On problems, worldviews, and bishops

I’ve held a number of callings over the past decade and a half that have given me the opportunity to closely observe several bishops and their counselors, while never having to be one myself. One thing that i’ve noticed is that bishops and (to a lesser extent) their counselors tend to really intensely believe in the church vs. world contrast i wrote about recently, with the world being a scary, dangerous, sinful place, and one that we in the church need to keep ourselves removed from.

I’ve wondered about this for a while—what is it that makes bishops have such a jaundiced (that may be a bit too strong) opinion of the world around us?

One contributing reason has recently occurred to me: If there’s some sort of major problem going on in a ward, it goes through the bishop.

→Someone committed a major sin? The bishop has to deal with it.
→A couple’s going through marital stresses, maybe even planning to divorce? The bishop has to deal with it.
→Someone has decided they aren’t going to fulfill a calling in any sort of reasonable way? The bishop has to deal with it.
→The youth are carrying on in high-risk ways? The bishop has to deal with it.
→Someone’s having financial problems, maybe not even having any food to eat? The bishop has to deal with it.

Really, this can’t be emotionally healthy for him.

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 world and its motes

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s bothering me anew and from a slightly different direction, so: What’s up with the whole the church (meaning quite specifically the Mormon church) vs. the world dichotomy? And, in particular, why is it that the world is always presented as being irredeemably evil, or at least teetering at the edge of irredeemable evilness?

For my part, i see lots of good in all sorts of bits of the non-Mormon world. In fact, there’s some rather non-good elements in the Mormon part of the world, i’d argue. So what’s actually going on here? Is this (as it always appears to me) simply a case of the mote and beam problem, or am i missing something here?

Letting speakers speak freely

Here’s something i posted in my list of thoughts from general conference, but i wanted to pull it out on its own. (Actually, i may do that in coming days for a few other things buried in those posts.)

When are non-native-English-speaking speakers finally going to be allowed to speak in their native languages in general conference? I remember listening to Ángel Abrea speak back in the day, and being able to tell he had something to say, but not being able to really follow along when he spoke (and i tend to be better than most at following along with non-native speakers). I’d rather have had him speak perfectly fluently in his native language, and let me listen to a translation.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

In honor of the date

So can we finally lose the idea that Jesus was born on 6 April? I mean, he certainly might have been, but the way that one verse in the book of Doctrine and Covenants has been spun into some sort of absolute “doctrine” by many members of the church disturbs me.

Things to remember:

1. Back when Jesus was born, there was no such thing as “April”. In fact, the calendar he was born under didn’t even always have twelve months, and any given day of any given month didn’t always occur at the same point during the earth’s orbit around the sun—it was a lunar calendar.
2. For that matter, 6 April doesn’t even always occur at the same point in the earth’s orbit every year—there’s slippage of a few seconds here and there.
3. And if the birth actually happened at night, when it occurred would make a difference, since the next day began at sundown back then, not at midnight.
4. And finally, the biggest reason this insistence on 6 April bugs me, you find collocations exactly parallel to “being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh” in all sorts of writing back then, both secular and religious. It’s just a fancy way of saying, in English, anno Domini 1830 (that is, in the 1,830th year of our Lord).

After all, you’d think that a people who quite happily recognize that the seven “days” in Genesis don’t each literally refer to a 24-hour day would be able to recognize that not all scriptural references to time are literal.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Sunday afternoon

And now, after the big leagues of the Sunday morning session, we move to Sunday afternoon. I don’t have any evidence for this, but i’ve long strongly suspected that this is the least-watched of all the conference sessions.

(And as an aside, i sometimes wonder if i’m the only person in the church who absolutely loathes the song “Abide With Me, ’Tis Eventide”. Oh, well.)

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

(Closing speaker)

• “The world seems to have slipped from the moorings of safety…” Well, i seem to remember reading that the earthquake in Chile wobbled the earth’s axis a bit, so that would be correct. (Sorry. I know. Sometimes i just can’t help it.)
• Anyway, not much to jot down here as notes from this speech—as with most closing addresses at general conferences, this was more of a pep talk and closing blessing (a benediction in its classic sense, i suppose) than anything else, which doesn’t lend itself to specific commentary.

Neil L. Anderson (of the quorum of apostles)

• There are no assigned subjects or themes for general conference speakers. Why, then, do we assign topics (or, more often, general conference addresses as topics) for speakers in sacrament meetings? What is the crucial difference?
• Lots and lots and lots about teaching children in this conference, including this address. That’s always a topic, of course, but it seems like a pretty intense focus this time around.
• How many single fathers are there in the church? We get another set of comforting thoughts directed to single mothers, but unless i missed it i haven’t heard anything for single fathers this weekend.

Francisco J. Viñas (of the first quorum of seventy)

• Interesting—if Ammon taught people “all things pertaining to righteousness”, and that led to a conversion so deep that they “never did fall away”, what does that tell us about what we need to teach those around us? I mean, “all things” is a pretty long list, and it probably goes beyond the bounds of what’s in any of the church’s lesson manuals.

Gregory A. Schwitzer (of the second quorum of seventy)

• So is this the great day of the second quorum’s power, or what?
• Ah! A public resuscitation of the image of Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus. (For what it’s worth, i don’t read the story of Mary and Martha as being as harsh on Martha as most seem to think it is—but there aren’t a lot of us with such a point of view, i’ve learned.)
• Good point about one’s actions not necessarily reflecting one’s internal state.

James B. Martino (of the second quorum of seventy)

• Appreciative laughter all around from our family for the baseball story he opened with.
• I like the reminder that even if someone’s trials don’t seem like much, they’re still very real to the person going through them. Probably not gonna stop anybody from playing “my trial is bigger than your trial”, but apparently we’re overly competitive that way.
• Well, count him as a general authority who doesn’t put much stock in the claims of those who believe that immunizations aren’t worth it.

Bradley D. Foster (of the second quorum of seventy)

• I don’t know that the story about the picture book illustrates the influence of mothers so much as that it illustrates that kids get used to specific practices really easily. (Good laugh line at the end, though.) Also, it is forcibly reminding of the P.D. Eastman book Are You My Mother?, which is, really, one of the dumbest children’s books ever.
• I don’t like the claim that caring is a feminine attribute—i’ve known too many women with no propensity toward caring, and too many men who were amazingly caring individuals. Do most modern cultures encourage caring in females more than males? Sure. Are women inherently better at it than men? I really don’t think so.
• Demographic thought: Single parents nowadays are more often mothers. I wonder if that’s been the case historically, given mortality rates in childbirth in the past.
• Cool thought that one of the things that Jesus had to accomplish as part of the process of the atonement was to make sure that his mother was taken care of.

Robert D. Hales (of the quorum of apostles)

• The way he presented the scriptural line “we do not doubt our mothers knew it” gives it an interestingly different spin than the way i generally read it.
• Church leaders often plan scouting events, but do these serve their most important purpose? he asks. Well, in my unhappy experience with scouting, that’d be a no, unless their most important purpose is to push away kids who prefer drama to guns…
• Great—now i have the Pink Floyd song “Is There Anybody Out There?” looping in my head.
• There really is an inherent tension in the ideas that it’s vital to raise children in the light of the gospel, and that every individual has free will to choose their spiritual path.
• Given the content of his address, it seems that the ones who really needed his blessing would be those children not growing up in homes where the gospel is lived well.

Russell M. Nelson (of the quorum of apostles)

(First speaker)

• Interesting job of making sure to include young people in the process of genealogical research.
• He says that oral histories (among many other things) are a crucial part of family history research. This makes me happy.
• I think it’s cool that the revised Family Search system lets people submit corrections. What happens when you get the Family Search equivalent of a Wikipedia edit war, though? What if both sides have equally valid documentation of their claims (which is entirely possible, even likely in some cases)? This is a problem for any database that is built on an assumption that all datapoints have a single correct entry. I figure it’s a known issue, maybe even has a solution, but i don’t know where to look to find the answer.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Sunday morning

So here we are, the Sunday morning session, the big leagues, the Christmas-and-Easter-mass equivalent of general conference. I know a number of Mormons who believe that full attendance at general conference means watching one of the four main sessions of conference plus, for some, priesthood session for the priesthood holders. (If you think historically, this makes sense—back when the only way to attend conference was to go see it in person in Salt Lake City, most could only attend one session, if any.

