OK, just for fun and just because I can’t seem to stop talking today, I’m going to propose a thought-experiment in the form of a bunch of related questions.
The Trouble with Giftedness
A recent thread at Segullah got me, yet again, contemplating my reservations about giftedness.
Proselytizing and Liberal Contempt
For me political choice is generally negative; prolonged exposure to the proponents of one set of dogmas tends to drive me into the arms of that dogma’s opponents. By the logic of this unpleasant via negativa, my upbringing in Utah County made me liberal; recent years in the ivory tower, on the other hand, have driven me right, although I’d continue to describe myself as a liberal-leaning moderate of the most unfashionable possible variety. Just a couple of my quarrels with the left: I think much of the sexual revolution was a misstep that has resulted in the widespread masculinization of sexuality–not a liberatory move for women, nor even for men–and I find our culture’s adolescent, pornographic view of sex both boring and exhausting. I also have reservations about a certain wholesale uncritical veneration of nature, ongoing now at least since that old wide-eyed hippie rake Rousseau. Sad though some of its consequences have certainly been, we as a species left nature behind about 10,000 years ago with the neolithic revolution, and I for one have no desire to go back. When well-meaning people earnestly inform me of the virtues of natural foods, natural fibers, and natural sources of energy, all I can think is that there’s nothing more natural than losing all of one’s teeth to chronic malnutrition, dying in agonizing childbirth approximately nine months after achieving puberty, or losing multiple family members to epidemics of cholera or the plague. Hooray for the thoroughly artificial health technologies of our culture. Not so interested in subsisting for long periods of time on berries and bark scrapings, myself. Read More
You’re like a mother to me
When my wife was young and she was first learning to talk, she called two other women “mom” in addition to her mother. Polygamous family? No. The other women were her then-teenage sisters. Given the often large families that Mormons have, I suspect her experience of being well over a decade younger than some of her siblings is not uncommon. I’m interested in how these large age differences affect sibling relationships when everyone is grown.
My Nacle Notebook 2008: Funny comments
During the Niblets, a random John said that he enjoys looking back at the stuff that gets nominated more than he enjoys the voting. I tend to agree with him. There are all kinds of interesting, funny, amazing, and touching things written in the Bloggernacle. But I have a short memory, and I typically don’t think about even the best of what I read for more than a day or two.
In an effort to improve my Bloggernacle experience, I’ve started bookmarking posts and comments that strike me. This way, when current discussions get too acrimonious or repetitive, I know I can always go back and find my own favorite pieces of writing.
So, on the assumption that a random John and I are not alone in enjoying looking back at favorite stuff, let me share some bits of my Nacle Notebook with you. I’ll start with the comments that made me laugh.
Is Utah Weird?
Utah is the most depressed state! (Or perhaps it’s the happiest state.) Utah has the highest bankruptcy rate of any state! Utah uses the most porn per capita of any state! Why are we interested in these rankings? This is probably obvious, but I think it’s because we read them as revealing what the effects of being Mormon are.
Missing Motherhood
In high school, I was often frustrated with the standard gender narrative for women (get married in the temple, have babies, become a noble mother in Zion, ad nauseum). I was passionate about education, and even in high school, I imagined myself going to graduate school. I resented being told over and over in YW that my only purpose in life was to be a mother. I wasn’t anti-motherhood, but I had other goals and dreams that I wanted everyone (including God) to recognize. Read More
Come See Us at Sunstone!
Four of the ZDs (Ziff, Lynnette, Seraphine, and Kiskilili) will be on a panel at Sunstone this week. We’ll be presenting Thursday morning, session 133, on the topic “Possibilities in Mormon Feminism.” Yes, it sounds dry, but what would you expect from a bunch of academics? And Ziff may liven things up with fun graphs and charts. We’d love to see fellow bloggers-both those we’ve had the good fortune to meet, and those we haven’t met yet. So if you’ll be at the symposium, please come by and say hello. (And if for some crazy reason you pick a different session that hour, we’ll be around for the rest of the symposium, and at the bloggersnacker on Friday night.)
A Partner to Adam
In describing the honored place of women in the plan of salvation, LDS leaders commonly cite the narrative found in Genesis 2, in which Eve is created as a helpmeet to Adam. They often emphasize that in order to be a true helpmeet she would have to be the equal of Adam, and reference the symbolism of Eve being created from Adam’s rib as pointing to her role as a full, contributing partner, one neither superior nor inferior. And not infrequently, the fact that Eve is created at the very end of the story is cited as evidence of her elevated status. Read More
The Grace of Community and Friendship
Last week I began to ponder how the Atonement might apply currently to the struggles I’m facing. We’re taught that the Atonement is not only there for sinners, but for everyone who needs healing and reconciliation. I began to wonder how it might be possible to use the Atonement to reconcile myself to a God from whom I am distant and with whom I am very upset.
This was in the back of my mind as I went to church on Sunday. Read More
Interfaith Dating: It Ain’t Just For NoMos Anymore
On a recent first date, I found myself discussing, with the suitor in question, the topic of previous relationships. We established that we both have a history of dating people for three or four months on average, before one party or the other decides it’s not working and everyone moves on (though rarely so undramatically as I’ve just summarized it); I suggested this happens because three months is about how long it takes to determine whether a thing has the grip to go long-term. He responded – and of course I paraphrase – “Well, at least if you’re both LDS, at least you already know you agree about all the important things.” Read More
Does God Want Us to Be Happy?
An oft-quoted scripture in the Book of Mormon is 2 Nephi 2:25: “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” When I typed “joy” into the lds.org search and looked at General Conference talks, I found talk after talk that expressed the joy that comes into our lives from living the gospel, being righteous, repenting, etc. Read More
Caring What Others Think
There is a conversation which I have seen repeated over and over. It goes something like this. Person A: “I’m upset because I did/said x and I got a negative reaction, people are annoyed with me, etc.” Person B: “Your problem is that you care too much what others think. You need to stop worrying about that.” Seeing variations on this basic exchange on a regular basis has led me to reflect on the question of whether it is necessarily negative to care what others think, a flaw to be overcome, as it is so regularly framed.
Read More
The Five Universal Truths of Road Trips
I’ve recently had the opportunity to do a lots of driving (somewhere over three thousand miles all told) and I think I’ve discovered the five universal truths of road trips.
1. Books on MP3 (aka CD/tape) make the trip go faster.
I listen to audiobooks to help my apartment get clean faster but this time I discovered they also seem to make road trips go faster. I seem to prefer light mysteries (I’m listening to the stories of Amelia Peabody right now) because I can move my attention to something else (like the semi up ahead who’s pulled over or the downpour that’s about to happen) without losing too much of the plot line. After sitting in a car for three, eight, or even ten hours straight, it’s nice to listen to someone else’s ‘life.’
Read More
Finding Myself
Recently, as I’ve sat pondering the mess that’s been my life for the past year, I noticed a common thread. For awhile now, I’ve been allowing other people to invade my boundaries, to dictate how I will act, to affect my life in negative ways without directly standing up for myself and my needs. Instead, I’ve been withdrawing further and further into myself, hoping the barrage from the world around me would stop. Read More
Nacle Numbers, 2003-2008, Part 2: The Blogs
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?
God is Watching Us–Can We Stop Him?
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.
At a Crossroads
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
Going Nowhere, Fast: Two Decades of Religious Crisis, and Counting
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
Missions, Numbers, and Lying
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