Drawing lines

Quick question, in case anyone out there knows: Is there an easy way to find out what ward boundaries are? I mean, i know that for my own ward it’d be easy* to ask the ward clerk, and for wards in my stake or nearby ones i could maybe ask a stake clerk, but is there a way i could just randomly check how many wards there are in, say, Munich, Germany and where the boundaries between them lie?

And i know i could go to the church’s website and repeatedly plug in addresses until i find addresses on either side of the boundary line, but that just seems astonishingly painful. Maybe—maybe!—it’d be worth it to find the boundaries between a single pair of adjacent church units, but for the wards in even a single city? No way.

(And yeah, yeah, i know, disappointment all around on two posts in a row with the serious tag. Back to more casual observations next time, i promise—but at least this one’s not the thoughtful type of serious, it’s just a request for information!)

* Really easy, in fact.

Sustaining and agreeing

A serious question today, one that’s been rolling around in my head for quite some time but that’s been indirectly crystallized by some interesting discussions going on over at Faith-Promoting Rumor lately:

When we vote* to sustain our church leaders, are we promising to agree with them?

There are a lot of people in the church who would say that the answer is yes—the whole “when the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done“ sort of approach.** This has been supported by some church leaders, too.*** On the other hand, there are declarations that go in the other direction—see, for example, all the stress in current policy on participants in ward council being open about their opinions including if they disagree with the bishop, and the importance of consensus decisions rather than top-down directives.

It’s an interesting tension—and maybe it’s there on purpose, and there’s no actual complete answer to my question. I don’t know, to be quite honest. Y’all’s thoughts?

* Yeah, i know, it’s the wrong word, but i’m going with it anyway.

** And yes, i know the history of that quote, and that the initial introduction of the line didn’t put it in a positive light. Doesn’t keep people from saying that’s the way we should be going about things, though.

*** See, for example and perhaps most famously or infamously (depending on your position on the issue), Ezra Taft Benson’s Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet address.

Violence and missionary work

I once heard a full-time missionary speak in sacrament meeting about people “getting hit with” the Book of Mormon, something completely new to them. I got this incredibly vivid image of missionaries bopping people over the head with Books of Mormon, causing the people to then fall into baptismal fonts.

Something about the “converting power of the Book of Mormon” should probably come here…

Hierarchies

I have come to a decision about administrative callings in the church:

Mission or temple president > stake president or bishop

Not because they’re more important or anything, but rather because even though they have to sit on the stand during church meetings, they get to hang out with their wives while they’re up there.

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.

Shall the youth of Zion tripfalter?

So the church has released a bunch of videos to go along with this year’s youth program theme. In one of them, a teenage boy talks about how passing the sacrament is the most wonderfully amazing feeling in the world for him.

I feel very happy for him, i really do—perhaps not least because when i was a teenager, you know what passing the sacrament felt like for me? Constant fear that i’d trip over my still-outsize-for-my-height feet and spill the bread or water all over the place. Not really the height of joy for me, you know?

Apparently i was already in training to be evil back then.

Fitting songs

Today for Mothers Day my ward didn’t sing “Love at Home”. Clearly, our bishop is now to the point of attempting outright heresy in order to get released.

p.s. Seriously, though, do we have a more grating song in our hymnal? It wouldn’t be so bad, i suppose, except that the musical setting lends itself to absolutely horrific congregational glissandos on the “love at home, love at home” lines. Maybe if we sang it as it was actually written it would be better—but i’m not entirely convinced of that.

The importance of place

I’ve heard people in church say—and often!—that the Restoration had to occur where it did geographically so that the Book of Mormon could come along as part of it. Was the timeline as it occurred really so necessary, though? Could the Restoration have occurred in, say, China with the Book of Mormon coming forth later (or maybe with the Restoration in China being accompanied by a record we don’t have yet)?

Really, i think it’s fun to imagine an alternate present in which Mormons bear testimonies about how blessed they are to live in China, the only place where the Restoration could have taken place, rather than in a less blesséd place like, say, the United States of America.

Being weepy

So this past Sunday was my ward’s testimony meeting. At one point a woman went up front to the podium, offered her testimony for a couple minutes, and then sat down. As she left the podium, my youngest* leaned over to me and said, softly but with clear surprise in her voice,

Oh! She didn’t need any kleenexes!

I’m glad to know that my child is learning all of the requisite cultural markers she’s going to need to survive the Mormon world as an adult.

* Three years old, which i think adds something to the story.

Never ask a lady her age

So the church just announced a batch of new mission presidents. Nothing unusual in the bunch, but when i was scanning through them, i noticed a bit of an oddity: In every case, the names of both the new (male, by virtue of church policy) mission president and his wife are given, but while every man has an age attached to his name, none of the women’s ages are given.

I have to wonder why. My favored (though, sadly, probably wrong) explanation is that it’s to keep anyone from figuring out whether they’ve broken the “half-plus-seven” rule.

Restoring

So the church has announced that they’re going to be restoring a rather important site in the history of the church: the area in Pennsylvania where the priesthoods were restored.* This led to an observation from my oldest child:

You mean they’re going to be restoring the restoration?

Yeah, i know, not even intended as a joke, but i found it amusing. But then again, i’m a word nerd.

* At some level, i’m a bit sad about this. I’ve been there a couple times, and the fact that it’s completely undeveloped (aside from an easy-to-miss historical marker) and remote always seemed to make it a nicely contemplative place. The price of progress, i suppose…

How our children is learning

I would like to express my gratitude for the spiritual lessons my children learn at church. Why, just about two weeks ago, one of my daughters learned a lesson in primary about service—and, as proof, brought this home:

It’s good to know that they’re learning such valuable lessons that will help them their entire lives.

Easter!

Okay, so i’d originally written a post for today that started

In honor of Easter, no snark…

But having just come back from church, i’ve changed my mind.

I just want to say, based on my knowledge of attendance numbers for a handful of wards over the past few years, that any Mormons who decide to praise the piety of adherents of our religion by making fun of “Christmas and Easter [insert name of other denomination here]s” are hereby entitled to be summarily slapped—we’ve got a whole lot of those amongst us, too, after all.

Still more proof that David B is evil

So i once heard the following story in a stake conference address, repeated here from memory:

On a beautiful college campus in Philadelphia* a dog had treed a squirrel. A bunch of people watched to see what would happen, but nobody intervened. Eventually the dog killed the squirrel by lulling it [the squirrel] into a false sense of security and then pouncing, and all the people felt guilty for not helping.

The speaker’s intended moral: We need to be aware of those around us, and help those who are in danger (especially spiritual danger, given the rest of the spearker’s address).

My take on the story: Yeah, it’s an interesting story with interesting applications, but i can’t help but be impressed by the intelligence of a dog that could lull another animal into a false sense of security. I mean, a dog that smart? That’s where my cheering interest lies.

Overarching lesson: Even Aesop’s fables sometimes have alternative morals to them.

* Of course, having gone to grad school in Philadelphia, i have to ask if there really is such a thing.

From the archives

So i was cleaning out old emails, and i found the exchange i’ve reproduced below. First there was a note from someone to another member of the family, HHH, who lives across the Atlantic Ocean but was planning a visit to the US:

The lesson in our nursery class calls for a mother and baby to come in and the mother tell the children how she takes care of the baby. HHH, would you be interested in doing that?

And i, who was cc:ed on all the travel planning, couldn’t resist replying with:

I vote, HHH, that you come in and say something like “When she cries too much, i hang her outside the window by a leather strap.” Or maybe “Diapers? What are those?”

Okay, maybe not. But just imagine the looks on all the grownups’ faces!

Flight to the US: $3,000
Lunch on the run in the airport: $25
Renting a car for a week: $500
Horrifying folks at church: Priceless

For some things, there’s MasterCard. For everything else, there’s the evil depths of David B’s imagination.

A prolixity of presidents

Why do we need presidents for adult Sunday school classes? Seriously—like the teacher can’t say hi to everyone and ask someone to say the prayers?

Why would we have a canon otherwise?

Really, really interesting quote, from Joseph Fielding Smith’s Doctrines of Salvation 3:203:

It makes no difference what is written or what anyone has said, if what has been said is in conflict with what the Lord has revealed, we can set it aside. My words, and the teachings of any other member of the Church, high or low, if they do not square with the revelations, we need not accept them. Let us have this matter clear. We have accepted the four standard works as the measuring yardsticks, or balances, by which we measure every man’s doctrine.

