doing it right.

Offensive!

So, just as some of you may have, i heard the news yesterday that Idaho’s liquor stores won’t be stocking Five Wives Vodka, made by Ogden’s Own Distillery, because it is (quoting from the newspaper article about it here) “offensive to Mormons who make up over a quarter of Idaho’s population”. And this isn’t just the reporter editorializing—the letter sent from Idaho’s regulatory commission actually used the word “offensive”.

And you know, i think they’re entirely right! You can’t have state-controlled liquor stores carrying products that are offensive to segments of the population that…aren’t remotely likely…to walk into…any of those stores…

Oh, wait.

Tradition!

Easter weekend traditions we’re celebrating this year at the David B and family home:

• Having an Easter feast with, as its centerpiece, a pork shoulder brined overnight in a cola beverage (in order of preference, Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola, or—the one we have to use this year—Pepsi, whichever we can most easily get in a made-with-real-sugar variety)
• Listening to a recording of David Sedaris’s reading of his own essay, “Jesus Shaves”
• Watching Jesus Christ Superstar

In other news, it’s fun occasionally making our fellow Mormons’ heads explode.

Marking devotion

As some of you know, a part of my scholarly research deals with the relationship between religious affiliation and devotion on the one hand, and language use on the other. Right now i’m at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, and in discussing this topic with other researchers, an interesting couple of questions about ways Mormons mark themselves as devout or not came up, and i didn’t know the answer—so i’m crowdsourcing it.

We all know that devout Mormons don’t drink coffee or tea (as in infusions made from tea leaves). Some Mormons mark themselves as extra devout by abstaining from all caffeine-containing foods, but with chocolate (in both liquid and solid forms) excepted. So, the questions:

1. Are there any Mormons who mark themselves as hyper-devout by choosing to abstain from chocolate due to its caffeine content?
2. How do fundamentalist (i.e., polygynous) Mormons mark themselves in terms of abstaining or not abstaining from any of these food and drink items?

In which David B reveals a pet peeve

Okay—sometimes Mormons just annoy me. Today’s issue? Mormons who get all superior by comparing fasting practices in Mormonism with fasting practices in other religions—or, even worse, saying that what folks in other religions do isn’t “real fasting”. You know the meme—saying followers of Islam aren’t really fasting ’cause the Ramadan fast lasts sunrise to sunset rather than twenty-four hours (while ignoring that these are people who are doing this for weeks at a time!), or that the Roman Catholic (among others) Lenten fast doesn’t count ’cause they’re not giving up all food and drink.

I mean, this is just wrong on many levels, not least because there’s no set definition of what would count as “real fasting”, anyway—there’s nothing magic about it involving food (let along food and drink), or about it being twenty-four hours at a go. And this is a meme i’ve heard multiple times in multiple places over the course of many years. Unfortunately, it’s considered impolite to throw an eraser at someone for saying idiotic things, or there’d be a lot of Mormons out there with chalk dust upside their heads.

Truth from the lips of a child

Thanksgiving is widely described as a “family holiday”, and so in honor of the day i give you a quote from a member of my family (my 10-year-old daughter) earlier today:

Hot chocolate is the Mormon coffee.

Wisdom and insight, straight from a child.

Opposition in a few things

Mini-rant: I’m tired of the overuse (not to mention misuse) of the “opposition in all things” line. For the record, it pretty clearly does not mean that, for example, one needs to taste straight lemon juice in order to properly appreciate chocolate.

However, the judicious addition of lemon to dark chocolate, yeah, i’ll admit that can only help.

I can’t help but ask these questions

The scriptures talk about “stirring the hearts of men up to anger”. Is this as opposed to “pureeing the hearts of men up to anger”?

If it’s inside it doesn’t count

A friend of mine reports on her blog* that the women in her ward got chocolates this past Mothers Day.

All really very unremarkable—chocolates are a very ordinary default Mothers Day gift in our church, after all.

Well, unremarkable except for the latte fillings the ones from her ward had, that is.

* Which i’m not linking to, since she regularly includes details about her children on it.

Wherein David B falls back into his natural habitat, the pun

A speaker in a church meeting i was in recently was talking about food storage, and pointed out that you need to rotate through food and water in your storage so that you don’t end up throwing stuff out as waste after you keep it past its shelf life. To aid in this, the speaker suggested dating your food and water supplies.

Date ’em? I hardly even know ’em!

Sacramental bread

I have been in wards where there was a strong local directive to only use white bread (as a symbol of purity, i suppose). I’ve also been in wards where there was a strong local directive to only use whole-grain bread (to match up with the Last Supper, i suppose).

Why not just recognize that it makes no difference, and not give any such directive at all?

White Lines (Don’t Do It)

Reposted, with permission, from the Combs Family* blog:

There was a woman dealing little baggies of a powdery white substance out of the trunk of her car in the church parking lot today.

Suspicious, huh?

Rewind to Relief Society…

“Hey ladies, Sister Blank ended up with a Costco size box of baking powder and won't be able to use it all before it expires. She has separated it out into some bags and if you would like to take some stop by her car after church. She doesn’t want it to go to waste.”

A bunch of Mormon ladies in a parking lot attracting attention. Over baking supplies.

Well, I thought it was funny.

And so did i, i must say.

* Written by Meggan Combs, someone who i actually know not just from the ’net, but from Real Life™. Yes, believe it or not, such things are possible these days.

For all the Mormon MBAs out there

It's worth remembering that the plain text of the Word of Wisdom says that Mormon-made sacramental wine is acceptable. There's gotta be a Mormon entrepreneur out there who sees a money-making opportunity in that.

Against overextension

God seems to be into dietary restrictions without regard to whether it's a health thing or not. (Consider the prohibition on shellfish in the Mosaic code, and on meat sacrificed to idols in the early Xian church.) I think we've done ourselves a disservice by treating the Word of Wisdom as a “health code”—it's not, it's a dietary restriction. Full stop.

Family home evening refreshments, part two

Another thought on the over-the-pulpit instruction i’ve received that family home evening doesn’t count as family home evening unless refreshments (specifically, sweets) are served. Jeanne’s reaction to that was to realize that we now have a church-approved definition of family home evening: A caloric bribing of children to sit still that begins and ends with a prayer.

Family home evening refreshments

Some months ago i was instructed, from over the pulpit in sacrament meeting, that family home evening doesn’t count as family home evening unless refreshments (specifically, sweets) are served. I’m glad to know that my church leaders are on the lookout for ways to promote unhealthy associations between wholesome family activities and the holy trinity of fat/​sugar/​jello—that’s the sort of thing that helps me sleep better at night.

Drinking tea

The German-language missionary discussions, at least back in the 90s, specifically said that Schwartzentee ‘black tea’ was forbidden. Tee ‘tea’ wasn't the word used, since that would have forbidden Kräutertee ‘herbal tea’, which is a different linguistic category in German. Interestingly, though, so is Grünentee ‘green tea’.

Therefore, given what we were teaching German speakers and what i got taught as an English speaker as i was growing up, i’ve wondered for a good while whether it’s legit for German-speaking Mormons to drink green tea, but not for English-speaking Mormons.