On sabbaticals, and emerging from them

So i haven’t posted here for a few weeks.

It’s not ’cause i’ve been unwell or anything, and it’s not that i haven’t missed posting stuff, but i’ve gotten tired of public Mormonism—you know, all the stuff in the news and other bits of the public sphere lately, most likely as a result of Mitt Romney’s candidacy for the president of the United States, about Mormons and Mormonism. And no, i’m not talking about attacks on the church and its members—i’m a big enough boy that I can handle that. It’s just the sheer volume of mentions of my faith that i keep hearing. It’s simply tiring.

To be honest, i don’t know how the evangelicals have managed to deal with it for so long.

(And the fact that my computer meltdown meant that i couldn’t get on to post for a few weeks this summer just made it easier to go with my feeling of being sick of my religion having so many mentions, too.)

I mean, i even stopped in the middle of a series—my recent posts on home teaching experiences were originally planned to be the first two of a three-parter.

But i’ve decided that it’s time to get back on this, not least because general conference is coming up in less than a week, and i really do enjoy posting my thoughts on that event each time. So—sometime this or (much more likely) next evening i’ll start posting again. I’m thinking that my posts over the next couple months are pretty likely to deal with this newly public face of Mormonism, if only because i’m trying to work through that. We’ll see how it all shakes out, though.

Please stay tuned…

…we are experiencing technical difficulties.

Basically, moving to a new place, a failed logic board, and the local internet service taking a few unexpected extra days to get set up have created a break in posting. I should be back into it properly in a couple or three days, but until then, thanks for your patience.

On turning 500

So this marks the five hundredth post on the Latter-day Snark since the blog began on 31 July 2008. That’s actually a pretty impressive milestone for a less-than-every-day blog, and so it’s a chance to look back at a couple interesting things i’ve learned, and to play with some statistics.

First, posts about testimony gloves (particularly when you’re not in favor of them, as is the case for me, as you can read here and here) get people’s ire up. I’ve been called nasty things in a lot of different fora, but the amount of venom (including a handful of really vicious responses from people who decided pseudonyms weren’t enough, they had to take it to non-public email) in response to my position that testimony gloves are most emphatically not a divinely inspired idea is kind of scary.

Also, stuff that i really expect to draw comments rarely does. Interestingly, though, much of what draws views (according to Blogger, at least) doesn’t draw many comments. So, for example, my post declaring that i won’t ever put ads on this blog? More views in the last week than any of my other posts. Yeah, i don’t get it, either.

Over the past couple months, a much more likely post led the pack: My post asking whether Mormons are Protestant—that one apparently links high enough on a number of Google searches containing the words Mormon and Protestant that it drives traffic to me.

(Speaking of Google searches, searches containing the words Mormon and evil apparently also drive traffic my way. Not necessarily surprising, i suppose.)

The all-time leader in views here, though? My original testimony glove post, of course—over a thousand views in a bit over three years, which isn’t a lot, but for a not-really-widely-publicized blog, it’s actually somewhat frightening that that many people would drop by.

Of course, my twice-yearly semi-liveblogs of general conference (next one this Saturday morning!) result in a spike in traffic, but that’s mainly ’cause people do searches for various addresses by speaker name rather than anything specific to my blog, i figure.

Finally, by far most of those who come to my blog come from the United States, as you might expect, but a strong second showing comes from the United Kingdom. The next few are bunched together, led by Germany; i don’t know if the relatively high number of German readers is because i’ve mentioned serving as a full-time missionary in Germany and Austria occasionally, but that’s the only explanation i can come up with.

Oh—and my youngest sister’s blog (which is largely but not exclusively her stories of homeschooling her kids) drives a lot of traffic this way, so here’s a link to see what might go the other way.

Metapost

So Blogger has been telling me that my blog is popular,* and that i’m missing out on making money by not placing ads on my blog (or, in their focus-group-tested language, i haven’t “monetized” my blog). Surely they’re only looking out for my best interests, and they want me to have some extra pocket change, right?

Actually, what i suspect is that Blogger knows it is missing out on the pocket change that they would get if i and a few thousand more like me were to allow ads to be placed on my site.

But i would like to publicly state my position: I will not place ads on my blog. Ever. I do this thing for fun, and advertising just doesn’t seem to fit in my ethos of fun, you know?

Anyway, just wanted to say that out loud for some reason. Back to the regularly scheduled snark in a couple days.

