Showing all posts by Ziff

In Children, Church Policy

Good, Good, Good

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

When I started school at BYU, back in the 1990s, the school used to celebrate the day before Thanksgiving by bringing a bunch of wrecked cars onto campus and leaving them in various quads to remind us all to drive safely if we were traveling for the holiday. This wasn’t an issue for me, because my family lived nearby, but I recall thinking that if the university had really been serious about students’ safety when traveling over the long weekend, they would just close the day before Thanksgiving to make it easier for people to travel without having to make dangerous overnight drives.

I was reminded of this when reading President Oaks’s talk in the Women’s Session of this last General Conference, where he lamented that Church members are marrying later and having fewer children. He said that people are delaying marriage “until temporal needs are satisfied.” I think he’s making the same error that the BYU administration of the 1990s was making: he’s oversimplifying complicated situations where people face competing goods. BYU students of the 1990s, wanted to attend their classes and do well in school, but they also wanted to go home and see their families for Thanksgiving. Young people in the Church today likely do want to get married and have children, but they also face (in the US, anyway) runaway education costs that mean they’ll be paying for their own schooling for decades, high medical costs that make it ever more difficult to bear and raise children, and high child care costs that make it more difficult for both spouses to get all the education they can. It has often been observed on the Bloggernacle that the Church’s admonitions to marry young, have lots of kids, get all the education you can, and stay out of debt are impossible to satisfy all at once unless you have the good fortune to have been born into wealth.

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In Church Policy, GA's

What President Nelson’s Talk Tells Us about Decision-making in the Q15

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

President Nelson stirred up a lot of discussion with his Conference talk, “The Correct Name of the Church,” where he explained that the use of nicknames like “Mormon” for the Church or its members are a victory for Satan. As many people have pointed out (for example, Jana Riess), the arguments he made were similar to ones he made in an earlier Conference talk almost 30 years ago. As a relatively junior member of the Quorum of the Twelve, he found his arguments didn’t gain much traction, as President Hinckley gave a talk in the very next Conference where he embraced the use of the term “Mormon.” This time around, though, he’s in the top spot in Church leadership, so he’s getting things done. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, for example.

One thing that really struck me about the comparison that shows that this issue has been on President Nelson’s mind for decades is what it reveals about the decision-making process in the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. The D&C says that decisions made by these bodies must be unanimous. If this rule is followed, it means that then-Elder Nelson must have been on board with unanimous decisions made that followed President Hinckley’s approach of embracing and owning the term Mormon. It also means that all the Q15 members who were also on board with President Hinckley’s (and Monson’s) strategy have all changed their minds together, and are now on board with President Nelson’s view.

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In Fun, General Conference

Two Is the New Three

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

In a special press conference, President Russell M. Nelson announced a series of changes in the Church related to the shortening of its Sunday meeting schedule from three hours to two, which had been announced in this last weekend’s General Conference:

  • The afterlife now includes only two kingdoms: Celestial and Telestial. “We considered keeping Terrestrial, since it has the benefit of being an actual recognized word,” he explained, “but as I read the description of this kingdom in Doctrine and Covenants 76, it was impressed upon my mind that the Lord’s will is that any so-called ‘honorable men of the earth’ who can’t manage to see through the subtle craftiness of men be grouped with the wicked in the Telestial Kingdom.”
  • The triple combination has been renamed the double combination, with the de-canonization of the Pearl of Great Price. President Nelson noted that although the Pearl of Great Price contains “some inspired writings,” it may also be misleading, for example, in that the Articles of Faith purport to summarize the Church’s key beliefs, but make no mention of the importance of heterosexual marriage or of God’s eternal hatred of gay and transgender people.

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In Fun, Scripture

Book of Mormon Stories that Get a Chuckle Out of Me

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

I suspect I’m not alone in generally thinking the Book of Mormon isn’t particularly funny. But I must admit that there are a few passages that usually make me chuckle.

