Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Sunday morning session

The big leagues! Yep, it’s Sunday morning, the the session of conference anybody who watches conference watches if they only watch one session.

Time to see who got the prime speaking slots.

As with the rest of these, this post is written bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post. My thoughts on each speaker, though, are given in the order i write them. Therefore, if you want a chronological view of the session, you need to scroll to the bottom of this post now and then start reading upwards.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• Interesting that he refers to becoming president of the church as his “appointment” to that office.
• Hurrah! A reminder that there is much that is good in the world! It’s altogether too easy for people, perhaps especially religious people, to dwell on everything that’s non-good in this mortal realm. Good to have reminders not to do so coming from the top.
• So does my habit of seeing the good in the world around us mean that i’m a grateful person and never realized it? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Always good to have something going for you, i suppose.
• Given that we believe in the immortality of the soul, is it ever too late to express gratitude to someone?
• Nice indirect reminder that it’s altogether too easy to get used to what we have, and therefore feel that there’s no reason to be thankful for it.

Dallin H. Oaks (of the quorum of apostles)

• He’s dealing directly with one of the inherent tensions of Mormon doctrine—that there is a hierarchical structure directing the affairs of the church and the behaviors of church members, but that there is also revelation to direct individuals’ lives that is available to all. Interesting terminological coinage he comes up with, calling these sides of revelation respectively the “priesthood line” and “personal line” of communication with God.
• If the personal line of inspiration is primary over the priesthood line in family governance, does that mean that such issues as how families determine who says prayers, when family scripture study is held, and so on aren’t subject to the directives of bishops and stake presidents? I know some people who may be surprised to have just learned that…
• So, Elder Oaks, tell us what you think about nondenominational Xianity. I’m sorta getting the feeling you’re not impressed, maybe?
• He pronounced the word shew as [ʃo] (i.e., the same as show), which is actually the pronunciation of that word. Cue the happy dance.
• Summary: He didn’t eliminate the tension i referred to above (which might be an impossible task, actually), but he did do a nice job of outlining some of the relationships involved that make it less of a tension than one might think. Nice job, really—like i wrote about one of Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s earlier addresses, it’s nice to hear addresses by general authorities who have had decent training in rhetoric.

Mary N. Cook (of the general presidency of the young women)

• Yet another reference to Joseph Smith’s leg infection! The meme lives…
• I’m going to have to review what she just said about the baptismal covenant. I haven’t been able to find it written down anywhere (and yeah, i know, i know, there’s Mosiah 18:8–10, but i’m not convinced that’s the baptismal covenant so much as it’s the qualifications for baptism), so i want to see if she gave any concrete pointers.
• Spending long periods on the internet or watching television is bad for us? You know, like spending eight or ten (depending on sex) hours listening to the internet this weekend?
• What she’s saying about clothing styles brings to mind a real question: Are current devout Mormon standards of clothing something that we should wish the rest of the world would adopt? I ask because, for example, current devout Mormon standards of clothing require the covering of shoulders, but are uncovered shoulders an inherently evil thing? I’m not certain of that.

Jay E. Jensen (of the presidency of the quorums of seventy)

• My linguist self must offer the following observation: He exhibited tooth-sucking a few times early in his address. This is interesting, because that feature is generally associated with African-American Vernacular English.
• “Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations and where is our religion? We have none.” Actually, quite seriously, that’s not true. Most other religions don’t have the Book of Mormon, and many (most, if you don’t count such things as the Bible or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gita) don’t claim revelations, and yet they still exist as religions. Would our church be very different without those things? Yes. Would we have as strong a claim to correctness? I believe the answer is no. But that’s not what was stated, you know?

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

• There’s a lot of stuff in here, but at least so far (several minutes into it) there’s nothing really to remark on here—it’s essentially saying “Obey the law of chastity”. Probably pretty good, though, to use as a foundational text for a family home evening lesson for families with teens/tweens like ours, though.
• There’s a lot of jumping from topic to topic here that’s making it semi-hard for me to follow—it’s all dealing with law of chastity stuff, but it’s hopping from, say, premarital sex to pornography to extramarital affairs to whatever else without a lot of signposting. This address, i think, is intended primarily for the written record.
• There’s code words in this right now—he’s talking about the pointlessness of legalizing evil things by the ballot. I’m curious why he isn’t stating outright at least some of the issues that this is referring to. I mean, i figure it’s likely that that was a statement against legalization of same-sex marriage, but one can’t be certain without it being stated directly. So—and this is something i’m quite seriously curious about—why all the indirection?
• ”Forgiveness means forgiveness.” Nice reminder.

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency)

• The members of the first presidency traditionally speaks in priesthood session plus in one other session (and the president of the high priesthood traditionally gives additional brief opening and closing statements). That’s a lot of speechwriting.
• Interesting that all three of the Biblical examples of people who didn’t trust/have faith in God (Jonah, Naaman, and Peter) ended up finally getting better at it. (Well, Jonah still had issues at the end of the book, but at least he had done what was asked of him by then.) He mentioned that about Peter, but it’s worth noting that the others figured out their errors, too.
• His story of paying of their mortgage included a nice example of something that could be called a coincidence but worked to strengthen faith—it is, i suppose, the nature of such things that they could always be taken as either miracles or coincidences, and the crucial difference is how they’re perceived by those participating in them.
• An acknowledgement that there are the honest in heart among those in power! Too often, i fear, Mormon culture (well, and Mormon history, really) leads us to be unhealthily distrustful of governmental authorities.

Opening prayer

• Didn’t catch the name of who said the prayer, but he clearly was working to prove he was listening at priesthood session last night—i think he repeated all of the buzzwords from each address.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Priesthood session

Due to stuff my family is doing, people we’re hanging out with for conference, that sort of thing, my notes for the Saturday afternoon and priesthood sessions aren’t going to go up until i can transfer my notes from paper to an electronic format. This is a placeholder post until i can put my notes for the priesthood session up (probably Sunday evening), so that things stay in order.

Priesthood session, the weird in-between session. It’s called a general session, but it’s only open to less than half the membership of the church (male members twelve years of age and older).

As with all the rest of these posts, this is presented bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, up to the final speaker at the top of the post, with my thoughts on each speaker given in the order i write them. This means that to get a chronological view of the session you’ll need to scroll to the bottom of this post and read upwards.

Closing thought

• Yet another bit of evidence i’m evil: I’m really curious what an “Auto-Tune the General Conference Speakers” (along the lines of “Auto-Tune the News”) would be like.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• Lots of stuff about choices. I was particularly gratified to see that he made it clear that there are some choices that really don’t matter in the eternal scheme of things.
• Wow—he said “In closing…” and there was an immediate rustle of people sitting up a bit throughout the room. Rather amusing. (Especially since he went on for a few minutes after that.)
• He said not to make exceptions to obeying commandments for extenuating circumstances, because life itself is a series of extenuating circumstances. There’s one to ponder on for a while.

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency)

• What is the gift of the Holy Ghost? It’s central to our religion, but it’s not nearly as well-defined as, for example, the sacrament or even sealing.
• He said that if we’re called to speak in a meeting in the name of the Lord, we should banish all self-doubt. Hurrah! Now nobody will ever start a sacrament meeting address by apologizing for their lack of speaking skills, right? Of course!

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency)

• He noted that after Ezra Taft Benson’s 1989 sermon on pride, it became taboo for members of the church to say that they were “proud” of anything (their children, their country, their work, or whatever). I remember that, and i remember thinking that that was taking things a bit too far. I’m glad that Elder Uchtdorf and i agree on that point.
• He said (though in different words) that social darwinism is bad. My social welfare-fan self gave a little internal cheer at that sentiment.
• He said that sports fans who vilify opposing teams and fans are exhibiting the sin of pride. Interesting. Has the Brigham Young University-University of Utah rivalry been particularly nasty lately?
• He said that such vilification also spills over into politics, ethnicity, and religion, and that it’s equally sinful in those spheres. Well, at least there’s little to no vilification of political opponents going on these days, so we’re okay there. Right? Right?
• There’s yet another reference to James E. Faust. Interesting—there’s been at least three so far today, at least that i’ve caught.
• It took a long time for this address’s first mention of flying airplanes.

Juan A. Uceda (of the quorums of the seventy)

• ”Only the home can compare to the temple in holiness.” We hear stuff like this a lot—but what does it actually mean?
• Yet another bit of evidence i’m evil: All the repetitions of “I am sorry” as something we need to say started Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” looping in my head—probably not what was intended.