* I suspect that that means they’ve discovered that more than two people read it, which certainly is an achievement for a blog, but i’ve seen the numbers—with the possible exception of my twice-a-year general conference notes, this blog is not what i would call “popular”.

Truth is beauty, beauty truth

So a couple posts ago i mentioned that i was going to be traveling to family reunions, and as i more or less expected, that resulted in my complete radio silence over the past week and a half or so. However, stuff that happened over the time i was away gave me a couple things to write about.

For example, this past Sunday my family attended church (along with most of the rest of that mostly-Mormon branch of our family) at a smallish branch.* While i was there i saw something i haven’t seen in a Mormon church service in years:

Metal sacrament trays!

(Old-school represent!)

You know, i certainly understand that they can get dinged up, and they’re noisier than the plastic ones,** but the metal ones are so much prettier—and i hadn’t realized how much i’d missed that.

* Those of you who know how church unit budgets are calculated will understand why i kept imagining that the branch president was thinking to himself, “Why couldn’t their family reunion have been in June instead of July?”

** Unless you use the paper cups—but for whatever reason, the paper cups cost noticeably more than the plastic ones.

What do you call a synonym that actually isn’t?

What’s up with the use of the word priesthood to actually mean men?

It gets ridiculous at times, like when i’ve seen active-but-nonmember husbands of members of the church included in the blanket label the priesthood.

Not to mention, of course, that the priesthood doesn’t direct traffic at stake conferences, people do. Is that really such a difficult distinction to make?

p.s. I’m going to be traveling and at family reunions the next bit, so posting on this blog may be sporadic the next month. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

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.

Why we’re better than the rest

I just ran across this absolutely marvelous 1973 quote from Hugh Nibley:

The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism…The haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances.

This, of course, is why nobody in any leadership position of our church cares whether boys and men wear white shirts or ties, or whether they wear beards, or whether they have long or short hair, or for that matter whether women wear skirts or dresses, or whether they have multiple earrings. Nope, nobody in our church is concerned with those sorts of things at all.

p.s. I’m considering moving this blog from Blogger to the WordPress platform, possibly hosted on my own server. I know there’s three or four people who read this blog semi-regularly, some of whom are bloggers themselves. Any input on that idea?

Is this really a covenant?

Is Mosiah 18:8–10 a summary of the baptismal covenant (as it’s usually referenced), or is it a summary of the qualifications and results of an effectual baptism? I think there’s a difference, and i suspect the difference would be important (not to mention that i suspect that it’s the latter, not the former), but i can’t put my finger on exactly how and why.

p.s. I actually like Blogger as a blogging platform, but my biggest annoyance with it (aside from the lack of decent photo placement tools, though that doesn’t really affect this blog) is that the buttons for publishing a post and saving it as a draft are right next to each other, making it really, really easy to think you’re scheduling a post to go up one afternoon, when you’re actually keeping it invisible to your readers. That is all.

Introducing a theme: Boys and girls

Sometimes i feel like i’m the only active Mormon guy around whose family is done with childbearing and has only daughters, no sons.* Having all daughters, though, has had the result of me being intensely aware of differences in the treatment of girls and boys in church culture and programs.** I have a few thoughts on the subject, and i’ve been wanting to see what happens if i devote a series of four or five posts to a theme—so the next few posts will be on that subject.

We’ll see if it works out well.

* And no, we didn’t keep “trying” to have a son until we gave up. Actually, i only wanted daughters, even before Jeanne and i started having kids—and i can produce witnesses to that fact. The assumption that all daughters was some sort of a disappointment isn’t a Mormon thing, though—i get that from all directions.

** Me being me, that would have probably been the case anyway, actually. Having all daughters and no sons certainly makes it more personal, though.

On being away

All [insert small number here] regular readers of this blog may have noticed i’m overdue for a post here. This is because i’ve been unable to post—i’m out in Chevak, Alaska, where internet (and cell phone, for that matter) access is tough to often impossible to come by, so no posts to this blog until sometime early next week.

(I’d planned to post something to this effect from the airport in Anchorage before i left, but their public internet access was down, even. So it goes.)

The cross and the garden

I don’t know what to think—i give y’all better than a week to talk about lust, and all i get is one comment.

Apparently sex does not, in fact, sell.

