Zelophehad's Daughters

Fastest hymn: Sing Praise to Him (Saturday afternoon)
Slowest hymn: Were You There? (Saturday evening)
Best hymn: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty (Sunday morning)
Worst hymn: God Is Love (Saturday morning)
Most entertaining choir member: See the amazing mustache on a BYU student choir member during the hymn Rejoice, the Lord Is King. I’ve linked a moment in the video when he’s most visible, but I’m clearly not the only one struck by him, as a shot centered on him is currently being used as the thumbnail for the video on YouTube, when most often the thumbnail is a shot of the whole choir.

Longest prayer: 127 seconds, Jorge F. Zeballos, Saturday morning benediction.
Shortest prayer: 44 seconds, Kevin S. Hamilton, Saturday morning invocation. This was the shortest prayer since Claudio R. M. Costa gave a 43-second prayer in April, 2019.

Best image: I like Robert Zund’s Road to Emmaus painting that Henry B. Eyring used in his talk.

Best laughs:

Jeffrey R. Holland told a story of one of his grandchildren biting another, after which their father told the victim of the bit that the biter probably didn’t even know what it felt like to be bitten. Naturally, the victim took this as an invitation to bite back.
Patrick Kearon talked about gifts, and informed his listeners that even some animals give gifts. He cited two examples: penguins and bonobos. I feel like he might be trolling us (and perhaps some of his fellow Q15 members) here, as penguins are in the news now for being targets of some of Trump’s misguided tariffs, and bonobos are best known for their healthy sexual appetite, especially for homosexual sex.

In Prayer

What’s wrong with written prayers?

Ziff28 March 20259 Comments

Mormons don’t do rote prayers. I feel like this was a central teaching in my upbringing. We weren’t like the other Christians who foolishly just said the Lord’s Prayer or recited the 23rd Psalm over and over. We said each prayer new from the heart, at least in theory. Related to this, does anyone else recall how stressful it was to give the closing prayer after a lesson on prayer, because you had to try extra hard to make your prayer original?

The scriptural support for this position isn’t hard to find. Our go-to is of course Jesus condemning praying with vain repetitions like the heathens in Matthew 6. But we also have the bad example of the Zoramites in Alma 31, who not only dissented from the true church and gave a self-aggrandizing prayer on their Rameumptom, but all gave the same self-aggrandizing prayer. (Not surprisingly, only the Zoramite men got to do this, as the women probably weren’t chosen by God in quite the same way.)

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. We have prayers for ordinances that are required to follow a script. The sacrament, baptismal, and temple ordinances are all like this. And it could be just me, but I feel like the emphasis on this principle has declined in my lifetime. (Or it could be that the emphasis was, to begin with, particular to my ward, or even my family.) Also, perhaps coincidentally, I’m happy to see bishops in wards I’ve lived in appear to become much more forgiving when a priest stumbles over a word in a sacrament prayer. When I was a priest, decades ago, I feel like nobody got away with even the tiniest error without having to re-say the prayer.

In Fun

Russell M. Nelson’s Calendar Unleashed!

Ziff18 February 202511 Comments

A few days ago, Russell M. Nelson announced the long-awaited dates for the Salt Lake Temple open house: April to October . . . of 2027. As he appears to be opening up his calendar to officially put his stamp on upcoming events, I thought I’d speculate about some of his other calendar entries that he might loose upon the world:

X/X/202X — On the death of Russell M. Nelson, the remainder of the Q15 vote that to keep in remembrance the name of this most beloved of prophets, future presidents of the Church will be called the second Nelson, the third Nelson, and so forth, following the pattern put forth in Jacob 1:11. The Church membership’s vote is, of course, unanimous in favor.

In Fun

Uncorrelated Cards for Valentines Day

Ziff10 February 20255 Comments

In Music

Favorite and Least Favorite Lines in Hymns

Ziff27 January 202520 Comments

What are your favorite and least favorite lines in hymns? Are there any that make you happy to think of, or that make you cringe when you sing them? Here are a few of mine. I’ll start with my least favorites so I can end on a positive note.