Patrick Kearon (of the quorums of seventy)

• Not much to really report on here, except to say that i think this guy is actually a superhero, MetaphorMan! (However, his full name is English Accent MetaphorMan!, so it’s all okay.)

Russell M. Nelson (of the quorum of apostles)

• He asked all of the full-time missionaries, wherever they might be in the world, to stand. You don’t get audience participation like that very often in general conferences.
• He repeated President Monson’s call for every worthy young man to serve as a full-time missionary, and said he hopes that counsel will be followed in every home in the church. Well, for those of us who are in homes without any sons, that’s going to be an interesting one to try to follow…
• Do people really not know they’re welcome to visit our church meetings? I thought it was generally assumed that the default is that religious meetings of all types are open to all who wish to drop in unless there’s some sort of signage stating otherwise.
• Interesting news: You can now create a personal member profile at mormon.org for nonmembers to view.
• This address was a fun listen—he was on tonight, even though the subject was fairly pedestrian.

Opening thoughts

• Dieter F. Uchtdorf was conducting. He read the order of service from paper—you could hear it rustling—and not from the teleprompter. I though that was interesting.
• ”Hark All Ye Nations” still sounds better in German than in English, no matter how it’s arranged.
• People were still filing in during the opening song. I’m mildly surprised that they didn’t have everyone seated a few minutes before the meeting began.

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday afternoon session

Due to stuff my family is doing, people we’re hanging out with for conference, that sort of thing, my notes for the Saturday afternoon and priesthood sessions aren’t going to go up until i can transfer my notes from paper to an electronic format. This is a placeholder post until i can put my notes for the Saturday afternoon session up (probably Sunday evening), so that things stay in order.

Saturday afternoon is kind of a weird session—it’s stuck on a Saturday and therefore not what people are likely to default to watching if they don’t watch all the sessions, but some years it’s kind of a must-see, what with it being the session with the sustainings (and therefore the announcements of who the new apostle is during conferences with an opening in that quorum). Not this year, though.

As with all of these, i’ve written this post bottom-up, with the first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, up to the final speaker at the top of the post. My thoughts on each speaker, though, are given in the order i write them. Therefore, to get a chronological view of the session you’ll need to scroll to the bottom of this post and read upwards.

Closing thoughts

• This closing song, “Home”, is…Let’s just say i vote no on the lyrics. That is all.
• Wait—the women are singing about fathers and the men about mothers? Heresy! (Well, at least the children sang about the children, so maybe lightning won’t strike.)

Richard G. Scott (of the quorum of apostles)

• He has two basic speaking modes: the really quiet, mellow, and frowny one, and the really quiet, mellow, and almost-but-not-quite-smiley one. He seems to be in almost-smiley mode today.
• Jeanne just whispered to me “I’m finding this very hard to follow.” Amusingly, that’s pretty much what i was just about to type. That makes two votes—anyone else?
• Satan has no ability to take away blessings. I’m not sure that Job would agree—maybe he means that Satan has no ability to do that without clearance from God?

Neil L. Andersen (of the quorum of apostles)

• Good warnings against taking offense and having that push you away from the church. Part of the problem, though, is that it’s difficult to see the difference between reasonable and unreasonable reactions when you’re in the midst of them (or, for that matter, reasonable reactions with ultimately unreasonable effects).
• I don’t know that we’re actually all that different from other people—it’s just really easy to recognize differences rather than similarities.

Gerrit W. Gong (of the quorums of the seventy)

• Fresh-baked bread in the Missionary Training Center? Man, do you realize how much you could sell that stuff for in some of the side hallways of that place?
• Okay, the thank-you notes from the missionaries was one of the best general conference opening jokes i’ve heard. I’m normally not a fan of trying to open with a joke, but for this guy i’ll happily make an exception.
• Okay, but i didn’t get the “Blackberries, when read in church, make green bishops blue” joke. Why green? (Still, one for two is better than a lot of these get.)
• It took me a while to get the “temple mirrors of eternity” thing—i must have somehow missed the first mention of it, or at least the context for it.

Kevin R. Duncan (of the quorums of the seventy)

• Is this the first extended riff on the Mormon pioneers of this general conference? We’re past the halfway mark in the second general session—that may be a new record.
• I’ve always been curious whether Jim Bridger ever paid up on his challenge about corn grown in the Salt Lake Valley.
• Having lived in the Utah Valley (immediately next to the Salt Lake Valley, i have to say that whether the Salt lake Valley has actually “blossomed” is somewhat debatable. You see, i grew up in the southern mid-Atlantic, where we actually have a reasonable amount of vegetation…
• I wonder if this guy heard the address given this morning on Ezra Taft Benson’s “14 fundamentals” about prophets, and had this intense sinking feeling, figuring he’d been preempted. (Fortunately, as a Mormon you can always get away with saying “Because this is so important, i’ll repeat it now.”)

Richard C. Edgley (of the presiding bishopric)

• “Yes, faith is a choice” and, by extension, a lack of faith is also a choice. I’ve known people, though, who wanted to have faith, desperately wished to have it, but found that it eluded them. How are they choosing to lack faith? Or are they? Can lack of faith simply be a simple trial of life?
• I like the admission that there are things in his religious beliefs he can’t explain or doesn’t understand—it’s something we don’t here much from church authorities (or rather, we hear it but we don’t usually hear it quite so bluntly).

Quentin L. Cook (of the quorum of apostles)

• I have to admit that when i hear the name Vera Lynn, all i can think of is the brief song of that name from the Pink Floyd album (and movie) The Wall. This, of course, is proof that i’m evil.
• He mentioned attacks on morality and religious liberty. I haven’t noticed any significant attacks on religious liberty lately in the United States (aside from some protests against the building of mosques), so i’m curious what exactly he’s referring to.
• My oldest was thoroughly confused by his metaphor about “blacking out” attacks on the home and such—she thought he was trying to say we need to live in spiritual darkness. Lesson: Be really, really careful with metaphors, especially when they rely on images much of your audience has no experience with.
• A straight-up naming of human trafficking as a significant evil practice! That may be a first in general conference.
• He keeps talking about “Judeo-Christian” values and such, but the values he’s talking about are found throughout non-Judeo-Xian religions, as well, and even in non-religious traditions—and he acknowledges that. I’m curious, then, why he keeps coming back to Judeo-Xian traditions. (It’s clearly being used for some rhetorical purpose, but what the purpose is is being utterly opaque to me.)

Robert D. Hales (of the quorum of apostles)

• It’s good for Mormons to learn that a lot of the words we use (agency, in this case) don’t mean to other people what we think they mean.
• By using one’s agency, one can lose one’s agency. There’s a bit of irony there (possibly classical irony, even).

Henry B. Eyring (of the first presidency), presenting the general authorities and officers of the church

• He gave Neil L. Andersen’s name as “Neil Andersen” (no middle initial). It was almost jarring to hear it without the L.

Opening thoughts

• The music is being given by a “family choir”. What in the world is a family choir? I’m assuming they’re not all part of one big family, since they’re pretty much filling up the choir seats. Maybe it just means kids are allowed in?
• And how do they pick the non-Mormon Tabernacle Choir choirs for general conferences, anyway? Is there an application process? Auditions?
• Okay, so i kind of understand the rationale behind those whose native languages aren’t English having to give general conference addresses in English (though i really think we have the technological ability to make that unnecessary), but can we let people at least pray to God in their native languages one day?

Sorta-liveblogging general conference: Saturday morning session

Welcome, welcome once again to general conference. As i’ve done for the past few conferences, i’ll be semi-liveblogging each conference session. By “semi-liveblogging” i mean that i’ll be jotting down thoughts during each session of conference and posting them after the session ends.

A warning about a scheduling snafu for today: Due to stuff my family is doing, people we’re hanging out with for conference, that sort of thing, my notes for the Saturday afternoon and priesthood sessions aren’t going to go up until i can transfer my notes from paper to an electronic format. I’ll put up placeholder posts for them until they’re up, just to keep things in order.

Also, a note about the way these are ordered: I’m going to be arranging these the same way i did last time, which may be confusing at first. This is because blogs arrange things chronologically from bottom to top, contra millennia of Western writing practice. Therefore, 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.

That said, just to make things less scrolling-intensive, each session’s post will be written bottom-up (i.e., first speaker at the end of the post, preceded by the second speaker, and so on, with the final speaker at the top of the post). However, each speaker’s entries will be given in the order i write them. This may be confusing, but i think it works. Anyway, this means that this is where you scroll to the bottom of this post, and then start reading upwards.

