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First: What happens on the bloggernacle, stays on the bloggernacle.

Second: The latest comment will be more controversial than the original post.

Third: The current post is more important to us than whatever we said last week.

Fourth: If the prophet leads the church astray, the bloggernacle will be sure to point it out. (Also, even if he doesn’t.)

Fifth: The commenter is not required to have any particular credentials or training in order to call the original poster to repentance.

Sixth: The commenter does not have to say “This is just my opinion” for it to be just her opinion.

Seventh: Whether you need to know it, or want to know it, or wish you’d never heard it, you can find someone on the bloggernacle vehemently defending it.

Eighth: The feminism of the bloggernacle  is not limited by men’s reasoning.

Ninth: The bloggernacle  can start flame wars on any matter – temporal, spiritual, ontological, ecumenical, grammatical, fiscal, or edible.

Tenth: The blogger may be involved in your local congregation. (Little do you know!)

Eleventh: The two groups who have the most difficulty following the bloggernacle  are the proud who are Correlated and the proud who still have dial-up.

Twelfth: The bloggernacle will not be popular with the popular.

Thirteenth: The bloggernacle and its blogs make up the unwashed masses – the lowest quorum in the church.

Fourteenth: Threats will get you nowhere.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post titled “Why I Don’t Want to Believe In Heavenly Mother.” Basically, I argued that our teachings about Heavenly Mother in their current form raise more feminist problems than solve them, and I concluded, “I sometimes think I might rather deal with the difficulties of no Heavenly Mother at all, than with the challenges posed by the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother who is irrelevant to the Plan of Salvation, and who is either unable or unwilling to communicate with her children.”

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We are excited to announce that after several years of discussing whether we should add new bloggers but never getting around to it (in classic ZD fashion), we have recruited two new bloggers: Apame and Petra.

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In the past couple of years, I’ve presented at quite a few Mormon Studies kinds of conferences. Almost all of them have been recorded–some just with audio, but some with video as well. (I’ve found this far more common in the Mormon Studies conferences I’ve attended than ones in my academic field more generally, which is why I mention them specifically.) I can appreciate why this is done; there are a lot more people who are interested in hearing what happens at these events than are able to actually attend, and from that perspective, it’s great to have the material available. Read More

The last two months of my life have seen a complete transformation. My experiment with on-line dating led to a relationship this summer, and recently, in an unexpected turn of events, my significant other and I got engaged. It’s been a crazy whirlwind, but in a completely wonderful way. Read More

Not Ophelia put up the text of President Benson’s 1987 talk about women not working outside the home over at FMH today. I had some thoughts after reading it, and I decided they were long and involved enough (and a little off-topic enough) that it would be better to put them up here as their own post. But they’re a reaction to the talk, so go read (or at least skim) it first.

While I always knew about this talk, I don’t recall ever being taught it much (though it’s possible I simply blew it off if/when it was taught and that’s why I don’t remember it), luckily. And I’m very grateful that my mother (who is very faithful, orthodox, conservative, and was always a SAHM mom) not only didn’t teach it, but didn’t listen to it. Or rather, that she didn’t let it keep her from making the choices that she thought were best for herself and her family. Read More

I’m at a point where I have never felt more free to choose the path I want my life to follow. In many ways, this is a wonderful thing, but my biggest dilemma is that I’m struggling to figure out what I want. I know I love teaching high school English and want to continue in this profession. And I know I eventually want marriage and motherhood. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about my patriarchal blessing, and doing some reevaluating. Read More

Check out this new blog–some academic-type Mormon women writing about women’s religious history, feminism, and other fun things. They’ve kicked things off with a discussion of the Pink Issue of Dialogue. Looks fabulous.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up a summary of the first day of the inter-religious diplomacy conference last month at USC. Then I got distracted by other life matters and never got back to the second day. I thought after slacking off this long I should maybe not bother with part two, but Eve told me to do it anyway, and I’ve heard one should listen to one’s older sisters. So here it is. (This is probably less a summary of the talks—which would be very difficult to do justice—than a mention of some of the points I found interesting.) Read More

[Recent reflections at FMH hereby prompt me to broadcast my own half-baked reflections on parenting theories. That said, this isn’t a critique of either Stephanie’s or Not Ophelia’s approaches to parenting, both of which strike me as eminently reasonable; in any case, the content substantially predates their posts. Rather, this is my current take on parenting, such as it is, which is very clearly a result of my particular temperament and circumstances. Like all of my views, it’s worth every red cent you paid for it, and I fully expect it to be substantially revised in three years, downright unrecognizable in five.] Read More

