Zelophehad's Daughters

I’ve noticed that there are a number of different wordings used in the Church Handbook to say not to do something. Of course, these differences long predate the new Handbook released this week. It was just the release of the new Handbook that got me to thinking about it now.

Here are seven different wordings I’ve seen in the handbook for saying “don’t.” (I’m sure this list is not exhaustive. These are just the ones I found from a quick look at a few sections.)

Members don’t do X.
The Church/Church leaders does/do not encourage X.
The Church/Church leaders counsel against doing X.
The Church/Church leaders strongly discourage doing X.
Members should not do X.
Members must not do X.
Doing X is prohibited/not authorized.

In Fun

Rejected Names for Church Wi-Fi Networks

Ziff17 February 202021 Comments

It appears that the Church will be changing the name of the Wi-Fi networks in meetinghouses from “LDSAccess” to “Liahona.” I assume this is part of President Nelson’s push to not use abbreviations for the name of the Church. Would it be too impertinent of me to point out that “Liahona” doesn’t contain Jesus’s name either?

In any case, I’m sure that the powers that be considered many possible names before settling on the one they chose. Here are some of my guesses for what some of their rejected candidates might have been.

LSD Access
No Doubter Router
Broad and Spacious Band
Strait and Narrow Band
Sweet Is the Network
The Promised LAN
WiFi #19
How Firmware a Foundation
In the Internet but not of the Internet
Holy Text Temple Protocol
Moroni’s Mesh
Helaman’s Hub
Router of Riplakish
Pillar of Firewall
Modest Is Hottest Spot
Wireless Local Area Network of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
SCMC Surveillance Van

If you have additions to the list, please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments!

In Fun

Old Testament Valentines

Ziff10 February 2020

In Church Life

Pregnancy Prophets!

Guest10 January 20204 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Josiah of the blog Josiah Reckons.

We love babies at our church! Our community is excited when someone in the ward is going to have a baby. People are quick to congratulate and offer support.

My wife and I had three children while in our 20’s. People gave encouragement, clothes, toys, food, and support in many other ways. Our church can be very supportive of couples with children.

Specious Signs

In our excitement, we love to talk about pregnancy and babies with expecting parents, but we can get carried away in our enthusiasm. Sometimes we start to think we are pregnancy prophets. We think we are seers seeing the signs of the times. And sometimes we say things that lead to awkward revelations like “Not Pregnant!”.

Being sick last week, and bloated this week is not the same as being pregnant. Gaining a little weight is not the same as being pregnant. Not bouncing back to pre-pregnancy weight ‘fast enough’ is not the same as being pregnant again. Working a couple of weekends and then showing up to church looking tired is not the same as being pregnant. Use your imagination, there are lots of possible reasons a person might look similar to someone in the early stages of pregnancy.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2019: Funniest Comments

Ziff6 January 20209 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: 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.

Comments on Sam Brunson’s post “Call for guest posts: #TeachingPrimaryCFM” at BCC:

[responding to the suggestion that a child could only sit still for as many minutes as they were old]

Great suggestion. I’ll be 72 this year and not old enough for 2-hour church.

Cate:

I taught the Valiant 9 class last year . . . . [at] the monthly teacher council, . . . . we all came in there with different challenges. The gospel doctrine teachers are asking themselves, How can I make this new and interesting to people who have heard it so many times before? The youth teachers are asking, How can I get my kids to see that this really does apply to them? And the primary teacher is asking, How can I get my students to sit at the table instead of under the table?

I was teaching 8 yr olds . . . about the miraculous occurrences at the Kirtland Temple dedication. I was using all of my story telling skills in hopes of providing a relatable experience for about ten. After telling the kids about some at the dedication speaking in toungues, the appearance of an angel, and the visions and miracles that occurred, the kids were quiet, still, and ostensibly attentive. I thought I had ‘em. Then one boy raised his hand. I knew him to be a smart kid. I expected him to ask who the angel was. When I called on him, he very matter of factly asked, “Brother G, did you know I’m going to Disneyland next week?”

In Nature of God, Praise, Spiritual Experience

Praising God

Lynnette4 January 20204 January 20202 Comments

Praising God is a staple of Christian worship. In the various Pentecostal churches I’ve visited, I’ve found that people are more likely to greet you by saying “Praise the Lord” than by simply saying “hello.” In churches where higher levels of congregational exuberance are the norm, it’s not uncommon for people to call out “Hallelujah” or “Praise the Lord” during the sermons and to have bands spending a lot of time on praise songs (“Our God is an Awesome God”). Episcopalians are more sedate, but every Sunday mass has a song of praise at the beginning (though my parish tends toward more traditional music). “Glory to you, beholding the depths; in the high vault of heaven, glory to you,” we sing. Read More

In Fun

New Church Policies for a New Year

Ziff3 January 20204 Comments

Some of my sisters visited me over the holidays, and together we came up with a list of goofy Church policy pronouncements that we’d like to hear this year.

