Zelophehad's Daughters

Ratings of Mormon Books on GoodReads

Ziff20 January 202320 January 20238 Comments

I wrote a post a couple of years ago where I looked at how Mormon-related movies were rated on IMDB. I thought it would be fun to do a similar look at how Mormon-related books are rated on GoodReads.

I got ratings for 568 books, mostly Mormon-related, but with a few others for comparison. The Mormon-related ones were scriptures, Church-published materials like manuals, and books by GAs, Mormon studies people, and popular Mormon authors (e.g., Jack Weyland, Anita Stansfield). The non-Mormon ones were a few Bibles, the Left Behind series, the top 10 fiction and non-fiction books on the GoodReads lists (I’m not sure exactly of the criteria for these), and 20 fiction and 20 non-fiction books I was hoping would be more representative of average books, so I chose them off of GoodReads user-created lists that had nothing to do with the book content (one was strange titles and the other was interesting covers). I required a book to have at least 50 ratings to be included, although I made exceptions for three extra bad ones I was interested in: the ERA-era book Woman, written by a bunch of GAs, the priesthood/temple-ban-justifying Mormonism and the Negro, and the mansplained classic Woman and the Priesthood. Note that I’ve gathered this data in bits and pieces over the last month or so, so some of the numbers might be a little out of date.

I assigned the books to categories depending on how Correlation-friendly they were. Unfortunately, I’ve only read a small fraction of the books, so I didn’t have firsthand knowledge in most cases. However, most books make pretty clear what type they are. For example, Mormon studies books are typically published by university presses. More correlated books are typically published by Deseret Book or Shadow Mountain. Anyway, this table shows, for all the Mormon books, the number of books in the sample and their average rating on the 1-to-5 scale used by GoodReads.

In my post on movies, I speculated that there would be higher ratings for movies produced by the Church, or that were scripture-adjacent, and that did turn out to be the case. It looks like there’s a similar pattern here, as scriptures rate the highest, and generally categories rank lower in average rating as they move further from being correlated. Here’s a brief explanation of what falls into each category:

Scriptures — LDS scriptures in different forms (e.g., Book of Mormon separate vs. Triple Combination) plus some non-LDS editions of the Bible.
Correlated — Church manuals and books that have essentially become manuals (e.g., Jesus the Christ).
GA biography — Biographies of GAs.
Near correlated — Nearly all books by GAs, as well as books by people like John Bytheway who are striving to be correlated, and novels by writers with similar goals (Gerald Lund, Chris Heimerdinger).
Correlation friendly — Books that aren’t quite trying to be correlated, but are still very Church-friendly, like many of the Givens’s books, Hugh Nibley, and some of Patrick Mason’s.
Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who’s still Mormon (e.g., Leonard Arrington’s Adventures of a Church Historian).
Mormon studies — Any look at a Mormon topic from a scholarly perspective, so for example Maxine Hanks’s Women and Authority, or John Turner’s biography of Brigham Young, or Kathleen Flake’s book about the seating of Reed Smoot in the US Senate.
Ex-Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who left Mormonism, regardless of hostility level, so everything from Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints to Katie Langston’s Sealed.
Not correlation friendly — This includes books with ideas that GAs would generally frown on, even if the writers aren’t hostile to the Church, so for example anything by Carol Lynn Pearson that’s too kind to gay people or too open to Heavenly Mother or rejecting polygamy.
Anti — The only book I got in this category is Ed Decker’s classic The God Makers.

In GA's, Prayer

Thou hast revealed thy gospel hobbies.

Ziff13 January 20239 Comments

The Church announced last month that second hour meetings should now begin with prayer. Also, while on the topic, the announcement reminded us that English-speaking members need to be saying thee, thou, thine, and thy when addressing God in prayers.

Of course, the issue of proper prayer language has long been a gospel hobby of Dallin H. Oaks in particular. I can’t even guess what interesting changes he might make if he outlives Russell M. Nelson to become Church President. Perhaps he’ll add a question to the temple recommend interview for English-speaking members only that asks if they’re using proper prayer language. Or perhaps he’ll require English-speaking wards and branches to submit audio recordings of their meetings so that the use of proper prayer language can be audited and corrected if necessary.