So, to those who propagate the meme that the words of the sitting prophet supersede the canon (as you occasionally hear in church classes, particularly around general conference time), i would like to point out that it was a prophet who said otherwise.

Doing wrong things (or, perhaps, doing things wrong)

As i read the Bible (and to a lesser extent the Book of Mormon), i sometimes think the entire reason the historical bits were included was to remind us that even God’s chosen can have flaws. I mean, Noah self-medicated with alcohol, Abraham lied when he was scared, David cheated on his wives, Peter doubted…

Interestingly, although you get hints of this even in the book of Doctrine and Covenants,* we don’t talk much about how God’s chosen have flaws these days. I mean, discussion of the personal flaws of, say, Brigham Young or Joseph Fielding Smith is pretty much out of bounds in Sunday school classes in ways that the personal flaws of David and Peter aren’t. I still can’t figure out why.

* I say “even” in that book because it doesn’t really contain much in the way of stories, and so one would naturally expect less of it there.

Parenting philosophies

A lot of Mormons i know* are frantic about their children attending one of the Brigham Young Universities,** believing that that sort of environment and the religious training their children would receive there is necessary for them (the children) becoming strong enough in Mormonism to stay in the faith throughout their adult lives.

Apparently, it’s sinful of me*** to think that it would be at least as useful for my children to go to Baylor or Catholic and take religion courses from other traditions—or, in fact, to go to Bryn Mawr or Penn or Maryland and have the option of taking religion courses that don’t even have a Faith background—and figure out how to apply those ideas to a Mormon context themselves, rather than receiving religious training where they wouldn’t have to work as hard to get through the struggle of making that application.

* And yes, i’m aware that this is a very middle- and upper-class group of Mormons i’m talking about.

** I figure that has to be the right plural—it’s better than any of the other obvious options, like Brigham Youngs University or somesuch—but it still doesn’t look right, for some reason.

*** Or so i’ve been told. No, seriously. I mean, only a couple of times, but i still find it a bit mindboggling.

Teach your children well

As some of you know, i used to be faculty at Brigham Young University. While i was there, i learned (somewhat to my surprise) that the full-time religion faculty at Brigham Young University do—or at least try to, it’s really up to the students to let them—teach the really important principles underlying our religion. The demand for religion courses there, though, what with them being required for graduation and all, means that a lot of the religion courses are taught by people who don’t have the same training in or dedication to the subject. In my opinion, this shortchanges the students there.

I don’t know how one would fix it, though—i mean, hiring more faculty is expensive. If we’re really serious about our church-owned schools as being places where people are trained deeply in the principles of the gospel, though, it might be worth the investment.

A semantics lesson

So here’s my thinking:

If i talk about my green sweater, then that implies that i also have at least one non-green sweater.

Therefore, if we start a prayer by addressing our kind and gracious Heavenly Father, doesn’t than mean we have at least one non-kind and/or non-gracious…

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Sunday afternoon session

And now we get to the mellow session of general conference—the casual listeners have tuned out by now, and so the speakers get to relax a little, i think.

Also, like with the last session, i’ll also be participating in Faith-Promoting Rumor’s open thread for this session of conference.

And so, one more time, your guide to the way this post is set up: The entries for the session are arranged bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post—but with each speaker’s entries given in the order i write them. This means that the start of the session is down by the bottom of this post.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• Gratitude to the general membership of the church.
• A reminder of Easter, and of what it celebrates.

Robert D. Hales didn’t have a speaking slot? I’d heard he was ill, but it generally takes a lot for someone at that level of church leadership to miss speaking in a general conference.

Jeffrey R. Holland (of the quorum of apostles)

• Elder Holland is speaking a lot slower than Elder Grow did.
• A discussion of what general conference is—very meta.
• Ah! He’s playing with the historical meaning of “angel”—very nice.
• Nice reminder that the beatitudes were a lead-in to harder teachings.
• Interesting discussion of the tightrope general conference speakers walk in condemning sin and praising good.
• More or less, he just gave us permission to ignore general conference addresses that don’t apply to us. Well, then. That makes things a little easier.
• A reminder that Thomas S. Monson also functions as the senior apostle.

C. Scott Grow (of the seventy)

• [Insert obligatory joke about his name here.]
• Nothing groundbreaking or even particularly noteworthy in this address, but simply a solid and very basic discussion of the atonement and repentance.
• Agency is involved in both sin and repentance.

Benjamín de Hoyos (of the seventy)

• I do like it when the appellation “saints” gets applied to members of the church. I generally use “Mormons” myself, but “saints” is a more descriptive one (and both are more evocative than “LDS”).
• Having fellowship with the saints is a blessing.

Lynn G. Robbins (of the seventy)

• “To do” is an event, “to be” isn’t a one-time thing.
• More trials and chastening!
• Praise children’s characteristics, rather than accomplishments.
• This was a very practically-oriented address.

When i was growing up, my ward sang “Come, Ye Children of the Lord” all the time. It was rather a shock to move elsewhere and find out that lots of people had never sung it in their meetings.

Carl B. Pratt (of the seventy)

• Getting the wrong moral for the story: It’s good to be on the right end of an exchange rate disparity.
• It’s not whether you’re paying tithing out of abundance or scarcity, it’s whether you’re obeying that commandment.
• Thank you, thank you, thank you for explicitly stating that blessings from tithing are not necessarily financial!
• Interesting idea: Paying tithing leads to a selfless attitude, which helps prevent divorce.

D. Todd Christofferson (of the quorum of apostles)

• He’s offering a pretty pointed critique of modern Xianity. I’m not sure if it’s entirely fair, really.
• This address makes for an interesting compare and contrast with Paul V. Johnson’s address in the previous session.
• Hey, wow! I mention Paul V. Johnson, and then D. Todd Christofferson makes explicit reference to that address. That must count for something at my end, right? Right?
• I’ve never understood why Hugh B. Brown was supposed to be thankful for being denied a promotion. I mean, it’s not like he’d’ve been ineligible to be an apostle if he’d achieved a higher military rank.
• The 11-year-old notes that he has a preference for talking into the side of the microphone.
• Well, here’s one apostle who refers to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Mormons…
• He’s now explicitly tied his remarks in to two other addresses at this conference.
• Interesting application of “my spirit shall not always strive with man”.

Richard G. Scott (of the quorum of apostles)

• It’s always a bit poignant when speakers i know are widow(er)s talk about sealings.
• Seriously, what is it with the repeated “guys, get married now!” meme at this conference?
• A mention of the important of not just physical, but also mental fidelity to one’s spouse.
• Expressing gratitude to one’s spouse will make life, among other things, more meaningful. Interesting point.
• Lots of reminiscences today.
• Marrying early prevents people from developing negative character traits?! I can’t have heard that one right.
• There were some beautiful tributes to deceased family members in this address.

Lots of primary songs at this running of general conference.

That may have been the longest prayer of this conference. Even if it wasn’t, the prayers have been nicely short as a rule.

The organ part (well, the entire arrangement really) of “I Saw a Mighty Angel Fly“ was most excellent—very Shaker-sounding, too.

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency)

• Nice smile!

Opening thought: I look at everybody up on the stand (quietly) exchanging hellos and thoughts, sometimes laughing, and i wonder about the desire for absolute silence before and after meetings so many of the leaders of units i’ve lived in have had.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Sunday morning session

Sunday morning session—time for the big leagues!

Before going further, i’d like to express gratitude for Sunday morning sessions of general conference. Not, not for any of the usual reasons, but rather because it preempts all the extra meetings that might occur before regular church meetings (bishopric meetings, priesthood executive committee meetings, missionary coordination meetings, ward councils, high council meetings, and so on—not that any one unit has all of them before church starts, but there’s always a few of them.) No one person has to go to all of them, of course, but for those of us who have to go to some of them, even with the timing of general conference here in Alaska (first session of the day at 8:00 am, being able to roll out of bed at the “late” hour of 7:00 am, shower, and still make our first meeting is enough reason to love this day.

Also, yesterday after i got back from priesthood session i discovered that Faith-Promoting Rumor has an open thread for comments on conference sessions, and i’ll be (minimally participating and) hanging out there, as well. (Multitasking!)

Anwyay: The entries for the session are arranged bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post—but with each speaker’s entries given in the order i write them. This means that the start of the session is down by the bottom of this post.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• When i was growing up, one of my goals was to visit all of the church’s temples. Since the church starting its temple building boom in the 80s, well, i don’t have that goal any more.
• A cool contrast between the journey to and from the temple—both were difficult and bumpy and all, but the return was coupled with the joy of having received those ordinances.
• He’s not asking it directly, but underlying this whole address is the question: How much is the temple worth to you?
• Oh—never mind, now he’s asked it directly.
• Does this mean going to the temple to do early-morning baptisms is a valid excuse for missing early-morning seminary?