Angels above us are silent notes taking
Of ev’ry action; then do what is right!
– Do What Is Right

I have enough stress with the visible entities in my life without worrying about angels spying on me and taking notes so they can scold me later.

There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question;

– Choose the Right

This is just patently wrong. Of course there are some decisions that have a moral dimension to them, but many decisions have no such dimension. If I’m choosing what color tie to wear to church, or what cereal to eat, there’s no reason for me to worry about whether I’m choosing the right. Furthermore, even when decisions do have a moral dimension, it’s typical for them to be far more complicated than just right and wrong. Rather, there are multiple options with all kinds of characteristics that we need to weigh. As Dallin H. Oaks famously reminded us, there may be good, better, and best.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2024: Funniest Comments

Ziff7 January 20259 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments (and lines in posts) that I read on the Bloggernacle last year. I’ve typically excerpted just a part of a longer comment or post. Each person’s name is a link back to the original comment or post, though, so you can go and see the larger context if you’re interested.

In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Dave B., in his post “How to Be A Good Ex-Mormon” at W&T:

Think of the Church as a very big room, maybe the Conference Center, with a variety of exits. There’s a door marked “Catholic,” there’s a door marked “Lutheran,” there’s a door marked “my local Evangelical mega-church,” there’s a door marked “None, nada, nothing, it’s just a big empty Universe, no God, no Force.” And then there are the specifically Mormon doors, one marked “Anti, and proud of it” one marked “formally but quietly disaffiliated,” another marked “quietly went inactive,” one marked “PIMO” (you don’t really go through that door, you just look at it wistfully), one marked “they exed me” (that’s the door you get pushed through, whether you want to or not).

Abby Maxwell Hansen, in her post “The Priesthood Makes You Special” at Exponent II:

This got me thinking about the renaming of the girls’ classes from Beehive, Mia Maid and Laurel to “12- & 13-year-old class”, “14- & 15-year-old class”, and “16- & 17-year-old class”. (These new class names roll right off the tongue just like saying “I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” does.)

Hawkgrrrl, in her post “Attention Seekers” at W&T:

Someone [on Twitter] asked what was the craziest rule your mission had, and I shared our mission rule that you couldn’t attend church if you didn’t have investigators . . . . After I made that comment, a bunch of “defenders of the faith” chimed in accusing me of making it up. . . .

Though I was hated and persecuted for saying that we had this mission rule, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? We actually had this mission rule; and who am I that I can lie about it, or why does the world think to make me deny what actually happened? For we had had this mission rule; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it (and probably didn’t like it), and I could not deny it…

Joseph Smith History 1: 25, sorta

In Children, Church Life, Suffering

Ideas I Accepted Uncritically

Ziff18 December 202418 December 20248 Comments

Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al – adam on Unsplash

President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.

Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.

“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”

Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.

Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)

What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.

In Christmas, Fun, Music

The Twelve Days of Temples

Ziff9 December 20249 December 20243 Comments

On the first day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the second day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . two vaporware ones¹
and renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the third day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . three in the Congo
two vaporware ones
etc.

On the fourth day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . four near Mexico City
three in the Congo
etc.

In Fun, General Conference, Music

Think Celestial: A hymn

Ziff26 November 202426 November 20244 Comments

A bunch of years ago, I wrote a post where I converted a particularly memorable Conference talk into a hymn. I thought this would be a fun exercise to try again, this time with Russell M. Nelson’s “Think Celestial” from October 2023. Sing to the tune of “Choose the Right.”

Celestial is the way you must be thinking.
Keep in mind the coming afterlife.
Think not you can be merry, eating, drinking.
Be celestial as man and wife.

Chorus
Celestial! Celestial!
Stop thoughts that may be troubling you!
Celestial! Celestial!
Recall you’re one of chosen few!

Fabulous is the plan that God has for us!
If we tithe, attend the temple oft.
Chastity is the rule, it’s ever been thus.
Be safe. Don’t risk your parts cut off!

Chorus

Celestial! It will answer every question!
Celestial! It solves all hurt and pain!
Celestial! It erases all depression!
Heed not those who dare to complain!