Closing thought

• The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s arrangements were, for the most part, crazy slow and mellow in this session. (Not the closing song, though.) Must have annoyed the sort of people who get annoyed by sacrament meeting songs being sung slowly.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf (of the first presidency)

• Very, very nice opening play on his own public speaking habits.
• In all seriousness, listening to this address is forcibly reminding me of Mohandas Gandhi’s famous line that “there is more to life than increasing its speed”. Good thing to be reminded of, whether it comes from a Gandhi or an Uchtdorf, i have to say.
• I like listening to general conference addresses by people who have clearly had some decent rhetorical training along the way.
• It takes a confident speaker to take a glitch like your voice catching and weave it into your overall narrative.
• Serious question: If we’re supposed to place that much emphasis on time spent with our families, does that mean, say, bishops will be expected to cut the time spent on church service each week to just five or six hours, max (and even that would be a bit much)? I mean, either that or limit the office to those who are properly retired (or maybe it’d be a good use of the male halves of senior missionary couples).
• Note to self: Play bits of this address for a family home evening lesson or three. (Can you tell that i really, really liked this one?)

D. Todd Christofferson (of the quorum of apostles)

• What’s up with the widespread use of first-name initials among general authorities? It seems more widespread among them than among the general population. I wonder where that practice comes from?
• “…all honest work is the work of God.” Interesting meshing of the divine and the profane right there.
• Can i hear cheers for his endorsement of the humanities and (especially) arts?
• He draws a contrast between those who believe that our mortal bodies are the result of evolutionary chance and those who believe our bodies a a creation of God. Such a construction pretty much ignores, though, the fact that there are a lot of people who believe both at once—and that would be an interesting tension to explore. A general conference address probably isn’t a good forum for that sort of analysis, though.
• So the ends don’t justify the means? But how in the world are all of Utah’s Amway sales droids going to make a living now?

David M. McConkie (of the Sunday school general presidency)

• Wait—he’s saying it’s important for teachers to prepare? Well, at least he’s in the Sunday school general presidency, so that sort of a drastic change clearly isn’t expected in elders quorum teaching.
• If you listen to general conferences of sixty or more years ago, the offices held by the speakers usually correlated directly with the content of their general conference addresses. (For example, the presidency of the seventy—there were no other general authority seventies at that time—generally spoke on missionary work, the presiding patriarch—that office was filled at the time—spoke on blessings and especially patriarchal blessings, members of the presiding bishopric spoke on the needs of those holding the Aaronic priesthood and the physical facilities of the church, and so on.) By thirty years ago, though, that was no longer the case. Now that members of general presidencies are no longer drawn from the general authorities of the church, we seem to be going back to the future.
• He said that it’s “contrary to the economy of heaven” for God to let us know individually what we’ve already been told collectively (in the scriptures). To be completely honest, i don’t think i agree with this idea.

name not caught due to audio glitches (of the quorums of seventy, i’d guess)

• He said that the “We believe…in…prophets…” in the sixth article of faith means that we believe what they say and follow their directions. Is that really what it means? I mean, there’s a lot of ellipsis marks needed to render that verse that way. (The full verse reads: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth.”)
• What does it actually mean that the living prophet can never lead the church astray? I think that we tend to have an overly simplistic view of that idea.
• Joseph Smith was a teenager when he was first called as a prophet (though he was in his twenties once his ordination occurred). The original quorum of apostles was made up of fairly young guys. Why don’t we have notably young people in the highest levels of church leadership any more?
• A lot of this was presented as, in his words, “obedience to the prophet”. I have to wonder if obedience to the prophet or obedience to God is a more basic daily guiding principle. (Certainly the latter overall, but i’m wondering about day-to-day life here.)

name not caught due to audio glitches (of the general primary presidency, it sounded like)

• It wasn’t her point, so no criticism of her, but it bothers me when the story of Joseph Smith’s childhood operation and his refusal of brandy as an anesthetic gets held up as a great example of following the Word of Wisdom—there was no Word of Wisdom at that point to follow, to begin with!
• “The world will teach our children if we do not.” Well, actually, it’s more that the world will teach our children no matter what we do—and you know what, i don’t think that’s a bad thing. Of course, i also tend not to think that the world is going to perdition in a handbasket.
• In the story she told about the woman whose children prayed for safety while she was driving though a blizzard, i suspect that the greatest answer that came to the prayer was the road being closed.
• A sports celebration as an instance of the strait and narrow path? I think it’s now officially possible to make anything into a gospel metaphor.

Jeffrey R. Holland (of the quorum of the apostles)

• Some discussion about the sustaining of church authorities and officers that’ll be done in this afternoon’s session. Leads me to sort of idly wonder when the last time was that the body of the church in conference assembled rejected a proposed name. I mean, i realize that it’s not a vote in the electoral sense (but rather a vote for ratification, like at a business board meeting). Still, you’d think there would be more frequent negative votes than there are.
• He mentioned funeral potatoes! I seriously hadn’t heard that term before my exile in Utah. (Potato casserole is what i’d heard it called, on those rare occasions i’d heard it called anything.) Regional lexical variation in the public sphere makes me happy.
• I like the story he told about how his parents paid for his mission so that his money would still be there when he got home. What i really like about it is that they didn’t tell him about it—they allowed him to focus on his work then so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the need to thank them until later. There’s something in there about why we’re generally not supposed to trumpet our good works before the world, i suspect.

Thomas S. Monson (president of the high priesthood)

• Did anyone else have issues with the audio feed on the internet here? I have no idea what he said, even though i could see the video perfectly. Hint to the techies running the church’s website: General conference video feeds are candy—it’s the audio that’s important.
• Anyway, a few minutes into his address (read: about a minute before he was done) we got the audio-only feed going. (We had to fire up Windows to get that to work, and then later got the video to—sort of—work with the audio under WIndows. Was the audio problem a Mac-only issue, perhaps?) Anyway, we got to hear the end of a pep talk on how older couples should serve as full-time missionaries, which is always a nice subject to hear about, ’cause we don’t have to worry about feeling guilty about that one for a couple decades yet.

Opening song

• So why is it that the men in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir wear business suits, but the women wear crazy tent dresses that no businesswoman in her right mind would ever wear?

Opening credits

• I’m watching this on the internet, so i don’t know if everyone else saw the same opening credits video montage as i did, but it really just didn’t work for me. Sorry. Better luck to the church’s audiovisual department next time.
• Our stake is really into the idea that people coming into meetings should be deathly silentreverent, and people shouldn’t speak to each other as they’re waiting for the meeting to start—any greetings or discussion need to occur outside the chapel in the foyer. Odd, then, that the general authorities of the church greet each other as they walk to their seats, and as they sit next to each other they pretty frequently lean over and exchange quiet words with each other. Hmmm…Might it be that reverence actually doesn’t mean silence?

Conference birthdays

Please allow me to kvetch for a moment about general conference scheduling.

For those with birthdays during the first weeks of April and October (and the last days of March and September), weekend birthdays are consistently wrecked by general conference wiping out the first weekend of those months.

Further, for women with birthdays during the last week of September, Saturday birthdays are sucked away by general relief society meetings—and this affects guys with birthdays then, too, ’cause it means that their wives or girlfriends are swiped out of their lives if their birthday happens to fall on a Saturday.

So i guess what i’m wondering is why we don’t mix it up a little—show a little love to those of us with birthdays in the 23 September to 7 October and 31 March to 7 April spans every few years by letting us celebrate without guilt.

On failing our children

Talking to my kids this evening, it occurred to me that Jeanne and i have done very, very badly by our children: We have taught them gospel principles, allowing them to reason things out at a reasonably deep level, and as a result we have doomed them to years of boredom in primary.

Again with the modesty thing

So i was going through old emails (dating back to 1999, which really is too long to keep stuff like that around), and i found this response of mine to someone else’s post in a long-running discussion of issues of modesty (in the usual Mormon sense). I reproduce it here even though it’s longish, and even though what it’s replying to isn’t an attitude unique to Mormons (we share it with lots of other groups). I’m curious what others think of my reasoning, though.

So, anyway, it started with something forwarded from a website apparently called “Religion Today”:

“Lurid and sexually provocative magazines at supermarket checkout counters are inappropriate, most Americans say. Seventy-three percent of 1,006 people questioned by pollster Wirthlin Worldwide said the covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Redbook should be covered up.” The head of an organization called Morality in Media, Robert Peters, states: “…it is irresponsible to openly display at checkout counters, where children and vulnerable adolescents cannot help but see them, trashy magazine covers that so blatantly violate common standards of decency and morality,” Peters said.

