Don’t miss Dane Laverty’s Mormon Stories interview on the genesis of
his feminist convictions and his hopes for his new site, Agitating
Faithfully. It’s well worth a listen.
A Spreadsheet for 2011
While I don’t hold with the idea that you can magically change yourself and your habits by setting goals as New Year’s rolls around, I still find it useful to occasionally stop and look at how I’m doing in various areas of my life, and try to figure out how I can improve. New Year’s and my birthday (which happens to fall in July) always work out to be good times to re-evaluate and try to change some things, and this year is no different.
I set some goals last year, like I do every year, and (as in most years) I achieved some and didn’t achieve others. I’m okay with that — my general philosophy is that I’ll never be perfect, but better is always good. Since I didn’t get as far as I wanted to on some of my goals last year, I decided I should try something different to help motivate me this year, and I had a brilliant idea — a spreadsheet. (I know, it doesn’t sound that brilliant, but really, it was. For me at least.) Read More
A One-Hour Block for the Holidays
What meetings does your ward or branch typically hold when Christmas in on a Sunday? Do you have all three hours of meetings, or just sacrament meeting? Or is there some other arrangement? Read More
A Very Worthy Cause
Judith Dushku and Eliza Dushku are attempting to raise $30,000 to build a healing center for former child soldiers in Uganda. For more information, including how you can donate (and be entered in the ultimate Feminist Mormon Housewives raffle), see fMhLisa’s post.
My Feminist Beginning: The Joseph Smith Seminar
It has always intrigued me to hear about people’s “realization moments”–for it seems that, often, women and men come to understand feminism in a sudden moment in time when it became clear, or a series of common events that string together to form the sentence, “Something is not right here.”
I have these moments, and I’ve often thought how interesting it was that my first self-identifiable “feminist realizations” floated around in one single summer, the summer I studied at the Joseph Smith Seminar. Read More
Things to Like in the CHI
A few years ago, I wrote a post asking why the Church Handbook of Instructions (CHI) wasn’t available to rank-and-file members. And now, bowing to the strength of my arguments ;), the Church has gone ahead and published the newest revision of the CHI (well, Handbook 2, at least) on its new website.
The Circularity of “Separate but Equal”: A Dialogue in Socratic Form.
Socrates and his pal Piggly-Wiggly are out for a post-Thanksgiving pre-Advent walk down by the river.
Piggly-wiggly: . . . and you know what else? Short people. Short people just need to learn to accept their divinely-appointed height role. It’s not a lesser role, just because they’re not allowed to hold public office or propose legislation. They have a lot of important responsbilities. Their role is just as important as tall people’s role.
Socrates: An interesting perspective, my friend. But, if I may query, why do short people need a separate role? Read More
Gratitude and Grace
A couple of years ago, I wrote a Thanksgiving post about my ambivalence about gratitude, and why, while I see the value of it, I think it’s a problem to dictate it, or to use injunctions like “be grateful” as a weapon against those who dare to express unhappiness about anything. I’ve been thinking about the subject again this year, but perhaps from a somewhat less psychological and more theological angle. I’ve been wondering—why, religiously speaking, is gratitude important?
I’m thankful for Feminist Mormon Housewives
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives. Read More
The Fine Art of Spiritual Vaccines
I was recently called as my ward’s early-morning seminary teacher. I’ll pause to let you all wince.
There are many challenges to this calling, but, to my surprise, waking up at 5:15 AM is not the greatest challenge. (This isn’t to say it’s the smallest challenge, either; I’m not a morning person, at all, and I freely admit to having some very un-Christian feelings in my heart–and words in my mouth–when that alarm goes off.) Read More
Quantity vs. Quality: If you could only have one on a spiritual desert island…
I have this weird relationship with visiting teaching.
I really like it, actually. I like it for its ultimate point: to make sure everyone has, if not a couple of friends in the community, at least someone who is making sure you’re okay. I’m all about making dinners, babysitting kids for bedridden sisters, or sending off a “how ya doin'” kind of card if I notice someone seems down. I really like getting visited and getting to know people I’m generally too shy to get to know on my own. Read More
30 and (probably) diabetic
You know how people always joke about their bodies falling apart when they hit milestone years? Well, now I know why. It’s totally true. (Okay, not really — if I really had to pick a point when my body failed me it would be when I got CFS, which was when I was 16. Still, I find this situation ironic.)
I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago to get general blood tests done so I could save money on my insurance next year. Most of the tests came back normal, but one test didn’t — my HgA1c level was high. For those of you not in the know (I wasn’t) this indicates that my blood sugar over the last few months has been high. Read More
The Fourteen Fundamentals of Following the Bloggernacle
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.
Why I Do Want to Believe in Heavenly Mother
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.”
New ZDs!
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.
Nine Reasons I Can’t Write a Post Right Now
1. It’s after midnight and I really should be going to bed.
2. I’m too busy reading through all of the blog posts I started but never finished.
3. The gelato in the freezer is calling my name.
4. The cursor on my computer keeps jumping around, making it just too difficult to type.
5. I have to harvest my rice in Farmville so that I can get gold in the Co-op I started.
6. I need to give moral support to Lynnette as she organizes her CD collection.
7. I either have to reorganize the apps on my iPhone or the files on my computer, I haven’t decided which.
8. I have to rip the twenty-four CDs I purchased today.
9. Robot. Unicorn. Attack.
Recording Talks
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
St. Augustine and the Sunday School Teacher
In reflecting on the value of figurative language in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine explains that “I contemplate the saints more pleasantly when I envisage them as the teeth of the Church cutting off men from their errors and transferring them to her body.” I’m totally with him in that I love the idea of Aquinas, Joan of Arc, and hey, maybe Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon too, chomping us down into the digestive tract of Christian devotion; it offers something for the imagination to chew on during a dull sacrament meeting. Read More
New Mormon Blogs
Launching today are two new Mormon group blogs. Wheat and Tares features many of the bloggers who recently left Mormon Matters. Also launching today is Doves and Serpents, where “Daily columns will cover Arts, Film, Religion & Spirituality, Family & Gender, Service, ‘Exploring the World’ and more” (quote is from their Twitter feed).
Rumors that a third new Mormon blog, Seagulls and Crickets, would also be launching today have not been confirmed.
Most Quoted Parts of the Proclamation on the Family
A recent discussion at fMh turned, as so many do, to a discussion of whether Church teachings about marriage emphasize more that the husband should preside or that the husband and wife should be equal partners. Given this question, I thought it might be interesting to look at whether the “presiding” part or the “equal partners” part of the Proclamation on the Family had been quoted more.