Chorus

In Statistics

How well does a mortality table predict Q15 member lifespan?

Ziff20 November 202411 Comments

This is a question people quite reasonably often ask when I blog about which Q15 members are likely to become Church president, using a mortality table as my guide. In this post, I used the same SOA mortality table I’ve been using to forecast longevity, and applied it to Q15 members who have already died, to see how well it predicted when we already know the outcome.

Of course a big weakness of this analysis is that Q15 members aren’t a big group, so it’s hard to say with much certainty how well the table is doing. In order to expand the sample a little, I looked back to all Q15 members who were in their positions in 1950 or who have been called since then, and have since died. For each month of each Q15 member’s life, starting from the later of January 1950 and his calling date, I checked how many actual months of life he had left, as well as what the SOA table said about how much life he had left.

“What the SOA table said” isn’t one number, though, because the table just gives, at each age, the probability of dying in the next year. (It breaks these down by employees and retirees, by women and men, by white collar and blue collar, and by disabled and non-disabled. I always use the white collar non-disabled men, the employees series as long as it goes, and then the retiree series.) What I do is to use these one-year mortality probabilities to find an implied distribution of probabilities of how much more time a man of a particular age has remaining. Really, what I want is just some summary statistics from that distribution: the mean and several percentiles, namely the 5th, the 25th, the 50th (also called the median), the 75th, and the 95th. At the end of the post, if you’re interested, I give a little more detail on this process.

This graph below shows a comparison of what the mortality table predicted versus how long a few Q15 members actually lived. The horizontal axis shows age, and the vertical axis shows years of life remaining. In the lower left, Bruce R. McConkie at age 66 (the left edge of the graph) had fewer than 4 years of life left, as he would die at 69. Cutting through almost the middle of the graph, Gordon B. Hinckley at age 66 had over 30 years left.

What’s interesting, of course, is the comparison of these actual life spans to what the mortality table would have predicted. The dashed black line shows the median of the distribution of probability implied by the mortality table at each age. As you can see, it flattens out as age approaches 100, as it always predicts at least a little more life (at least until age 120, where it gives a mortality probability of 100%). I haven’t shown the mean because it’s very similar to the median, falling a bit below it for younger ages, and a bit above it for older ages.

In Politics

How does Trump embody Latter-day Saint values?

Ziff21 October 202410 Comments

I read a comment recently at W&T about Church members in Arizona being split on whether Trump embodies Latter-day Saint values, with most believing he does, and a minority disagreeing. (I’m not linking to the comment because on a quick search, I couldn’t find it.) As you can guess if you’ve read ZD much, I’m very much with the minority.

But it did get me to thinking that clearly there’s some connection that can be drawn between Trumpism and Mormonism that so many Church members are picking up on. After some thought, here are some LDS principles I think Trump follows or exhibits that make him feel so right to so many American Mormons:

Patriarchy: Trump clearly has little use for women holding positions of authority. Similarly, the LDS Church gives women very little institutional authority, having all-male leadership both at the general and local level. While Trump and the Church obviously disagree about rules around sex, they agree that women are the attractive objects who are responsible for it. Perhaps Trump’s largest-looming legacy will be appointing judges to get Roe v. Wade overturned so states could restrict or ban abortion. Similarly, while GAs claim to believe in sometimes permissible abortion, the way they talk about the issue makes it pretty clear they expect these to be so rare as to be irrelevant.
White supremacy: Trump is a thoroughgoing, unapologetic racist. On the Church side, while it has made some steps in recent years with occasional nice statements about racism being wrong, the racial makeup of the leadership still shouts white supremacy. The unapologized-for and now carefully waved away century plus long priesthood/temple ban still shouts it. The racist justification for the Lamanites’ dark skins in the Book of Mormon still shouts it. It’s no surprise that lots of Church members are happy to embrace Trump’s racism.
Prosperity gospel: Trump is wealthy. He may have driven many businesses to bankruptcy, but he at least has the appearance of having a lot of money. He signed into law a tax cut strongly weighted toward him and his wealthy friends. The Church similarly has a problem with worshiping wealth. Men called to be GAs are typically businessmen and lawyers, and typically well-off. Along the same lines, at the local level, bishops and their counselors typically have white collar jobs. The Church spends a lot of money to make temples look fancy in ways that echo Trump’s love of plating things with gold. The Church’s requirement of tithing, which is a disproportionate burden for poorer people, makes it a more comfortable place for better-off people. While the prosperity gospel may not be taught in as many words, there is a lot of coded language that gets passed around like “self reliance” and Ezra Taft Benson’s famous line about people to take the slums out of themselves.
Nationalism: Trump is deeply concerned about the United States not being powerful or white enough. (This point is of course connected with white supremacy.) He doesn’t want the country involved in alliances like NATO, and he’s suspicious of trade agreements. He’d rather slap tariffs on imports to show other countries who’s boss. He hates immigrants, legal or not. In the Church, while there have been movements toward becoming more seriously international, the headquarters is still in the US, and the top leadership is still largely American. The influence of Ezra Taft Benson’s paranoid America-firstism may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s far from gone. We also still have things like God saying in our scriptures that he inspired the US Constitution and GAs (and former GAs) who are clearly America worshipers. One disconnect with Trumpism is that many American Mormons have served missions in other countries and tend to be more pro-immigrant than Trumpists in general.
Authoritarian control: Trump hates any checks on his power. He openly mused while president about becoming president-for-life, he called for the 2020 election to be postponed, and when it turned out not in his favor, he tried to have it overturned. He hates having reporters check him on his fabrications or publish anything critical of him. In the Church, while we have some nice aspirational statements like Joseph Smith’s “teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves,” we have far more a norm of leaders directing and members following. GAs are so unwilling to accept feedback from the rank-and-file that they periodically send a letter telling us we can raise issues no further than our stake presidents, and we should never contact them directly. Another very telling example is that we’ve turned the sustaining vote from an actual vote as it was at the beginning of the Church to a loyalty test, where anyone voting opposed on any calling is doing nothing but marking themselves as suspect.
Revering elders: Trump is an old man. For Latter-day Saints raised to revere the authority of GAs who are old men, he fits right in (not even to mention that he’s white and wealthy).

It’s quite a bit, actually, that Trumpist Latter-day Saints are picking up on. Interestingly, I think it’s more often unspoken than spoken issues. For example, the Church doesn’t come out and say “women are lesser,” it just treats them differently. Or GAs don’t (any longer) say that people of color are lesser than whites, they just try to pretend the priesthood/temple ban never happened.

But I still disagree with Trumpist Mormons. Even if he’s a good example of white Christian nationalism, he utterly fails at any scriptural or other Church righteousness test. Let me give you a few.

In the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, Jesus pronounces blessedness on the following:

The poor in spirit.
They that mourn.
The meek.
They which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
The merciful.
The pure in heart.
The peacemakers.
They which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

None of these match Trump in the slightest. I imagine his supporters might argue that the last one does, because he’s widely hated for his righteousness in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. I totally disagree, as I don’t believe allowing or enacting abortion bans is righteousness. But even setting that one aside for the sake of argument, can you imagine anyone who fits this list worse? The meek? The merciful? The peacemakers? Trump is full of bluster, anger, and cruelty.

In Fun, Temple

Go to the Smarthouse of the Lord

Guest17 October 202418 October 20247 Comments

This guest post comes from Zatch, who last year also shared “Go to the ~~House~~ Mansion of the Lord.”

My spouse and I were talking earlier about the challenge of staffing all those new temples. Clearly steps have already been taken to limit the number of personnel required to operate a temple:

Recorded movies/slideshows instead of live actors in the endowment presentation
Digitization (bar codes on ordinance cards)
Minimizing physical contact in the endowment ceremony
Removing laundries, cafeterias

At one point in our conversation my spouse joked that maybe they’ll just use AI to fill in the gaps. That got us thinking about the role of technology in the temple, and how it could be used to further reduce the staffing footprint required. We came up with the following ideas, arranged roughly in order of most to least feasible (or least to most wacko):

Digital translation – Bilingual temple workers are great, but your smartphone can deliver a live translation of your rote ordinance recitation just as easily.
Automated entry kiosks replacing workers at the recommend desk. Would be easy-peasy to implement; I go through three of these on my way to work every morning: one to get on the metro, one to get into my building, and one to get into my corridor.