Anyway, for most such people, this is the one session to watch—so pay attention, these are the ones people will remember. (Though i did know one family who held that position on conference attendance, and so—this was back in the day when you had to go to the stake center to see a conference session—they’d always go to one of the Saturday sessions so as to avoid the crowds.)

And speaking of Easter, that’s today. I sometimes wonder how many Mormons miss out on general conference when it falls on an Easter Sunday because non-Mormon parents or grandparents require family presence on those days.

Finally, it still seems kind of weird to me to talk about the Saturday or Sunday “morning” sessions, ’cause growing up on the east coast every conference session came after noon. I still remember being vaguely confused as a kid when they’d welcome everyone to the morning session of conference at 12:02 in the afternoon.

And remember, as in other posts in this series, the first speaker is at the bottom of the post, and you scroll upward as the session progresses. This is so that you can end up with all five posts (once the Sunday afternoon session is up), and scroll bottom to top through the whole thing to get every speaker in chronological order.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

(Final speaker)

• You don’t actually get this much of a focus on death as death in many addresses in the Mormon church.
• The “I have read, and i believe…” formulation is nicely compelling.
• I read a couple of scholarly articles once about views toward death in nineteenth century America, and how Mormons tended to deal with the deaths of children very differently (and, to modern sensibilities, in healthier ways) than the general population. The authors made the interesting claim that this led to nineteenth-century Mormons often putting more emotional investment into their small children, as well. Anyway, for presumably obvious reasons, this address reminded me of that.

Quentin L. Cook (of the quorum of apostles)

• He said that taking the sacrament renews our baptismal commitment. This is a very common statement, but i don’t see the parallel between the sacramental and baptismal covenants. I figure it must be there, though, since it’s so widespread—so what is the parallel?
• Interesting thought, that the way we interact with each other is a reflection of our commitment to God.
• Ah! I’ve been wondering if we’d get anything like what he just offered: An indirect statement telling the more extreme elements among the Tea Partiers to chill out a bit. (It was phrased more generally, of course, as such statements always are, but most of the disagreement-spawned contention and vandalism in the news of late in the United States has come from that quarter.)
• Do we ever get intense stories about righteous people who don’t survive disasters? I’m guessing they’d be harder to document (there might be a lack of surviving witnesses to tell the story, after all), but i wonder if sometimes we get into a groove of thinking that the righteous will always be protected while the wicked will not, founded on stories like the one he told about the tsunami in Samoa.

Cheryl C. Lant (past general president of the primary organization)

• You know, we don’t have any photographs of Jesus. There are a lot of different—and i do mean a lot of radically different—visual representations of Jesus out there. So why do we place any weight on a child identifying as Jesus a picture that they’ve been told is a picture of Jesus? Seriously, i don’t get it.
• Her retelling of 4 Nephi was interesting—she said that multiple generations of people were righteous because they were taught well. Does this mean the children who were taught well weren’t taught how to teach their children well, and that’s why it eventually fell apart? I’m gonna have to think about that one.
• Nice subtly delivered (but probably effective, for the listening population) reminder at the end that children need to be included in religious observance.

Donald L. Hallstrom (of the presidency of seventy)

• I wonder about parallel stories like the ones he gives (one family that left the church after a death, another family that stayed in the church after a death). Are they really fully parallel? I always want to ask about the details that are left out in the telling—it could be that the one family was helped and comforted, while the other was criticized and effectively driven out, we just don’t know.
• But that said, yeah, the story of Simonds Ryder leaving the church is pretty stunning.

Richard G. Scott (of the quorum of apostles)

• Good point that we don’t know why God the Father had to withdraw from God the Son during the agony on the cross. (Doesn’t mean that us Mormons aren’t gonna keep speculating about it, of course, but that probably goes without saying.)
• His address got me thinking: If the home is, in the end, preeminent over even the church, does that mean that parents have the right to alter, including in major ways, church programs for the home so that they fit their individual family’s needs? I tend to think the answer is yes, but i know a number of Mormons who would say that the answer is no.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (second counselor in the first presidency)

(First speaker)

• The story of the statue that he tells is all over the net, if you put enough terms into Google to filter out extraneous stuff. It’s supposed to be at a cathedral in England, and the repair work was done at least in part by German volunteers. The inscription placed on the semi-repaired statue varies from account to account, which makes me wonder if it’s glurge or real. (Either way, a good message.) In any event, the most widely given reference is Paul Brand’s book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, if anyone wants to figure out where the story happened.
• As someone who just doesn’t like the white-shirt-tie-and-jacket uniform of present-day male Mormonism (and so doesn’t wear it), i did a little happy dance when he said that we shouldn’t judge others by how they look or what they wear. I actually haven’t had much backlash from other Mormons on the way i dress (even back when i had a ponytail), but it has definitely happened now and again. I have a thick skin about such stuff, but not everyone does—and those are the ones we risk losing.
• What? We don’t all have the same ability to judge as God does? But—but—but that means Mormon culture might have to change in lots of big ways! That can’t be right, can it? I mean, active Mormons are all already perfect, yes?
• I liked the twenty dollar bill simile.
• I hadn’t heard the story of Zimri and Avraham before. I liked it a lot.
• I’ve said it before, but the experience of being marginalized as a refugee child really does seem to have had a pretty sizable influence on his outlook on life. I also think it’s good to have such an outlook represented in the highest councils of the church.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Priesthood session

First of all, i still don’t understand why the general priesthood session of conference is treated differently than the other sessions. Why isn’t this session available via the internet or regular satellite television? Not everybody in the church has access to a church building with a satellite dish, after all, which means that if priesthood session is so vitally important, the decision to restrict its distribution (and, at least in past conferences, to not release it in digital formats until some weeks after conference is over) is puzzling.

Anyway, that said, here’s some observations on priesthood session. As with the other entries i’m doing, the first speaker is at the bottom of this post, the final speaker at the top.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

(He was the final speaker.)

• Not too long ago, i asked on this blog whether a sitting prophet had ever counseled the youth of the church not to date until age 16. Well, even if it had never happened before, it happened today.
• In connection with that, i think it’s interesting that he noted that not all teenagers want or need to date. (Or, in other words, if your kid doesn’t want to go to prom, don’t stress out about it.)
• Anyway, this address was basically a list of practices, a “here’s how to behave” sort of thing. It’s really hard to get anything substantive down from something like that.
• Money quote of the night: “…and he said, ‘Brother Monson, do you remember me?’ I get that everywhere i go!”
• And by the way, does the counsel to “avoid extremes” in grooming and dress include avoiding the extreme of looking like you just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalog? ’Cause if so, i can totally get behind that idea.

Henry B. Eyring (first counselor in the first presidency)

• He quoted Brigham Young to the effect that priesthood holders who are diligent will not only receive the blessings of God, but will also receive a knowledge of how to receive them. That’s a really interesting concept, if you start thinking about it at all.
• He called the sacrament “the sacrament of the Lord’s supper”. I’ve always liked the poetry (and historical accuracy) of that phrasing.
• And in his address we got another use of the full name of the Melchizedek priesthood. Interesting.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (second counselor in the first presidency)

• This was my favorite address on the night, but it’s hard to summarize, except to say that it was about patience. It was amazingly full of material—little to no fluff.
• A couple of quotes i jotted down: “As the Lord is patient with us, let us be patient with those we serve.” “Never give up on anyone—and that includes giving up on ourselves.”
• He explicitly used a non-King James Version rendition of a verse!Let happiness abound!
• I like having someone speaking in general conference who smiles a lot.
• Also, he talks with his hands a lot.

Congregational singing!

• Why do we stand for these songs?
• No, really—why?

David L. Beck (general president of the young men’s organization)

• I often get vaguely annoyed—and i did even when i was in my teens—that the majority of addresses in the priesthood session of conference are addressed to the teenaged boys in the audience. (I mean, don’t the older types count, too?) The general president of the young men’s organization, though, i think i’d be weirded out if he didn’t address himself to that group.
• So apparently i understood correctly earlier, and the church is tweaking the young men’s program.

