Showing all posts by Ziff

In Gender Issues, General Conference

“I never noticed women weren’t praying in Conference”

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

In the discussion of the Let Women Pray movement, one of the comments I heard most frequently was something along the lines of “I never noticed women weren’t praying in Conference.” In a few cases, the context suggested that the statement was being made as a marker of being more righteous than thou, but in most cases, it came across to me as a genuine statement of surprise. Heck, I probably said something similar at one point. I don’t think I had ever really thought about the question until I read Cynthia L.’s post on the issue at BCC a couple of years ago.

Even for all of us who sincerely hadn’t noticed that women weren’t praying, though, I think a lot of people drew the wrong conclusion. Specifically, they concluded that because they hadn’t noticed, then it must not be a problem and must not need rectifying. I think this is completely backwards, though. The fact that so many of us hadn’t noticed this very public and constantly repeated instance of institutional sexism means that sexism in the Church is a huge problem.

Read More

In Priesthood

Which is it? Did Jesus say so, or are you going to use your Jedi mind tricks?

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

In Peggy Fletcher Stack’s recent article on the Ordain Women movement, she quotes Church spokesperson Jessica Moody on the question of whether women could receive the priesthood:

But a male-only priesthood “was established by Jesus Christ himself,” Moody said, “and is not a decision to be made by those on Earth.”

This argument stands in contrast to Relief Society General President Burton’s comment on the same issue in the Church’s new video:

I don’t think women are after the authority; I think they’re after the blessings and are happy that they can access the blessings and power of the priesthood. There are a few that would like both. But most of the women, I think, in the Church are happy to have all the blessings. That’s what matters most to them, and it doesn’t matter who holds that umbrella. They’re happy to let someone else hold the umbrella because we have different complementary roles and are happy with that.

So which is it? Did Jesus command the priesthood ban be put in place? Or is going to be that Church leaders will send their female spokespeople to wave their hands and try to convince us with a Jedi mind trick that real Mormon women don’t actually want the priesthood? (President Dalton’s “[you] will see no need to lobby for rights” comment fits perfectly here.)

Read More

In GA's, General Conference, Statistics

They always say the same thing in Conference (Part 1)

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

A few months ago, I was working on a project that required me to look through a lot of search results at the Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks. I was surprised to find that some speakers not only told the same stories and made the same points in multiple talks, they frequently used exactly the same phrasing in doing so. In other words, they were clearly copying and pasting parts from one talk to another. Not that I blame them. I know GAs are busy people, so in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

This got me to wondering, though, whether some Conference speakers use this copy-and-paste strategy more than others. I hit on an easy way to measure how often they do this while reading Brian Christian’s fascinating book The Most Human Human. The book is about the author’s preparation for participating in a Turing test, where his role is to serve as a chat partner for judges who are trying to distinguish between computer programs and people, and his goal is to win the award that is the book’s title, by convincing the most judges that he is a human and not a computer. One issue Christian discusses is redundancy in language. For example, when we’re reading, we can predict with accuracy far better than chance what word will come next in a sentence, and our accuracy goes up as the sentence goes on. More importantly for my purposes, compression software also works by spotting redundancies in language.

Read More

In Language, Statistics

Gender-neutral Language in Conference

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

In a recent discussion in a Facebook group, I guessed that one way the Church might have improved recently in its treatment of women is in GAs using more gender-neutral language in talks. My memory is that President Hinckley, for example, when he quoted scriptures talking about men, would sometimes explicitly point out that it included women as well. But I’ve never actually studied the question systematically. Until now.

Read More

In GA's

The Virtues of Vagueness

Author ZiffPosted on 20 Comments

After President Dalton’s much-discussed “you . . . will see no need to lobby for rights” talk, Galdralag wrote a post in which she asked, “Why don’t our leaders clarify their remarks more often?”

I think this is a great question. Church leaders frequently say things that sound vague to me, often intentionally vague. This puzzles me. I would think if they have messages from God to share, they would want to come right out and share them, and not beat around the bush so often. Certainly they’re not always unclear–I think I can venture to conclude, for example, that they don’t like porn–but a lot of the time they are.

In this post, I’ve come up with a list of possible reasons for their sometime vagueness. (Some of the better ones I’ve borrowed from Andrew S’s post on the Church’s statements on caffeine last year at W&T.) In the comments, please let me know which of these you find more or less plausible, and also other causes you think might be important. This is kind of a laundry list of seat-of-the-pants thinking, so I won’t be surprised if you disagree with some (or all) of my ideas.

Read More

In GA's, Statistics

Who Wrote the Proclamation on the Family?

Author ZiffPosted on 48 Comments

While the Proclamation on the Family was nominally written by all 15 men serving in the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve at the time it was issued, it seems likely that some of them were more central to the project than others. For some reason, I’ve always thought it was Elder Nelson’s baby, although I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s just because divine gender roles seems to be his favorite topic.