In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2024

Ziff14 October 202418 Comments

Fastest hymn: “On This Day of Joy and Gladness” (Sunday morning) and “Praise the Lord with Heart and Voice” (Sunday afternoon).
Slowest hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” (Sunday morning), at least at the beginning and end.
Best hymn: “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (Sunday morning), “And the Glory of the Lord” (Sunday afternoon), and “Holding Hands Around the World” (Saturday afternoon).
Worst hymn: “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet” (Sunday afternoon). This was just a usual congregational hymn, but I really don’t like it because it sounds like something that would be sung from a Rameumptom.

Longest prayer: 108 seconds, J. Kimo Esplin, Saturday morning invocation.
Shortest prayer: 51 seconds, Ciro Schmeil, Saturday afternoon opening.

Best title: “God’s Favourite,” Karl B. Hirst.
Phoning-it-in title: “Following Christ,” Dallin H. Oaks.

Best laugh:

Gerrit W. Gong and two of his grandchildren came up with the following dad joke: “What do you call a dinosaur who crashes his car? Tyrannosaurus Wrecks.”
David L. Buckner: “My father often reminded me that simply sitting in a pew on Sunday doesn’t make you a good Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car.”

Best image: I really like Yongsung Kim’s painting The Hand of God that Juan Pablo Villar showed in his talk. I appreciate how Jesus looks happy, rather than annoyed, to be reaching into the water to retrieve Peter (or us).

Most troublesome image: While talking about contention, Dallin H. Oaks showed a picture of two men arguing. When I first looked at the talk, it was included, but now it appears to be gone. (You can still see it on the video of the talk on YouTube if you’re curious.) I’m assuming this means someone decided it wasn’t correlated enough.

In Fun, Statistics

Church President Probabilities: 10,000 Possibilities

Guest30 September 20243 Comments

Frequent commenter DaveW used the results of the Monte Carlo simulation from my last post on Church president probabilities to put together this fun follow-up post (and as an added bonus, he corrected an error in my post that came up from cutting off the simulation at 360 months).

I love numbers and spreadsheets and attempts to predict the future that rarely work out, so I’ve been a long time fan of Ziff’s work in projecting the future of the presidency of The Church. Longtime readers will be familiar with his Church President Probability posts going back to 2015. Ziff has done an admirable job of building a model and running 10,000 simulations to compile a view of things that are likely to occur with the presidency of the church. But I’ve always wondered, what about the improbable scenarios? What are the craziest outcomes in his 10,000 simulations that aren’t likely to happen, but still certainly could? Well, Ziff has been kind enough to let me look through his results, and now I guess he’s letting me share them here on ZD.

These uncommon outcomes come from Ziff’s work, so he deserves most of the credit here, but I did make one small improvement. His simulations only went 30 years into the future, which is generally pretty good for talking about the lifespans of senior citizens, but in some instances we needed a few more years to see how things would play out, so I extended his forecasts as much as an additional 20 years, so we can really see the outliers. One impact is that Ziff is slightly underestimating the odds that Kearon will become president some day (it’s more like 38%, not 34%), and the average time as president is a bit higher for the younger apostles (Kearon’s average should be more like 6 years, not 4).

Like all the super hero movies they seem to make now, these 10,000 simulations open us up to 10,000 possible universes. Almost anything can happen in the multiverse. So let’s explore some strange new worlds

World 2803: Some things can last forever?
The Q15 stay very healthy, and Andersen is surprisingly the next to go in 2027. Then Oaks goes in 2031 just before his 99th birthday, followed quickly by Uchtdorf that same year. In 2033 we lose Eyring (99), and Christofferson and Gong. Cook lasts until age 96 in 2037, and Holland until age 99 in 2039. And who is still in the biggest of the red chairs through all of this? Nelson, who makes it to his 120th birthday before finally turning the keys over to Bednar in September 2044. No one else reached 120 in any of the simulations. Eyring was the only one to crack 115, with 1 scenario where he made it to 118. The chart below shows the presidential succession through all the current Q15 for the simulation. (The x-axis shows the month and year.)