Ronald A. Rasband (of the presidency of seventy)

• He opened by saying that God needs every able young man to prepare to become a full-time missionary. Is this a shift from the “raising the bar” idea in which it was stated that not every young man should serve as a full-time missionary, or is the stress here on “able” young men, thereby restricting the population being referred to?
• Interesting that in pretty much every reference to full-time missionaries after that opening, he was careful to include both male and female missionaries, plus one reference to older couples. (I have daughters and no sons, so i notice these things. He talked about his son and daughter receiving mission calls, so i wonder if part of it comes from having raised a daughter who served as a full-time missionary.)
• I hadn’t known it was individual members of the quorum of apostles who assigned missionary candidates to missions—i’d always assumed it was the missionary committee or somesuch.
• His story of observing and participating as Henry B. Eyring assigned missionaries was an interesting take on learning to receive revelation.

Dallin H. Oaks (of the quorum of apostles)

(He was the first speaker.)

• He gave an explicit example of the prayers of non-Mormons leading to a miraculous healing.
• Interesting that the “blessing” part of blessing the sick isn’t the essential part of the ordinance. I mean, i knew that, i just don’t think i’d ever seen or heard it stated so bluntly.
• I have to admit that, even after listening closely to this address for anything on the topic, i still don’t understand what the effective difference between a prayer of faith for healing on the one hand and a priesthood blessing for the sick on the other really is.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday afternoon

By way of reminder if you read my last post, i’m posting notes on the speakers in reverse order, so to get to the beginning of the session, you should scroll down to the bottom.

Jeffrey R. Holland (of the quorum of apostles)

• He called his wife “Sister Holland”—i’m going to have fun tracking this bit of variation. But then again, i’m a sociolinguist, so my sense of fun is bound to be a bit twisted.
• Interesting that he defines “lust” as a fleeting, temporary thing. I don’t know that i’d define it the same way. Adopting his definition for the discussion, though, his points stand.
• Ooh! Really, really nice job of playing on the multiple meanings of “prostituting”!
• He’s having a lot of fun with wordplay in this address, actually. Heavy topic, but lightened a bit by the manner of delivery—it makes for a nicely effective preaching style, to be honest better in terms of style than i usually expect from him.

David A. Bednar (of the quorum of apostles)

• Is the Book of Mormon actually the only book that God has testified to be true? It seems to me that the book of Doctrine and Covenants and (less directly) the Bible both can be described that way, as well (minus the “only”, of course).
• Hurrah! for the statement that parents should both teach and learn from their children.
• Interesting that he talks about parents bearing testimony (and, therefore, teaching gospel principles) “spontaneously”. I wonder whether, if that was actually widespread in the church, there would be a need for family home evening.
• More hurrah!s for his endorsement of pretty-much-unstructured family home evenings.

Bruce A. Carlson (of the second quorum of seventy)

• Courtesy of Wikipedia: He was appointed director of the National Reconnaissance Office last year. That’s a pretty heavy government post. (He’s also from Minnesota, which makes me happy for some reason.)
• Interesting application of the story of Jeroboam, saying that partial obedience can’t gain blessings. (I understand why he followed that up with the story of Naaman. Given the end of the scriptural account of that story, though, i don’t know that it fully supports his thesis. Understandable, though—lots of stories in the scriptures are complex enough that they don’t fit into the neat little packages we so often work on fitting them into.)

Koichi Aoyagi (of the second quorum of seventy)

• A journey from Buddhism to Mormonism? I want to hear more about this.
• I wonder if his future wife sent him the postcard he talked about because she was interested in him back then, or whether that came later. A cool story either way, but it changes the spin—and if the interest developed later, the vaguely knowing audience laughter is a bit less well-placed.
• Also, he’s a native speaker of Japanese, which brings to mind something i’ve wondered for a long time: When are non-native-English-speaking speakers finally going to be allowed to speak in their native languages in general conference? I mean, i remember listening to Ángel Abrea speak back in the day, and being able to tell he had something to say, but not being able to really follow along when he spoke (and i tend to be better than most at following along with non-native speakers). I’d rather have had him speak perfectly fluently in his native language, and let me listen to a translation.

D. Todd Christofferson (of the quorum of apostles)

• I like his idea of the scriptures being communal memory. I think it might be fun to have a conversation with him about memetics.
• Interesting that he critiques the idea that God wants us to work for social justice, but doesn’t care how we behave. I suspect that a number of church members are going to read this as saying that God cares about our personal behavior, and doesn’t want us to work for social justice. Actually, the critique says nothing about whether God wants us to work for social justice.

L. Tom Perry (of the quorum of apostles)

• Listening to all the learning his mother had them do at home, i’m surprised i hadn’t heard how days used to be 34 hours long when he was growing up.
• Teaching in the church would be improved by improving teaching in the home. I agree, wholeheartedly—so does this mean i get to be with my children to teach them at home for more than 90 minutes on Sundays now? Just asking.
• I’ve published linguistic studies on the card-cord merger—the variable pronunciation of or as are found along the Wasatch Front of Utah (among other places). L. Tom Perry’s speech is one of the clearest examples of this among the current regular general conference speakers, with reparted, carner, and such making regular appearances in his speech. Not a doctrinal note, simply something that makes me professionally happy.

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

• It looks like we’ll hit 14 million nominal members sometime this year or early next year. Less than a third of a percent of the world’s population, but still.
• So the number of full-time missionaries has remained more or less flat over the past many years, but the number of convert baptisms is down a bit from its peak around 20 years ago. I wonder what the comparative retention rate between then and now is, since the full-time missionaries are now used more intensely in retention efforts. That’s the sort of thing that’s interesting to stats and demographics geeks like myself, but it’s probably never going to get mentioned in this speaking slot, I guess.
• What are the rules on who gets mentioned in the “prominent members who died” section of these reports?

Robert W. Cantwell (managing director of church auditing): church auditing report

• This has to be the most boring speaking slot in general conference. It’s turned into a nearly-set bit of text—nothing like the full financial reports (the stake with the highest per capita fast offerings is…with an average donation of…) that used to be given. I understand some of the reasons for the change, but why use up the satellite time with an auditing report at all?

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (second counselor in the first presidency): presentation of general officers and general and area authorities

• I find it interesting that area authorities are presented in general conferences, rather than in area, regional, or stake conferences. I wonder whether and when the number of area authorities will grow large enough that the current practice will end.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday morning

So it’s that time of year again—general conference time! And so, as i did last time, i’ll be semi-liveblogging each conference session—that is, there will be separate posts for each session, with a few thoughts from each address.

A note about the way these are ordered: Blogs arrange things chronologically from bottom to top, which is kind of annoying, since it goes against a few millennia of Western writing practice. However, there’s nothing i can really do about that, which means 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. (Grrr—sometimes the little things about blogging annoy me.)

That said, just to make things sane (in the sense of less scrolling-intensive), i’ll be writing each session’s post 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 will be given in the order i write them. This may be confusing, but so it goes. Anyway, this is where you scroll to the bottom of this post, and start reading upwards.

Henry B. Eyring (first counselor in the first presidency)

(Remember, this is the last speaker in the session, since i’m doing this in reverse order.)

• There’s an interesting tension in Mormonism (and we’re not alone in this)—on the one hand, we hold that it’s important to teach children and youth well so that they won’t go astray when they grow up, and on the other that we have freedom such that people who have been raised well can go astray and those who have been raised badly can be faithful. This address doesn’t speak directly to the tension, but it clearly focuses on the first part of that paradox.
• That said, i think it’s cool how much he’s focusing on the ability of children to learn and act, no matter what we adults might think.
• New curriculum announcement! (I think—or is it a restatement of an already-existing part of the young men’s program?) If it actually is a change, i didn’t catch enough of the details to be sure of what’s going on, but it sounds like it’s a minor shift in the young men’s program to make it a bit more similar to the young women’s program. Maybe this is another step toward finally separating the young men’s program from boy scouting? We can only hope.