Oh well. I’m back, so on with the three or four times a week schedule, starting with:

Where’s the doctrinal evidence behind the common Mormon meme that Gethsemane was of bigger importance to the Atonement than Golgotha? Is it just a way of distinguishing ourselves from mainstream Xian groups that focus on Christ’s miracle on the cross, or is there something deeper?

On lust

I’m about to head off to Columbus, Ohio for an academic conference. (It’s on pedagogical practice in linguistics, if you care about that sort of thing.) As a result, i won’t be posting anything after this here for about a week—so i’ll give you something interesting to talk about.

Let’s talk about lust.

As far as i can tell, the word “lust” is consistently used in a negative sense by church leaders. I didn’t have the time to do an exhaustive search, but if you run a search of general conference addresses, “lust” doesn’t seem to come up in positive contexts.

This makes sense, i suppose—lust can be distracting, to say the least, and we do a lot of counseling teenagers to beware of lust, ’cause lust ups your chances of falling into sexual sins. Fine.

But what about those of us who are married? Is lust always a bad thing, or is it acceptable to feel lust toward your spouse?

True story: In a ward i used to live in, i was in a gospel doctrine class where the topic was the law of chastity. (By definition, not having sexual relations with anyone other than your spouse who you’re legally married to.) This led to discussing how Satan uses sexual urges to tempt us, and how we need to resist them. (Yes, how we need to resist sexual urges, not how we need to resist temptation. I disagree, as you’ll see, but it’s a pretty widespread Mormon cultural meme.) There were a handful of people who talked about how we need to do everything we can to avoid giving in to “unhealthy sexual urges”, and the word “lust” was used a couple of times in a very negative sense. Eventually i raised my hand and, when called on, said that lust is actually a good thing—if we didn’t have them, then people would probably be much less likely to have children to raise, and since part of God’s plan is for people to raise children, then it’s a good thing that lust happens.

Well, a bit of an eruption followed—and i basically got lectured by several people on how healthy sexual urges have nothing to do with lust. But you know what? I think that’s hair-splitting—the difference between “healthy sexual urges” and “lust” isn’t a difference of kind, it’s purely a difference in what you care to call it to keep yourself from shocking your Puritan neighbors.

For my part, i feel lust toward Jeanne regularly and frequently, and i don’t think it’s a sin. In fact, i would probably find it troubling if i didn’t.

But i’m curious what y’all think. Is lust always a Bad Thing? Is there actually a difference between lust and what people call “healthy sexual urges”? (And just to keep things on an even footing, let’s limit ourselves to lust directed toward one’s spouse—we can all agree that extramarital lust is wrong without having to get into those sorts of details.)

A new year

Well, reader, you have a new year here, patterned after the old one in which we used to live.

The question, i suppose, it what you’re going to make of it. But that’s always the question, isn’t it?

The true meaning of Xmas

And today, of all days, let’s all remember the true meaning of Xmas: birthday cake for Daddy!

This message brought to you by the Committee to Remind Alaska’s Families that David B’s father was born on 24 December.

Happy Thanksgiving!

For those of you in the US, a happy Thanksgiving. For those of you outside the US, happy Thanksgiving anyway—just feel free to pretend i posted this on the appropriate day for your locality (4 October in Germany, 12 October in Canada, and so on).

Alaska? Yes, Alaska.

An administrative note, and a forewarning: We’re going to be moving to Alaska* this summer. This means that from sometime mid-June to sometime probably mid-August my posts here are going to be pretty sparse, since we’re packing everybody into the minivan and driving there, taking in as much scenery as we can along the way.

(So if i suddenly appear to drop off the fact of the earth next month, y’all will know why.)

* Yes, we currently live in Florida. Yes, we already know it’s cold up there. And yes, we also know it’s a long way away.

On this Easter morn^H^H^H^Hafternoon

No snark today, just a nod to the reason we worship.

(And for those who aren’t nerds enough to get the subject line, ^H refers to an old widely-used keystroke for a backspace-delete.)

With a nod toward the day

What, you expected a practical joke here today? No, if you’re after that, you really ought to go looking for the experts.

Post-Thanksgiving grumble

So the younger of my sisters (Heather of Camian Academy) has “tagged” me. This means, she says, that i’m supposed to post the rules on my blog (you can follow the link to Heather’s blog, the rules are there), write six random things about myself, and tag six or so people to keep the chain going.

So, therefore, here are six completely non-random things about me:

• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.
• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.
• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.
• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.
• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.
• I don’t forward or participate in email (or similar) chains.

But Heather already knew this, i think.