Mormon Fundamentalism and LDS Fundamentalism

In Steve Evans’s recent post “I Could Not Do It” at BCC, he mentioned the “serious aspect of fundamentalism at the heart of being a Mormon,” and then clarified,

I am using “fundamentalism” in a general sense, and not in reference to polygamist groups, although that is clearly an example of fundamentalism in action.

His comment got me to thinking that it’s too bad that, in the Mormon context, the word “fundamentalist” has come to be almost synonymous with “polygamous.” Read More

And his name shall be called…

In a recent post at T&S, Kaimi suggested

it seems to me that church members (and leaders) tend to de-emphasize the use of the single-name description Jesus. We regularly use the name Jesus when it is associated with the title Christ. However, when we use a single-word name, LDS speakers — unlike speakers I’ve heard from other denominations — tend to use the name Christ, not Jesus.

I think he’s probably right, but I thought it might be interesting to gather a little data to check. 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.

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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.

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Implied Statistical Report Graphs

Over at T&S, Kent Larsen wrote an interesting post based on the Church’s statistical report from Conference. He compared this year’s data with statistical reports from 5, 10, and 25 years ago. Since I find this kind of speculation so entertaining, I searched lds.org and found statistical reports all the way back to 1973 to fill out the data set a little. To make the resulting data easier to look at, I’ve put some of the numbers Kent and the commenters discussed into graphs.

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Better than Orange Juice

In the October 2000 General Conference, Elder Robert C. Oaks compared our reluctance to invite people to join the Church to a person’s reluctance to share orange juice with a guest:

Consider that you are invited to a friend’s house for breakfast. On the table you see a large pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice from which your host fills his glass. But he offers you none. Finally, you ask, “Could I have a glass of orange juice?”

He replies, “Oh, I am sorry. I was afraid you might not like orange juice, and I didn’t want to offend you by offering you something you didn’t desire.”

Now, that sounds absurd, but it is not too different from the way we hesitate to offer up something far sweeter than orange juice.

This has always struck me as a particularly poor analogy. It trivializes what I think are very real concerns we might have about sharing Mormonism with our friends. Read More

Rearranging Zelophehad’s Daughters

If you’ve visited recently, you may have noticed that elements of our sidebars have been moving around. We recently upgraded our WordPress installation, so Lynnette has been tidying everything up in the aftermath, when of course some plugins failed and now have to be replaced.

But rather than rearranging pieces of our blog, I’m thinking more about rearranging the letters in Zelophehad’s Daughters to see what words I could come up with. If you’ve made a resolution, as I have, to waste more time in 2009 than you did in 2008, you’ll immediately see the value of such an undertaking.

So I’ve fiddled around with Zelophehad’s Daughters, as well as the names of some other blogs I read most, to see what I could come up with. I’m not nearly good enough to do complete anagrams, where all the letters are used. Most of my solutions are just partial, leaving one or more letters out. Also, since I did these all manually, I’ve probably made errors, so please feel free to point them out.

Here are a few of my favorites: Read More

More Like Three Wise Guys, I’d Say

As a kid, I was at least somewhat aware that we Mormons believed differently than other Christians about some crucial doctrines. For example, I knew that our belief in God having a physical body wasn’t widely shared. I also knew that, unlike the sadly misled apostates, we believed that the Wise Men weren’t present at the birth of Jesus.

Yes, I thought that was a central doctrine. I also thought that Mormons uniquely took that position that the Wise Men arrived later. I’m not sure why I thought this was so important or unique. Maybe my parents mentioned it to me once or twice, or suggested I move the Wise Men away from the stable in the nativity scene. I don’t know. It makes me laugh to think back now that I thought it was such a central and important issue.

I’d love to hear of anyone else’s experiences of finding out that the Church-related ideas you thought were crucial as a kid turned out to be not so important.

[In case it’s not clear, my title is a reference to the Far Side cartoon in which a bartender (I think) is dismissing the Wise Men with this line.]

Approved Party Song #19

In a discussion about the hymnbook at FMH a few weeks ago, patti said that her husband thinks Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel is the Communist fight song. This reminded me that many years ago, when I was in a BYU ward and this hymn was announced, a friend wrote a note referring to it that said, “Working shoulders of the world, unite!” (Perhaps my friend is patti’s husband.) This comment inspired me to rewrite the hymn: Read More

Are There Any “Soft R” Movies? (and Other Movie Rating Musings)

A few months ago, The Baron argued in a post at Waters of Mormon that a weakness of the MPAA movie rating scheme is that it considers only the movie’s worst content category (of violence, profanity, and sex). For example, if a movie has enough profanity to get an R rating, the R says nothing about its levels of violence or sex. Such a movie could have any combination of levels of violence and sex, from none at all up to enough to warrant an R rating on their own even without the profanity.

The Baron pointed out that this practice of rating movies by only their worst type of content might set up an odd incentive:

this only encourages filmmakers to add more “R-rated” content to their movie, since obviously if they know they’re getting an R for violence already, why NOT add a lot of profanity and nudity as well?  The rating is going to be the same, either way

This had never occurred to me, but I can see his argument that the rating system would create this incentive. His unstated assumption, though, is that movie makers want to put as much violence, sex, and profanity into their movies as they possibly can. I doubt that that’s actually the case. While I suspect they probably chafe at times at restrictions that trying to get a particular rating might place on them, I would be surprised if getting lots of offensive material in is often one of their major goals.

So which is true? Are movie makers anxious to put lots of offensive content into their movies, or not? What’s fun about this question is that there’s data I can use to try to answer it.

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