M. Russell Ballard (of the quorum of apostles)

• Another first-name reference to a general authority’s wife! Maybe we’re going to see a trend away from the creepy (to me, at least) reference to guy’s own wives as “Sister LastName”.
• Interesting take on pop-culture depictions of women—that women are portrayed as valuable only in terms of their ability to be seductive. I don’t know that that’s the only way women are portrayed in popular culture, though it certainly is widespread. It leads me to wonder how he feels about portrayals of women as strong leaders (often stronger than men) in popular culture.
• A (slightly circumlocutive) statement that children shouldn’t be “protected” from ever hearing about sex and sexuality, but that parents should take the lead in teaching their children about such things.
• I think his statement that highly revealing clothing on women and girls is wrong because it perpetuates problematic stereotypes may be the first time i’ve heard that done in a way that doesn’t, in the end, place blame for any lustful thoughts that result from such clothing on the person wearing the clothes. Now if we can remember that men and boys can wear revealing clothing, too…

Wilford W. Andersen (of the first quorum of seventy)

• Interesting that the name caption on the video feed doesn’t tell you which quorum of seventy speakers are in. (How do i know which one this one’s in? Thanks, Wikipedia!)
• He gives a discussion of the issues faced by church members in Haiti after the recent earthquake, and the example of their firmness of faith and optimism in the face of tragedy and struggle. You know, it occurs to me that once the immediate needs (sanitation, food, shelter, probably in that order) of the people there are dealt with, one of the best long-term things that could happen to Haiti would be to help the people there work on reforestation of that side of the island. Attention will fade before anything gets to that point, though, i fear.
• He draws a distinction between depression and sadness. This is a Good Thing, i’d say, and not always considered.

Keith B. McMullin (second counselor in the presiding bishopric)

• Similar theme (forgiveness, even under the shadow of tragedy) in the opening to a general conference address of James E. Faust’s from a few years ago.
• There’s been an interesting shift in the content of general conference addresses by various speakers over the last 40 years or so. Back in the 60s and earlier, it was pretty reliable that the first presidency and quorum of the twelve gave addresses on spiritual life and the priesthood, the seventies gave addresses on missionary work, and presiding bishopric spoke on church physical facilities and the youth (especially the young men), and the presiding patriarch spoke on patriarchal blessings and the priesthood more generally. (And stake presidents gave prayers.) Listening to this address, given by a member of the presiding bishopric on the spiritual life (particularly forgiveness and prayer), i am reminded that these differences in themes by office don’t really reliably exist any more.
• It’s nothing groundbreakingly new, but the address includes a very nicely succinct solution to the inherent paradox of prayer (that is, coming up with a reason to pray when you know that God already knows what you’re going to be praying about).

Julie B. Beck (relief society general president)

• Back when i was in grad school, i took a seminar on Mormonism from the anthropology department. (No, this wasn’t in the jello belt—i went to grad school in Pennsylvania, at the school that prides itself as being the nation’s first college founded without any religious affiliation whatsoever.) One of the things i learned in that class was that, for the first time since records had been kept, the attrition rate from female Mormons going inactive between the ages of 12 and 19 had recently gone higher than the attrition rate among male Mormons at the same ages. Every time i hear an address that starts out talking about the glory of womanhood and such like this one, i am forcibly reminded of that.
• Women didn’t speak in general conferences in the 50s, but i wonder how an address by the relief society general president would have been different back then—membership in the relief society was voluntary, not automatic from a combination of adulthood, church membership, and biological gender.
• The last few minutes of this address were the closest thing to “Suffrage NOW!” i think i’ve ever heard in a general conference address. Of course, it was still pretty mild, but it surprised me a little anyway.

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

• The opening bits about “correlation” are interesting—people without either a deep memory or a good grasp of sorta-recent church history might be completely at sea here.
• He actually used the full scriptural name of the Melchizedek priesthood. You don’t hear that very often.
• Every once in a while you can tell that the speaker missed a line from the teleprompter. It makes me wonder whether anyone still gives addresses in general conference from paper notes.
• I’m certain i have the specific phrasing wrong, but this was interesting: “We have done a good job distributing the priesthood, but we have not done as good of a job distributing the power of the priesthood.”
• A bunch of discussion of the need for the father (when present, of course) to preside in the administration of priesthood ordinances in the home, no matter what priesthood authorities might be present. This leads me to wonder whether he’d also say that the mother (when present) should preside in childrearing decisions, per the discussion of parental stewardships in the document generally called the Proclamation on the Family.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

(He was the first speaker at the session.)

• He’s talking about all the places that the church has helped out with humanitarian aid. You know, i sometimes think that church humanitarian aid is a no-win public relations situation. If we don’t publicize it, some uninformed people get after us for not doing anything; if we do say what we do, some aggressive people get annoyed about us blowing our own horn too much.
• Cue the happy dance for two very different reasons: His wife is doing better healthwise, and he called his wife by her first name, not “Sister Monson”. Cool mini-story about the historical connection between his family and hers, too, with good laugh lines built in.

Sometimes you get heretical notions here

So let’s start with the foundational axiom that Jesus Christ led a sinless life.

Fine. But what does sinless mean?

The general idea among us Mormons, shared by most Xian theology, i think, is that it means that Jesus Christ never committed a sin—he was tempted, but never submitted to temptation.

However, there are other possible readings.

First of all, for Mormons, it could be that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but that he did so before the age of accountability.*

Another possibility is that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but he never sinned against any particular law that he knew of—after all, there’s that textually ambiguous status of sins committed by someone who doesn’t know what the rules are. (That’s at least part of why Mormons don’t consider the Fall to be the result of sins on the part of Adam and Eve—no knowledge means no sin.)

He may have sinned but consistently repented perfectly (better than the rest of us do, i’m thinking), meaning that those sins would not have been attributed to him.

And finally, he may actually have never sinned. At all.

I’m not sure which of these i hold with. I’m throwing this out there ’cause i’m curious what others think.

* For any non-Mormons reading, one doesn’t become accountable for one’s sins until arriving at the age of eight. (There’s more to it, but that’s enough detail for the moment.)

Sometimes you get useful tips here

A few weeks ago i complained that you can’t search on the church’s music web site by meter. I still don’t know how to conduct a proper search, but i’ve since looked more closely and discovered that you can browse by meter—there are two methods, one straightforward and one less so. The straightforward method is useful when you know what meter you’re looking for:

1. Go to the church’s music site.
2. Click on the “Music” link, and then on “Hymns” in the menu that pops up. (Note: This does not work for the “Childrens [sic] Songbook” link, which i think is really a shame.)
3. Click on “Meters” (naturally enough) in what comes up

That’s fine and all, but you have to know the meter you’re looking for for that method to be much use. If you know you want to match the meter of a particular song but you don’t know its meter off the top of your head, you have to use the roundabout method:

1. Pull up any of the songs in the hymnal on the interactive music player. (Here’s “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” my second-favorite song in the book.)*
2. On the left-hand side is a box titled “About this Song”. (Yes, the capitalization is a little messed up.) If it’s collapsed, click on the triangle to expand it.
3. One of the entries in this box is “Meter”. (For “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” it’s a mindboggling 14 14 4 7 8!) Click on the meter itself, not the label.
4. This opens up a new page from which you can browse through songs by meter, already opened up to the meter of the song you started with. (As you might expect, no other songs in the hymnal have the same meter as “Praise to the Lord”.)
5. Enjoy the music-nerd happiness.

By the way, if anyone can figure out an way to actually search by meter on that site, i’d like to hear it.

* My favorite is “All Creatures of Our God and King”, but you can’t use the interactive music player for that one due to copyright restrictions.

More questions about the hymnal

My least favorite song in the hymnal, arguably, is “In Our Lovely Deseret”—i see little to no redeeming value in it.

Lately, though, i’ve become curious whether i most object to the insanely didactic nature of the song’s lyrics, or if it’s the oddly unmusical musical setting those lyrics have been put to. Has anyone out there ever heard this song put to different music? Is there anything that works, that would make it more palatable for someone like me?

(What’s really bad is the musical setting for that song played on a piano, by the way. On the organ it still sounds bad, just not as gag-inducing.)

Why do we end that way?

When did closing speeches with “…in the name of Jesus Christ, amen” become standard in church meetings? General conference addresses in the first half of the twentieth century didn’t always end that way. Did sacrament meeting addresses and public testimonies end that way back then, or did that come in later? Anybody out there have any memory of that era of public speaking in the church?

With fecundity comes responsibility, apparently

I’m not just bored by the following sacrament meeting meme, i’m actively annoyed by it: The claim that i have to be righteous, because otherwise my descendants will be wicked. Really? My descendants have no moral agency whatsoever? Who knew?

How great the tenor and the bass

Thomas McIntyre’s musical setting for “How Great the Wisdom and the Love” is notably cool. The tenor and bass lines are more fun to sing than not only the alto (and let’s be honest, the alto parts in our church’s songbook tend to be more boring than they should be), but even the melody.