  • In Mosiah 11, Abinadi has to flee for his life after condemning the wickedness of King Noah and his people. At the beginning of the next chapter, he returns in disguise, and the first words out of his mouth are: “Thus has the Lord commanded me, saying—Abinadi . . .” So he had carefully put together his disguise so he could sneak in among Noah’s people without being recognized, and then in just one line, he blows it all. I imagine him saying that and then thinking D’oh! Should’ve used a pseudonym!

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In Children, Church Policy

Let’s Support Breastfeeding Mothers and Children

Author ZiffPosted on

The folks at the Exponent have launched an action to request that Church leaders make a policy that  mothers are permitted to breastfeed their children publicly in LDS churches. I think it’s deeply unfortunate that so many women who want nothing more than to feed their children–something that you would think the Church should be deeply supportive of–are pushed to use terribly inadequate mothers’ rooms, shamed, told they need to cover up and that they’re contributing to the porn problem. Seriously, we’re a church that appears to not be able to get enough of the idea of divine gender roles. Let’s join this action to raise the issue with leaders, both general and local, to ask them to put their policies where their rhetoric is.

The action is called “Let Babies Eat,” and you can read more at the Exponent or at the website for the action.

In Fun, General Conference

More Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Given my remarkable success at predicting things that would happen in April General Conference, I thought I would try my hand again with some more Conference predictions for October.

  • In a stunning rebuke of the murmurnacle, President Nelson will announce that not only will the three hour block not be shortened to two hours, it will actually be lengthened to four hours. Existing meetings and classes will not be changed in length. The extra hour will be used for a mandatory meeting where all ward members (including primary and nursery-aged children) sit in council and discuss the importance of Defending the Family. Meetinghouses used by three wards will follow the 8-12/10-2/12-4 schedule. Fifth Sundays will be celebrated with a special five-hour block, with each meeting lengthened by 25%.

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In Wonder

Is there room for wonder in the Church?

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Earlier this year, I blogged about the Pew Religious Landscape Study and looked at some of the results, comparing Mormons to members of a few other groups. One of the questions in the survey asked people how often they felt a deep sense of wonder about the universe. Here are results for Mormons and the other groups I was looking at.

Mormons don’t have quite as many people answering “at least once a week” as do Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, or agnostics, but like all the groups I looked at, we have more people answering this than any other response frequency. By this measure, Mormons are pretty middle-of-the-pack when it comes to experiencing wonder.

I was recently thinking about this question when I read Nate Staniforth’s book Here Is Real Magic. Staniforth is a magician, and the book is largely memoir, but he also spends a fair amount of time discussing the question of why magic is fascinating to him. The answer boils down to wonder: Performing magic often allows him to see wonder provoked in his audiences, and he treasures this experience because in his view, wonder is so uncommon and so precious. He even subtitles the book A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World. Here’s one point where he describes his experience of using magic to induce wonder:

From the students on the playground at recess to this man named Ahmed who worked in a terrible neighborhood in Kolkata, the response to great magic is the same: a mouth stunned open, widening eyes, fear, doubt, and then openly, nakedly, joy. Pure joy. The transformation is far, far more amazing than the trick, which is just a tool designed to create this moment. A moment of pure astonishment makes you forget to be cool. It makes you forget to be composed or distinguished. It make you forget to–consciously–be anything. The faces that are revealed when our masks of self-awareness are propriety are blasted away are, simply, beautiful [p. 100].

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In Church Policy, Fun

Mormon Edits

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

Joseph Smith taught that Mormon means more good. Taking this meaning, then, I’m wondering what Mormon edits we might get to see now that President Nelson has announced that God isn’t a fan of Mormon as a label for LDS (sorry, Latter-day Saint) -related things.

At a minimum, I’m hoping to see the following edits made to the scriptures:

Mosiah 18:8

And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God . . .

3 Nephi 5:12

And behold, I am called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, being called after the land of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . . .

D&C 135:8

. . . their innocent blood on the floor of Carthage jail is a broad seal affixed to “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-ism” that cannot be rejected by any court on earth . . .