My response:

I find this fascinating, myself, particularly since Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Redbook were singled out, all of which (usually) show women in to be honest not-terribly-revealing but certainly often enticing/​provocative (depending on your point of view) outfits. (Cosmo makes much use of push-up outfits in its cover photos, but swelling breasts are not in and of themselves revealing—if anything, they involve the creation of an illusion that hides rather than reveals.) What’s really interesting about this, though, is that magazines like GQ and Men’s Health, which often have men on their covers showing lots more skin than any of the women on the named magazines’ covers, were not mentioned. Is it only photos of fully dressed women that are “lurid and sexually provocative”?

For a moment, i’d like to reminisce on my own experience in Germany as a full-time missionary. Yes, magazine cover (and advertising, for that matter) shots of scantily-clad women (usually not men, interestingly, although there were some in my observation) showing more skin than would be allowed on the cover of Cosmo in the United States were quite common, but i have to admit that i don't necessarily see this as being related to any sort of “moral decay” in German culture—they simply showed more skin in their photographs than Unistatians tend to.

And this brings me to what troubles me about this whole discussion—there’s an underlying assumption that nobody’s questioning. That is, there’s a tacit ground rule people are using that having more skin visible in public places is necessarily a Bad Thing. Is it, though, or is this simply Unistatian (or American? Angloamerican? Euroamerican?) values being parrotted by the participants in the discussion? The assumption may well turn out to be correct, but never holding it up for questioning is, i feel, a disservice to the entire issue.

I mean, it’s quite valid to propose (full disclosure: this is actually my position) that the problem isn’t visible nudity, but the problem is rather the people who view that nudity. I suppose that i’ll be the minority here, but i’d argue that a fear of viewing human skin is at some level irrational, and we should be less worried about what’s visible to the world and more worried about how we react to it. (Arguably, we should also worry about how others react to it, but in my opinion we need to work on ourselves first.)

Maybe i’m alone on this, but my reaction to scantily-clad men or women on magazine covers tends to be something along the lines of “attractive person” or “good muscle definition” or “that outfit’s entirely the wrong color for that person, and i can’t believe that shot made it to the cover”. Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing to think that the problem isn’t that which is seen, but rather the reaction of that which sees?

I mean, really—the reaction of most Germans i knew, when i asked them about the level of nudity on magazine covers over there or the topless beaches or somesuch was something along the lines of “But it’s just a body!” And that, folks, is all it is—it’s just a body. Yeah, that’s an important thing and all, but it’s not like what you see in front of you is something eternal, even given the Mormon doctrine of a corporeal postmortality—it’s just a mortal body. So why the uproar over something as ignorable as that?

Gender imbalances and eternity

Here’s a Mormon meme that i don’t think i hear as much as i used to, but that i still hear occasionally: that more women will inherit the Celestial Kingdom than men. (Every once in a while you even hear the dreaded “A general authority said in a stake conference that…” on this one.)

Anyway, i for one haven't been able to find any definitive word on this issue. Most defenses of the claim, though, go something like this:

1. Every individual that receives exaltation must be sealed.
2. Some men have been sealed to more than one wife. (Not just nineteenth-century polygynous sealings, either—for example, under current policy a widower can be sealed to his second wife while remaining sealed to his first wife, but this is not done for widows.)
3. God keeps covenant promises. This means that those who keep their covenants cannot have a sealing broken.
4. Therefore, if at least one man and two of his wives keep their covenants, there will be more women than men in the highest level of the celestial kingdom.

The problem, though, is that this is based on certain widely-held but uncertain assumptions. For example, assumption (1) seems reasonable, but we don't actually know that it’s true as stated. Those who die before the age of accountability, for example, are saved in the celestial kingdom automatically, sealing in the sense we think of it or no.

Assumption (2) presents an incomplete picture. Some women have been sealed to more than one husband, to begin with—under current practice, when doing sealings for the dead, if a woman was married more than once she is sealed to all of her husbands.

I’ll agree with (3), but that doesn’t lead directly to (4), even ignoring the problems with (1) and (2). Conclusion (4) seems logical enough, but i would argue that those who present it are making an assumption that sealings work in postmortal existence the way they’re applied in mortal existence. (That’s arguably a warranted assumption, but one that one oughtn’t make without explicitly building a case for it.)

Basically, we don’t know. Given the desire of Mormons to fill doctrinal gaps, though, it’s the sort of speculation one would certainly expect to find.

Definitely doesn’t make it right, though.

More weirdness in Mormon culture

So i was at our local Mormon-oriented bookstore a little bit ago, and i saw that they had a bunch of motivational posters for kids based on heroes from the scriptures. (“Real Hero Posters”, they’re called.) I went over to look more closely at them, and i saw that there were about two dozen of them. It was a two-sided display, one side made up of Biblical heroes and the other of Book of Mormon heroes.*

The Biblical side was mostly male heroes, but it had threefour female heroes mixed in. Well, the Book of Mormon is pretty thin on female characters,** so i was curious what they held up as role models for girls.***

Correction: I’d originally only thought that three of the twelve Biblical hero posters featured female characters, but i was wrong—there are four: Ruth, Esther, Hannah, and Mary the mother of Jesus. Not a bad set, i’d say.

Rather to my surprise, there was only one poster out of the twelve Book of Mormon posters that had any female characters,**** and it was (wait for it) the daughters in the wilderness. (That is, the daughters of Lehi and Ishmael who subsisted only on raw meat but still were able to nurse the children they gave birth to.)

I’ve since learned that they’ve come up with one more female-oriented poster in the series: the mothers of Helaman’s stripling warriors.

Um, yeah. I mean, nice stories and all, but Abish gets bupkis? You know, you may remember her—she went house to house among the Lamanites to get attention to what was going on as a result of Ammon’s preaching. Pretty important for the story, and i’d say she’s a pretty good role model for girls (and boys, for that matter). Or if not her, what about the queen of the Lamanites from the same story?

No, instead of women who actually performed active, individual roles in the Book of Mormon, we get women who acted in groups, none of whom even have actual speaking roles.

Not cool, nameless Mormon-oriented commercial products designers. Not cool at all.

* Neat trick, really—you can send only the Biblical half to mainstream Xian bookstores and make money off a larger market segment.

** Famously, the Book of Mormon has only three named female characters that aren't shared with the Bible. There are a handful of other unnamed female individuals or groups that play some sort of plot-movement role, though, and i don’t think they should be forgotten.

*** I was kind of figuring the harlot Isabel was out.

**** See footnote **.

Sacramental bread

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

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

More on scheduling

Why is it that we rotate meeting times when multiple units use one building? Any building with multiple wards or branches i’ve ever been in, there’s been an annual (usually but not always coincident with the turn of the year) shuffling of meeting times.

Or, in other words, just when people finally get everything in order for the schedule their ward has, we upend everything.

I assume that this stems from general church policy (it’s built into the record-keeping software the church uses, for example), but why in the world do we go through this annual ritual? Why not just say that one ward meets at time X, another at time Y, and the third at time Z, and to keep things simple it’ll stay that way?

When did art become graffiti?

Can we stop it already with the meme that tattoos are bad because they’re like putting graffiti on a temple, in that one’s body is a temple and tattoos involve putting marks on one’s body? Yeah, i know it has the imprimatur of having been used in general conference, but that doesn’t mean the analogy holds up to even minimal scrutiny.

I could understand the whole argument if we built our temples out of rough-hewn stone or maybe even if we only used smoothly polished facing materials, but many (most?) of our temples have decorations carved/cast into the facing material. Really, if we decorate our temples, why are tattoos so different than that?

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?

The cult of the early riser

Can somebody explain why the church still does early morning seminary for high school students? I mean, we’ve known for years that teens really do generally need to sleep in later than those of other ages—but we make a big deal about getting up hyper-early to go to seminary classes.

So why? Why do we put our teens through something that is so clearly bad for them and call it a virtue?

Attaching a name to a story

So i was paging through the August Ensign, and i noticed that in the very last article in the issue the author talked about growing up in an abusive home. However, the name of the author looked like a real name, not “Name Withheld”.