Sometimes you get some deep questions here

Has Jesus Christ accomplished the Atonement? It just occurred to me that the Atonement might not be completed, but rather still be an ongoing process.

Acquiring culture

So i’m sitting in testimony meeting and three straight semi-little kids (all from different families) stand up and start out with these exact words:

I’d like to bear my testimony, i know the church is true, i’m thankful for my family…”

I mean, even the stress pattern was the same for all of them!

What i want to know: Where do they learn it?

* Not the most recent one i was at. That one, we actually had the conceptual opposite, where lots of kids stood up and they all said different things. That was a Good Thing, i’d say.

Choosing to serve

My parents didn’t grow up in the church (and so didn’t serve full-time missions), i didn’t hang out with returned full-time missionaries while i was growing up, and i lived with a non-Mormon relative for the couple years before i served as a full-time missionary—all that to say that i didn’t really have any “role models” to follow on the whole serving a mission thing.

Perhaps as a result of this, i was shocked (and i mean that quite honestly) when i was in the Missionary Training center and learned that there were a lot of people there who had chosen to serve a mission even partly out of social, non-internal reasons. My experience was, of course, rather different, and almost zen—the opportunity was there to serve, so i chose to serve. (There wasn’t even really any “Should i go?” questioning. I wonder how widespread or not such an experience is. I’m guessing it’s not all that unusual, but it doesn’t make for good stories so we don’t hear about it very much.)

All about the unintended messages

Michelle’s response to the last post on this blog reminded me of a memory that had been buried in the back of my brain for a long time.

Back when i was a teenager, i read a lot. (Still do, actually.) Since i was growing up Mormon, a chunk of what i read was the pablum that passes for adolescent literature directed at Mormons (which is not to say that most adolescent literature not directed at Mormons isn’t pablum, but that’s a separate issue). This was particularly the case since my parents ran a Mormon-oriented bookstore for a bit of my growing up.

Anyway, one book in particular (the title and author of which, sadly, are lost in the mists of brainfog) was written to try to steer young Mormons away from four of the Big Vices—alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, and premarital sex.* This book’s particular approach to the de rigueur hamhandedness of the genre was to take the done-without-names third-person narrative common to Mormon lesson manual narratives of the 70s and 80s** and apply it to horror stories about the way things could go terribly, terribly wrong for teenagers who committed sins.

I remember a few of them, but the one i particularly remember was the story of a girl (cleverly named “a young woman”) who started having sex at a very young age (i can’t recall if it was twelve or thirteen) with pretty much any willing guy she could find, and ended up contracting a sexually transmitted disease that left her infertile. This was presented as the most negative of all possible outcomes. I still remember thinking, as a teenager, that if someone was engaging in such high-risk sexual behavior, infertility would probably be a positive outcome for that person, what with having one less thing to worry about and all—and if i, in my early teens and not playing the sexual promiscuity game, had that thought, i can only imagine that there were a few teenagers who were being sexually promiscuous who figured that they’d just been informed of a novel way out of some of their major life stresses.

Like the title says, it’s all about the unintended messages.

* You’ll notice the conspicuous absence of rock and roll from this list. Apparently, the author felt that Lex de Azevedo had already done such a poorly-reasoned approach to the subject with his book Pop Music and Morality that it could never be surpassed.

** Those of you around then will remember this—stuff like “A relief society president decided she needed a better way to reach the newly-married sisters in her ward…” and “A young girl was praying at dinner one night…” I mean, could they have telegraphed that they were made-up stories any more blatantly? Probably, but i can’t think of how.

The power of stupid terminology

Do non-Mormons use the silly, silly term “power of procreation” to label sex (and, relatedy, fecundity)? I find scattered references from other sources on Google, but the top hits are all Mormon-oriented.

If you could hie to Gilligan’s Island

In honor of it being Jeanne’s birthday today, and also with April Fools Day coming rapidly upon us, here’s something she and i came up with together.

Our ward’s choir sings once each month (on the Sunday the high council dude speaks). Last month, they sang “Oh My Father” to the tune of “If You Could Hie to Kolob”.* (This is an unprecedented two-fer—you get the two space-doctrinest hymns in the hymnal, both at once!) This was a new combination for me, even though i’d already known that you can sing either of these to the tune of either “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” or “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle”—and so that got us thinking of fun tricks choir directors could play with the hymnal.

Our favorite was the idea of singing every single 7676D-meter song in the hymnal (and the 7777D songs that would work)** to the tune of “If You Could Hie to Kolob”, a different song with the same tune each month, and see how long it took the congregation (and, more amusingly, the bishop) to catch on to what was going on. (My guess is that it might take some members of the choir a couple months to catch on, actually.)

I almost want to go up to my bishop next Sunday, shake his hand, and say “Hey, bishop, i’ve got this great idea for an April Fools prank on the ward…” just to see the initial expression on his face before he realizes that this is only what he should have come to expect from me by now.

* I know a lot of people absolutely heart both of these songs, but i would like to insert an obligatory gag here. There is no end to the “no end” verses, to begin with.

** By the way—does anyone know why you can’t search by meter on the church’s music web site? One would think it would be relatively trivial to implement, and quite useful.

What we don’t all know

Pet peeve, and a very serious one: People introducing concepts in sacrament meeting addresses with something like “We all know that…”

No, we don’t all know about whatever—many of us may, but what about non-Mormons who may be visiting, or people who have been away from the church for a while, or small children, or even people you’d expect to know but happen to have missed that concept somehow? I mean, i suppose you could get away with it in a very small group where you know everyone really well, but even there it’s a risky claim.

Dating and rumors

Jeanne and i were talking about growing up Mormon, and we realized that all through our growing up people told us that “the prophet” had said that kids shouldn’t date ’til they’re 16 years old, but we never actually saw a prophet say that ourselves. Were we simply looking in the wrong decade (or century)? I know it appears in various bits of church literature, but had a sitting prophet actually made such a declaration by the mid-80s?

(Of course, nobody ever actually defined “dating” when saying that anyway, so when it really comes down to it it’s not like it was actually terribly helpful advice.)

Blessings and cursings

I’m actually not certain, various Mormon memes notwithstanding, that God wants us to experience affliction in this life. Generally, afflictions are described in the scriptures as punishments. Not all are, of course, but it’s worth noting that even in those cases they’re not described as blessings.

Mormonism meets Buddhism

A zen testimony: My belief is.

Or, if you prefer, a fast meeting koan: What is the sound of one testimony being sobbed?

They don’t look identical to me

Serious question: Where did the sacrament=baptism thing originate? I mean, i don’t see where the covenants involved line up (aside from the way that all covenants line up)—so why do we talk about the sacrament being the renewal of our baptismal covenants?

What if it’s entirely legal?

Here’s an honest question: Are Peruvian Mormons allowed to use marijuana?

Peruvian law, as i understand it, allows the possession of up to a certain amount of marijuana for personal use. This means there’s no illegality involved if an individual grows their own (as opposed to purchasing it from someone who presumably has a larger amount available, since that would introduce some illegality into the process). However, the Word of Wisdom, by relatively recent tradition, includes a prohibition on illegal (or illicit) drugs. If it’s not illegal, is it allowed?

(And yes, i know that the prohibition is sometimes described as forbidding “harmful” drugs, but i haven’t seen that ever get defined rigorously anywhere—not to mention that there’s an open question on how dangerous, by whatever definition, marijuana-laced brownies might be in comparison with something like, say, overeating.)

Anyway, i suspect the answer is (a very firm) no, but i’m curious what the basis for it would be.

God be with ye

When i was a full-time missionary in southern Germany and western Austria, a lot of the members of the church (and nearly all of the full-time missionaries) there took issue with a part of the local culture: the common greeting Grüß Gott!

The main issue was the use of Gott ‘God’ in the greeting—it was perceived as a violation of the commandment not to take the name of God in vain.

I never really bought into that, though, particularly since i recognized it for what it actually means—it’s a wish for God’s blessing to come on the one being greeted.

Do i think that everyone who used this greeting meant precisely that? No. But am i going to urge people not to say it even if they mean it? Also no.

But then again, i also use Goodbye! even though it’s at least as much a use of the word God as Grüß Gott! is,* so i guess it’s not something i care to worry about very much.

* Yep.