Twinkies are permitted for use in the sacrament (see D&C 27:2), but only if it is preceded by a disclaimer that their use does not imply any endorsement of the Church or its priesthood by the Hostess Corporation.

The Church wishes to state clearly so there can be no confusion that it has no connection with the dating app Moroni’s Bosom.

In Christmas, Fun

Christmas Carol Confusion

Ziff20 December 20193 May 20218 Comments

When I was a kid, I was deeply confused by the lyrics of some of the Christmas carols that I heard or even sang. For example, in the chorus of “What Child Is This?”, this line got me stuck:

Haste, haste, to bring Him laud

Laud? What the heck is laud? I remember wondering if it was a long-ago time, and since food wasn’t as abundant as it is now, maybe what Baby Jesus needed to have brought to him was lard. Not that tasty, but it would keep him and his family alive for a while. Also, I reasoned, perhaps people were just singing the word with some kind of weird affected accent.

Another song that caused me confusion was “The First Noel.” This line in particular:

Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay

For the longest time, I thought that the word certain here was a verb, and this was some as-yet-unknown-to-me usage that meant “to make more certain.” So the angel appeared to the shepherds, who were in doubt and fear, and the angel reassured them to make them certain that all would be well. I admit that I’m still kind of disappointed at its actual meaning, where it feels like a filler word. Like, was it really important at all which shepherds heard the news of Jesus’s birth? Not really. It could have been any old shepherds. Or people of any occupation, really. The important point is just that the birth was announced. It’s not like they were the certain Wise Men who came from the east or anything. So it wasn’t really certain poor shepherds. It would work just as well to say random poor shepherds. I still like my childhood interpretation better. I imagine that we all like shepherds have need of being made more certain, and an angel comes down and provides that certainty.

In Tithing

What to do with the earnings on $100 billion

Ziff18 December 201910 Comments

So, it appears that the Church may have an even bigger stack of investments than many of us thought. In this post, I’m not interested in the possible tax law issues of this giant fund, but rather just the size of the fund. To be blunt, I find it appalling that the Church has this much money available at the same time that General Authorities continuously harp on members to pay tithing, not to mention that they pass other costs on to members like the recently-announced increase in the cost of serving as a missionary and the ongoing requirement for members to clean church buildings.

I was so irritated by this revelation that I started going back through Conference talks and Ensign articles to try to make a comprehensive list of all the times GAs have told stories of members valiantly paying tithing instead of paying for food or rent. But I got sidetracked by a really interesting talk that President Monson gave in 1990 where he discussed changes the Church had made over time to reduce the financial burden on members. He said,

The newly announced local unit budget allowance program is but one of several carefully studied and prayerfully implemented steps taken by the Church to relieve the membership of financial burdens which some simply could not carry.

He then went on to list four changes made in the previous years that were designed to reduce the financial burden of Church membership on members:

The consolidated meeting schedule was introduced (I assume reducing transportation costs).
The Church went from paying 50% of the cost of new buildings to 60%, 70%, 96%, and finally 100%
The per-capita welfare assessment was eliminated.
Ward/branch budgets became completely funded by the Church.

In Church Meetings, Statistics

Who bears their testimony in F&T meeting?

Ziff2 December 20192 December 20198 Comments

Who bears their testimony in fast and testimony meeting? I’m interested in this question not so much in the sense of which particular people do (“Oh, no, it’s Brother Mansplainer!”), but in the sense of whether it’s the same ten people every month or an ever-changing group.

To get some data on this question, I noted who in my ward bore their testimony in each of the 12 fast and testimony meetings in 2019. Of course it would be much better to have data from hundreds or thousands of wards and branches in different locations, but that would be really hard to get, so I decided to start with what I have. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted data for one month when I got a new phone and factory reset the old one, so what I’m working with is 11 months of data. I excluded the testimony that’s always borne by the bishopric member who’s conducting the meeting, as I was interested in tracking testimonies borne by people who chose to do it, and bishopric members are pretty much expected to do it as a matter of course.