David A. Bednar (of the quorum of apostles)

• The spirit of revelation is available to everyone in the church, not just the presiding authorities.
• Revelation can occur either suddenly or gradually. I like that he’s allowing for both possibilities in the same address—we don’t get that very often.
• We can know the truth as God knows it, and act according to the truth as Jesus does it.
• Doubts are normal!
• All this talk about sunrises and such is really resonant if you've experienced subarctic midwinters and midsummers, by the way.
• We can receive revelation suddenly, gradually, or even so gently that we don’t realize that we’re receiving it (even as we act according to it).

Silvia H. Allred (of the relief society general presidency)

• From someone on Faith-Promoting Rumor: “Another talk on welfare. Now if only we could get this without a welfare anniversary.”
• Love as a motivating force for church welfare actions. What a radical concept!
• How does one live up to the story of the widow and her two mites when one actually has abundance? She didn’t directly raise the question, but this address has sent my mind in those directions.
• God sending acts of service as a form of reassurance. Interesting.
• I wish she’d had one of the longer slots they give to certain other positions—it would have been nice to hear that one a little less rushed.

We’re already at the halfway point? That went fast!

H. David Burton (presiding bishop)

• I’ve long believed that temporal salvation must precede spiritual salvation. Nice to see that idea given a shout-out in general conference. (Makes sense it’d be the presiding bishop to do so.)
• Why do we insist on trying to say that we’re not helping people, we’re helping people help themselves? There’s political code words in there, and that bothers me a little.
• We are under condemnation if we don’t help the poor.
• Flying to the relief of the stranger! It’s not just our fellow Mormons we need to care about (though he didn’t say that directly).
• I have to admit it—the story of the Willie & Martin handcart companies has been told so often and in so many ways that the hugeness of it has been bleached for me. I find this unfortunate.
• “Be kind to the poor” as final deathbed counsel. That kindness (not just helping them, or even helping them help themselves) isn’t something we focus on very much these days, i’m afraid.

Paul V. Johnson (of the seventy)

• What does it actually mean for something to be “consecrated for our gain”?
• I don’t know why, but analogies relating to hiking through the mountains never really work for me.
• Joseph Smith (and Moses, though he didn’t mention him) was nearly overcome by evil, but called on God and was saved. Was the important thing the calling on God, or the exertion to do so?
• Growing up, i felt like a lot of people in my ward were in competition to have the biggest trials. Maybe they were thinking that brought them closer to Jesus’s ultimate trials?
• You know, this is all making me think that the stories (are they just urban legends?—one can hope) of early Xians trying to get martyred is a rational, though in my opinion wrong, reaction to the idea that trials are Good Things.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency)

• I was busy multitasking enough that i missed Henry B. Eyring’s announcement of the first speaker. Fortunately, the first speaker’s voice is recognizable enough that i didn’t even have to look to see the identification banner.
• This is a very classically-structured address. This is making me happy.
• If you’re playing a general conference drinking game, we just had the use of “beloved prophet”, pronounced as one word—that’s two shots of Diet Dr. Pepper.
• Interesting pivot, switching from the need for people to move forward in their individual spiritual lives to the need for people to move forward in their service to others.
• He referred to his wife by first name. This makes me happy.
• Self-deprecating aviation meta-joke FTW!
• I like St. Francis of Assisi, and he just gave one of my favorite St. Francis lines. I like having a member of the first presidency who uses pre-Restoration religious references at the rate he does.

As the song started, i got to thinking that only the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could make “Hark, All Ye Nations” sound like a dirge. It got better as it went along, but really only because the organ carried it at times.

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency), opening remarks

• Another mention of the anniversary of the church welfare program. It’s almost like the first presidency is trying to make sure nobody forgets it today, even if it got ignored by everybody else yesterday.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Priesthood session

So here are my notes from the third general session of this round of general conference. (Yep, priesthood session counts as a general session, even though it’s not open to the general membership of the church. Go figure. However, i will say that this was perhaps the one priesthood session i’ve ever seen that actually merited that label—every address actually dealt with the priesthood in very specific ways.)

So: The entries for the session are arranged bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post—but with each speaker’s entries given in the order i write them. This means that the start of the session is down by the bottom of this post.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• He started out by saying he was going to address a number of issues that have been worrying him lately, and then went through essentially a laundry list of wide-ranging topics (profane language, the word of wisdom, pornography, and so on).
• What’s the marriage rate in the church? Thomas S. Monson isn’t the first one at this conference who’s said that men (and, in other sessions, women) shouldn’t avoid marriage.
• You know, they guy has really good pacing when he tells his stories.
• So how stressed are marriages among church members? Is the divorce rate rising, or was his bit against divorce a reaction to other trends?

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency)

• All priesthood holders need to learn the duties of their offices.
• I wonder how much of his commentary about how tough the neighborhood that he lived in as a kid in New Jersey was will make it into the written report.
• Love is both a cause and an effect of priesthood learning.
• Great priesthood quorums have peacemakers, allowing unity to occur even when there are differences.
• The priesthood is a source of knowledge.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency)

• The priesthood shouldn’t just be used to bless our church and family, but also out community.
• For many, a testimony comes quietly and gradually, and this is an important thing for people to know, or else they might not realize it. Sometimes, though, i wonder if we say that so often that it might lead those whose testimonies come loudly and/or suddenly to doubt their own just as real experiences.
• We need to be joyous as priesthood holders (and, given other stuff he said, as members of the church).
• Avoid being the three Ws: weary, worried, whining.

“Redeemer of Israel” as the congregational hymn. Why don’t we ever get to sing verse 5 or (especially!) verse 6, when those are the coolest parts of the song?

Larry M. Gibson (of the young men’s general presidency)

• Only one point that really struck me, but it’s both interesting and important: Priesthood quorums aren’t classes, but rather councils.

Steven E. Snow (of the presidency of the seventy)

• Two straight addresses (even briefly) mentioning the world cup? That may be a new general conference record!
• You know, you don’t generally get as much focus on hope as you do on faith and charity.
• Interesting point that hope can lead to action. You hear that about faith fairly frequently, but not hope so much.
• More reasons to care about hope: He quoted Moroni to the effect that hope is necessary for salvation.
• He directly said that today’s trials require the same level of faith and hope as the early Mormons required for their trials—thus providing a nice counterpoint to those who talk about how amazing they must have been and how people now are soft and wouldn’t be able to handle that sort of persecution and such.

Neil L. Andersen (of the quorum of apostles)

• So he’s addressing his remarks mainly to the 12- to 25-year-olds. Does this mean i get to nap for a while? (Yeah, yeah, i know—you have to pay attention so that you know what your sons need. But since i don’t have any sons…)
• Was he reading his address from paper? If not, the teleprompter was adjusted way wrong.
• So every young man should prepare to serve a full-time mission. This leads me to wonder whether the requirements for being a full-time missionary have changed since M. Russell Ballard talked about “raising the bar” for missionary service back in 2002.
• He explicitly addressed people who can’t serve as full-time missionaries due to health concerns and such, and told them not to feel bad about it. Good to hear that group get addressed, especially with what turned out to be the intense focus on full-time missionary service this session.
• Why do general conference addresses get to use visual aids, but sacrament meeting speeches don’t?

The guy that said the opening prayer had a really strong foreign accent. So when do people finally get to give prayers in their native languages in general conferences?

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday afternoon session

Saturday afternoon is generally my favorite session. There’s the sustaining of church officers and authorities in the April running each year (and i always like to actually listen to that, not just let it gloss past like i suspect many Mormons do), and the speakers generally seem to be more relaxed in this session (along with the Sunday afternoon one).

Anyway, to remind: The entries for the session are arranged bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post—but each speaker’s entries are given in the order i write them. This means that this is where you scroll to the bottom of this post and start reading upwards.

M. Russell Ballard (of the quorum of apostles)

• Interesting claim, that we’re only able to love our neighbor (the second great commandment) if we first love God (the first great commandment). Is this actually true? (Also, is that actually what was intended by what he said?)
• I had to look up “silage” online. (Can you tell i didn’t grow up as a farmer?) Yeah, cleaning up a silage pit isn’t a job i would have found pleasant, either.
• Nice brief reminder to avoid gossip.
• Nice brief reminder to do missionary work with our friends.
• Nice brief reminder to generally be nice.
• Part of me feels like his main point in this address is all the various brief reminders, and the general topical matrix they’re embedded in is almost incidental.