Admitting mistakes

Recent news: The church has announced that the Ogden temple is going to be getting a complete makeover, both an interior but more so an exterior one.

How extensive is this makeover going to be? Well, the current exterior looks like



and the new exterior will look like



Or, in other words, the temple department of the church is finally admitting that the Provo and Ogden temples were the sad, sad architectural errors* that they were.

* At least they had the “pillar of fire by night, cloud by day” symbolism thing going—but even that disappeared when they repainted the spires white, and it was too opaque of a bit of symbolism for anybody to be able to get anyway.

UPDATE 5 June 2011: I changed what the “before” picture links to, since the church changed its picture of the “old” Ogden temple to a picture of the new version. Sadly, i couldn’t find a picture of the real old version of the Ogden temple (with the orangegolden-red spire and no angel on top), but you have to go with what you’ve got available, you know?

Where we fit

Not too terribly long ago i had an extended discussion with another member of the church about whether Mormonism is more Xian, Confucian, Taoist, or Zoroastrian. We decided the answer was Zoroastrian, but we also figured that saying that out loud would get us some really weird looks (firstly, from those who had never heard that word before…)

Learning from others

Back when we lived in Florida we learned about the Society of St. Andrew, a mainstream Xian group that does “gleaning”: going into already-picked fields to pick leftover fruits and vegetables and donating what's picked to food banks. We signed up to help a group pick sweet corn that was about to be plowed under at a farm about thirty miles away from our house.

By the end of the day our little group of twenty people, including a half-dozen children, had picked enough corn to fill half of the back of a delivery truck—about 4,000 pounds!

As we left, the man who was there from the food bank said to me “God bless you”—and he meant it. It struck me that lots of times we say things like that to each other, but it’s just a perfunctory thing—but he meant it sincerely, and I could feel the blessing of God wash over me. It was a powerful moment.

Anyway, just saying that it’s cool to be taught important spiritual lessons from someone of another faith—which is only to be expected, of course, since we Mormons may claim a monopoly on divine authority, but we oughtn’t ever claim to hold a monopoly on divine power.

A couple of thoughts on the gift of healing

Some people have the gift of healing, that’s a given. But it’s worth noting that there’s an often-unacknowledged flip side to this, in that there’s also a gift of faith to be healed.

The thing that i think is most excellent about this is that, even if someone doesn't have the faith to be healed, the book of Doctrine and Covenants commands (in the section sometimes called “the Law of the Church”, no less!) us not to criticize said person, but rather to do what we can to comfort them.

Just noting this because people often talk about one or the other of these gifts without taking into account the fact that both are involved in a delicate balance, and also because some people seem to imply that a lack of the faith to be healed or the faith to heal is a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing, it's just a difference between each of us as people.

The office of misfit dudes

Ward clerk: The last remaining significant administrative calling in the church where iconoclasm (and maybe even downright cultural oddballness) is perfectly okay.

Identifying a debate

Having written about Mormon culture and its practice the last couple posts, it occurs to me that a lot of the contention between Mormons about little pieces of Mormonism (you know, stuff like whether one may drink caffeinated soft drinks, whether it’s okay to for an endowed member to wear one’s swimsuit during the drive to the beach or not, and so on) comes down to one question: Which is more important in Mormonism—orthodoxy or orthopraxy?

(Of course, this simplifies the picture a bit—for example, there’s a small number of Mormons who wish current doctrine and practice were done away with or at least radically changed. I’m limiting this discussion to those who Mormons who approve of the Mormon church as it now is, though.)

I’d suggest that Mormons as a whole, by what seems to me to be a slim majority, seem to view the practice of religion as more important than the belief of religion. I’m very firmly on the other side—i tend to view belief as much, much more important than action. (There are deeper things that these different points of view lead to, as well—for example, do works lead more naturally to faith or does faith lead more naturally to works?)

To someone who views orthopraxy as more important than orthodoxy, certain issues of behavior are central—for example, the question of whether or not one gets tattoos is a vital part of the religion, and that’s precisely the issue to be addressed: Should one get tattooed or not? To someone like me who views orthodoxy as more important than orthopraxy, the question is quite different: Why would one get a tattoo, and is that an acceptable reason?

I strongly suspect that one of the hidden but huge fault lines within Mormon culture is this orthopraxy vs. orthodoxy thing.

Explaining Utah

Another thought stemming from going through papers and such relating to my time living in Utah…

As anyone who’s known me for a while (whether online or in Real Life™) can attest, i’m not a fan of pretty much any part of Utah Mormon* culture except for my admiration of raspberry lemonade made with real raspberries, but that’s more a Western thing than a Utah thing anyway.

Anyway, there are definite differences between Mormonism in Utah and Mormonism elsewhere, but what’s important for the moment isn’t what those differences might be, but rather why they exist at all. I suspect that most of the differences stem from two factors:

1. Utah Mormons are part of a majority subculture.
2. Utah is located in the Intermountain West.

Factor (1) results in a bit of a normative cultural trend, making appearances highly important. After all, as has been pointed out in some of the work on Mormons done by researchers in the sociology of religion, Utah Mormons don’t need each and every Mormon in the area to make Mormonism work, and therefore there tends to be less tolerance for significant deviation from Mormon orthodoxy and orthopraxy than in places where there is a lower concentration of Mormons—and since orthopraxy is easier to perceive than orthodoxy, that tends to lead to a lot of normative pressure regarding religious externalities.

Factor (2) is important because the Intermountain West tends to be a very socially conservative region of the United States—and under the strong reading of Bowie's Inequality Constant*** (i’ve gotta write a blog post on that thing one day), one would expect Mormons from the Intermountain West (and, therefore, Mormons from Utah) to be more socially conservative than Mormons from, say, Maryland or Ontario or Germany or some other not-as-socially-conservative place.

These working together mean that there’s a strong social pressure toward socially conservative behavior for Utah Mormons, and it’s stronger than places where Mormons are more widely scattered through the local population. (Happily, though, it’s not all blandness.)

* Really, the boundaries of Utah Mormon culture can’t be claimed to be fully coincident with the borders of Utah—southern Idaho, maybe eastern Arizona, other bits of nearby areas are all part of what i’m calling “Utah Mormon” here. Sociologists call the region the “Mormon Dominance Area”, which is more descriptive and precise but has the drawback of not annoying people from Utah, so i’ll stick with the name i’ve used.**

** There is, though, a much more fun label that i use occasionally—the “jello belt”. I only wish i were creative enough that it was original with me.

*** Utah ≠ Mormon, if you’re unfamiliar with it.

A worrisome ratio

Going through some old papers and such, i came across some things from my exile in Utah. We lived in a tiny little town near the south end of the Wasatch Front, and there was one particular difference between my ward there and the wards i’ve been in in the eastern US that fascinated (and, arguably, continues to fascinate) me. (I’m also curious whether this ward is representative of the Wasatch Front, or even Utah County—i have no way of knowing.)

When we arrived in our ward in that town, there were seventeen full-time missionaries out from the ward (that was their peak, but it stayed around a dozen during the years we were there). Two of them were an older couple, so that means there were fifteen young-person full-time missionaries from the ward—a number any bishop could consider a success. However, only one of the fifteen was female. I can’t imagine one of my bishops from the eastern states being happy if, for every fourteen male full-time missionaries his ward sent out, there was only one female full-time missionary—it’d be obvious proof that the young women’s program in the ward was having some serious problems.

Interestingly, though, my ward and stake leaders when i lived there talked quite a bit—more than i’ve heard in other wards and stakes i’ve lived in, before or since—about how great it is for young women to serve as full-time missionaries. My conclusion from this is that it wasn’t institutional (in the sense of coming from the church) pressures that kept the relative number of female full-time missionaries low, but rather that it was social pressures.

For the record, as the parents of girls, that frightened Jeanne and me, and it’s one of the main reasons we moved away from there.

More reasons to dislike the 70s

Anybody here ever gone back and read copies of the Ensign from the mid- and late 1970s? Absolutely amazing—and that’s not a good amazing. I’m not a fan of conflating culture and doctrine (that’s pretty much the definition of mingling the doctrines of men with scripture, isn’t it?), and it was all over the place back then.

I’m actually really glad that i wasn’t old enough to be fully aware of such things at that point in time—had i been a bit older then instead of later, i might have ended up pushing even further away from the whole concept of faith and Faith than i did in my teens.

