Awhile ago, during one of my long stints in nursery, a new couple was called to serve with me in the older children’s room, and I watched a painful dynamic gradually unfold between the wife and one of the children in the class. Read More
Showing all posts by Eve
How Has the Bloggernacle Changed Your Experience of Church?
Since a number of my siblings and co-bloggers are involved in more exciting activities than I am (going on vacations, attending Sunstone without me!) or more exhausting activities than I am (packing and moving in the blistering heat), I’ll take it upon myself to keep the blog afloat. Read More
Women and the Priesthood, Fifteen Years Later
Maxine Hanks’s 1992 anthology Women and Authority includes a chapter by D. Michael Quinn, provocatively entitled “Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843.” Quinn makes it clear that he’s not arguing simply for what I’ll here call “soft” claims about women’s priesthood status, for example, that women hold the priesthood only “through temple marriage or through the second anointing” (368). On the contrary, he’s arguing a “harder” claim, that women actually held–and therefore, by the successive conferral of authority that authenticates Mormon ordinances, continue to hold–the Melchizedek priesthood completely independent of marriage, on the basis of temple endowment alone. Read More
Demoted to Mrs.
Marriage is at once the most public and the most private of institutions. On the private side, although we can both be incredibly stubborn, my husband has never treated me with the slightest hint of condescension or domineering. Even in the early days of our marriage when he was still a believer, it would never have so much as crossed his mind to pull priesthood rank, which is of course one of the reasons I married him. But as ECS’s excellent post about the cultural blind spots in which women reside recently reminded me, whatever private arrangements husband and wife make, for women, marriage can mean social invisibility. Read More
The Evils of Email
May has been a month of email trauma. Read More
On Ignorance and Offense (includes FREE Bonus Discussion of Infertility!)
Patricia’s excellent series of posts about her experiences with her daughter Mattea over at T&S have got me thinking again about ignorance and offense. I don’t want to presume to compare Patricia’s experiences (which she rightly terms “unbelievable”) with my own, but I suspect all of us have experienced the hurt and frustration of blithely presumptuous, well-meaning drive-by comments on our lives, sometimes in church settings, sometimes from fallible church leaders. I imagine all of us have endured remarks that stick in our craws that we struggle to forgive and to eject from our souls. To start this post off I’ll reflect on a few such remarks in my own life. Then I’ll try to put those remarks in some sort of meaningful context. Read More
Contemporary Mormonism and the Magic General Authority
Because I have polygamous pioneer ancestors and am therefore related to an immoderate number of other Mormons, and because I grew up in Utah, attended BYU, and spent two months in the MTC, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of General Authority sightings. None were spectacular or even particularly personal, so “encounters” would be too strong a word. Read More
Please Don’t Feed the Snoofs: An Anti-Paternalistic Screed
A couple of years ago, in the middle of an intense, protracted, hilarity-inflected conversation, my sister Kiskilili invented the term “snoof” to designate the imaginary beings sometimes posited mid-argument to bolster the claim that ________* is harmful. The snoof-positer isn’t herself harmed by ________. She’s too intelligent, too intellectually sophisticated to be hurt by ________ personally. But she just knows there are snoofs out there–hordes of interchangeably childlike people who aren’t quite as bright or worldly-wise as she is. These poor snoofs are earnest, blank souls, liable to be utterly confounded by the first deviation from the sacred orthodoxy of ________ they encounter. Read More
To Some It Is Given: Knowledge, Doubt, Mercy
Today’s thread over at BCC arguing that the loss of faith is ultimately a choice included a comment that wrenched my heart.
Subsequent discussion made reference to a passage in D&C 46 that has haunted me for most of my life, particularly these strange words:
To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world.
To others it is given to believe on their words, that they might also have eternal life if they continue faithful. Read More
Mormon Masculinity and Theological Blood Sport (Or, What We Mormon Girls Look For In the Boys We Date)
At this point in my life I happen to be pretty thoroughly acquainted with, and very fond of, two unrelated men able to recite myriads of scriptures and general-authority citations at the drop of a hat. Both are the uncontested theological authorities of their marriages; their wives might timidly pose questions or even more timidly offer their own ideas, often only to be ignored or shot down. When such men encounter one another, ritualized combat or mutual exhortation often ensue; either the combatants joust over some theological point or they join in denouncing the evangelicals, the secular world, or other unenlightened Mormons or Christians (to mention a few of the more popular targets). And as is so often the case in ritualized intellectual combat, the combatants often provoke one another into taking harder and harder stances, shoving softer, more moderate, and more considered, nuanced voices aside. We’ve all sat through a Sunday-school lesson or two that has followed this general outline. Read More
Homeschooling Reservations
When it comes to a child’s primary and secondary education, parents have three choices: public, private, home. Each has both its peculiar advantages and its undeniable drawbacks. Read More
The Western University and the Secular Compromise: Some Implications for Literature
This afternoon one of my students met with me about his next paper, which he wants to write refuting The Da Vinci Code and defending the divinity of Jesus Christ. I found myself struggling to explain to him why he can’t write such a paper to fulfill a university assignment. I tried to help him think about possible lines of argument he could pursue that would allow him to discuss his beliefs in intellectual and secular terms. It is my pleasant responsibility to help him master the norms of the university, and that means learning to speak, think, and write about religion in terms accessible to public consideration, in the terms of rational argument and empirical analysis. On the one hand, I deeply respect those terms; I’ve chosen with great joy to spend my six-day-a-week life examining the world in them. And learning to think about one’s beliefs in intellectual terms can be a vital and invigorating experience, although there are far too few spaces in the borderlands between the university and the church where believing students can bring the disparate pieces of their lives together; as a believing scholar, I long for more such spaces. But on the other hand, perhaps we secular educators (among whom I must count myself, insofar as I teach a secular subject in a secular context) sometimes rush too quickly over the losses incurred in the secular environment. The most essential expressions of religious belief are generally precluded by secular norms; in an important sense we allow every possible discussion of religion except what it most essentially is. Read More
Why I Love Poetry
This semester I’m taking a course in French phonetics in mild defiance of my department’s new stricter graduation timelines; I’ve already fulfilled the language requirement, and I simply want to improve my pronunciation. It’s fascinating. As I told Lynnette enthusiastically over the phone last weekend, “We’re learning all about where in the mouth you say the different vowels!” Not being one of the family’s language nuts, she said, affectionately and dryly, “How boring!” (Acid criticism from a woman who teaches Thomas Aquinas to grad students.) And we both had a good laugh. Read More
In Praise of Feminine Language
A couple of months ago Idahospud favored us with a fascinating analysis of blogging genderlect over at FMH, which reminded me of a long-simmering desire to take a manly stand for womanspeak. (Oh, the androgyny.)