As has been discussed for years on the Bloggernacle, it’s weird that we turn these words around that used to be the informal forms of address to make them the formal ones, and so turn on its head the idea that God should be close to us, and instead puts him at a distance. It’s also strange to do different things in different languages. I’m sadly monolingual, but as others who speak more languages than one have also noted, it’s common that even the Church’s own materials (e.g., scriptures) in other languages follow the convention of using the less formal words when addressing God. So it’s English speakers only who need to put God at a distance; for everyone else, he can be treated as close.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2022: Funniest Comments

Ziff4 January 20234 January 202314 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments and bits of posts that I read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of these are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each person’s name a link to the original source, so you can go and read them in their original context if you want. Also, the comments are in roughly chronological order.

Old Man, commenting on Bishop Bill’s post “Permanent Changes” at W&T:

How did Enoch get his people translated without strict adherence to the block schedule? How did the Old and New Testament prophets, prophetesses, apostles, etc., ever develop into the great human beings they were without long weekly meetings, youth programs and trek? How did ol’ Brigham cross the plains without a Sunday School Presidency, Primary, and not a single Eagle Scout on hand?

Michael Austin, in his post “BYU’s New Demonstration Policy Explained” at BCC:

This policy is designed to maximize our students’ moral agency–which we define as “the ability to exercise uncompromising obedience in the face of difficult moral choices while not being gay.”

Comments on Michael Austin’s post:

Stirling McKay Adams:

This policy may be part of a formal move to rebrand “BYU” as “BY-CES.”

peterllc:

the philosophies of men, mingled with with poorly drafted legalese.

Rockwell:

Seriously, every one going on a date on the BYU campus needs to file for permission to demonstrate because they are 2 or more people meeting to raise awareness, primarily about each other.

anon:

Pairs and trios of missionaries will, I trust, apply for university sanction?

Also, pretty much like Jesus said: where two or three or gathered, lo, the honor code is there.

In Christmas, Music

Mary, did you know . . . you need to cover up?

Ziff25 December 202216 Comments

As part of the Church’s “Light the World” campaign this year, they released a set of images for people to share. One of them was a modified version of a painting of Mary and baby Jesus that had a number of edits made. See below to see the original and the modified versions. (I’m not sure who to credit for noticing this or making the comparison image. I’ve seen it mentioned in a bunch of Facebook groups and I think on the Mormon Reddit, but I’m not sure who made the original observation.) In honor of the covering up of any hint of Mary’s cleavage in the edited version, I’ve rewritten the song “Mary, Did You Know?”

Mary, did you know that your wicked breasts
Would cause good men to stumble?
Mary, did you know that your sinful chest
Made men’s composure crumble?
Did you know that your cover up
Would save men’s souls from sin?
These parts of you were secretly, morality’s linchpin

In Christmas, Church Life

Attending Church on Christmas

Ziff22 December 20227 Comments

The Church announced back in November that as Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, church will be a sacrament meeting-only affair. (The wording of the announcement actually makes me chuckle—it says “the only meeting Church members need to attend that day is sacrament meeting”—which kind of sounds to me like a suggestion that wards should still hold the second hour, it’s just that nobody should feel obligated to attend it.) Although my memory isn’t great, it appears from this Church Tech Forum discussion that they made similar announcements in 2011 and 2016 when Christmas fell on a Sunday, as well as in 2017, when Christmas Eve did. But church wasn’t consistently shortened for Christmas on a Sunday in previous years. I definitely remember attending all three hours of church as a kid in the 1980s when Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1983 and 1988, and I recall being desperate to get the boring church stuff out of the way so I could get home and enjoy my presents! I’m not sure what I was up to in 1994, but in 2005, again I remember attending all three hours of church, as my wife and I were visiting her parents. In 2010, I even blogged about the question, suggesting that maybe church should be shortened around the holidays. Maybe I should take credit for the Church deciding to listen and start doing so!

I saw Peggy Fletcher Stack share this New York Times article (This is a gifted link to the article, so you can read it even if you don’t subscribe.) about different ways Christian churches are handling Christmas on a Sunday this year. According to results of one church’s survey, the percentage canceling church entirely is up five percentage points (from 11% to 16%) since this was last an issue in 2016. I really liked this summary point from Timothy Beal, a religious studies professor who was quoted in the article:

Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other. Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.