Big dumb guys

You know, the story of Samson really is the ultimate big dumb strong guy story, isn’t it?

Modesty, again

Calling the wearing of “immodest” clothing (that’s immodest in the pop-Mormon, not the real, sense) a sin annoys me. Isn’t it sort of a shift of the blame from where it really should lie, with the person who’s not controlling their thoughts?

(Not to mention that it seems less than half a step from that to “She was askin’ for it, wearin’ that miniskirt and all.”)

No more memorizing?

The new (well, newish, really, since it’s a few years old by now) approach to the missionary discussions (yeah, yeah, i know, lessons—distinction without a difference, folks) gets portrayed as a huge shift from previous practice, particularly in that the full-time missionaries aren’t expected to memorize the discussions now, but rather to try to teach the various principles in their own words.

Really? This is new? I didn’t memorize the discussions when i was a full-time missionary nearly twenty years ago. Jeanne (my wife) didn’t memorize them when she was a full-time missionary almost as long ago. I’ve met very, very few people, in fact, who memorized the discussions as full-time missionaries. So how is this a big change?

So who are they, anyway?

Random serious scriptural question: In the book of Doctrine and Covenants, section 133 verse 34, who are Ephraim’s fellows?

Not loving the love

“Love at Home” is a horribly boring piece of music. The only way i can make it through happily is if i sing it in a really bad Russian Boris Badenov-type accent.

A presiding non-high priest?

Idle weird thought: If your ward’s bishop is a bishop by virtue of being a Levite (and thus can hold the office without being ordained a high priest) and isn’t a high priest, who’s the presiding high priest in the ward?

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.)

Things we learn from the scriptures

Moral of the Noah story: Build on high ground, and caulk your windows really well.

We have three, so it’s a valid question

My last post got me thinking: How does one make Brigham Young University plural?

As an initialization, it's pretty clear: BYUs seems the best way to go. But for the full name, Brigham Young Universities just doesn’t sound right to me, even though i figure that’s probably the best way to do it in the end.

The linguist in me gets overly amused, though, by analogizing from Book of Mormon > Books of Mormon and making the plural of Brigham Young University into Brigham Youngs University.

The only thing that would be better is if we decided that the university wasn’t named after Brigham Young so much as it belonged to him—then it would be Brigham Youngs’s University. Maybe even better: Brigham Youngs’s Universities.

Right? Right? Hey, where’d everybody go?

Hiring at the BYUs

Back a few weeks, there was a discussion on this blog about women working outside of the home and what the church’s actual position on it might be (which i claimed isn’t very black-and-white, as opposed to church culture, which is pretty intensely one-sided, i think). I said in an email conversation with one of the commenters on that post that at some point i’d post my thoughts on it given hiring practices at the Brigham Young University campuses (i used to work at one of them), so here it is:

I have to admit that i have difficulty believing that the prophets actually want women who desire to work outside the home not to do so. I mean, consider that faculty appointments at the Brigham Young University campuses are subject to approval by the Church Educational System Board of Trustees, and that group includes half of the Quorum of the Twelve and all of the First Presidency (among others). If the prophetic stance was actually that women (or at least women with children at home) shouldn’t work outside the home, then wouldn’t there be no appointments of women with children at home to the faculty of Brigham Young University? And yet there they are…

And before it happens, in case someone says it’s because of nondiscrimination rules, that doesn’t apply here. Colleges and universities in the United States with clearly defined religious missions are exempt from nondiscrimination rules in two ways: They’re allowed to discriminate based on religious affiliation, and they are allowed to discriminate in other ways that clearly relate to the religious doctrines of the affiliated religion. In other words, the BYUs can give hiring preference to practicing, devout Mormons—which they do—and they can refuse to hire anyone whose hire would contradict the religious doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That they hire women with small children at home anyway at the very least sends a signal that that isn’t a point of religious doctrine for the church.

Movie-going discomfort

Heard in a sacrament meeting address: “You shouldn’t go to a movie you’re uncomfortable with.” So does that mean that if you’re someone like me who has a very, very high threshold for feeling uncomfortable with stuff, then anything goes? The logic works for me!

Counting baptisms

Why, oh why do people talk about a full-time missionary’s “number of baptisms” (meaning the number of people who that missionary taught who immediately chose baptism) as if it’s a valid measure of success, or even a valid measure at all?

(And yes, i say this as someone who taught more people who were baptized than my mission’s average, so i get to ask it without it seeming like it’s sour grapes.)

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?

I can’t help but ask these questions

Was it evil of us to have our family home evening this week on the subject of how to properly MST3k overly earnest church videos?

The most important morpheme

One last Xmas thought, and this time a completely serious one: Why do so many people worry so much about keeping the Christ in Christmas? Seems to me that it’s actually more important (and probably more difficult) to keep the mass in Christmas.

Keeping the X in Xmas

When people say we ought to put the Christ back in Christmas, i heartily concur. In fact, i think that that doesn’t go far enough. I say we ought to put the voiceless velar fricative back at the beginning of Chanukah, and the penultimate stress back at the end of Kwanzaa, and the…

No, it’s not original with me. Wish i’d been clever enough that it was, though.

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.

Wasting an afternoon

Scriptural thought: Lehi states that the Fall was necessary for Adam and Eve to have had children, but he doesn’t state that the Fall had to happen precisely the way it did. Think that one through next time you have an afternoon to waste on pure doctrinal speculation.

The prophets vs. the scriptures

A rather frequent Mormon meme that actually bothers me pretty intensely: The idea that if we had to choose between having the scriptures or having living prophets, we should choose the living prophets ’cause they can simply give us what’s already in the scriptures as well as anything else we need.

This, of course, is the reason that the prophet Lehi felt free to leave the brass plates behind in Jerusalem. Right?

The Law of Socialism…errm, Consecration

A serious note, because i think it’s something we need to be reminded of occasionally: The Law of Consecration≠the United Order. The United Order was a method of living the Law of Consecration, but we can live that law without the benefit of such an order being set up.

(Not that i’m doing it myself, of course, but it’s worth keeping in mind anyway.)

Defining “the minimal piercing of the ears”

So our oldest is about to get her ears pierced,* and it’s brought to mind the statement on tattoos and piercings that Gordon B. Hinckley offered in 2000:

The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve have declared that we discourage tattoos and also “the piercing of the body for other than medical purposes.” We do not, however, take any position “on the minimal piercing of the ears by women for one pair of earrings”—one pair.

I remember this well, because i was teaching at Brigham Young University at the time, and the dress and grooming standards were rapidly changed so that “excessive” ear piercing for women was defined as more than one per ear, rather than more than two per ear.

This leads to an intriguing question. We’ll take it as a given that current church policy allows only one piercing per ear—but i see no requirement for those piercings to be in the earlobe. Our kid’s going to get her ears pierced in her earlobes, but presumably a devout Mormon woman could have piercings through her ear cartilage, as long as she only had one per ear. Right? Let me know if i’m missing something here, ’cause that’s the way it reads to me (and to Jeanne, for what it’s worth).

* This has nothing to do with the fact that it’s nearing Xmas, despite the calendar—we’re actually a few months overdue on when we told her we’d let her get it done.

An extra-special special musical number

This entry comes courtesy of guest contributor Heather the Mama Duk, who writes that this is snarkworthy enough that it’s just begging to be posted here—and she’s right. So, in her words:

Today our special musical number was extra special. It was six women singing and was billed as a “double trio”.

A double trio you say?

But of course. Because the word “sextet” is not appropriate for church no matter that it is what a group of six people singing is called in the musical world.

Family home evening refreshments, part two

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

Family home evening refreshments

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

The family’s under attack? When?

I’ve been thinking about it, and i’ve realized much of what it is that bothers me about claims that the family is “under attack” (whatever that actually means)—the evidences supporting that claim are nearly always purely anecdotal, and terribly subject to confirmation bias. For example (to present an anecdote i’ve actually heard), i’ve heard evidences such as someone criticizing a family’s size presented as proof that the family is under attack. Really? Has anyone ever told these people that they have a very nice family? Shouldn’t that be taken as evidence that the family is not under attack?

Naming practices

Jeanne and i only had female children, but if we’d had a male child i might have pushed for naming him Thyson (i could make a case that it was a variant of Tison, i suppose) so that everyone could bear testimony in his name along with Jesus’s.