Dallin H. Oaks (of the quorum of apostles)

• He’s presenting human behavior as very, very rational.
• And yep, that’s really the main thing i’m getting from this whole address: People develop a hierarchy of desires and then operate according to them, so we need to develop righteous (hierarchies of) desires.
• Specific ideas on how to apply the principles being taught! (That’s unfortunately pretty rare in general conference addresses.)

Cecil O. Samuelson (of the quorums of the seventy)

• I’m liking this address, but am not finding individual items to pull out for highlighting.
• Here’s kind of a weird parallel that occurred to me: He said that with a testimony, if you give some away, so to speak (i.e., you share it), you end up with more. In the previous session, Henry B. Eyring said that your will increase in temporal terms if you give away of your substance to help others.
• It’s always nice to hear the occasional general conference address that’s brimming with optimism for the future, rather than talking the position that everything around us is dangerous and trying to destroy us.

Richard J. Maynes (of the quorums of the seventy)

When i was a full-time missionary, i found that the idea of an eternal family unit wasn’t actually all that appealing to a lot of the people i met. Why is it so frequently presented as out missionary ace in the hole?
• Lots and lots of stuff about families and their importance—but not much that stands out as different from most general conference addresses on families.
• So i get that countering the false traditions of “the world” with teaching in the home is important. How do we know, though, which traditions of the world are false, and which are correct? I mean, it’s not like everything that’s widely popular in the world is evil, or even not entirely good.
• So families are strong because everyone has different strengths? I’m cool with that—and i think i’ve got my superpowertalent of sarcasm going pretty good, so everyone else in my family can feel free to provide the other talents we need.

Russell M. Nelson (of the quorum of apostles)

• That was a blunter mention of death than you usually get in public addresses (not just general conference addresses).
• I so have the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song “Teach Your Children” looping in my head now.
• There’s an interesting question this whole discussion of obedience leads to: If we gain blessings from obedience to individual commandments, what blessings are those who choose to obey only certain commandments entitled to?
• He didn’t mention this in his discussion of tithing, but excommunicants are not allowed to pay tithing. That’s an interesting counterpoint to the claims of some who argue that the church preaches tithing only as a way for the church to amass wealth.
• Linguistics nerd note: He pronounced the word “Melchizedek” as [mɛlkɛzədæk]. I’ve been observing (maybe better: noticing) that [æ] in the final syllable more and more often.

Boyd K. Packer (president of the quorum of apostles)

• I think it’s actually cool that we have an actual president of the quorum of the twelve apostles who’s functioning in that role—i remember that for years and years the president of the quorum was in the first presidency, so the quorum was headed by an acting president (for many years, actually, Boyd K. Packer).
• Interesting that “Latter-Day Saints” is given as a preferred short form for items referring to the Mormon church, rather than something closer to “Church of Jesus Christ“—you’d think that if we’re worried about people perceiving us as non-Xian, we’d go more in that direction.
• And yes, i just referred to the church as the “Mormon church”, thus providing further evidence that i’m evil.
• Interesting bit of logic: Others don’t have to accept that revelation exists, but anyone who wishes to understand Mormons and Mormonism has to accept that we accept it.
• This is an amazingly wide-ranging address, going from topic to topic rather suddenly. I mean, the topics progress in a logical pattern, but there’s no single overarching theme that i can figure out.
• The counsel to forget slights and offenses and move on is good advice, i think, but the specifics of how exactly to do that are needed, too—and knowing how to do that, that’s where people run into difficulty, i think.

Brook P. Hales (secretary to the first presidency), church statistical report

• We’ve passed 14 million? How’d i miss that?
• It’s interesting how long we’ve been holding at just a bit over 50,000 full-time missionaries.

Robert W. Cantwell (of the auditing department), church audit report

• Why do we even take the time in general conference to present these any more? Back when the church gave accounting for funds (sometimes down to the penny!) it made sense, but nowadays? What’s the point?

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency), presentation of church authorities and officers

• Interesting that effective dates that weren’t today (1&mnsp;May 2011) were given for the releases. I wonder whether the calls were immediate, or effective as of a date?
• One of the new members of the first(?) quorum of the seventy has the first name LeGrand. Gee, i wonder whether he was named after a very specific former general authority…?

The guy who gave the prayer said that we’re participating in general conference because we have complete faith (trust?—memory is a faulty thing). That’s assuming a lot of his listeners…

With Quentin L. Cook’s address this morning in medium-term memory, i ask: Has a woman ever given a prayer in general conference?

The choir sang “How Firm a Foundation”. I’m not a fan of choral music like you get in general conferences (as i’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog), but this is a song that really does work well in arrangements for large choirs. Best of all, though, they sang the last verse—and we really ought to sing that verse more often in our congregational singing, in my very vocal opinion.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency), opening remarks

• No welcome to the folks on the internets—i think that that may mean that we’ve finally arrived, and it’s not weird enough to rise to the level of remarkable any more.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday morning session

Welcome, welcome, SabbathSaturday morning. As i’ve done for the past few general conferences, i’ll be semi-liveblogging each conference session, by which i mean that i’ll be jotting down thoughts during each session of conference and posting them after the session ends.

An explanation of the way these are ordered: The entries are arranged the same way as the last couple times i did these, which may be confusing at first. This is because blogs arrange things chronologically from bottom to top, despite millennia of Western writing practice, so that if you visit this page after conference is over, the final session will show up first, followed by the Sunday morning session, then the priesthood session, and so on.

I’m going with the same ordering within each post so that readers don’t have to do quite so much scrolling. Therefore, each session’s post is written bottom-up (i.e., first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post). However, each speaker’s entries are given in the order i write them. This is probably confusing, but so are any of the other alternative i’ve come up with (and certainly less confusing than a true live-blogging format, i think). Anyway, this means that this is where you scroll to the bottom of this post, and then start reading upwards.

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency)

• Interesting that all three members of the first presidency (including even Dieter F. Unchtdorf in his brief opening remarks) made direct reference to the need to work toward the temporal salvation of others, while everyone else in this session, if they dealt with the topic, did so only indirectly or as part of a larger focus.
• He quoted a good chunk of the song ”Have I Done Any Good in the World Today“—i started to wonder if he was going to quote the old lyrics (that is, the stark line “only he who does something is worthy to live”). No such luck, though.
• Interesting arguments for the importance of involving children in temporal service (if not an outright plea for people to do so).
• The story of the family that returned from holiday after the Teton dam burst was interesting—this is where i start wishing i had primary sources to find out more about the people involved.
• Nice twist on the term “self-reliance”, with the implication (if not outright direct statement) that what follows true self-reliance is actually giving one’s surplus to others. (Insert spooky music and mutterings about “sharing the wealth” here…)
• He pointed out that we’re commanded not just to help the poor, but also to seek them out to help them. That’s actually a tough command at times.
• A churchwide day of service later this year? Interesting.

Quentin L. Cook (or the quorum of apostles)

• I find lists of qualities that women have to be interesting, given that one finds the same qualities as men. (Of course, the sociological training i have leads me to hold that the minor differences in the way those qualities manifest themselves are at least primarily the result of differences in socialization. I guess that means that i’m irredeemably evil, then. Oh, well.)
• The story of the purse had really nicely amusing moments. (Of course, part of my mind kept thinking, “Wow, that girl knows how to accessorize for church functions in case someone looks in her purse. Talk about being prepared!”)
• Another thought from the sociological side of my brain: I wonder to what extent the satisfaction that Mormon women (and men, though he didn’t focus on that) have with their religion is the result of church policies and procedures, and to what extent it’s the result of self-selection among women.
• Bishops are supposed to delegate more. Does this mean that one day they’ll be able to skip out on leadership meetings, too?
• What’s that? Men who skip out on serving full-time missions still have all of the saving ordinances available to them? Heresy!
• Actually, from the statistics i’ve seen, it’s not so much that fewer people are getting married so much as that people are opting to get married at later ages—you know, closer to the average age of first marriages, say, 500 years ago.
• Wow! A blunt, direct statement telling people not to judge families where the mother works outside the home—that’s something i don’t think i’ve ever heard in a general conference (or even a stake conference) before. Telling people bluntly not to judge couples who don’t have children, yes, that i’ve heard before (and there’s wider social recognition of the impoliteness involved there, too)—but this is a potential first.