In any case, the writers aren’t likely to tell us who was most and least involved, but I wonder if they might have revealed this information to us indirectly. It seems reasonable to assume that those who were most enamored of the project would quote from and refer to the document most often. So I went back and checked who has referred to the Proclamation the most.

Read More

In Commandments

Optimally (un)reasonable commandments

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

A few weeks ago in my elders’ quorum, we had the lesson from the George Albert Smith manual on the Word of Wisdom. As often happens with lessons on this topic, a couple of people raised their hands and talked about how the Word of Wisdom is the perfect health code, that it tells us exactly what we must do to be the healthiest we possibly can. Along similar lines, in response to some provocateur asking why we don’t drink a little wine since some research suggests it might be good for us (no, the provocateur was not me :D), people also commented that if any “science” (their tone suggested the quotation marks) suggested something different than the Word of Wisdom, then the science was sure to be proven wrong sooner or later.

The manual is more conservative. While it says that we’ll be physically blessed for following the Word of Wisdom, it doesn’t say that the Word of Wisdom is necessarily the perfect health code. I think this is actually a strength of the commandment: it’s reasonable, but it’s not too reasonable.

Read More

In Uncategorized

Nacle Notebook 2011: 15 Posts I Loved

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

For the past few years, I’ve posted lists of some of the funniest comments I read on the bloggernacle in the previous year. One reason I do this is because I love to laugh. But another reason is that I hate to forget. The bloggernacle is full of all kinds of great writing on interesting topics and fascinating discussion (yes, I know, not always), but it’s also ephemeral. Today’s interesting post is a vague memory tomorrow, and will likely be forgotten by the end of the week.

So in my ongoing effort to promote remembering what is great about the bloggernacle, allow me to present a list of 15 posts from 2011 that I loved. (It was going to be 10, but I could only reduce my list so far.) With each post, I’ve included a quote that will, I hope, draw you in and lead you to want to go (re)read the whole thing. Other than the last one, which actually appeared first, the posts are listed in the order they were published.

Read More

In Church Policy, GA's, General Conference

Distal Effects of Missionary Age Changes

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Kent Larsen at T&S has a great list of possible effects of the changes in minimum missionary ages that President Monson announced in Conference. Many of the effects discussed are straightforward and closely tied to missionary work (e.g. enrollment at BYU), but others are more weakly tied and more speculative (e.g., divorce rate). I want to push things out even father, and guess about other possible changes in the Church that are completely unrelated to missionary work, but that might be made more likely by the missionary age change. Read More

In GA's, Unintended Consequences

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

. . . the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

You probably remember Princess Leia saying this to Governor Tarkin right before he started trying to impress her with the size of his battle station. But I’m not here to talk about battle station size or who might be compensating for what. Instead, I’m interested in Leia’s point about unintended consequences: sometimes pushing directly for some outcome can actually make that outcome less likely.

Read More

In Scripture, Statistics

Doctrinal Density of the Scriptures

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

We just finished talking about the war chapters at the end of Alma a couple of weeks ago, in my ward’s Sunday School anyway. Discussion of these chapters sometimes brings up an argument about whether all scriptures are equally valuable, since of course if you don’t believe they are, these chapters are perfect examples to cite.

I got to thinking that it might be fun to try to answer this question  empirically. To do so, I looked at how much time the Sunday School manuals spend on each chapter of the scriptures. This can tell us how doctrinally important each chapter is. Of course it’s a pretty crude measure and it’s just one class in church, but at least it’s a starting point.

Read More

In Chicken Patriarchy

Chicken change: A step forward or a sidestep?

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

How has the Church’s view on homosexuality changed over time? In a post at T&S last year, Kaimi gave an overview of some of the major changes, and summarized them as follows:

Over the course of the past three decades, the church’s stance has evolved from virulently anti-gay and homophobic, to its current soft-heterosexist approach of “love the gays, hate the gayness.” It is a limited sort of shift, as the changes have largely involved rhetoric and attitude, while many of the underlying church doctrines have remained relatively constant.

I haven’t systematically examined Church statements about women, but I think there may be a similar change going on in this area. My impression is that it used to be that women had their own roles and their own sphere and that’s just how it was, but now there are General Authorities reassuring women at every turn that they’re incredible and important. But like the change in views on homosexuality, like Kaimi said, it’s been mostly in rhetoric and not much in practice. Borrowing Kiskilili and Eve’s term, it could be called “chicken change.”

Read More

In Meta-Messages

“All Lanes Open”

Author ZiffPosted on 28 Comments

While driving back from a wonderfully enjoyable Thanksgiving visit with my sisters, I saw an electronic billboard by the side of the highway. It was the kind typically used to announce construction ahead. But this one wasn’t doing that. Instead, it said, “All lanes open.”

Read More