I can only assume that the editors responsible for this oversight have been taken out and flogged.

p.s. Actually, to be entirely honest, i welcome this. I mean—and i’m dead serious in this postscript—if we regularly attach things such as abuse only to nameless folks, or at least real folks who are still ashamed enough about it or still feel so injured by it that they won’t let their names be attached to the story, how will we ever really be able to combat such thing amongst us?

Timely thoughts from times past

Just saw this bit, and i thought it was worth quoting:

We ought always to be aware of those prejudices which sometimes so strangely present themselves, and are so congenial to human nature, against our friends, neighbors, and brethren of the world, who choose to differ from us in opinion and in matters of faith. Our religion is between us and our God. Their religion is between them and their God.

It just seemed worth quoting, given certain hot-button arguments going on right now in the US.

Oh—and the source of the quote? Joseph Smith. (It’s from a letter he co-wrote to Edward Partridge and the church at large from Liberty Jail, Liberty, Missouri, dated 20 March 1839.)

Sunday is a special day

When i was growing up, i never really understood why people felt the need to dress up when they went to church.* I heard a lot of people explain it, though, by saying that the sabbath is a special day, and so we need to dress differently on Sundays than we do on other days.

You know, that actually makes a lot of sense to me.** However, what doesn’t make sense to me is why that means all the lawyers and bankers and such out there end up wearing the same clothes to church on Sunday as they wear to work most of the other days of the week—doesn’t that mean that, for them, Sunday is not a special day?

* Okay, full disclosure: To some extent, i still don’t.

** I’m completely serious about that. And that’s why i’m left with the question i close the post with.

Sometimes dissonance is fun

A few months ago there was an announcement of a stake activity for young women in association with a church broadcast for them. The stake activity was to feature “workshop classes…in nail, skin, and hair care”. I really hope that the church broadcast that followed focused on how it’s what’s on the inside, not on the outside, that really counts.

The sabbath is a relative thing, really

I may have said this before, and this isn’t limited to Mormons, but it bears saying today anyway: Why are so many Mormons so into the idea that it’s a horrible, horrible thing for businesses like grocery stores to be open on Sunday? I mean, why is it so important to us that observant Seventh-Day Adventists and Jews have more trouble doing their shopping than the rest of us?

In which David B makes a political statement

During my exile in Utah, i noticed that there were a lot of ballot initiatives. (I mean, not a lot by California standards, but still a lot.) For those unfamiliar with ballot initiatives, they’re a process by which a proposed law gets placed on the ballot at an election (along with the various candidates for public office), and if the ballot initiative gets enough votes, it becomes law.

Anyway, Jeanne and i have been reading through the church’s redress petition to the United States in the late 1830s, and i just have to say that i’m rather surprised that any Mormon with a sense of history would be fully comfortable with the whole idea of a local majority making legal decisions.

An unexpected biography

Thurl Bailey played basketball for the Utah Jazz from 1983 to 1991, and currently lives in Salt Lake City. He is also a Mormon. All of these things would seem to go together.

The fun thing about this is that he wasn’t a Mormon when he played for the Jazz—he became a Mormon some years later, when he was playing professional basketball in Italy.

Not at all significant, really, i just found it an amusing bit of unexpectedness.

p.s. And he has an amazing bass—basso profondo, really—singing voice.

White Lines (Don’t Do It)

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

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

Suspicious, huh?

Rewind to Relief Society…

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

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

Well, I thought it was funny.

And so did i, i must say.

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

Blatant heresy

Why are Mormons so into having choristers lead us whenever we sing? It’s really bizarre, particularly when you consider that it’s something a lot of other religious traditions do just fine without.

Us, though, we just have to have someone waving at us while we sing, even to the point of occasionally press-ganging people who would rather not into performing that role. Why?

True confessions

A moment from my life:

Last night i walked down the stairs and found my 11- and 9-year-old daughters reading the Song of Solomon from a very, very modern translation (The Message, to be specific). Interspersed among their reading of the book, they were having a discussion about healthy and unhealthy relationships, particularly but not exclusively romantic ones.

The fact that this all happened spontaneously in children i’ve had a hand in raising is probably enough to convince a good chunk of the Mormons out there that i and my whole family are on the proverbial highway to hell, and i’m pressing down hard on the accelerator.

Further, that stumbling on this was a proud parenting moment for me probably simply affirms their conclusions.

Really, sitting works just as well

Why are some people so utterly insistent about standing for intermediate hymns? I mean, i get that in some congregations the tradition is to stand for them, but the way some people (often choristers, actually) act, you’d think a congregation not standing for a song that happens to be wedged between speakers was a symbol of mass apostasy.

Again with the skirts and trousers

One more thought on skirts: I know this isn’t limited to Mormons, but what’s the deal with skirts (not miniskirts here, i’m talking about knee-length things) and dresses being perceived as more “moral” than trousers on women? I mean, i always thought of skirts and dresses as somewhat less moral, what with sexual access being quite a bit easier with them and all. So what am i missing here?

It…It was the trousers, really.

We get weird about clothing in our church. Consider, for example, the one i’ve run across more than once that holds that women must wear skirts to go into the chapel. Why?

Weirdest instance of this i’ve ever run across: Some years ago, Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever youth activity night, and a handful of women huddled outside the entrance to the chapel, trying to figure out how to get the child of one of them who was running around in the chapel. The problem? All of the women were wearing trousers. I walked by with a (male) friend, and they asked us to go fetch the child, which was then done.

The weirdness? We were wearing jeans. At least some of the women were wearing dress slacks. So what was up with it being okay for us to go in the chapel but not them?

p.s. Ten bonus points for whoever gets the obscure film reference in the title of today’s post.

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.

For all the Mormon MBAs out there

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

On fear

Just an interesting point a sacrament meeting speaker made recently: The word fear is problematic in religious contexts, because it’s ambiguous. Therefore, it becomes necessary to contrast what i as a linguist might call fear_reverence and fear_shame (with reverence and shame being the words the speaker used).

Again, the gathering is over

Okay, so i completely understand people singing and loving “Come, Come Ye Saints”—it’s not my musical preference (it’s in G major to begin with, never a good choice), but fine, whatever works for you.

But could we please have a rewrite on some of the lyrics? Especially that bit in the third verse, which starts

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared
Far away in the West…

I mean, this isn’t accurate anymore on two counts.

First of all, this is a clear reference to the “gathering” to Utah. However, it hasn’t been the policy of the church to have church members move to Utah for a long, long time—so why make it sound like it’s still in effect in one of our most commonly-sung songs? (I suggest replacing “Far away in the West” with something like “Near at hand, where we stand”.)

Second, isn’t “in the West” a bit relative? I mean, now that i live in Alaska, far away in the west is Moscow, if it’s anywhere. (In fact, when i was growing up in Maryland, i started refusing to sing that line on the principle that the gathering was over, and the land that God had prepared for me was right where i was. On the other hand, of course, during my exile in Utah, i made it a point to sing that line with vigor.)

The ‘gathering’ is over. Repeat, the ‘gathering’ is over.

What’s up with “gathering” songs like “For the Strength of the Hills” being in the hymnal? The gathering to Utah ended about a century ago, after all, and with a very few exceptions (like “Israel, Israel, God Is Calling”) the lyrics of that sort of song are painfully didactic and the melodies are boring. Really, not a good combination, especially when it goes along with a message that goes against current church practice.

Spirituality and boys

I’ve gone back and forth on posting (well, reposting, sort of) this, but i want to get people’s reactions on it.

A couple months ago, Heather the Mama Duk related this story in a comment to a post on this blog:

Not really on your point, but it reminded me of something I found totally weird.

My former visiting teaching companion in my old ward once said she felt people who were given several boys were the more spiritual people in the church. She said that she knew I must be a wonderful person because I have 3 boys. She wasn’t so much because she only had one boy.

Um, yeah. I seriously had no response. Totally speechless. It was the strangest conversation I’ve ever had with another Mormon. I mean, I’d had almost the exact same conversation a few days before with my next door neighbor, but she was Muslim so culturally her point made a lot more sense.

For the record, I do not believe at all that Mormons with lots of boys are any better than those who have lots of girls…or no kids at all.

I’m (re)posting this to find out if anyone out there has had similar experiences, or has heard similar things from other Mormons. Is this widespread and people just don’t say it to my face ’cause i have all daughters (and so therefore must be unspiritual)?* Or is this the sort of thing that comes about ’cause we’re gathering our converts from all the wrong neighborhoods?** Or is this actually an integral part of Mormon doctrine, and i’ve just managed to miss it in my readings of canon over the years?

* I mean, unspiritual for that reason, not for things like that i run a vaguely snarky blog.