Kent F. Richards (of the quorums of the seventy)

• Kent F. Richards was a surgeon. I wonder if him talking about medical stuff is the equivalent of Dieter F. Uchtdorf talking about airplanes.
• Interesting that he implicitly assumes that we earn forgiveness.
• Is direct revelation actually different from personal experience?
• Interesting approach, so closely equating physical pain and spiritual sin.

The choir sang “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” here. It’s not a bad song to sing, really, but listening to it—wow, it’s really repetitive, isn’t it?

Walter F. González (of the presidency of the seventy)

• There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the first half to two-thirds of this address, but it’s being hard to pull out single specific items to comment on (either snarkily or seriously).
• His statement that loving Christ results in receiving the strength to follow Christ is an interesting one, since one could also say that following Christ results in loving Christ. The issue then becomes how one can jump into the cycle, you know?
• Interesting idea that our covenants are inherently stronger than our challenges. That’s one to mull over.

Jean A. Stevens (of the general primary presidency)

• She gives the story of “a general authority” who went on assignment to Hong Kong, and what came of his counsel. Why didn’t she name the general authority? The construction reminds me of the awkward way so many stories in the lesson manuals opened when i was a kid. (That sort of construction didn’t bother me when she said stuff like “a ten-year-old boy”. Maybe it’s the difference between referring to minors and adults? Or maybe between celebrities of whatever sort and non-celebrities? I’ll have to think about this.)
• One interesting thing is that this is an address by a member of the general primary presidency that’s unambiguously directed toward the adults in the audience. Yes, it’s about children, but members of primary presidencies very often aim for dual audiences (adults and children).
• “Behold” is a semi-archaic word meaning, quite simply, “look at”. Due to its archaic nature it sounds more impressive, but it really only means that. Yeah, it doesn’t mean to just glance at or whatever, but we really shouldn’t try to make individual words mean more than they really do.

L. Tom Perry (of the quorum of apostles)

• I always like addresses that talk about the importance of the Bible—yes, we have unique scripture with stuff like the Book of Mormon (well, nearly unique—there are other religions that accept that as scripture, after all), but it’s important not to forget the stuff we share widely with others, too.
• This whole discussion of the sacrament raises a question that i wonder about occasionally: Why is priesthood authority necessary for the blessing and passing of the sacrament? (I suppose that’s a question particularly for the “and passing” part of the question.)
• He quoted the scriptural passage that says we’re to go to church and take the sacrament, and do “none other thing” (and he gave special emphasis to that phrase). I’ve always found it interesting that that’s immediately followed by an exception: We’re explicitly allowed to prepare food.
• Ah! The claim that outward appearance necessarily reflects inward attitudes! Maybe sometimes, even often, but as a blanket statement?
• He said that we should avoid amusements (to use an old-fashioned term) on Sundays, and followed that by quoting the line from the New Testament that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. I got a bit of mental whiplash trying to follow that argument, to be quite honest.
• Can y’all of my generation imagine using glass cups for the sacrament? The handwashing requirements would have been annoying, to put it mildly.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• It always surprises me when general authorities said they didn’t think they’d fill the Conference Center. (I remember the original public announcement saying that they didn’t expect to fill it at first.) I’m actually surprised they underestimated the demand so strongly, given that, e.g.,  Brigham Young University’s Marriott Center fills for visiting general authorities, and sometimes large stadiums (stadia?) get filled by church members for visiting authorities.
• Three new temples: Fort Collins, Colorado; Meridian, Idaho; and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Of those, Winnipeg fills in the most obvious and glaring hole in the map. Actually, given Winnipeg’s traditional role as the transportation hub of the Canadian plains, i was surprised when Regina got one before Winnipeg did.
• Some people say that the church shouldn'’t announce like this when we’re providing humanitarian service (you know, the whole don’t trumpet your good deeds before the world thing). I disagree, actually—letting members of the church know that good works are being done is a way of getting them to feel like it’s simply a normal thing to do, and therefore to make it more likely that they’ll do such stuff in the future.

Allan F. Packer (of the quorums of the seventy)

• He prayed that we’ll live so that we can merit blessings (i didn’t get the exact words). The tension over the primacy of grace vs. primacy of works tension really is alive and well within Mormonism, you know?

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency), opening remarks

• This conference is the 75th anniversary of the church’s welfare program. Given his personal history, he may well feel the importance of that more intensely than many others of the general authorities.

Well, it is the beginning of April

Given the day, i figured i’d come up with a story about how this blog was being discontinued, and i’d be working on a regular dead-serious column about the perfection of mainstream Utah Mormon culture for LatterDayConservative.com from now on.

But i couldn’t keep a straight face even while i was trying to start typing it up, so i figured it wouldn’t look at all convincing to y’all.

Sorry. Maybe i’ll do better next year.

Proper citations

So speaking of “If You Could Hie to Kolob”, i’ve been in sacrament meetings a few times now where we’ve been told that ward member X was going to play a solo instrumental rendition of that song.

Really? Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say that she (and it’s always been a she, for whatever reason) was going to play Ralph Vaughan Williams’s arrangement of the Christmas carol “Dives and Lazarus”? I mean, it seems a bit presumptuous of us to claim Williams’s work as our own, as if putting our most space-doctrinish hymn to that piece of music meant we were the only ones that happened to recognize its existence and use it.

And who hies anymore, anyway?

So yesterday my ward sang “If You Could Hie to Kolob”.* It brought to mind something one of my missionary companions once mentioned when i was a full-time missionary in Germany. He said (paraphrasing from time-hazed but still strong memory)

You know, i hope they don’t ever translate “If You Could Hie to Kolob” into German—if they did, half the German LDS would leave the church. [pause] Well, and the other half would sing it every Sunday!

(It’s probably only amusing if you’ve spent much time around Mormons in Germany, but for those of us who have…)

Anyway, i haven’t gone through the 1996 Gesangbuch (the German hymnal) page by page to check on this (and they didn’t provide an index of authors, like they did in the English version), so i may be wrong, but as far as i can tell from a quick scan, a translation of the song isn’t to be found in there—so my companion’s prediction will have to wait a few more decades for testing, i suppose.

* Yes, my two oldest spontaneously sang “there is no end to this song” along with me in place of “there is no end to being” in the final verse. I feel that i can rest easy in the sure knowledge that i have raised them well.

Advantages

I’ve mentioned a few times that i have all daughters and no sons, and sometimes i feel like i’m the only active Mormon guy around in that situation.

There is one very, very big advantage that this gives me, though, you know. Specifically:

I will always have an easy out when it comes to father-son campouts.

All you guys out there with sons can feel free to be jealous now.

In which David B pretends to be a deep thinker

I’ve read a good number of mainstream Xian critiques of the Mormon view of God from various sources, and they generally leave me with a simple question, based on the common claim that the mainstream Xian view of God entails a God who/that is absolutely perfect in every possible way and exceeds in all things, namely:

What's so great about absolute greatness?

This probably sounds like a joke, but it’s a serious question. If a critique of the Mormon conception of God is that the Mormon view entails a God who is not as wondrous as the mainstream Xian view entails,* then why is that supposed to be such a huge criticism? I see no inherent reason that that should be a valid critique; it seems to me that it’s a critique simply and only because it goes against some people’s underlying assumptions about the nature of deity, not because it somehow is a problem with a conception of deity.

And remember, an argument like “Isn’t it better to worship an absolutely great deity than a limited though still great deity?” won’t hold for this—i want concrete arguments here, not arguments in the abstract. It might be better if life here on earth didn’t involve the ebola virus, for example, but proposing an earth without ebola doesn’t make reality any different. I’m looking for arguments that speak to reality—and i haven’t found any yet.

* Something i’m not ceding, but which i offer as a basis for rational discussion on this issue.

Choosing friends

Every once in a while, the youth of the church get told (generally at the local level) that they should only date members of the church, and in fact that they should preferentially make friends with members of the church.

Beyond the fact that such advice makes me wonder whether we really are as missionary-oriented a religion as we tend to think, i suspect that such advice actually stems from people porting in ideas from the jello belt areas where Mormons are found in relatively large numbers.

Consider: If the number of youth who are Mormon nearby is larger, it’s easier to have Mormon dates/friends who are good influences selected from the total pool. If you’re a youth who lives near three other Mormon youths and two of them are, um, not quite living according to the principles of the gospel, your good-influence options for friendships among Mormons are terribly restricted. If, however, you can choose from thirty nearby Mormons, even given the same ratios so that twenty of them would be bad influences, that still gives you ten good-influence Mormons to hang out with.