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In Agency, Modesty, Sexuality

Modesty and Locus of Control

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

The discussion over at the Exponent about the Utah woman who had her bishop and stake president refuse to renew her temple recommend because she refused to follow their counsel to cover herself while breastfeeding in church reminded me of a concept I remember discussing in psychology classes. That concept is locus of control. Here’s the first line of the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In personality psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.

People are thought to fall along a continuum from having an internal locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by decisions they make–to an external locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by other people or other things outside themselves. You can read the full Wikipedia article or look up any of a big pile of academic papers talking about locus of control, but the level I’m thinking about it is as simple as this brief description.

I think it’s clear that Church teachings are heavily focused on pushing us to have an internal locus of control. For example, Lehi tells Jacob in 2 Nephi 2:27: Read More

In Hymns, Music

Now Let Us Rejoice in the Hymnbook Revisions

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

The Church has announced that the hymnbook and children’s songbook are both going to be revised. I have a bunch of random thoughts on this. I’ll put them in three lists to try to create some illusion of organization.

Good News

  • The Church is actually asking for our feedback for once! Here’s the survey. (I’m assuming they’ll do something to limit multiple responses from the same person. I’m actually surprised that it looks like they’re not requiring an lds.org account login to participate.)
  • From the FAQ on the project: “New and existing hymns and songs from around the world will be evaluated and considered for inclusion.” This seems like great news, and a welcome change from the English-only hymns we have now. In the Church News story, Elder Kopischke, who’s an adviser to the project, says “We hope that these new books will also include some of the best hymns and songs originating in other languages that will then be translated into English and the other languages of the world.”
  • Elder Curtis, another adviser to the project, says (in the Church News story) “As an extension to the new printed hymnbook and songbook, additional sacred music will be made available online, including music of local interest in each language.” This also sounds like very welcome news to me, as so much music in church is limited by what’s in the hymnbook, so if the hymnbook is expanded with these official supplements, this will give us much more music (potentially) to choose from in church.
  • Also from the FAQ: “Because the new core collections will be the same in every language, national anthems will not be included in the printed hymnbooks.” I am very happy at the possibility of a little more uncoupling of nationalism–particularly American nationalism–from our religion.

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In Fun

Our Donald

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Evangelical Christians aren’t typically big on saying the Lord’s Prayer, but I understand that this revised version is gaining some traction:

Our Donald which art in the White House, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy tariffs come, Thy will be done in Congress, as it is by executive order.
Give us this day our daily tweets.
And reduce our taxes, but reduce moreso the taxes of our corporations.
And protect us from brown people at our border, as thou deliverest us from brown people kneeling at football games. For thine is the Presidency, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

 

 

In GA's, Statistics

Do women really like Elder Uchtdorf more?

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

Yes. Yes they do.

Or, at least it looks like they do more on Facebook. Here’s a list of the most common patterns of likes of Q15 members by women and men. In the second row, liking Elder Uchtdorf alone is done by 6% of women but only 4% of men. The two percentage point difference (in the last column) is the largest difference for any Q15 like pattern. (Perhaps he really does need to cover up to prevent the women of the Church from sinning in their thoughts!) The pattern men have most compared to women is liking all Q15 members but the three most junior, which 2.5% of men, but only 1.3% of women do.

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In Fun

18 More Websites That Should Be Blocked on Church Wi-Fi

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

The Church announced (to its local leaders leaders) that some social networking, video and audio streaming, and gaming sites will be blocked on meetinghouse WiFi beginning this month. Of course when I saw the headline that mentioned social networking, I immediately thought of the 800-pound gorilla of social networking sites: Facebook. But no, it looks like Facebook has been spared, perhaps because some missionaries are now using it to find people to teach. Instead, the blocks hit sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and MySpace.