** Not that i’d blame relatively-recently-appeared-in-Mormonism social attitudes that are clearly borrowed wholesale from evangelicalism on such things. No, of course not. Never.

Obscuring a distinction

For several years, the Mormon church has used the term ‘less active’ to refer to those who don’t attend church meetings. This has replaced the term ‘inactive’ to describe such people, and the terminology shift seems to have caught on among the general membership of the church, at least in places i’ve lived.

The problem i see, though, is that ‘less active’ and ‘inactive’ actually, at a literal level, describe two very different things. After all, among church members there’s (at least) a three-way distinction to be made in activity levels: Some Mormons are fully active in church activity, some are fully inactive, and some are in between. Why not use all three terms to describe these groups, where ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ mean exactly what they look like, and ‘less active’ refers to those who have some degree of activity in church, but aren’t really fully involved?

No, seriously—why not use the terms that way?

Qualifications

Section 4 of the book of Doctrine and Covenants does not say (as is commonly claimed) that faith, hope, love, &c. qualify you for the work—it says that the desire to do the work qualifies you, and that’s a far more intriguing claim.

In which David B makes an unpatriotic statement

So there’s all sorts of commercial sites out there running scamstours of “Book of Mormon lands”. The thing i find really interesting about this is that, as far as i can find, all of these sorts of tours involve destinations in Mesoamerica,* but, at least among Mormons in the United States, the same sort of people who swallowaccept Mesoamerican claims for Book of Mormon locations also seem to believe that when the Book of Mormon talks about promises for “this land”, it means the United States specifically, or maybe (if they’re feeling generous) all of the Americas.

What i want to know is: Why might those promises not be intended for, say, Costa Rica? Or Nicaragua? Or the Andean highlands? Or anyplace else that doesn’t include the United States?

* Yes, even though we don’t actually know where any of the locations—and there are multiple named locations, something a lot of people forget—in the Book of Mormon might actually have been.

Excluding folks from heaven

The very early Mormons (before what people often mean by “the early Mormons”—i’m talking about the late 1820s and early 1830s) tended to believe pretty firmly in a very inclusive, almost universal heaven. What happened to push us away from that?

(Couldn’t be a need to feel better than others, i’m sure. Right?)

Considering lessons from the scriptures

A sacrament meeting speaker recently told us to consider the lessons we can draw from 3 Nephi 1:4–13.

The main lesson i draw? God has a thing for the dramatic.

Going through the logical possibilities

I wonder about 3 Nephi 11:33–34—it says the unbelieving who aren’t baptized are damned, the believing who are baptized will be saved. It say nothing about the believing who aren’t baptized, but i guess they get hit by not fulfilling the law given to them. The remaining case of the unbelieving who are baptized is interesting, though, and their fate is left tantalizingly undefined.

The n+1th commandment, where n≥0

Seriously, i’m tired of the meme that the first commandment given to Adam and Eve was to have kids. The first one we have record of? Sure. The first one ever? We have no way of knowing. (And that’s even assuming the Garden of Eden story is non-allegorical, which the church has no actual position on, as far as i can find.)

Not better, just different

I’m not a fan of the “my wife is better than me” meme that you hear guys offer up occasionally in sacrament meeting speeches and class discussions. (I’m also not a fan of its less-often-heard “my husband is better than me” analogue.) The truth is, everybody’s better than everybody else, if you focus on an overly narrow slice of characteristics in each case. So your wife’s better than you, and you’re better than your wife. Stop trying to impress us with your fake humility, and you might become even better.

A simple request

Please, y’all, stop apologizing for your speaking skills when you get up to speak in sacrament meeting. It’s not helping the rest of us take you seriously, really it’s not.

Involvement by assignment

As a bit of a transition out of my last few posts, a thought about boy (and especially cub) scouting and the Mormon church.

Boy scouts makes a big deal about how its leadership is drawn from parent volunteers, and in fact that cub scouts is a primarily parent-driven program. However, adult positions within Mormon-church-affiliated boy and cub scout organizations are issued as “callings”—which means that even though those positions are technically filled by volunteers, they’re actually filled by assignment.

This leads to the issue of people being involved in boy and cub scouting who might not want to be involved in it, or in some other way aren’t invested in it. I’m not certain that this is optimal.

Boys and girls: Access to authority

Organizational leaders in the Mormon church get extra-special bonus meetings* on top of the meeting load that comes simply with being an active member of the church. Two of these are “priesthood executive committee” and “ward council”.

Priesthood executive committee is a meeting that includes the bishopric, those holding a couple of administrative positions, and the heads of priesthood groups.** Ward council is a more expansive group, including the priesthood executive committee plus the heads of the “auxiliary organizations”—things like the primary and relief society organizations, the young women’s organization, the Sunday school, and so on.

This means that the head of the young men’s organization attends both priesthood executive committee*** and ward council meetings, while the head of the young young women’s organization attends only ward council, thereby giving the young women’s organization less access to the bishop—and, probably more crucially, fewer opportunities to schedule things—in such settings, and only in a situation where the access is much more diluted. I’ve seen this lead to miscommunications before (never anything major, happily, but it certainly happens).

Of course, you could always do what a bishop i knew some years ago did, and say that since ward council includes everyone in priesthood executive committee, they’d be combined into a single ward council meeting. With our religion’s love of meetings upon meetings upon meetings upon meetings, though, i figure that many would consider that a heretical solution to the problem.

* Yeah, great joy and stuff.

** I seem to recall reading once that church leadership had said that the head of the relief society organization could be included in this group at the option of the bishop, but i’ve never known that to actually happen. Anyone know if that’s just a Mormon urban legend, or if it actually is an official option?

*** Ostensibly as the person in charge of the Aaronic priesthood-age boys, but the bishop is actually the head of the Aaronic priesthood in the ward (according to canon), so i’m not sure exactly what’s going on there.

Boys and girls: Adult investment

The structure of cub scouts with lots of age-defined packs within a single den, and the widespread institutional Mormon desire to split things up into small atomic units,* means that 8–11-year-old boys generally end up with more adults directly invested in their midweek activities than the girls of the same age do.

Concrete example, from a ward i’ve recently lived in: Achievement days has about eight girls who attend regularly, with two adults directly involved in running the program.** Cub scouts has about eight boys who attend regularly, with seven adults directly involved in running the program.***

Yeah, that’s balanced.

* Which i really don’t understand—i mean, given the way a decent number of people in any given ward are unwilling or unable to accept callings, you’d think you’d want to combine stuff, not split it up. But there we go, with tiny numbers of kids in primary classes, tiny numbers of kids in cub scout packs, tiny numbers of grownups in any given Sunday School class (aside maybe from gospel doctrine class), and so on.

** That is, one class, not two. This goes against the trend of splitting things up atomically mentioned above, and i have no explanation for that—but even if that was done, it’d probably only be two classes, and so four adults.

*** And i’m not counting people who work with both cub scouts and boy scouts in the count. The seven are one wolf pack leader plus assistant, one bear leader plus assistant, one webelos leader plus assistant, and one cubmaster.

Boys and girls: Presidencies

Here’s something that’s more an interesting oddity than anything else: Pretty much every organizational presidency or presidency-equivalent (e.g., the high priests group leadership) in a ward involves the bishopric* calling the president, and then getting recommendations for counselors from the newly-called president. Those counselors are then called if the bishopric (or stake presidency, for some organizations) approves.

There is one** exception to this, though: The presidency of the young men’s organization. In that one, the bishopric selects the president and the counselors.

Interesting, and i wonder why.

* Well, in the case of a bishop the calling comes from higher, of course. Also, in some cases, such as an elders quorum presidency, the organizational president is called by the stake presidency upon recommendation by the bishop. However, the general pattern beyond that is the same, it’s just the authority issuing the calls that’s different.

** I think i’m right that this is the only one, that is—i don’t think i’m wrong, but if i am i’d like to hear it. In any event, the presidency of the young women’s organization is certainly not an exception.

Boys and girls: Callings

A few years ago, the church set up policies to protect children from sexual predators. (A good goal, certainly.) Among these, rules were set up for teaching primary classes that required that a primary class be taught by one woman, two men, or a married couple (i.e., a man and a woman). This makes it rather less efficient to have a man called to teach a primary class, since if a man is called to teach a primary class two people have to be called to teach it, not just one.* This means that, in most wards, women are more likely to be called to teach primary than men are.***

I tend to think that the heavy preponderance of women teaching primary classes simply serves to give support to the stereotype that women are the ones who should be involved with children, and that men should feel free to be the aloof father of Bambi type—in my own opinion, not very healthy.