(Of course, this leaves out the fact that the sort of clannishness that advice offers isn’t healthy at all, and also that one has to wonder who’s supposed to be a good influence on people who aren’t themselves good-influence types, but i’m guessing anybody who regularly reads this blog either already knows that or already loathes me enough that they wouldn’t believe me on such points anyway.)

General conference and local television

When i was young enough that i can barely remember it, Washington DC’s channel 5 carried some of the general sessions of general conference, but they stopped that at some point while i was growing up. Anyone know why? It’s not like the number of Mormons in the DC area (and, therefore, the number of likely potential viewers) went down during that time.

Weighing options

When i was in high school, i was heavily involved in extracurricular activities. Some of these, particularly drama, required me to stay after school until rather late in the evening. Since for me to attend seminary i would have had to get up at or before 4:00 in the morning, the only year of high school i attended seminary was the one year my ward offered it Wednesday evenings (and even then i missed several classes).

I’ve mentioned this to some members of the church over the years, and have actually been told by a few of them* how horrible it was that my family didn’t make the “sacrifice” to get me to seminary. For some reason i still think it was important that i got 7–8 hours of sleep a night, and i also think it was important for me to be involved in the activities i was involved in. (Sometimes the choice is between good and good, after all.)

* Usually folks without high schoolers of their own who would have had to get up at 4:00 am, of course.

Why we hate each other

My last post got me thinking about regionalism in the church, and something i’ve often heard from Utah Mormons: Why do Mormons from places outside of Utah hold a grudge against Utah Mormons? Why is there so much Utah Mormon bashing?

Well, i suspect that it’s largely more of a perception thing than anything else, to begin with. I tend to think that it’s simply a case of Mormons having stereotypes about the various cultural subgroups (often geographically based) within Mormonism, and whatever group you’re part of seems to you to be the one that gets slammed the hardest.

That is, Utah Mormons are sensitive to (and notice) jabs at Utah Mormons ’cause they’re Utah Mormons, California Mormons are sensitive to jabs about California Mormons, Eastern [US] Mormons would be sensitive to jabs about Eastern Mormons except that we know we’re evil, &c.

According to my own perception, though, i think there’s also a cultural trend among Utahns (not just Mormons from Utah, by the way) to talk about Utah as if it’s necessarily the greatest place on earth, and everybody’d better agree with that claim—and i would expect a backlash against that sort of thing.

Consider that, while i was growing up in Southern Maryland, i had to listen to Utah transplants go on about how it was too humid (never thinking that some of us might think that the air is actually pleasant in Maryland, but that it’s too dry in Utah), our mountains were just “baby mountains” (completely missing the point when i’d respond “Yeah, but our mountains have trees!”), that it took too long to get to church (40 minutes on Sunday morning for my family before they improved the roads, an hour and a half for some families in the ward), and the like. I feel that, faced with such, it would only be natural to expect a certain amount of backlash.

So i’m sorta sorry, Utahns, but i feel no sympathy.

Sometimes being a missionary is fun

Completely true personal story: Back when i was a full-time missionary (i was sent to Germany and Austria), i had a missionary companion (a Utahn) who, when introducing himself to people, would go on and on at length about how Utah was the greatest place on earth—and one of his “proofs” of this was that Utah has every sort of landscape possible: there's desert, mountains, forest, &c. I dealt with this for a while until i as a born-and-bred Marylander couldn't take it any longer and i broke in (in German and as innocent-sounding as i could manage it) with “Really? I didn't know Utah had any ocean coastline.” I still think that the minimal cruelty was entirely worth it for the expression on his face.

Should it be a classic?

I recently ran across an old copy of Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness that was sitting on the wrong shelf, and i flipped through it. I didn’t do a close rereading of it or anything, but it reminded me that i’ve never understood the appeal of the book.

So what’s up with it? What am i missing about it that makes it such an allegedly wonderful thing?

What if most of us can’t sing all that well?

So musical numbers in sacrament meetings are supposed to be of the highest quality possible, and then we encourage everyone to participate in ward choirs. Doesn’t anyone else see a looming contradiction here?

Attending to…who?

Is Doctrine & Covenants 123:11–14 a complete sentence? It’s punctuated as if it was one, but i can’t find an actual predicate anywhere in there. Maybe it’s actually that i can’t find an antecedent for verse 14’s these.

A bit of light demography

Self-identified Mormons make up 2 to 2½ percent of the United States population (depending on survey methodology). About 25 to 30 percent of the United States population has had personal contact (even briefly) with someone they know was Mormon. (This includes things like chatting with the full-time missionaries at the door.)

This means

1. we’re doing a pretty good job at contacting people and being open about our religion, and
2. we’ve got a whole lot of work left to do.

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!

That’s not the way it works

“Let Us All Press on in the work of the Lord,” goes the song, “that when life is o’er we may gain a reward”.

Um, no. Deity is not a vending machine. You don’t gain a reward ’cause you worked hard, you gain a reward because the grace of God is sufficient for your salvation. Sorry about that.

Another awkward song

“Sweet Is the Peace the Gospel Brings” is one of the more awkward musical settings for a song in our hymnal, and the whole problem actually comes from a single small flaw—it’s entirely the fault of the second and third notes in each verse. Throwing things like “is the”, “laws and”, and “we who” into eighth notes while everything else in in quarters (plus extended time for the end of each line)? No, not good at all.

Modesty, yet again

My oldest is approaching twelve years old, so she recently attended the “New Beginnings” event for girls entering the young women’s program during the coming year. As part of my ward’s program this year, the entire (rather small) group of active young women put on a semi-improvisational skit designed to teach about various gospel values.

(It wasn’t that bad, either—and it had a decent amount of natural and un-self-conscious humor to it. Gave me a flicker of hope for the future. But i digress.)

Anyway, one of the girls’ had, as her character, someone with a problem with modesty. When another girl prompted her to give ways she could be more modest, she gave answers like not wearing so much jewelry and not trying to draw so much attention to herself.

That clearly wasn't what the other girl expected, so she tried again, asking whether there was anything that might be changed about her clothes. This actually seemed to puzzle the first girl a little bit, but she eventually came up with something along the lines of maybe not wearing clothes that were quite so bright and flashy.

Clearly, this girl has been raised by parents who use the same definition of modesty as me (and the same definition as, according to a plain text reading, the writers of the Book of Mormon)—a lack of ostentatiousness.

It’s good to realize i’m not completely alone.

Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

More than a stonecutter

The story of John R. Moyle is amazing. It’s incredible. It’s inspiring. It’s mind-blowing, in all the positive senses of that word.

And yet as it develops into a mainstream bit of Mormon folklore it runs the risk, i fear, of becoming as bleached of nuance and detail in favor of sappiness and simplicity as the story of the Willie and Martin handcart companies became before it.

Sometimes we do our stories a grave injustice as we tell them.

What we’re ashamed of

This is normally a text-only blog, but the following recently came across on GraphJam, and i just had to post it here:

Yeah, that seems about right.

A tisket, a tasket…

Sometimes, after a particularly grueling Sunday of meetings (and, it seems, more often on testimony meeting Sundays), i feel like i’m the only person in the church who believes that the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, or in fact in any other reasonably sized conveyance.

Sealings in less than a year!

As is widely known, the church requires members who were married civilly without being sealed in a temple at the same time* to wait one year from the date of the civil marriage before they can be sealed.

It’s not as widely known that there are a few exceptions to this, the most interesting (in my opinion) being that if one or both of the members had been a member of the church for less than a year at the time of the civil marriage, they’re eligible to be sealed as soon as both of them have been confirmed members for at least a year.

For example: If someone got baptized this past 1 January, and another this past 1 February, if they got married this coming 1 June, they wouldn’t have to wait until the following 1 June to be sealed, but rather only until the next 1 February. Also, as i read things, even if a lifelong member married the person baptized this past 1 February on 1 June, they’d only have to wait until the next 1 February for their sealing, not the following 1 June.

So if you’re going to require waiting periods to enter the temples, i like this policy for a number of reasons. (And, contrary to what one might expect from reading this blog, i actually do like finding church policies that i like.)

* For those countries that don’t recognize a temple sealing as a valid marriage, substitute “as close together as possible” for “at the same time”.