In the 11 F&T meetings, 99 testimonies were borne, or an average of 9 per meeting. These 99 testimonies were borne by just 44 people, so the average person who bore their testimony bore it 2.25 times in the year. The maximum number of testimonies borne by any one person was 9, and this was achieved by two people, so together they accounted for over 18% of all testimonies borne. Of the 99 testimonies, four came from visitors and two from missionaries serving in the ward.

Before I get more into the question of the same ten people, I thought it might be interesting to look at a breakdown of the testimonies by age and gender, which is shown in this graph.

Most of the testimonies (82%) were borne by adults, with some teens (age 12-17) and only one child (age < 12). Women and girls bore more testimonies in all age groups (58% of adults, 76% of teens, 100% of children).

In Depression, Mental Health

Going to the Edge

Lynnette23 November 201923 November 20199 Comments

CW: Suicidality

To start with, it was my birthday, and even in good years I don’t like my birthday. It comes just after New Year’s, after everyone is burned out on holidays and get-togethers and eating too much rich food, and has moved on to New Year’s resolutions about healthier living. It’s only two weeks after the winter solstice, and the light is barely making any headway against the still-dominant darkness that somehow seeps into everything. And by that point I am usually tired of people and celebrations, and feel cranky and just want to hide. In bad years, I am also deeply upset about being alive, and the anniversary of my birth feels like a bleak thing to be noticing, let alone pretending to be happy about. Read More

In Race, Scripture

Do Scripture Stories ever depict heavenly people of color?

Ziff20 November 201914 Comments

Well sure they do! For example, here’s a picture from New Testament Stories that shows the pre-mortal existence and includes a black boy, and here’s another picture from Doctrine and Covenants Stories that shows people going to the Celestial Kingdom, and they’re not all white.

Other than those two, though, no.

In Uncategorized

Book Review: Crossings, by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

Petra2 November 20191 Comment

Necessary disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

There’s a grand tradition of Mormon (and ex-Mormon) women writing memoirs, from polygamy and temple tell-alls to coming-of-age stories to narratives of faithfully enduring the tragic to tales of everyday life and motherhood. Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood is Melissa Wei-Tsing’s entry into the genre, and the title right away tells you that the author is not your average everyday Latter-day Saint woman. (Is there even such a thing? A topic for another essay.) Hers is a unique life, and, with a slightly more academic audience, Crossings could have easily been called Intersections, as the work touches on what it’s like to wear multiple identifies, as Inouye slips between fitting in and standing out and always works to ground herself in what matters to her.

In Fun, General Conference

Conference Review, October 2019

Ziff30 October 20193 Comments

This post has some of my favorite and least-favorite things from this last General Conference. I’m sorry it has been a few weeks so it might be largely forgotten. Anyway, please share your favorites and least favorites in the comments if you’d like.

Best story: Elder Alliaud’s story of his non-member mother quizzing him when he decided to get baptized, including asking him, “Do you have any idea how long church is?”
Worst story, hedge about the law category: Elder Christofferson’s story of the paralyzed patriarch where he carefully made it clear that it was a priesthood holder and not some unwashed heathen (or worse yet, woman), who supported the patriarch’s hands when he gave blessings.
Worst story, endlessly serving woman category: Elder Christofferson again, although this time sharing a story he heard from Elder Bednar and his wife about a very recently widowed woman who of course still served as an usher at a temple dedication, thus helpfully normalizing the idea that women should be forever serving and never thinking of themselves.

Best visual aid: The Del Parson painting of a smiling, welcoming Jesus included by President Aburto in her talk “Thru Cloud and Sunshine, Lord, Abide with Me!”
Worst visual aid: The picture of a (to me) comically distressed-looking Moses included by Elder Stevenson near the end of his talk “Deceive Me Not”
Worst visual aid, missing category: Elder Uchtdorf made mention of Hobbits throughout his talk, but didn’t show us a picture of even one Hobbit!

Best laughs: Elder Holland’s report of the little boy who laid on the floor and raised his foot during the sustainings last General Conference; Elder Gong’s story of the longsuffering Primary teacher who didn’t interrupt the child who prayed and expressed gratitude for each letter and number.
Worst laugh: President Oaks making light of a woman’s concern over whether she would have to share a house with a sister wife in the next life.

In Baptism, Conversion, covenants, Episcopalians, Ritual

Re-Thinking the Covenant Path: What Baptism in the Episcopal Church Meant to Me

Lynnette22 October 201922 October 201910 Comments

(This is adapted from something I recently wrote for a writing group.)