* The policy puzzles me, incidentally. I mean, yeah, the popular stereotype of a sexual predator is certainly male, but there are a lot of female sexual predators out there. So why are women allowed to teach primary alone?**

** And yes, i know that the policy does provide some situations in which a man can teach a primary class alone. That’s certainly not the default, though.

*** This was probably already the case, but the current policy, i think, makes it even more so.

Boys and girls: The purpose of the thing

Once Mormon children turn eight, they get to participate in midweek activities. For the 8- to 11-year-old boys, this means cub scouts—a weekly program with clearly stated aims that moves the boys along in a progressive building of skills with formal recognition of progress made along the way. The 8- to 11-year-old girls are in achievement days, a biweekly* meeting with vague goals that don’t really progress to a specific end and don’t naturally lend themselves to any recognition for intermediate progress.

Of course, my experience with this is in the United States, where the Mormon church and boy scouting are linked to a very high** degree. In some other locations, achievement days is a sex-neutral (though still, as i understand it, sex-segregated) church program. I’m curious how the implementation of the program might differ in those areas.

* In most wards, that is—in my current ward, achievement days occurs weekly. Of course, my current stake has never met a meeting it didn’t like, so this difference makes sense in that context.

** And unhealthy, in my opinion, but that’s just my opinion.

Boys and girls: High adventure

The general policy of the church, as i’ve heard it from multiple bishops in widely dispersed areas, is that a large chunk of a ward’s budget allotment in any given year is supposed to go to the youth. This makes sense to me.

In addition, most bishops try to be fairly evenhanded about the way the budget is allotted*—the same amount of money for the young women as the young men,** or allotting the same amount per individual to each of those groups.

So far, so good. But then there are what might best be called special allotments—and, in my observation, the only one of these for the youth is annual or biennial funding for the priest-age boys to go on a “high adventure” trip.

Yeah, it’s cool that the 16- and 17-year-old boys get to go white-water rafting a few hundred miles away from home, or camping out at a national park none of them have ever gone to, or traveling by horseback through the mountains. But what do the girls get along those lines?

Yep, that’s right—bupkis.

Incidentally, this is a recurrent theme over at the Spanish Fork 401st Ward blog—see, for example, their Young Men/Young Women activities calendar for this past April.

* This is spelled correctly, but doesn’t look like it is to me.

** Not that great of an approach when there are very different numbers of young men and young women, but it’s an easy way of dealing with ward budgets, and having seen ward budgets up close, i’m not going to begrudge making them easier.

Boys and girls: Networking

I am not a fan of boy scouting. Not at all. However, i have to admit that there’s one thing it has going for it: There’s a built-in mechanism for the boys involved in it to meet other boys with similar interests through the institutions of camporees and jamborees.

Girl scouts have similar things, but the church doesn’t sponsor girl scout groups, for whatever reason.* Odd, really, that the church would be linked at the hip with a group that has as a stated purpose the development of boys into strong-willed, independent men, but has nothing to do with a group that has as a stated purpose the development of girls into strong-willed, independent women.

* I’ve heard that this is because of the cookie sale fundraising requirement, but that rings false with me. If fundraising was an issue, the boy scouts wouldn’t be allowed to send people to scout training meetings at Mormon churches to drum up donations—but they do, they most certainly do.

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.

Buying prom dresses

I’ve heard lots of people complaining lately that “it’s impossible to find a modest* prom dress” these days. This is generally taken to be an indictment of how horrible “the world” has gotten lately.

Well, two problems.

First, i remember hearing precisely the same complaint back when i was in high school (the mid-80s, for what it’s worth), and i’ve seen such complaints in print from the early 60s, and much of me thinks that Ardis over at Keepapitchinin** could probably dig the same thing up from the mid- to late nineteenth century. And even if i’m wrong on that last one, it’s not like this is a new complaint—so exactly why is this surprising anyone these days?

Second, i take issue with the entire proposition. There’s lots of modest (see the first footnote) clothing out there, including formalwear for teenage girls—though i will readily allow that the “prom” section of any semi-randomly selected department store is unlikely to provide many (if any) prom dresses that would be allowed in the door at a church dance. Move to other sections of the same store, and you’ll find a lot of prom-suitable dresses and sets with covered shoulders, knee-length or longer skirts, and so on.

Really, as i see it, the real problem is that people actually believe the branding at their local department stores.*** So please, stop trying to use it to indict people who aren’t you.

* This is using the usual Mormon meaning for the word modesty, which i still think is wrong. Given the context for the discussion, though, it makes sense to use it here.

** An amazing and wonderful blog on, for lack of a better description, the cultural history of the Mormon church. You should add it to your list of regular reads.

*** Well, and that they actually think prom is worth blowing that much money on for a single-use piece of clothing. But that’s a whole nother issue, and beyond the scope of this blog.

Mormon headlines

Photocopier humor, not by me, from an unknown source. I like them, though, so if you know where they’re from, let me know.

Ancient Tins of Wheat Discovered in Garage

Investigator Admits Feeling Tingle in Big Toe, Agrees to Second Discussion

Deacons Quorum Advisor Compares Priesthood to “the Force”

Family Maxes Credit Card at Costco to Replenish Food Storage

Area Man Feels Holy Ghost During Disney’s “Lion King”

C.S. Lewis Rejects Posthumous Baptism

Elders Quorum Instructor Skims Lesson During Opening Exercises

Pioneer Reenactment Reenacted

Family Home Evening Degenerates into Pudding Fight

Spirit Whispers for Area Man to Sell Amway

Prototype of Franklin Planner Found in Nauvoo Dig

Priest Reporting on Campout Says “It Was Fun”

Area Woman Calls for More Stylish Male Temple Caps

Ensign Forgets to Use “Name Withheld” on Sex Abuse Article

Steve Martin Finally Admits to Conversion

Area Man Surprised at How Dirty Temple Slipper Soles Have Become

Richard Dutcher Announces Feature-Length “Johnny Lingo” Remake

Church Approves Hometeaching Via Email

Steed Family Book of Mormon Auctions for $23,000

Scrapbookers Scrapbook About Themselves Scrapbooking

Temple Escalators Remarkably Clean, Area Woman Observes

Ward Has Potluck, No Jello Served

Ward Discovered Where All Sing During Hymns

Sacrament Meeting Speaker Forgets to Apologize for Poor Speaking Ability

First Presidency Issues Letter Asking Members Not To Submit Elvis Presley’s Name For Temple Work Again

Magna 122nd Ward Relief Society Sends White Shirts and Ties to Africa

High Councilor Begins Sacrament Meeting Talk Without Attempt at Joke

New Church Policy Forbids Use of Church Parking Lots for Teen Driver Instruction by Parents

Stained Glass in New Chapel “An Exception”, Says Church Spokesman

Secret Girls Camp Video Spurs Copycat WWF Series

“I Hate Homemaking Meeting Crafts”, Admits Local Mom

Male Primary Teacher Called

Priesthood Holder Completes Home Teaching by 25th of the Month

Local LDS Ward Starts Sacrament Meeting on Time

Elders Quorum Moving and Storage a Real Moneymaker for Church

Ward Boundaries Realigned, Everyone Happy

Elders Quorum Instructor Prepares Centerpiece for Lesson

Bishop Attends Sunday School, Is Welcomed As Visitor

Church Basketball Injuries Fewest In Years

Ward Chorister Sets New Record for Slowest Singing of "Come, Come Ye Saints"

Jewish Family in Provo Confused When Called “Gentiles”

Provo Baptist Family Reports: Never Invited to Sacrament Meeting, Regularly Invited to Dinner by LDS Neighbors

Utah Legislature Passes Bill to Restrict Sales of Cola Drinks to Minors

Ensign Publishes 135th Article with “Legacy” in Title

High Priest Stays Awake in Sacrament Meeting, Wrestles Children While Wife Dozes

Returned Missionary from Hawaii Fails to Reprimand Congregation for Not Responding Loud Enough to His "Aloooooha!"

Sacrament Meeting Talk Ends Early, Bishop Closes Meeting Anyway

Congregation Sings "How Great Thou Art" in Under Two Minutes

Why we should not repent daily

Jeanne and i have been reading through the B.H. Roberts-edited History of the Church together. (It’s taking us a long time.) Recently, we ran across an interesting line from Joseph Smith (on 27 June 1839):

Repentance is a thing that cannot be trifled with every day. Daily transgression and daily repentance is not that which is pleasing in the sight of God.

