Last year, I counted up posts and comments for 11 Bloggernacle group blogs and found that By Common Consent was the largest in 2007, in terms of both posts and comments. So which blog was the biggest in 2008?
A couple of nights ago, I was working on my laptop when a bug innocently wandered across the keyboard. I grabbed a tissue and smooshed it. Then I started thinking about what it meant about my character that I would so glibly snuff out a small life simply because it inconvenienced me. And then I wondered whether God was aware of the bug’s experience.
Now’s your chance! Go nominate your favorite blogs and bloggers and their bests posts and comments from 2008 in the Niblet nominations at Mormon Matters.
I’m still exercising my particle of faith, but recently I’ve been thinking through the implications of what happens if the exercising of my faith doesn’t provide me with the answers and reassurance from God that I need. Read more…
It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Late this afternoon I sat down to feed my seven-month-old daughter dinner. She quickly tires of solid food; she’ll accept a few spoonfuls, but then she wants to bang her fists on her tray and throw Cheerios on the floor, so I keep my laptop on the table to entertain myself in between offering bites of cereal or strained peas. In my browsing I came across a presentation on Mormonism and feminism I gave sixteen years ago, the summer I was twenty-one. I clicked on the file with trepidation, sure I’d be dismayed at how young and naïve and foolish I sounded. But what I found was far worse: I was dismayed at how familiar I sounded. Sixteen years ago I was dealing with almost exactly the same issues in Mormonism that I am now. Read more…
Don’t miss Bored in Vernal and Dr. B blogging together at He Said/She Said.
(Apologies if you came thinking this was an actual post. We’re still tinkering with our sideblog to make it work again.)
On a thread last year at BCC entitled Coming Clean, Mark Brown daringly confessed to the entire Bloggernacle that he invented his mission numbers reports. His bold revelation transported me straight back to a dark, sweltering night in the dark, sweltering center of my mission. I had recently become senior companion, and while my first couple of ZLs had accepted our numbers as representative of our best efforts and delivered encouragement rather than condemnation, our new ZL, who had just ascended from junior companion with a death grip on his own personal scepter of self-righteousness, was subjecting us to the first real numbers pressure I’d ever experienced. The Sunday-night ritual of calling numbers in was becoming distinctly unpleasant; the ZL was constantly critical of the weekly results we had to report, unwittingly heaping discouragement on me during what was already, for me, a very difficult time, one of the lowest of my mission. Read more…
A popular feminist argument against Mormon patriarchy asserts that it is simply a cultural relic absorbed unquestioningly from the surrounding social textures of past prophets. We learn that Paul was a product of his time, that Joseph Smith made assumptions about women’s status consonant with his own cultural milieu, or that the Book of Mormon’s androcentrism can be dismissed as an unquestioned cultural orientation rather than a divine imprimatur for marginalizing women’s experience. Because women’s subjugation has pretty much always been part of the air previous leaders breathed, there’s no reason to suppose it has ever been divinely inspired. As the Church continues to grow line upon line and precept upon precept, this model proposes, the scales of these unfortunate “philosophies of men” will gradually be sloughed off as further divine light and knowledge are embraced. Read more…
Last year I threw together a big pile of numbers, counting during the previous year the number and length of posts and comments on 11 Bloggernacle blogs, as well who wrote them. A question that came up a few times in the ensuing discussions was what the numbers would look like across several years. So for this year, I went back and collected some of those numbers.
But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties…and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you… (Alma 32:27)
If you’re a regular reader, you know my life is a mess and that I’m in the middle of a religious crisis. Here’s where I am currently: Read more…
I wanted to talk about this during the Prop 8 fervor, but didn’t quite have the energy. With the recent ruling in Iowa going into effect, I thought this was a good time to bring it up again. My friend John already wrote an awesome note stating my feelings on the matter better than I could, so (with his permission) I am reposting it here. Read more…
In our recent discussion of theory and practice, ZD hit 10,000 comments. (The 10,000th comment, by the way, was Geoff J’s #6 on that thread. Congratulations, Geoff; your prize, a T-shirt that says “This is What a Feminist Looks Like,” and a subscription to BUST magazine, will be in the mail.) I have to say that it’s a bit strange to think that our relatively small blog has this many comments. (Just think of the number of dissertations that could have been produced by all that writing. Of course, they might not have been coherent dissertations.)