A phrase that seems to have become popular in the Mormonism of recent years is “covenant path.” It’s after my time; I don’t recall hearing the term much, if ever, during my years in the church. But even from my vantage point outside the church, I’ve noticed the phrase appearing more and more. Honestly, it makes me flinch. I have some old baggage with the notion of covenants, and the phrase “covenant path” seems to be used, as often as not, to weigh in on the failings of those who are not on it. People left the covenant path, and terrible things befell them; the tale is told in many ways and in many contexts, but the moral remains the same. Read More

In Temple

Some Thoughts on the Changes in One of the Temple Recommend Interview Questions

Ziff9 October 20199 October 201913 Comments

President Nelson introduced an updated set of temple recommend questions in Conference on Sunday. The change that stood out to me the most was the revision to the question about affiliation with apostate groups. Here’s the old version of the question:

Do you support, affiliate with, or agree with any group or individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or oppose those accepted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

And here’s the new version:

Do you support or promote any teachings, practices, or doctrine contrary to those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

(I’ve taken the wording for both from WVS’s handy side-by-side comparison at BCC.)

The old version of this question has been the subject of lots of discussion on the Bloggernacle, particularly when a dissenting group (e.g., Ordain Women) has been in the news. It appears that the original version of this question was aimed at members of polygamous groups who wanted to have access to LDS temples, and much of the discussion has focused on whether the question is still about polygamous groups, or whether it includes all kinds of groups that might oppose Church teachings.

In GA's, Statistics

The Selfish Gene (-ral Authority)

Ziff1 October 20198 Comments

How often do General Authorities call their relatives to also be General Authorities? A friend asked me this question, and I thought it might be an interesting one to look at. Off the top of my head, I thought the answer would be that this happens a lot. For example, I remember President Hinckley protesting that he had nothing to do with the calling of his son as a Seventy, and I know about historical examples like Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Parley and Orson Pratt, and Bruce R. McConkie being Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law.

To make the question more manageable, I decided to look only at members of the Quorum of the Twelve rather than all GAs. This includes nearly all First Presidency members too because I looked at data at the person level (meaning that each Q12 member was counted only once, versus for example looking at the composition of the Q12 each year or something like that) and nearly all FP members were also Q12 members at one point.

The first analysis I did was kind of a quick-and-dirty approach that I think is nevertheless kind of fun. I listed the last names of all Q12 members, and then checked whether each, at the time of his call, brought a new last name to the Quorum. For example, two Johnson and two Pratts were called in the original Q12, so among the four of them, they brought only two unique last names. In this analysis, I counted Smith as being a duplicate the first time it was used, given that Joseph Smith was the head of the Church, even though he wasn’t a member of the Q12.

The graph below shows, across time, the cumulative count of number of Q12 members called (blue line), and the cumulative count of unique last names for those Q12 members (red line). If every single Q12 member had a unique last name, the two lines would be on top of each other. They separate to the degree that new Q12 members have last names that duplicate last names of previous Q12 members. Note that on the horizontal axis, I separated 1835 out as its own bin, because that’s the year the original Q12 were called. After that, I grouped years into 15-year bins, which I know is a little odd, but the calling of new Q12 members is such an infrequent event that when I used 10-year bins, there were several decades with few to no new calls.

In Fun

Book of Mormon Story Titles, Very Slightly Revised

Ziff24 September 2019

Earlier this year, I wrote a post where I rewrote familiar Mormon titles by adding, subtracting, or changing a single letter, and then briefly wrote what the resulting story would be. For example, The Work and the Glory became The Work and the Gory, a dramatized version of early Mormon history, with special focus on the Danites. I thought it might be fun to try this with Book of Mormon stories too. As these stories could be given many different names, I used the chapter names from the Church’s Book of Mormon Stories for children as a starting point. I broke my one-letter rule a couple of times, but mostly I stuck to it. Please add your revised Book of Mormon story titles in the comments if you’d like.

Lehi Warms the People — Rather than jumping right into condemning them for their wickedness, Lehi opens his preaching to the people of Jerusalem with a few jokes.

Lehi Leavens Jerusalem — Before leaving Jerusalem, Lehi adds leaven to all the residents’ Passover bread, and brings down their wrath on him even more than his preaching had.

The Brass Pilates — Concerned that his family will get flabby while trekking in the wilderness, Lehi sends his sons back to Jerusalem to recover the secret of an ancient physical fitness system, the details of which are engraved on metal plates.