Anyway, considering the question again, I had a few thoughts. They don’t really hang together, so I’m just going to make a bulleted list.

Christmas church isn’t a big deal for us because we Mormons don’t follow a liturgical calendar. We don’t have particular different services for any holiday. Not Christmas, not even Easter, the centerpiece of Christian celebration. (Well, maybe Mother’s Day.) Sure, individual wards and branches can decide on their own to have a more music-and-scripture focused sacrament meeting on or around Christmas, and in my experience, many do, but that’s up to them. There’s nothing stopping a bishop from assigning speakers to talk on the City of Enoch or the Word of Wisdom this Sunday.

In YW/YM

Parts I Like in the New For the Strength of Youth

Ziff15 December 20224 Comments

As you know if you read ZD at all regularly, I’m mostly a complainer when it comes to Church-related issues. Today I wanted to break from my routine and talk about parts of the Church’s new edition of For the Strength of Youth that I appreciate. It still doesn’t fully match what I’d ideally hope for (for example, in maybe mentioning Heavenly Mother and not telling gay teens they need to live a celibate life), but it’s just so much better than the previous version (which, in my more usual vein, I wrote a post complaining about several years ago). If you want a more comprehensive look at the changes from the previous version, you might want to check out Elisa’s excellent post from October over at W&T.

I’ve put the quotes in the order they appear in the booklet. I’ve linked to each chapter before the quote or quotes I’m taking from it, in case you want to read them in context.

Message from the First Presidency

There may be times when you don’t feel strong or capable. That’s normal.

One of my biggest complaints about the previous version is that it pathologized some things that are perfectly normal for teens, like any sexual feelings at all. I am therefore very happy to see lines like this that tell teens in a straightforward way that they’re not alone when they have difficulties or struggles.

In Advent, Depression, Joy

Gaudete

Lynnette12 December 202211 December 20226 Comments

It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything. Read More

In Fun, GA's

Pet Projects GAs Might Endorse

Ziff23 November 202214 Comments

Ronald A. Rasband recently dedicated a new campus of the American Heritage School, which sounds like it’s a Mormon Christian nationalist place that I’m guessing will teach things like the wickedness of separation of church and state. Now that he’s opened the possibility of Q15 members using their position to suggest Church endorsement of their pet projects, I’m wondering what places other Q15 members might go for. Here are some guesses:

Russell M. Nelson – Hundreds of new temples all over the world (I guess this one doesn’t really qualify, because he’s gone a lot further than just implying Church endorsement.)

Dallin H. Oaks – Museum of Straight History at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia

Dieter F. Uchtdorf – Luftwaffe visiting exhibit at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio

Neil L. Andersen – White Fertility Enhancement Project at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina

Image credit: Cornelis Saftleven, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gary E. Stevenson – Fitness Center for the Stars in Bel-Air, California

Jeffrey R. Holland – Expanded Dodo Research Center at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar (a pretty good school)

Kevin W. Pearson (hoping to become a Q15 member) – Texas State Prison system’s Panopticon Project in Huntsville, Texas

What pet projects do you expect to see Q15 members endorsing?

In Church Life

What types of questions might differentiate types of Mormons?

Ziff31 October 202231 October 20224 Comments

I was intrigued by a guest post at W&T a couple of weeks ago where an anonymous poster shared a question from a survey the Church was doing that invited respondents to categorize themselves as one of five types of Church members. (These appear to be unrelated to Robert Kirby’s five types of Mormons.) Here are the five types. Note that I’m dropping the edits between the February and October versions shown in the W&T post and just going with the October version.

I am committed to the gospel, but personal spirituality is more important to me than being institutionally religious. I may attend worship services regularly, but I don’t feel obligated to attend every meeting. As a Christian, I value being open-minded, fair, and tolerant.
I am committed to the gospel, and the Church plays a central role in my life. I believe all of its teachings. I usually read my scriptures daily. I think members should be strictly obedient to the counsel they receive from their priesthood leaders.
I primarily belong to the Church because of family, tradition, culture, or community. I usually enjoy participating in the Church socially, and feel that God rules more by love than by fear.
I am generally less interested in religion and/or spirituality. Even though I may believe some Church teachings, they don’t play a large role in my life. I don’t attend church as often as other people do. Sometimes I have been frustrated by the impact of religion on society.
I am committed to the gospel, and the Church is important to me I try to follow its teachings and do the things I’m supposed to, balancing with life’s other priorities. I tend to focus on practical applications of the gospel that are most relevant to my current life and family situation.