Children and (pictures of) Jesus

I’ve started hearing, as proof of children’s spirituality, the fact that they’re so easily able to identify pictures of Jesus. Um, dude? First of all, we don’t know what Jesus looked like, and so there are a lot of different-looking representations of him around—find one that doesn’t match with what you’ve taught your children to identify, and you might be surprised at how unable children are to identify pictures of Jesus.* Also, take a child growing up in one of the completely non-Xian parts of the world, and i bet that child won’t be able to pass your spirituality test. You’re saying that those kids aren’t as spiritual as the ones who live near you?** How, um, lucky of your kids to live where they do.

* Yes, i realize the sort of person who makes such claims will cite that as proof that those aren’t what Jesus really looks like. I’m not even going to try to argue with that sort of twisted illogic, though.
** I do realize that there are some people who hold such positions. The technical term for such people, of course, is “idiots”.

Feeling Christ’s presence

I keep hearing people in church say that the Book of Mormon is really cool ’cause they feel Christ’s presence so clearly in it, more so than in any other book. It makes me wonder: Am i the only person in the church who finds Christ’s presence most clearly felt in the New Testament, followed by the book of Doctrine and Covenants, followed by the Old Testament, then the Pearl of Great Price, and least of all in the Book of Mormon?

Yeah, probably. Oh well.

Wherein David B claims to have read Obadiah

Serious thought: I read the entire standard works in 2½ weeks of (mostly) 9a–9p days while my missionary companion was sick and effectively bedridden. It’s cool what you notice in, say, the book of Doctrine and Covenants when Obadiah is still in medium-term memory.

Silencing Brigham Young

Every once in a while you get a sacrament meeting address or class discussion where we hear the meme about how it’s the calling of women to be good mothers. Odd how you don’t hear a lot about Brigham Young’s declaration about it being the calling of women to use their talents in whatever way uses those talents best, including in a number of occupations that can only be done outside the home.*

Quite seriously, i wonder why.

* For those of you who might not know it, here’s my favorite Brigham Young quote on the subject:

We think the sisters ought to have the privilege to study various branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. Women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but they may also stand behind the counter, study law and physic, or become good bookkeepers, and all this to enlarge their sphere or usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation.

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).

Missionaries who don’t want to be there

A thought resulting from going through some old papers of mine: When i was a full-time missionary, i had a number of companions who didn’t want to actually do missionary work. That didn’t bother me, really,* but it did bother me that they all (without exception among my own small sample) rather obviously hadn’t thought the reasons for their decisions and attitudes through.

* I mean, to be honest, i’m not temperamentally well-suited to missionary work, myself, i just forced myself to do it, and to do it well as i could.

Just one quick question

So what is the point of ward conferences, anyway?

Movie theatres aren’t my thing, anyway

Heard in a sacrament meeting address: “There are few movies that Latter-day Saints can go to these days without being embarrassed by the language used.”

Well, i don’t know if that’s true, but apparently there are few movies that Latter-day Saints can go to these days without being embarrassed by being seen by all the other Latter-day Saints there!

Nobody comes to Utah by chance

During my exile in Utah, i was at a sacrament meeting that was focused on increasing missionary activity in our town.* One of the things that was said, in an attempt to get us to feel that we would be successful in talking to our neighbors about the gospel, was “Remember, nobody comes to Utah by chance.”

Given my own experience, i can attest that this is true—some come well-prepared so that they can learn the gospel, some come so that they can help build the church up even stronger, and some come so ill-fitted to the local culture that they give the angels giggling fits. You get one and exactly one guess which group i fell into.

* This happened in a town where the population was more than 95% nominally Mormon, and where sacrament meeting attendance among those Mormons was higher than 80%. Think that through, and the whole subject becomes very, very different.

More thoughts on Family Home Evening

Holding family home evening on Monday nights seems weird to me, if it’s actually (as i’ve heard stated often enough) intended to reinforce the lessons learned on Sunday so that they don’t atrophy during the rest of the week. If this is really (part of) what it’s for, why don’t we hold family home evening on Wednesdays or Thursdays? I mean, if Sunday’s lessons are going to atrophy over six days, it seems to me they’ll atrophy over five days nearly as well.

David B gingerly touches the third rail of Mormon blogging

I don’t entirely get why the whole same-sex marriage thing is such a big deal (for either side of the argument), but i get that it’s a big deal for a lot of people. However, when it gets mentioned in church meetings it often gets really weird at me—like statements that marriage has to be between one man and one woman and that history has shown that “alternative forms of family formation” are doomed to failure. Well, if anyone would know that, i guess it’d be us Mormons…

Things being a parent teaches you

Anyone who believes that calmly, rationally discussing church meeting behavior with your children will lead to them behaving better needs to stop feeding their children so much Benadryl right before church.

Yet another phrase we could do without

Has there ever been a musical number in sacrament meeting that wasn’t very special?

My family hasn’t been shot at, for one thing

I’ve heard a lot of people in church claim (mostly in gospel doctrine and priesthood classes, but occasionally in sacrament meeting speeches) that “the family is under attack”. Can someone explain to me exactly what in the world that phrase is supposed to mean?

And i mean that seriously—i really just don’t get it.

Gardasil

Our oldest child has reached the age where we need to decide whether she gets the Gardasil shot or not.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a shot that provides some immunity to a number of strains of HPV, which is probably the most widespread sexually transmitted disease out there. This is a big deal healthwise, because these strains of HPV are the main causes of cervical cancer.

A number of people out there—most of the voices out there are mainstream Xians, but there are some Mormons among them—are vehement in saying that girls shouldn’t be vaccinated against HPV. There are a number of arguments raised, and some of them are outside the scope of this blog (for example, the whole Vaccinations Are An Evil Communist Plot Against America nonsense), but one is clearly worth mentioning here: The idea that HPV (and, by extension, any cervical cancer that results) is a punishment for the sin of sexual promiscuity, and we shouldn’t be immunizing kids against the effects of sin. Also, there’s some worry that girls will be more likely to be sexually promiscuous if they know they’re not in danger of one of the possible drawbacks to such promiscuity.

A number of people have pointed out that kids don’t necessarily think of the drawbacks that go with having sex when they have sex, so that last argument has flaws. However, i’d like to take issue here with the other one, which i think is much more insidious.

Should we be preventing people from experiencing naturally-occurring punishments of their sins? It’s an interesting question. However, it doesn’t really work as an argument against vaccinating girls against HPV. Consider the following ways in which a woman may have contracted HPV, neither of which involve sin on her part:

• She, as a virgin, marries a guy who isn’t a virgin and is a carrier of HPV.
• She is the victim of a rape, and the rapist is a carrier of HPV.

In addition, arguments against Gardasil on the basis of HPV being a punishment for sin seem to make the claim that repentance really shouldn’t be allowed to be as complete as God promises, and they don’t deal with cases like, say, a woman who was never taught to limit her sexual activity, but then repents and is baptized and lives a sexually sinless life after that. She gets to be punished because she was raised in ignorance? Really nice thinking, folks.

We’re vaccinating our daughters against HPV—we actually trust our kids to make decent decisions, and if they don’t, we’re evil enough that we believe repentance should be allowed to actually work.

Spiritual communication

Why do Mormons get so into this whole “God speaks to us through our feelings” thing? Where’s the scriptural justification for claiming that that’s God’s primary means of communicating with us? (Hint: Galatians 5:22–23 doesn’t actually say that, so that one’s out.)

Who can pass the sacrament?

Here’s a puzzler: Technically, it’s a deacon’s responsibility (or at least the responsibility of priesthood holders) to pass the sacramental emblems to the congregation, but obviously even a nonmember can pass the bread and water down the row to someone who wants to partake. Does this mean that a woman could take the sacramental emblems into the mother’s lounge? More generally, what is the role of the priesthood holders in the process?

And this becomes more interesting when you look at the scriptures, where one reading limits the distribution of the sacramental emblems to the priests*—and there’s no scriptural reason for the deacons doing it (though, presumably, it could relate to their responsibility to assist the bishop as needed), nor for restricting the preparation of the sacramental table to the teachers and not the deacons.

When it comes down to it, i’ve often thought that these policies were actually instituted as a means of making early-teen boys feel important, but that’s probably overly cynical for even me.

* See Doctrine and Covenants 20:46,58, where we run into the problem of what precisely administer means.