Beyond serifs

What is it with hyper-cheesy fonts in materials created by young women’s leaders? Is there something in the handbook that mandates superfluous curlicues? ’Cause if there is, i missed that line somehow.

Relative scriptures

I feel the presence of God’s love much more intensely in the Old Testament than in the other parts of the standard works. People often look at me strangely when i tell them that, but it’s true.

Men on this side, women on that side

So why do primary presidents have to be female, while Sunday school presidents have to be male?

I mean, i guess i can kind of (but only kind of) understand why primary presidents are female, ’cause there’s the whole women-taking-care-of-children thing. But Sunday school presidents having to be male, that i don’t get at all. Seriously, that requirement seems like it was simply made up to give some guys something to do. It’s not like a female Sunday school president wouldn’t be able to be in charge of male Sunday school teachers, since female primary presidents are in charge of male primary teachers, so it’s not even something that can be explained away by appealing to stereotypes of sexism and authority. So what’s up with the policy?

How young is too old?

Where did the widespread Mormon cultural imperative for (comparatively) young marriages come from? I mean, it’s not like terribly young marriages were the historical norm throughout human history and age of first marriage has just recently started to rise*—so it has to have started sometime. Did it get ported in from some other group? Is it of relatively recent vintage, at least among Mormons?** More interestingly (for me), why is it such a taken-for-granted thing nowadays?

* For example, according to Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage: A History, the median age of first marriage for women in England between 1500 and 1700 was 26.

** Looking at age of marriage for general authorities throughout church history, i actually do suspect it’s a relatively recent cultural development.

Deciding who speaks when

Is there actually a church policy that someone who holds the Melchizedek priesthood (or at least a man) must be the closing speaker for sacrament meeting? (Or maybe that a woman can’t be the closing speaker?) There actually is, as far as i can find, no direction on this, which presumably would mean that it doesn’t matter—so why have most of the wards i’ve lived in treated things (sometimes explicitly, even!) like that was the rule?

One word, different worlds

You know, it occurs to me that the abbreviation “WoW” means very different things to Mormons and non-Mormons.

I have a dream (that sacrament meetings will sound interesting)

So yesterday was a holiday here in the United States in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. As a result, i heard a bunch of archival recordings of Dr. King on the radio, especially of his most famous speech.

Listening to that, i wondered why our church speechifying is so, well, boring. I mean, not necessarily in terms of content, but in style—even when the speaker is saying something stirring, there’s almost never any prosodic shifting going on, there’s no serious attempt to bring the congregation into the flow of the words.

And it’s not like this flat delivery is something inherent to Mormonism—if you listen to old general conference addresses, the old-school speakers (those who came of age in the nineteenth century) got into it. So apparently it used to be part of Mormon preaching—but now it’s not. So what happened? Why did we move away from interesting-sounding sermons to monotonous-sounding ones?

People are weird about blood

(So i’m back from Pittsburgh, and fully settled back in. Good trip, though intensely sleep-depriving. But enough of that—on to content.)

Something i’ve been thinking about a good bit lately: In at least some temples, girls who go to do baptisms for the dead are asked beforehand if they’re on their periods, and those who are aren’t allowed to participate.* Why is this done?**

In fact, one woman i know very well*** had her ward’s youth temple trips coincide with her period often enough in her early teen years that she simply stopped going on them. This highlights an unintended and rather serious consequence of this tradition (i’m assuming it’s not a formal policy)—teenaged girls are being excluded from participating in the highest level of religious rites that they can at that age, due simply to factors they have no control over. Yeah, that’s useful priming for these girls’ future activity in the church.

* I come by this knowledge via conversations with several women over the years. Yes, i have a history of having had lots of conversations with women i’ve known about menstruation-related issues. No, i don’t see this as in any way strange.

** And when giving your answer, please remember that public pools seem to have no problem with menstruating women being in the water.

*** Who i doubt would mind being identified by name, but she’s not here right now to ask for permission.****

**** Gratuitous footnote, just so there’s one more.

Gifts and influences

I’m off on a business trip for the next several days, and so i doubt i’ll have the chance to post again until sometime next week—so, then, a question i’ve been trying to figure out the answer to for a long time now:

     → What in the world is the Gift of the Holy Ghost, anyway?

The Gift of the Holy Ghost is generally described* as entitling the recipient to the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, as long as the recipient remains worthy of it. This is contrasted with the influence of the Holy Ghost, which allows those who have not received the gift to feel the influence of the Holy Ghost in their lives as long as they’re worthy of it.

Sorry, but i don’t see a difference here. This is especially the case when you look at how “companionship” and “influence” are described, and you discover that they’re describing the same thing.

Yeah, it often gets described metaphorically as a “flashlight” (the gift) vs. a “flash of lightning” (the influence). This presumes, though, that those with the gift will remain constantly worthy, and those without the gift won’t—and i really don’t think you can make that claim with any validity.

So what’s the difference?

And, to add an additional wrinkle, i have to say that i’m not certain that the Gift of the Holy Ghost actually has anything to do with receiving inspiration from the Holy Ghost (in the usual ways we talk about it, at least), anyway—i mean, the Gift of the Holy Ghost is generally described as a saving ordinance, which means that there’s something way beyond experiences in mortality going on with it. Receiving inspiration from the Holy Ghost doesn’t seem to be quite comprehensive enough to have it have that sort of effect, you know?

So, i repeat: What in the world is the Gift of the Holy Ghost, anyway?

(And now i think i’m gonna have to break out the “serious” tag on this one.)

* In the current edition of the Gospel Principles manual, even!

Not preventing teen pregnancy

I’ve read a few things lately that have noted that a teenage girl who wants to have children rather than not wanting to have children is at higher risk for teen pregnancy.* However, we spend a lot of our time in young women’s lessons and activities talking about how marvelous and glorious motherhood is, and how a girls’s highest calling will be that of a mother.**

It seems that we’re sowing the seeds for teen pregnancies with that—or rather (more likely, i’d say) we’re at least counteracting some of the protective influences against teen pregnancy that active Mormon girls tend to have.***

So, then, why do we push the whole baby-making thing? I mean, it’s not like women who aren’t raised in contexts where their religion goes on and on about the glories of motherhood automatically refuse to ever conceive children, so why do we cling to our rhetoric on childbearing when it may actually even be harmful?

* For “teen pregnancy”, read “unwed teen pregnancy”. Also, the studies i’ve seen have shown no difference between girls who want to have children and those who are ambivalent about it—basically, the only protective effect comes from actually actively not wanting to have a baby.

** Which annoys me, actually, if for no reason other than that some of them will not be mothers. Way to set ’em up for an emotional fall, folks!

*** Strong religious belief, familial and community support, and such—not that all active Mormon girls have all of those, but the likelihood of any given active Mormon girl having those is comparatively high.

The primacy of family home eveningNew Year’s Eve

According to the official handbooks, the church does not allow any church activities to take the place of Monday night family home evenings. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Well, except…

If New Year’s Eve occurs on a Monday, church activities may be held that evening.

This is actually a longstanding policy—so, i have to ask, why? What’s so special about New Year’s Eve as opposed to any other holiday that’s frequently celebrated with late nights (like, for example, Independence Day in the United States)?

Youth dances and hair

A couple weeks ago, i chaperoned a church youth dance for the very first time.

It was a weird experience, being the grown-up. But that’s not the aspect of it i want to talk about today.

Here’s what really caught my attention: There’s a dress and grooming code for attending dances in my stake. (As far as i can tell, there’s such dress and grooming codes for church dances at least nearly everywhere, though the details of what they are may be different.) Here, the dress and grooming standards are, essentially, the same ones that Brigham Young University requires of its students.

For the most part, this isn’t a problem, because my stake allows youth who come to the dances but aren’t following those dress and grooming rules to change their appearance on the spot, and then they’re allowed in. So, for example, a girl with more than one pair of earrings (or a boy with any earrings, or anyone with any visible non-ear body piercing) can simply remove the piercing and they’re good to go.

This even goes to the clothes the kid is wearing—if, say, a girl comes in wearing a skirt that’s too short, the stake holds a bunch of teen-sized clothing in reserve that they can change into so that they’re then following the rules. (In my opinion this is good, by the way—if you’re going to have rules on appearance that have somewhat subjective boundaries, providing a way to adhere to them on the spot seems only reasonable.)

There are, though, a few rules that don’t lend themselves to on-the-spot changing—and there lies the problem. For example, one of the rules in my stake forbids youth with multiple colors of hair (you know, like bleached ends or a streak of color)* from attending youth dances.