What most surprised me about this is that the survey apparently just straight up asked people to categorize themselves. This seems way out of the norm to me for how social science questionnaires work. I mean, I understand that companies, and I guess churches, might make profiles of common types of their customers or members. But it seems much more conventional to me that instead of asking people to directly categorize themselves, a researcher would ask them a bunch of far simpler questions, and then aggregate the responses by looking at which ones correlate with each other and come up with the types without showing them to the people taking the survey. If you’re familiar with the problem of double-barreled questions, which ask more than one thing at a time, these are like ten-barreled questions.

I strongly suspect that that’s what the Church researchers originally did. And that got me to wondering what questions they might have asked to try to get at types of Church members. In this post, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I hope or wish they asked, and that of course I’d love to see data on for a large number of Church members to see if types of Mormons fall out like I’d expect.

Beliefs

How strongly to you believe in each of the following Latter-day Saint doctrines?
Response options: Don’t believe at all to believe completely

God lives.
God loves us.
God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.
Jesus lived a perfect life.
Jesus Christ atoned for our sins.
The early church established by Jesus fell into apostasy.
Joseph Smith restored the Church.
Prophetic authority to lead the Church has been passed in an unbroken line from Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson.
The Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record of a people who lived in the Americas.
The Book of Abraham is a translation of an ancient record written by Abraham.
We lived in the pre-mortal existence before our life on earth.
There is life after death.
Our place in the life after death will depend on the kind of life we have lived.
Our place in the life after death will depend on whether we have performed the required ordinances (or someone else has performed them on our behalf).

In Fun

Church data on me I’d like to see before the hackers get it

Ziff19 October 202210 Comments

Image credit: Massimo Botturi on Unsplash

The Church recently released a statement about a cyberattack they had suffered this last March (they waited this long to say something at the request of federal law enforcement). It sounds like the attackers made off with information on some Church members like name, membership number, and preferred language. But this got me to wondering about what other data I’d like to see if the Church is keeping it on me. I remember from the movie “The Mountain of the Lord” how Wilford Woodruff said it was important that we be “a record-keeping people,” so I have no doubt there are many records being kept that are far more interesting than my preferred language. Here are some examples of what I’d like to see:

Attendance

The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church, and whether this has varied by whether it’s football season or not.
The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church where I’ve maybe attended what one of my sisters calls “the church of the hallway” during second/third hours.
My on-time performance for sacrament meeting, and whether it varied by my ward’s meeting time slot. (I assume I’ve done worse with 9am, for example, versus 11am, but I’m actually not sure. Maybe later starting times just lead me to be more lackadaisical.)
The fraction of stake conferences I’ve attended.
How many different church buildings I’ve attended church at regularly.
How many church buildings I’ve attended church at at least once.
How much church buildings I’ve played basketball or volleyball in, without ever attending church meetings there.

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2022

Ziff7 October 20227 October 202214 Comments

Fastest musical number: “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah,” Saturday morning.
Slowest musical number: “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” Sunday afternoon
Best musical number: “All Creatures of Our God and King,” Saturday morning
Worst musical number: “Let Us All Press On,” Sunday morning. This was a weird and drawn-out arrangement that made an already overly bouncy hymn worse.

Longest prayer: 91 seconds, Susan H. Porter, Saturday evening benediction. This is a really short longest prayer. Typically there is at least one over 100 seconds.
Shortest prayer: 54 seconds, Weatherford T. Clayton, Sunday morning invocation

Longest talk: 2028 words, D. Todd Christofferson
Shortest talk: 374 words, Russell M. Nelson, in the last talk of Conference where he mostly just announced new temples.

Choir successes, non-music category:

The missionary choir that sang in the Saturday afternoon session for once didn’t only include young missionaries, but also senior missionaries, which I thought was nice.
The child-and-youth choir that sang in the Saturday evening session included several teen boys with hair to their collars or longer. (One of them was the son of April Young Bennett at the Exponent; she blogged about their experience.) It’s encouraging to me when BYU rules stop being applied to the whole Church.