In Statistics

Church President Probabilities, Updated for President Nelson’s Birthday!

Ziff12 September 202416 September 202411 Comments

Russell M. Nelson turned 100 this week, so it seems like a good time to look at probabilities of who among the Q15 is likely to become Church president in the future. If you’ve read ZD for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me do this before. Here’s my most recent post (and here’s a follow-up post). I’m following the same method I’ve used in the past. Using this handy mortality table produced by the Society of Actuaries, I estimate the probability of each Q15 member having died for a number of times in the future. Then, using the logic of seniority and succession, I can calculate the probability of each member becoming president from the probabilities of (1) all members senior to him dying, while (2) he survives. One small change I made this time versus previous times is that I looked at monthly points in the future rather than yearly points. It’s nice to make more fine-grained graphs, but it doesn’t change the results materially. For more on the method, see the “Method” section in my 2023 post.

This first graph shows each Q15 member’s estimated survival probability out to 30 years (360 months) in the future. Calculating this has always been a step in the process, but I had never graphed it before and I thought it might be interesting to look at. What’s striking, I think, is where a man falls out of line with those near him in succession order. For example, Elder Bednar is between Elders Andersen and Renlund, but of course in seniority, he’s ahead of them, as well as Elders Rasband, Christofferson, and Cook, even though he is younger than they are.

This next graph shows probabilities of becoming Church president by year.

In Fun

Possibilities for a Surveillance Church

Ziff30 August 202430 August 202412 Comments

You’re familiar with surveillance states. We all live in one, to one degree or another. COVID and mass working from home also brought attention to surveillance corporations, which sometimes track their employees’ every keystroke to be sure they aren’t having unauthorized fun when they should be appropriately suffering for their paychecks. (Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing this post at work.) But what about a surveillance church?

I feel like the LDS Church is ideally positioned to become a surveillance church for several reasons. First, it’s exclusive. Unlike so many American Protestants, who believe members of many churches can be okay with God, we believe we alone have essential ordinances that members of any other church are missing out on. This is important because if, say, the ELCA decided to try intrusively surveilling its members, they’d all just go down the street and become Episcopalians or something. Second, it has a top-down hierarchical structure. By contrast, if say the Southern Baptist Convention said its member churches should intrusively surveil their members, they could just ignore it or leave the organization. Third, it isn’t too large. The Catholic Church is also exclusive and top-down, but it’s so gigantic that I think it would be harder to implement a surveillance program across the whole church than it would be for Mormons. Fourth, it isn’t too small. I imagine there are a lot of much smaller churches that would love to be super controlling and surveil their members constantly, but they just don’t have the resources. The LDS Church is, of course, ridiculously wealthy. Fifth, it has multiple tiers of membership (baptism level, temple recommend level), which provides more opportunities to prod members into compliance to maintain (or improve) their position.

Okay, let’s get to my suggestions. Only they aren’t suggestions so much as just thoughts or ideas of possibilities that could happen. You can probably guess that they’re at least partly tongue in cheek. But I’m a little bit serious too. I’m thinking along the lines of the quote attributed alternatively to Ray Bradbury or Frank Herbert that science fiction writers don’t write to predict a future, but to prevent it. I hope none of these ideas come to pass, but if a true zealot became Church president, or even a more garden-variety fundamentalist leaner, I could see some of them happening.

In Church Life, Communities

Connection or Control?