Every once in a while the Bloggernacle revisits the familiar critique of the stereotypical LDS woman’s inability to make a definitive statement. (The Sugar Beet did the definitive satire which, sadly, I can’t seem to find.) Periodically this alleged inability is bemoaned hereabouts, and there’s certainly something to the criticism. From time to time I have encountered LDS women who seem so uncertain of themselves, so timid, so petrified of offending that they are unable to take a stand or risk disagreement about anything. But I’ve known more LDS women who have no difficulty speaking their minds than I have LDS women who can’t summon the confidence to speak definitively. Passive-aggressiveness and backstabbing, sadly, seem able to coexist quite happily with discursive confidence, and seem also to flourish in a culture in which niceness is the supreme virtue. Read More
Credentials: Do You Have Any Idea Who You’re Talking To?
I have mixed feelings about announcements of credentials. We’ve all seen credentials waved about obnoxiously or induce obsequiesness in otherwise rational persons. (I think here of the breathless tones in which some used to pronounce the name Hugh Nibley, for instance–tones I tend to suspect Nibley himself would not endorse.) In general, though, I really like to know what someone has studied or is studying. Education–what we love, what we know, what we hope to know–is an important part of who we are and of the perspectives we bring to various issues. And in any case, the Bloggernacle is so awash in credentials they lose some of their unhealthy power in a healthy way, I think, simply by virtue of the fact that a third of the people blogging at any given moment are avoiding their dissertations. Read More
Write What You Know, Know What You Write: A Review of Bradford Tice’s “Missionaries”
On my way out to Utah last week to attend my sister Melyngoch’s farewell and see her off on her mission to Sweden, my plane was delayed in Denver, and I violated the budget my husband and I agreed upon just hours before and bought the Atlantic’s summer fiction issue. (The Zelophehad family is not noted for the ability to delay gratification.) After a hilarious story by Marjorie Kemper about a priest who gets into massive debt trying to help his poverty-stricken parishioners entitled “Specific Gravity” and Tobias Wolff’s excellent “Bible,” I flipped to Bradford Tice’s rather tiresomely predictable story about Mormon missionaries. (Religion is clearly in the air, even among the secular MFA crowd.) Read More
On the (Occasional) Spiritual Necessity of Defying the Church
Rusty’s post speculating about the ultimate fate of missionaries involved in bizarre baptizing schemes over at Nine Moons has reminded me again of a thorny issue I’ve considered from time to time: the occasional spiritual necessity of defying the church. Read More
Karen
I can’t remember when I first met Karen, but I’m sure that she took me seriously aback. Karen was a large, heavyset, mentally handicapped woman in our branch who had little sense of personal boundaries or respect for personal space. Karen favored enormous T-shirts featuring her favorite band, Cinderella, and pants for church, and she sported the type and amount of bling stereotypically associated with inner-city drug dealers. Karen loved painting her nails and dying her hair, and her nail polish was generally badly applied, and her hair badly dyed. Various Relief Society presidents tried to convince Karen of the virtues of dresses and skirts and looking a little more like the rest of us. No go. Karen was insistent on Cinderella. Read More
Homesick
It’s been nearly a decade since my husband and I left Utah. We visit regularly, since our families are both still centered there. I’ve made the drive across the plains of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming in both the dead of winter and the scorching heat of summer. And I’ve flown into Utah many, many times now, staring out the plane window, circling over the bare or snowy mountains–or the city lights at night–before touching down at the Salt Lake International Airport. Of all the landscapes I’ve loved, it is the landscape of the desert and the mountainous West that lives most deeply in me. Read More
The Passions of Other Minds
We love the things we love for what they are. —Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook”
A couple of weeks ago I started a summer directed reading in the English Romantic poets with a somewhat shy but extraordinarily intelligent and kind professor. I’ve never done a directed reading by myself before–last semester plodding through Ovid in my slow and inexpert Latin I had a friend at my side to share translating, commentary, conversational duties–and being more than somewhat shy myself, I found our first meeting awkward. We both fumbled around trying to figure out how to talk about the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey and the Lyrical Ballads. Partly because I came armed with a list of questions about the readings, our second meeting was smoother. At one point in our conversation, my professor started comparing Wordsworth and Blake, and I found myself suddenly bursting out with the question I always want to ask everyone, all the time: Why did you choose to study Blake? What is it about Blake that drew you on so irresistibly? Why do you love the things you love? Read More