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In GA's, Statistics

That’s *President* Soares to You: Probabilities of New Q12 Members Becoming Church President

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

I’m so happy that I was so wrong last week when I predicted that President Nelson would call two white men from Utah to fill the openings in the Quorum of the Twelve. I’m thrilled that Elders Gong and Soares can bring some new perspectives to the Q15. And of course, one of the first things I looked up when I learned that they had been called was how old they are, because I was curious about what the chances were that either of them would make it to be Church President.

In this post, I’ve updated the simulation that I’ve run before to estimate the probabilities of each Q15 member becoming Church President. I last did this just a few months ago when President Monson passed away.  The gist of it is that I use a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries, assume that the yearly mortality probabilities apply to all members of the Q15 equally, and then run a bunch of simulations (100,000 in this case) and in each, pick a bunch of random numbers and compare them to the mortality probabilities for each member and use the comparison to work out how much longer each man would live, and the resulting way that the Presidency would be handed from one member to the next–which members would get to serve as President and which ones wouldn’t. The process is described in a little more detail in this post from 2015. Anyway, the numbers for the most senior 13 members have changed little since my post in January. What’s interesting here is the probabilities for the new Q15 members.

The table below shows the probability of each Q15 member becoming Church President, and how many years he would serve if he did. Note that if you compare carefully, you might notice some small discrepancies between this table and the one in my January post. When I was running the simulations for this post, I realized that when I ran simulations for my January post, I had calculated current age by rounding to the nearest birthday (e.g., a man who is 65 and 7 months is counted as being 66) rather than the more conventional approach of calculating it by just looking at last birthday passed. If you noticed this error in the previous post and didn’t feel the need to correct me, thank you!

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In General Conference

General Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

General Conference starts tomorrow, and this provides all kinds of opportunities to speculate about what changes in the Church it might bring. Of course we can speculate before every Conference, but this one is particularly ripe given that there will be two new members of the Quorum of the Twelve called, and that it will be President Nelson’s first Conference. President Monson was unwell for years, so there may have been big decisions that the other Q15 members left unmade. Now, with President Nelson appearing to be in good health, he may move forward with some items that had been on hold.

Here’s my speculation about the new Quorum of the Twelve members: They will be white, and will have a strong connection to Utah. Risky speculation, I know! Seriously, though, I was extremely disappointed in 2015 when, even with three Q12 positions to fill at the same time, President Monson still couldn’t bring himself to call a person of color to the Quorum. My guess is that President Nelson will be even less likely to do so. Also, given how much he clearly loves God’s Most Holy and Most Blessed Order of the Eternal and Most Divine Gender Roles, Which Were and Are from All Eternity to All Eternity, I’m betting that he won’t call anyone like Elder Renlund to the Quorum. Elder Renlund’s wife had (gasp) a career, and to make it worse, only one child. I really doubt that President Nelson could see someone like him as being faithful enough. So my expectation is not just two older white men with ties to Utah, but two older white men with ties to Utah who are descended from polygamists and whose wives were SAHMs and had plenty of kids.

A question that might be even bigger than who the new Q12 members will be is whether President Nelson will canonize the Family Proclamation. This seems like the perfect example of an issue that was left in limbo with President Monson’s deteriorating health, that President Nelson might jump to solve. Really, though, after reading a bunch of discussions on the Bloggernacle and on Facebook, I’ve come to agree with those who argue that it doesn’t really matter if he does or not. One of my sisters pointed out that for the FamProc to enter the canon would kind of be a step down. The canon is what we read now and again and pull proof texts out of. The FamProc is what we love so much that we hang it on our walls! It’s better than canon. What I really expect is that, rather than canonizing it, President Nelson will borrow some lines from Joseph Smith and tell us that “The Family Proclamation is the most correct of any proclamation on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man will get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other proclamation.” That’s what he’ll do: cement its place as super-canon.

It also might be worth wondering whether President Nelson, or any of the other speakers, will mention all the fallout from the Joseph Bishop scandal. My guess would be no, both considering the timing–all the news has broken so close to Conference, and talks are planned well in advance–and the content–GAs won’t want to bring the issue to the attention of anyone who hasn’t already heard about it. This is a topic like polygamy, where the Church will probably be sure to keep any of its responses carefully out of the way of most members, to avoid causing more trouble than they solve. Kind of like the Gospel Topics essays.