Comments, I think most bloggers would agree, are both one of the most fun and one of the most challenging aspects of running a blog. Read more…
“I know it works in practice,” a French scholar (steeped in a tradition emphasizing Cartesian rationalism) is reported to have said, “but does it work in theory?”
Certain churches may be the only institutions in this country that are more sexist in theory than they are in practice, as Mark Chaves suggests in his study Ordaining Women. For example, not infrequently women are officially barred from ordination at the same time they are allowed to engage in activities that, strictly speaking, belong to the exclusive province of “priests.” Women may be formally subordinated to their male leaders but tacitly permitted relative autonomy. Read more…
The possibility of universalism comes up every so often in the bloggernacle (see for example, these discussions at M*, BCC, and NCT.) In reading these conversations, I’ve realized that my own universalist leanings are not particularly unusual, at least in the context of the Bloggernacle. (Further evidence of its apostate nature, some might say.) I think the theological debate is an interesting one. But in this post I want to bracket the question of whether universal salvation is possible in the context of LDS doctrine, and look at some of the more practical issues involved. The concern most often raised about the idea is that it leads to complacency. In a nutshell, if everyone is eventually going to be saved, what incentive do I have to be good? Why not eat, drink, and be merry? Is anxiety about salvation something positive, even necessary—something that will motivate me to live better in the here-and-now? Read more…
So, I’m not able to post much about anything that doesn’t relate to the reasons my life is currently falling apart. This post is connected to the post I made on “Trusting God,” but my questions and thoughts are slightly different.
What do you do when God makes promises to you (and you know it’s God), but those promises aren’t fulfilled? Read more…
Recently I dreamed that it turned out Elder Richard G. Scott was some sort of intelligence agent sent to spy on a fellow apostle, a certain Elder Nat Ott. Elder Ott, in turn, had been hired by the Church to spy on Elder Scott. (Alas, the details of the operation escape me.)
What does it all mean?
P. S. By all means, please share your own portentous religious dreams.
Over at T&S, Kent Larsen wrote an interesting post based on the Church’s statistical report from Conference. He compared this year’s data with statistical reports from 5, 10, and 25 years ago. Since I find this kind of speculation so entertaining, I searched lds.org and found statistical reports all the way back to 1973 to fill out the data set a little. To make the resulting data easier to look at, I’ve put some of the numbers Kent and the commenters discussed into graphs.
One of the things that most struck me at the recent Claremont conference was the extent to which I was doing what I might call “negative feminism.” I’m using “negative” both in a kind of netural, descriptive sense (in academic theology, there’s a tradition of “negative theology” which emphasizes what we don’t know about God), as opposed to more constructive work which puts forth new ideas–and “negative” in the more usual sense of the term, in that I was in fact painting a rather negative picture of LDS teachings regarding the eternal status of women. The reactions I got were varied; some liked it, but others found it excessively gloomy. This has gotten me thinking about possible dangers with this approach, but also why I think it’s important. Read more…
A fun concept in Catholic teachings is the notion of the sensus fidelium, the “sense of the faithful.” The idea is that the work of the Spirit guiding the church can be found not only in the teachings of ecclesiastical leaders, but also in the beliefs and experiences of the members of the church, the community of faith. Theologian Roger Haight explains that it includes “an active charism of discernment, a power of practical and possessive knowledge belonging to the body of the faithful by virtue of their concrete living of the faith.” He clarifies, “This does not mean that in every matter of detail a majority of even a consensus of opinion in the Church at any given time is theologically sound. But it does mean that the experience of the faithful is a source for theology.”1 Read more…
I’ve been wanting to put this post up for a while. The second annual World Autism Day gave me the impetus I needed to actually finish and publish it.
A while ago I was in the waiting room of a local children’s clinic, waiting for my son’s doctor’s appointment. There was another boy there with his parents and his grandmother. He was probably about 12, and while I’m not sure what exactly was wrong with him, he had some obvious developmental delays. I watched as his grandmother took him outside in the small garden adjoining the waiting room, and the boy expressed obvious delight in nature and the outdoors. When he came back inside he came up behind me and gave me a hug. It surprised me at first (I didn’t realize he’d come up behind me), but then I turned around, gave him a big smile, and said, “Hello.” He smiled back. His grandmother immediately rushed into a defensive explanation of him and his behavior. I just smiled and said, “I know.” Read more…
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