Lehi’s Ream — Lehi’s family makes it out of Jerusalem with 500 sheets of precious papyrus that they plan to keep records on. Unfortunately, they have to change plans and use metal plates when Laman and Lemuel wickedly use all the papyrus to make spitwads and papyrus airplanes.

Building the Shiv — When Lehi and Sariah’s family find themselves imprisoned in the land Bountiful, Nephi receives a series of revelations that allow him to build a shiv, which he uses to behead enough prison guards that the family is able to escape.

eOS — While hunting beasts in the forest, Enos prays for many things including the forgiveness of his sins, and for God to watch over his people. All of his desires are granted except for his wish to develop an operating system that will unseat Apple’s flagship OS on their own hardware.

Bling Benjamin — An aging king wants to give a farewell address to his people, but their numbers are so large that his voice cannot reach them all. He sends written copies of his speech out so his people can know his words, and he also delivers the speech from the top of a tower while wearing as much bling as his aging body can manage, so that even people far away can see him shimmering in the sunlight.

In GA's, General Conference

Stay

Ziff17 September 20192 Comments

I’ve heard it said a lot in fringe and ex-Mormon spaces that General Authorities are spending more time now than they used to talking to and about people who leave the Church. This has been my impression as well. It occurred to me just recently as I was looking through some Conference talks that checking this impression out might be as simple as looking for how often they use one word: stay.

In the past couple of decades in Conference, we’ve been exhorted to stay by the tree, stay on the path (twice!), stay on the high road, and of course, in I think the talk of this type I’ve seen discussed most, to stay in the boat. And these are just the talk titles! It does make sense to me that GAs would use this word a lot if they’re concerned about people leaving. You stay instead of leaving, going, exiting, ending, or finishing. But it also reminds me of commands we use to train dogs. Sit, stay, heel.

Stay isn’t my favorite word because it seems to me that it values the past over the future. Progress that’s already been made is fine, but stay with what you’ve done and don’t continue to move. GAs worry that moves we make will be regressing, but I wonder if they sometimes misidentify progress as regress if it doesn’t fit into the sometimes rigid life paths they prescribe.

Anyway, I looked up use of the word stay in the Corpus of LDS General Conference talks to see if it has been used more recently than it had been before. Here are the results since 1950. The lighter line shows the yearly usage rates per million words, and the darker line shows the five-year moving average, which smooths out some of the yearly bumps and makes for something that’s easier to look for patterns in.
Read More

In Church Policy, GA's

Discussion of the Name of the Church in Conference

Ziff13 September 20196 Comments

Last fall, after President Nelson made it a point of emphasis that he didn’t want the Church to be called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church, or for its members to be called Mormons, I wrote a post where I asked what this quick turnabout on the “Mormon” label meant for decision-making in the Q15. The theory is that they’re supposed to be unanimous, but this change, particularly so (relatively) soon after things like the Church’s “Meet the Mormons” movie and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign suggested to me that decisions are made by the Church President, and the others just serve as rubber stamps. I wasn’t alone in writing about this, of course. Many other people on the blogs brought up, for example, that Elder Nelson had given a talk on this issue in 1990, to which President Hinckley responded the very next Conference where he gently contradicted Elder Nelson and explained that he had come to peace with the common use of the nickname, and he simply hoped that Church members would strive to make it have positive associations.

After this 1990 back-and-forth, I thought the issue had pretty much lain dormant until President Nelson brought it up last fall, first in an announcement before Conference, and then in a Conference talk. But I’ve been reading through some Conference talks for an unrelated project, and I found that I missed a few related follow-ups.

First, then-Elder Nelson didn’t entirely drop his point after President Hinckley’s talk. In a 1993 talk given at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (that someone must have thought was pretty important, because it’s listed with the October 1993 General Conference talks), he said near the beginning,

I would like to speak of the organization I represent. I would like to speak of the institution and of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the “Mormon” church. That is not its correct name, as many of you may know; it is only a nickname

And again, two years later in a Conference talk, he clearly wanted to bring the issue up again, but, unwilling to openly challenge President Hinckley, he instead slipped in this relatively large footnote to a pretty much wholly unrelated point in his talk. (The footnote is number 37, right after the phrase “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Speaking of correct names, we are reminded of a proclamation given by the Lord: “Thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (D&C 115:4). He did not say, “Thus shall my church be named.” He said, “Thus shall my church be called.” Members have been cautioned by the Brethren, who wrote: “We feel that some may be misled by the too frequent use of the term ‘Mormon Church’” (Member-Missionary Class, Instructor’s Guide, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1982, p. 2).