This goes against what i think is a fairly common Mormon meme, namely that we sin every day, and therefore we have to repent every day. According to Brother Joseph, though, God thinks—or at least hopes—otherwise.

Anyway, just throwing this out there as an interesting item. I don’t have much to say about it in depth right now, though, ’cause i’m still mulling it over.

Against overextension

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

Yeah, it probably is just me…

Is it just me, or does anyone else start thinking that they’re gonna be breaking out the Jenna Jameson movies when they hear announcements about the “adult session” of stake conference?

Just a brief rant today

We just had stake conference here, and there were dozens (seriously, dozens) of mentions of the importance of getting 19– to 25–year-old men to serve as full-time missionaries, but only two phrases given in passing that even acknowledged that 21+–year-old women can serve as full-time missionaries.*

Well, as a father of daughters and no sons, i started to get annoyed at having to sit through being told multiple times that i was remiss in my spiritual duties if i didn’t “prepare [my] sons to serve a full-time mission”—so i have this to say:

No, i’m not preparing any sons to serve as full-time missionaries—but i am preparing my daughters to, and i’m preparing them to be better teachers on their full-time missions than your sons will ever be.

* And this is through priesthood leadership meeting, the adult session,** and the general session.

** That reminds me of something. I’ll post it next time.

’Nother thought on Mothers Day

Also, as far as i can tell, there is no directive in the Church Handbook of Instructions for the youth to hand out chocolates or flowers to the adult women in the congregation at the end of sacrament meeting on Mothers Day.

Doctrine vs. practice

You know, there’s no canonical requirement for the Primary children to sing on Mothers Day. Just sayin’, you know?

Naked people doing naked things

I’ve heard a lot about pornography lately (read: the past few years) from church leaders, both local and general. It would be correct to sum up everything i’ve heard from them in two sentences: “It’s a bad thing” and “Don’t consume it”.

I think it’s interesting that the reasons given for this take a number of different forms, but they tend to center around the claim that pornography leads to sexual lust among the unmarried, and to sexual separation among the married. In particular, since the consumption of pornography is an individual act, it leads the one using porn to become sexually fixated (even if temporarily) on individuals other than one’s spouse. Another, less frequent but perhaps more potent, reason is that the consumption of pornography by one member of a married couple is effectively a form of adultery, given the New Testament view that lusting after someone who’s not one’s spouse is equivalent to adultery.

These reasons make sense to me, but they leave out one particular market for porn: married couples—specifically, married couples who consume pornographic material together as part of their sexual experiences as a couple. (This is not one of my particular kinks, but i know people for whom it is.) This leads to an interesting question: Is the consumption of pornography by such couples as couples the sort of thing that would be considered acceptable by church leaders? I suspect (with a likely 100% certainty) that the answer is a firm “no”, but none of the reasons* generally given in church settings against the consumption of pornography necessarily lead to that answer.

So: Why would the answer be negative?

* One possible exception: That the creation of pornography necessarily involves immoral acts, particularly fornication, by those creating it, and so the consumption of pornography rather directly encourages immorality. For the sake of argument, let’s limit ourselves to pornography involving only sexual acts between people married to each other, so as to make that one less of a distraction.

Ignoring the prophets, again

M. Russell Ballard’s “Raising the Bar” address was delivered in the October 2002 general conference. (Yes, it was that long ago, and yes, you really are that old.) The quote everyone seems to use from it is:

Please understand this: The bar that is the standard for missionary service is being raised.

To my mind, though, the most interesting thing was stated very near the end of the address (emphasis added):

Upon you bishops and you stake presidents rests the responsibility to recommend only those young men and women whom you judge to be spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared to face today’s realities of missionary work. Brethren, judge wisely and remember: Not every young man needs to be called to serve away from his home; some may best serve under your direction as ward missionaries.

In my observation, however, this has been pretty much ignored—the goal is still to get every male 19-year-old in the church to serve as a full-time missionary, and those that don’t are viewed as failures on the part of the young men’s program leadership and/or the priesthood leadership of the ward and/or the young man himself (or, possibly most often, on the part of all three). And even if that’s not the view in a particular case, there’s certainly still a cultural bias against a young adult male in the church who opts (for whatever reason) not to serve as a full-time missionary.

And so, as is always the case when i notice something like this, my question is deceptively simple: Why?

Ignoring the prophets

I remember Boyd K. Packer speaking in the October 1998 general conference—and it was striking enough that Jeanne and i looked at each other with a “Did he really just say that?” reaction—about scheduling youth activities, and the need to make sure we don’t overschedule our youth with church things. The entire address is worth reading, but here’s the money quote:

I must touch upon what must surely be the most difficult problem to solve. Some youngsters receive very little teaching and support at home. There is no question but that we must provide for them. But if we provide a constant schedule of out-of-home activities sufficient to compensate for the loss in those homes, it may make it difficult for attentive parents to have time to be with and teach their own children. Only prayer and inspiration can lead us to find this difficult balance.

We often hear, “We must provide frequent and exciting activities lest our youth will go to less wholesome places.” Some of them will. But I have the conviction that if we teach parents to be responsible and allow them sufficient time, over the long course their children will be at home.

There, at home, they can learn what cannot be effectively taught in either Church or school. At home they can learn to work and to take responsibility. They learn what to do when they have children of their own.

Or, to summarize: Please cut back on scheduled activities!

Didn’t happen, though—leading me to wonder why. Any ideas?

What other people think

Heard in a sacrament meeting address: “You shouldn’t go to any movies that don’t follow church standards, because non-members might see you there and think less of the church because of you.”

Now, beyond the fact that i strongly doubt that non-Mormons care at all about what movies Mormons watch, it brings to mind something i saw in an email forward once, which was a list of lines headed by “You know you’re a victim of bad timing if…” One of them was “…you don’t have an umbrella, so you take shelter in the only place available, the awning of a local movie theatre—but it’s an X-rated theatre, and that’s the moment your minister decides to take a walk around the neighborhood.”

On the meaning of an adjectival affix

Serious question: Is becoming Christlike the same thing as becoming like Christ?

Even a child can see through it!

So my 9-year-old was looking at the current nursery manual with me this evening, and she saw one of the first suggested activities in the “I Belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” lesson (lesson 25, page 104, for those who care to follow along). It reads:

Display the picture on page 106. Tell the children that this is a picture of Jesus Christ and we belong to His Church. Point to the picture and ask, “Who is this?”

Answer: “Jesus Christ.”

Anyway, my 9-year-old read that and said “Isn’t that a little silly? You tell them what the answer is, and then ask them?”

Basically, she was calling the manual out on being manipulative. I think this is evidence that i’m raising my children right.*

* And yes, i realize that there are people out there who would argue that this is evidence that i’m raising my children exactly wrong, and that i’m evil. That’s okay—i’ve learned to live with that.

In which David B may commit heresy

I suspect this is cultural heresy, but here goes:

I don’t believe that midweek activities for the youth are really all that helpful at encouraging church activity among said youth.

I’ll step into my asbestos suit now. Fire away.

Voices, an epilogue

The title of my last post reminded me that the song “Voices” from Saturday’s Warrior was the only halfway-decent song in the entire movie/play.

(And yes, “In Our Humble Way” is listenable for the humor value, but being funny doesn’t make it any good. Sorry.)

Voices

Just a little note stemming from the fact that i’ve probably listened to more pre-1970 general conference audio than anyone else born post-Woodstock.

Most people my age (and older) associate Spencer W. Kimball with the slow, intensely gravelly voice that came from him surviving a bout with throat cancer by having a chunk of his vocal folds removed.

When he was first called into the quorum of apostles,* though, he had one of the most beautiful speaking voices i’ve ever heard. In my tradition of asking unanswerable questions, i wonder whether he would have been perceived differently had he never had his voice disfigured like that.

* Yeah, i know that’s not the standard name of the quorum—it’s accurate, though, so i’m sticking with it.

Who presides over what?

Another one that comes from thoughts during general conference:

Mormons generally say that the father (when present, of course) needs to preside in the home. However, given the discussion of parental stewardships in the document generally but slightly improperly called the Proclamation on the Family, i wonder whether it’s actually the mother (when present) who should preside in childrearing decisions.

(Of course, Jeanne and i are evil, since we operate by consensus rather than by one or the other giving direction, but what else do you expect from pinko commie liberal hippie types like us?)