Choir failure, non-music category: The same child-and-youth choir was seated not in a typical arrangement with boys on one side and girls on the other, but with the boys in the center and the girls around the periphery. This seems like a striking illustration of how we think about the relative importance of boys and girls in the Church.

In Gender Issues, Hymns, Music

Gender-Neutralizing the Hymns: A Proof of Concept

Ziff27 September 202219 Comments

How difficult would it be to make our hymns gender-neutral? If I could make one change to our hymnal, I’m with Mike C. in this 2014 post: this is the change I’d make. Incidentally, I would also be in favor of making our scriptures gender-neutral, but I expect modifying the hymns would be a much easier sell at this point (not that either is likely to happen soon). My reasoning is the same in either case. As it’s become less acceptable and less common in the world in general for words like “man” to be used to refer to humanity in general, women’s experience at church becomes more and more of a contrast with the rest of their lives. Virtually every reading of scripture and many singing of hymns just emphasizes again to women how unimportant, how peripheral, they are in the Church. Of course I’d rather we changed the actual structure of the Church to make women more equal, but while that’s not happening, modifying our hymns would be a good step.

There’s even precedent for gender-neutralizing hymns, at least a little. Douglas Campbell documents in this 1995 Dialogue article that in the update to the current 1985 hymnal from its predecessor, a few hymns had some of their language changed from gender-exclusive to gender-neutral. Still, I realize that such changes are unlikely to be made wholesale. I can’t imagine Presidents Nelson or Oaks signing off on such changes, for example. Perhaps in a few more decades when we get our next new hymnal, the GAs of the day might consider it.

In this post, I’m going to look at a very mundane question that has always kind of lurked in the back of my mind on this topic. If we actually did want to change the language of our hymns to make them gender-neutral, how difficult would it be? I looked at 20% the hymns in our current hymnal (all hymn numbers that are evenly divisible by five, so 68 of the 341) and tried my hand at rewriting the gender-exclusive words into gender-neutral words. My goal was just to see how easy or difficult the exercise was.

First, I made a list of all the gender-exclusive words in these 68 hymns. There are 379 in total, or about five and a half per hymn. Most of them, though, are references to Jesus or God (e.g., Father, Son, Lord, and King). I’m not considering these types of usages. I’m only interested in gender-exclusive words that refer to people in general, or to Church members. This table shows the breakdown of the 379 words.

It’s just the 55 words from the second and fourth rows, then, that I attempted to gender-neutralize. All but two of the 55 are male gender-specific words. To be complete, I tried to gender-neutralize them all, male or female. One other note, in case anyone is ever interested enough to try to retrace my steps: if a word occurs multiple times in a hymn because a line is repeated (like in a chorus), I count each repeat as a separate instance.

In Fun, Sacrament

New Rules for the Sacrament

Ziff12 September 202212 September 202219 Comments

Now that President Oaks’s preference for people to take the sacrament with their right hand has been enshrined in the Handbook (see instruction #7), we here at ZD are excited to leak the following list of additional rules for the sacrament that President Oaks also proposed but that have been put on hold until he becomes Church President.

Materials

Homemade bread is preferred for the sacrament, but store bought may also be used in cases where the women in the unit have rejected their divine gender role.
Bread should be neither too sweet nor too savory, as either of these may detract from the simplicity of the ordinance.
Bread color should be as white as possible, to provide the most delightsome possible representation of the Savior.
The use of filtered water is encouraged, but not required. A water filter may be installed in the church building, but if so, it must be funded by the members in the units using the building.
The carbonation or flavoring of sacrament water is strictly prohibited.
The temperature of water should be between 45 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit (7.2 and 12.8 degrees Celsius).
The use of ice cubes in place of water is prohibited.