Fine. You can make whatever rule you like. But i wonder about whether this is actually a good sort of rule to have, one where the so-called “problem” can’t be fixed on the spot. (Basically, if someone shows up with multiple hair colors, they’ve got to go home—there’s no good way to cover it up, especially with hats not being allowed.) What, though, if a non-member who has, say, blue and blond streaks gets invited to a youth dance here? They’re not allowed to enter—if they show up, they get barred from going in. Of course, if that happens they’re less likely to show any interest in the church in the future, i would expect.

And there we have a real issue (and not necessarily the one you’d immediately think of). The big problem: Our expectations start to feed our reality—i mean, a kid with blue and blond streaks clearly isn’t the sort of person who would ever have any interest in the church, anyway, right? After all, they never seem to want to come to our dances, so their hair color must just be a reflection of a hard heart and spiritual weakness, right? And we wouldn’t want someone like that in our church, would we?

* Of course, the enforcement of this rule doesn’t extend to girls with blond highlights. I suppose they can’t really enforce that one ’cause if they did, they’d have to ban some of the youth leaders from showing up. Amazing how the practices of the ones holding more power are acceptable, even if it goes against the literal statements of those in power, isn’t it?

Holidays and meetings

As much as i loathe extra-special bonus meetings, i do wonder why we don’t do Xmas Eve meetings, like so many other Xian faiths do. I mean, if you’re gonna have one extra meeting, you’d think that’s the one you should have.

(Of course, not having a bonus meeting on Xmas is, i suppose, better than what we do with Easter, which is to have the regularly scheduled meeting anyway but pretty much ignore the specialness of the day while we’re meeting.)

Looking at the calendar

Can we stop it already with the repeated claim (over the pulpit sometimes, even!) that we’re special because Doctrine & Covenants 20:1 tells us that Jesus was born on 6 April, 1 bc?

I mean, especially since it appears to be simply not true, what with the reference to the year most likely being just a hyper-flowery way of saying ad 1830? (Not to mention the issues of mapping a solar calendar to a lunar one, and the fact that each solar year isn’t always the same length anyway, and…) Also, it seems especially impolite to make such unsupported-by-scriptural-text statements right around Xmas itself.

Yeah, i know, we won’t (stop, that is). A boy can dream, though, can’t he?

Mormons and persecution

The next time somebody starts going off in a church meeting about how persecuted they are as a Mormon,* i’m going to direct them to the recent NPR story on Iraqi Christians being singled out for death threats and even actual killing simply because they’re Christian.

That’s persecution, folks. People look at you weird or won’t vote for you or laugh about your beliefs ’cause you’re a Mormon, that’s simply life. Get over yourself. Mormons in the 1830s and 1840s were persecuted. Mormons in the 1880s were persecuted. Nowadays? If Iraqi Christians had the time or energy to spare, they would scoff at your delusions—and they’d be justified in doing so.

* A surprisingly common meme, really. Occasionally it’s blatant (the “somebody laughed at me at school because i’m Mormon” sort of thing), but usually it’s more subtle, and couched in terms of “attacks” on religion or the family or somesuch, but set up with a clear attack-on-Mormonism sort of spin.

Missing sleep

Can somebody explain to me how it’s healthy for our church’s teens to have weeknight church activities once a week that go until (in most places i’ve seen) 8:30 or 9:00 pm, and then have to get up early in the morning the next day for seminary? Seriously, what’s up with the logic? Have we decided our teenagers are superhuman, and don’t need sleep for healthy functioning?*

No, really—i don’t get it.

* And y’all in the Mormon Dominance Area, where you don’t have early-morning seminary, you don’t get off easy on this one. What i want to know from you is how it helps our youth to pull them away from their academics in the middle of the day, instead of putting gospel study in the home, where all the rhetoric we use says it rightly belongs.

Decorum and performance

I have, not infrequently, heard members of the church talk about how horrible and apostate—yes, the “A” word comes up occasionally—certain other faiths are because they allow things like drums and electric guitars and such into their meetings, and members of the congregation do things like dance or or shout or cheer.

All i can say is that if you don’t sometimes want to get up and dance or cheer in sacrament meeting, well, then your ward’s choir isn’t doin’ it right.

Why these meetings?

Can somebody explain to me the purpose of the priesthood executive committee at the ward level? I mean, why is there such a group that has to meet quite so often, as opposed to just doing everything through the ward council?

Changing rules

Unless i read it wrong, the most recent version of the church’s administrative handbook* says that the wearing of white shirts and ties should be encouraged among those who are asked to conduct the administration of the sacrament, but that—and this is the interesting part—white shirts and ties aren’t to be required of those who administer the ordinance.

I wonder if the widespread local de jure rules on white shirts and ties while administering the sacrament will actually go away, or if they’ll simply be replaced by de facto versions of the rule.

* Now called just Handbook, though it’ll always be the GHI to me!

Padding

What’s with padded folding chairs where the relief society meets, but hard chairs everywhere else (at least in most meetinghouses i’ve been to)? Are women’s coccyges really that much more delicate than those of males?

Politicians as leaders

So my stake was reorganized Sunday before last, and the new stake president is Sheldon Fisher. Interestingly, he has a political past—he unsuccessfully challenged Congressman Don Young in the most recent Republican primary here, running to Young’s right (which, really, is pretty hard to do).

In my memory, political figures in ward and stake leadership tend to be better at keeping politics, even to the level of code words, out of the pulpit than those who aren’t political figures.* (Maybe they know the game, so they know how to avoid it.) I’ll be interested to see if this observation continues to hold true.

* I use the phrase “in my memory” on purpose—i do realize that this hasn’t always been the case (see Benson, Ezra Taft and Roberts, B.H., among many others). My personal memories of these sorts of things, though, only go back to the early 80s or so.

Quads

Why is it that, as far as i can tell, the church only publishes quadruple combinations with leather (or at least leather-like) binding? What if i want a hardbound copy of the scriptures? I’m limited to separate volumes for the Bible and everything else. Why not let those of us who prefer to have everything in one book have them in cheaper options?

Mormons actually vote in other countries, too, you know

There’s a general perception that Mormons in the United States are, by and large, sociopolitically conservative.* Certainly, more of the Mormons in Congress are Republican than Democratic—i’m curious, though, whether Mormon politicians in other countries are generally affiliated with their countries’ conservative parties. (The only list of currently serving Mormon politicians from outside of the United States i can find doesn’t give enough information to figure that out.)

* Some say that that’s evidence that Mormonism necessarily leads to a sociopolitically conservative outlook, but that’s not a defensible position as long as the potential confound of region isn’t factored out—and i haven’t yet seen a study of Mormon sociopolitical leanings that does so.

Nylons and the oral tradition

The overreliance of Mormons on what i sometimes call (for lack of a better label) the “oral tradition” troubles me. This is particularly the case for a religion like ours that leans so far to the orthopraxy side of things.

Specific case:

When we lived in Florida, most of the women in our stake didn’t wear nylons to church. In fact, it was generally regarded as a silly thing to do—we were in Florida, after all, and nylons are a rather warm bit of clothing.

Now that we live in Alaska, as far as i can tell, nobody cares one way or the other—some women wear nylons to church while others don’t, and it’s not a big deal.

I know women who live in other locations, though, who have been taught over the pulpit by bishops and stake presidents that it’s a moral sin—yes, that’s not made up—for women not to wear nylons to church.

Sorry, folks, but i’d have to think that if it’s not a sin in Florida or Alaska, it’s also not a sin in Maryland or even Utah.

(Of course, i still remember a post from a while age on the Spanish Fork 401st Ward blog where the question was posed whether nylons are a “spiritual requirement for sisters, or old-men fetish?” Well, given that there really apparently is a word in Japanese porn for that, i know what my guess is…)

Glurge

Why do so many speakers feel the urge to pepper their speeches in church with glurge? Particularly when a quick trip to Snopes could demonstrate the falsity of much of what’s out there—scroll through the list on the glurge page, and you’re bound to see a lot of thing you’ve heard before in sacrament meetings, i’d wager.)

It’s a serious question—especially since i have to wonder whether the Holy Spirit is going to testify to the truth of something that quite definitely isn’t.

Counterintuitive elections

So it’s election night here in the United States, and ABC News has just projected that Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, will retain his seat (which hadn’t been at all a given before today).

This means that, to what i assume is the annoyance of lots of Mormons in this country, the most powerful Mormon elected officeholder in the United States will continue to be a member of the left-of-center Democratic Party.