Ziff21 August 20242 Comments

In her book, You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, the linguist Deborah Tannen points out a common issue in mother/daughter dialogue that becomes more prominent as the daughters age to adulthood: Mothers raise topics of conversation in order to maintain connection with their daughters, but daughters interpret them as trying to maintain control over them. The possible topics are many: who are you dating, where are you living, what are you driving, where are you going to school, where are you working, and on and on. Either party could be right. Mothers might in fact be trying to maintain some control in their daughters’ lives when daughters are perfectly capable of making their own decisions. Or daughters may be defensively pushing back when all mothers are hoping to accomplish is to know how their daughters’ lives are going. Or, most likely, something in between is true, with mothers being a little more controlling than they need to be (even unconsciously) and daughters being a little more defensive than they need to be. It makes sense that this connection or control question could be a fraught one especially for mothers and daughters (or any parents and offspring), given that parents are necessarily completely controlling of their kids’ entire lives when they’re younger, and in most cases, the kids’ entire lives are taking steps away from the parents.

In Fun

Naming the BYU Medical School

Ziff30 July 202415 Comments

The Church announced yesterday that BYU will be adding a medical school. I have some suggestions for what it could be named and different medical areas it could emphasize. Please feel free to add yours in the comments.

The Neil L. Andersen OB/GYN Training and Fertility Research Institute (and Medical School)
The John Taylor Center for Research on Preventing Injury Using Ordinary Household Objects
The Ronald A. Rasband Center for Discovering Doctrinal Drugs of Divine Design
The Dallin H. Oaks Medical School and Conversion Therapy Research Center
The Brigham Young School of Digestive Health
The David A. Bednar School for Hospice Care of People Having Faith Not to Be Healed
The Joseph Fielding Smith Clearinghouse of Answers to Medical Questions
The Dieter F. Uchdorf Healthy Sleep Research Center
The Jeffrey R. Holland Musket Wound Treatment (and Infliction) Center
The Gary E. Stevenson Medical School (brought to you by ICON Health & Fitness)
The Joseph F. Smith Believing Blood Research Center (and Blood Bank)
The Neal A. Maxwell School of Supernal Surgery

In Books, History

Ben Park’s American Zion and different trajectories the Church could have taken

Ziff9 July 20249 July 20245 Comments

I recently read Benjamin E. Park’s new history of the Church (in the US mostly), American Zion. It was such a great read! Of course as a Mormon who’s attended church for decades and has even read a little academic Mormon history, I was familiar with a lot of the events in broad strokes, but Ben (I’m acquainted with him, so I’m going to call him that) brought in all kinds of interesting context and information about periods of time especially where my knowledge was really thin. And I was also especially interested to read how he thought about events in the last couple of decades, when I’ve been blogging about Mormon stuff and at least generally following the trends of what’s going on in and around the Church.

Here’s an example of broader context Ben brought in that I found interesting. When the Church went to the state of Ohio in 1836 to ask for a banking charter, it was a time of a lot of pressure on banks in general because Andrew Jackson had successfully defunded the national bank. People everywhere were scrambling to work out how to handle financing issues. The state granted zero banking charters during that legislative session. So it wasn’t just that they were out to get the Mormons. It was that it was a difficult time and they were caught up in a difficult situation that made hard times for a lot of people. I love reading this kind of context because I feel like so much of my knowledge of Church history and secular history more broadly (both of which are admittedly pretty thin) are in silos in my head, and it really opens up my understanding when a historian like Ben connects the appropriate dots to make the Mormon experience make more sense in the context of the US (or the world).

In Books

Ten things I loved about Steve Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor

Ziff1 July 20244 Comments

I recently read Stephen C. Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor. I’m acquainted with the author, so I’m going to refer to him as Steve, because it would sound strange to my ear to call him Taysom. Also, I’m going to follow his convention of referring to Joseph F. Smith as JFS.

I appreciate that Steve takes his readers seriously enough to occasionally introduce a theoretical framework for understanding an event in JFS’s life. For example, when talking about the Mormon diaspora that followed the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, he first briefly discusses diasporas in general and the idea of returning to a homeland, and then shows how Mormons were both thinking of returning to a particular place, and also to an imagined one, an idealized version of the United States. Or again, when talking about how JFS made sense of the Manifesto, both for himself and for Mormons in general, Steve first refers to a historian who’s thought about meaning-making in Judeo-Christian religions more generally, before getting into applying the historian’s ideas to the particular situation JFS was in.