In Conversion, Episcopalians, Nov 5 Policy, Spiritual Direction

How Talking to a Quaker Helped Me With Leaving the Church

Lynnette5 September 20225 September 20223 Comments

It was the spring of 2019, and it had been over a year since I’d been baptized into the Episcopal church. I still felt like it was the best decision I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still haunted sometimes. I was sitting in a Taize service one Sunday evening and thinking about my decision to leave the LDS faith, and I started to feel sick. Some fears are old ones; some fears are laid down in your understanding of the world before you’ve even begun to develop a sense of self. I’d been told all my life that walking away from God’s One True Church was a terrible mistake with eternal consequences, and even though my conversion had been an amazing experience, that didn’t always cancel out the anxiety, or erase the years of General Conference talks given in ominous tones by human leaders who were one hundred percent positive that they spoke for God. I wanted conversion to be more straightforward, cleaner; I wanted it to be a light that was so blinding that I could no longer even see the past, and I had no choice but to go forward. But while it was undeniably life-changing, my past was still there, a part of me to be reckoned with. Read More

In Abuse

Four Things That Hamper the Church’s Anti-Abuse Messages

Ziff1 September 20222 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the Church’s response to the AP story about the sex abuse case in Arizona. In it, there’s a bit that says “Church teachings and handbooks are clear and unequivocal about the evils of abuse.” This is definitely a good step, but what struck me is that I think it’s hard for the anti-abuse message to get across clearly when the Church has organizational features and makes rhetorical choices that can actually enable abuse (and here I’m thinking of abuse more generally, not just in the particular Arizona case). There are four issues in particular that I was thinking of.

The first is the authoritarian power structure. In the Church organization, control and information are only supposed to flow in one direction. GAs periodically remind us that they’re too busy to listen to us individually. This is bad for the Church in that it makes it difficult for those at the top to get real feedback. But it’s also a bad family structure. It sets parents (and fathers in particular) up as authorities who are not to be questioned. I don’t know if being an unquestioned authority makes someone more likely to become abusive in the first place, but it seems like it’s definitely smoothing the path for them to continue if they start, as a potential brake has been removed.

In Church-Hopping

Visiting the JWs

Lynnette15 August 202215 August 20223 Comments

In 2017, I spent a lot of time church-hopping. My visit to the JWs is one that still stands out in my memory as being particularly interesting from a Mormon perspective.

Sunday, June 4, 2017, 2:30 pm worship service

I was nervous about this visit, because I feared that they would aggressively try to convert me. Which made me laugh at myself, given my Mormon background. They met in a very utilitarian, plain building; from what I’ve seen, all the Kingdom Halls look the same. In the lobby, I found information about what areas of Bloomington met at what times. (Geographically assigned congregations meeting in the same building at different times also felt very Mormon!) Read More

In GA's

The Q15 and the Big Five Personality Traits

Ziff12 August 202212 August 20225 Comments

In personality psychology, there’s a dominant model that suggests there are five big factors that capture many differences in personality traits. In this post, I’m going to speculate about where the Q15 might fall on each of these five personality traits (mostly where they fall collectively), and how this might make them different from members of the Church in general.

Here are abbreviated definitions of each of the traits in the Wikipedia article on the Big Five. (Note that I’ve excerpted only what I think are the most descriptive bits, but to make them more readable, I haven’t used ellipses where I’ve omitted parts.)

Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. Those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven – sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.
Conscientiousness is a tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.
Extroversion is characterized by breadth of activities and energy creation from external means. Extroverts enjoy interacting with people, and are often perceived as full of energy. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals. Introverts have lower social engagement and energy levels than extroverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. (Note that it’s also sometimes spelled extraversion, as in the Wikipedia article.)
Agreeableness reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others.
Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. Those who score high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress. Individuals who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings.

In Hymns, Music

Some thoughts on hymns and the hymnal update

Ziff11 July 202237 Comments

In preparation for the release of the new hymnal, I’ve been working on a comparison of the current (1985) hymnal with its predecessor (first published in 1948; I’m using a slightly revised version from 1973). In this post, I’m just sharing some random things that came to mind while doing this comparison.