If you’re a single woman in the church (late 20s or older), people are kind to you (likely more kind than they are to your male counterparts). However, you have also been an object of pity more times than you can count. The problem is that most of this pity is not direct–instead, it’s usually manifest through attempts to comfort you (because of your poor, pitiful, single status). I call this pity-disguised-at-attempts-to-comfort-the-sad-women-who-are-struggling-to-find-meaning-in-their-lives. Read More

I see that a couple of people have already posted about the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy conference last weekend (see here and here), which reminded me that I’d told a couple of people I’d post some of my thoughts about it. It was really fun to go to the conference; I’ve been kind of obsessed with issues related to pluralism for the past decade or so, but most of my conversation about the subject has been done in a non-LDS context, so I especially enjoyed thinking about them with reference to Mormonism in particular. (Not to mention that I got to hang out with cool people and hide from my dissertation.)

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I decided to pull this draft out because it was voted for — twice! — as one people would like to see finished. It was the only one of mine voted for (not too surprising, since my drafts make up about 1% of the total drafts), and I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I figured I should not only blog something again, but listen to the opinions of our commenters. So here you go. (Also, it was started a long time ago, but what was already there still applies.)

I’ve been reading this thread over on FMH. It had me thinking about presiding in my own marriage, and since I didn’t want to threadjack (and since the blog has been a little dead lately), I decided to post my thoughts here. Read More

So, I’ve been having a hard time with all things church-related for about six months now. Not in an angst-driven way (the anger/hurt of last year has subsided), but in a I-just-don’t-want-to-be-religious-for-no-explicable-reason kind of way. I did know that I wanted a bit of distance from God after what happened last year, but this past week, as I thought through why I was skipping church yet again, and as I thought about where I am with my dating life, it all finally clicked for me.

I’m struggling with the law of sacrifice. But let me back up just a bit. Read More

So, my series isn’t over, but until I have a chance to finish another post in the series, I need some advice.

Like I mentioned in an early post, I have re-entered the world of dating, and I’m currently signed up for a couple of on-line dating sites. I just recently signed up for match.com, and I’m currently facing a small dilemma. Read More

Last April/May is when my life hit rock bottom: my ex and I permanently broke things off, and I was left facing not only an emotional mess, but a religious crisis of unprecedented proportions. Because yearly anniversaries tend to resonate with me, recently I’ve been pondering my life and revisiting where I was a year ago. Read More

Two years ago, observing the fact that the ZDs seem to struggle a bit with finishing posts, I put up a screenshot of our post queue. Since then, I fear the situation has only gotten worse. We currently have 795 drafts which have yet to see the light of day. So just for fun, here is a scarily long list of titles you would see were you to poke your head into the ZD queue.

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A while ago I had a conversation with an utterly sincere and extremely orthodox Mormon–one who’s devoted his life to CES, one who believes that evolution is evil and Rough Stone Rolling a vicious slander on Joseph Smith’s good name, to name just a couple of his views –I revealed some of my own unorthodoxies. It’s been years since I’ve revealed such views to someone I knew would disagree with me, and although I’ve sometimes been frustrated by my own silences, the conversational fallout recalled me to my reasons for those silences.  This good, kind man called me a few days after our conversation in a fairly transparent attempt to resolve my concerns, and it was evident he’d been thinking about them ever since we’d talked and was struggling to produce answers for me. He proposed a few justifications for practices I disagree with, people I should talk to to help me “work things out,” various actions I should take to increase my spirituality. I ended up feeling poised between gratitude at his sincerity and kindness and exasperation at the very premises of the conversation–I’m wrong, and I just don’t understand; he’s right, and he does. Suddenly I’ve become dubious, spiritually suspect. I need fixing. I’m a person of concern. Read More

In Steve Evans’s recent post “I Could Not Do It” at BCC, he mentioned the “serious aspect of fundamentalism at the heart of being a Mormon,” and then clarified,

I am using “fundamentalism” in a general sense, and not in reference to polygamist groups, although that is clearly an example of fundamentalism in action.

His comment got me to thinking that it’s too bad that, in the Mormon context, the word “fundamentalist” has come to be almost synonymous with “polygamous.” Read More

I spent the last few days at Utah Valley University, attending the annual conference of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology. It was an intense couple of days; I feel like I’m in a kind of intellectual and social overload and the introvert in me would now like to go hide in the mountains for a couple of days and decompress. Read More