What do you think will happen at Conference?

 

In Church Policy

It is the nature and disposition of almost all men

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Like many Americans, I have had a new appreciation for the existence of checks on the President’s power since Donald Trump was elected. They may not always work as they were intended to, but I’m glad that at least the framers were concerned about the question.

The organization of the US government (and of many other governments) is a striking contrast in this way to the organization of the LDS Church. As the Joseph Bishop story sadly shows, there really aren’t checks on the power of LDS church leaders. I mean, there are in cases where they do outrageous things in public, or if they get on the bad side of leaders over them. But what I’m talking about here is that if a church leader does awful things in private to the people he’s presiding over, then the victims have pretty much no recourse. A situation like this can always be reduced to he said/she said, and the presumption of higher-level church authorities appears to pretty much always be that the accused leader is innocent. The woman assaulted by Joseph Bishop reports having raised years later to her then-bishop, but he said he found her accusations not credible, based on the simple fact that Bishop had been called to several high callings in the Church.

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In GA's, Priesthood, Women

Women Are Like Hydrogen

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

I read some discussion on Facebook recently of a diagram showing the organization of the Church. I think the diagram was something like what’s shown in this post, but I’m not completely sure. Whatever the exact details of the diagram, what’s important about it is that the structure it showed included only men: First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, Seventies, stake presidents, bishops, etc. The striking thing was its exclusion of women.

I don’t fault the person who made the diagram or whoever shared it. It looked to me like it accurately captured how the Church is structured. If women are included anywhere, it’s at the margins, and perhaps informally, if any of the men in positions of authority ever discuss issues they’re facing with their wives.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that to be included in the hierarchy, men must be married. Bishops I think have to be married by rule. I’m not sure if it’s a rule for the other positions, but if it isn’t, it’s at least an extremely strong norm. The fact that each of these men is married but that their wives aren’t shown reminded me of diagrams of the structures of molecules that one of my kids was showing me recently. In at least some forms of these diagrams, most hydrogen atoms are not included explicitly. They are just assumed to be bonded at each atom where they would be required for the atom to have the right number of valence electrons.

Here’s an example, courtesy of the NIH’s PubChem website:

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In Belief, Church Life, Statistics

Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Since she started attending church with the Episcopalians, I’ve heard my sister Lynnette observe that members of her new church appear to have a much broader range of beliefs than Mormons do. I guess I had never really thought about this, but if it’s true, this seems like maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. There is lots of pressure to conform in Mormonism, all the way from scriptures that have Jesus saying “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine” to talks that exhort members to set aside the cultures they grew up in to join “the gospel culture.” And of course, this doesn’t even touch on the pressure at the local level to conform. Consider, for example, the immense backlash faced by women who participated in the “wear pants to church” actions a few years ago. They were not even going against a rule of any kind, but rather violating a norm and standing out, and this made a lot of rank-and-file members appear to lose their minds. I don’t have a very good sense of the Episcopal Church in general, but I’m guessing that, like many American Protestants, they are simply less top-down in their structure than Mormons are, so there’s more room for differences of opinion or even belief.

Really, though, what I thought would be even more interesting than reasoning out why or why not Mormons might be more homogeneous in belief than members of other churches, would be to see if there were any empirical evidence of this difference. It occurred to me that a great place to look would be the data gathered by the Pew Research Center in their Religious Landscape Study. It’s a US sample only, so it misses the larger fraction of Church membership that lives elsewhere, but it does represent the largest single concentration of Mormons in one country. I looked at Pew’s 2014 data. As these data are a few years old, they’ve already been discussed quite a bit on the Bloggernacle. I am coming at the results from a new angle, though. Rather than focusing on the particular answers respondents gave, I am interested in how similar the sets of answers are for members of the same church, regardless of what the particular answers are.

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