Hymn Titles

“Though Deepening Trials” is a clunky title for a hymn. In my experience, over half the time, people say the first word as through, which I think is completely understandable. Though is just a limp and unexpected word to begin a hymn title with. The problem, really, is that the first line is used as the title. From the 1973 hymnal to the 1985 one, several hymns had their titles switched from being the first line to being their most core or oft-repeated line. For example, “Ere You Left Your Room This Morning“ became “Did You Think to Pray?” and “When Upon Life’s Billows“ became “Count Your Blessings.” The problem is that “Though Deepening Trials” doesn’t have a chorus or oft-repeated phrase, which is why, I assume, the 1985 hymnal compilers left its title as-is.
“Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion” always sounds to me like damning with faint praise. “What do you think of Zion?” “Well, I’m not a fan, but I’ve heard glorious things are sung of it.”
The title “Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord” always makes me chuckle, because if you just added a question mark to the end, it sounds like something a long-suffering servant would say when their master kept making annoying demands. I imagine it being said by the servant in the Parable of the Vineyard in Jacob 5, when he was so tired of the Lord wanting to go back to the vineyard over and over and over.

In Eucharist, Mental Health, Ritual

A Tangible Presence: Thoughts on the Eucharist

Lynnette6 July 20224 July 20222 Comments

If I hadn’t grown up immersed in Christian symbolism, I suspect that I would find the Eucharist both bizarre and deeply disturbing, perhaps even offensive. Even as accustomed as I am to the whole thing, the sheer strangeness of it still hits me at times. I wish that Jesus had come up with a different ritual for remembering him, I sometimes think. I’m not sure how much I care for this one. In John 6, Jesus graphically comments that “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (v. 56), and links this eating and drinking to eternal life. The disciples complain that this is a difficult teaching (v. 60), and then many of them end up leaving him (v. 66). Honestly, I’m sympathetic. I don’t think that this would have won me over.

But on a week-to-week basis, I find that I struggle less with the weirdness of the ritual, and more with how mundane it actually is in practice. Maybe I’ve read too many exciting accounts in which the Eucharist worked wonders, but I find myself wanting it to be a mystical experience, to be somehow transcendent. I don’t think that it ever has been. Read More

In Abortion, Modesty, Patriarchy

Modesty and Abortion

Ziff30 June 202222 Comments

With the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, leaving the question of abortion up to individual states, many American Mormons are celebrating the chance they have to live in a state that bans all (or nearly all) abortions. The Church’s official position allows for abortion under some circumstances, which makes it not consistent with such blanket bans. So why the inconsistency? Why, when the official position allows for some exceptions, are so many Church members excited to have all abortions banned?

A few years ago, I wrote a post where I asked this question and suggested an answer based on reviewing a bunch of Church rhetoric around abortion. I concluded that while GAs wrote the exceptions, their rhetoric constantly minimizes their occurrence, making them seem so rare as to be negligible.

Today I want to consider another line of explanation in addition: Church rhetoric on other issues—I’m taking modesty as an example—is based on a deeply patriarchal worldview that is straightforward to apply to abortion too. Note, just to be clear, that I’m not arguing that the Church’s stance on modesty causes its (or its members’) stance on abortion. I’m just saying that they’re both driven by the same underlying stance on women, so when GAs talk about one issue, it’s easy for members to understand the worldview and generalize it to another issue.

Image credit: National Photo Company, retrieved from Library of Congress PPOC

Here are some points of similarity I’m thinking of:

Men’s responsibility is ignored.

In Church modesty rhetoric, there is lots of discussion of women (and girls) needing to dress a particular way to avoid giving men (and boys) sexual thoughts or ideas about their sexual availability. There is no discussion of the need for men to stop themselves from objectifying women, regardless of how they’re dressed. (This is in contrast, of course, to Jesus’s famous admonition that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out . . .”)

It’s easy to see how this line of thinking lines up with abortion too. Nearly all pregnancies result from an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but anti-abortion rhetoric focuses pretty much completely on women. Sex is something that just happens, and so is pregnancy. Men’s participation is ignored. It’s assumed that if women don’t want to be pregnant, it’s on them to prevent it from happening. The whole topic of abortion isn’t even brought up until there’s a pregnancy.

The same line of thinking plays out in the Church too. Men are never reminded not to pressure their partners into unwanted sex or into unwanted pregnancy. In fact, given that couples are told to work out their childbearing decisions between themselves and God, but husbands are also told they’re to preside over their families, it seems likely that the effect in many families is that husbands dictate to wives how many children they will be bearing. Also, needless to say given that even these topics aren’t discussed, men are certainly never told explicitly not to commit rape.