Showing all posts in General Conference

In Feminism, General Conference

Everything I Know about Feminism I Learned from the 1970s

Author BeatricePosted on 39 Comments

At a recent FAIR conference, Joshua Johanson spoke about how he has negotiated the conflict between his same sex attraction and his religious faith.  Something that struck me about this talk was a comment he made near the beginning about his wife’s relationship with the feminist movement and how it is similar to his relationship to the gay movement.  He stated: 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 General Conference

General Conference Stories Where the Subtext Speaks to Me

Author ZiffPosted on 78 Comments

Often what I remember best about General Conference (other than controversial bit that are later argued in the Bloggernacle, of course) is the stories speakers tell. This probably isn’t surprising. A vivid story is likely more memorable for most people than an abstract discussion of Church doctrine or practice. But what might be unusual is that I’m frequently more struck by the subtext of a story than by its text. (By subtext, I just mean what is implied by the story’s content, or what is conveyed without being explicitly said.) Read More

In General Conference

No Longer a Black and White Issue

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

In last month’s Conference issue of the Ensign, (PDF complete–note it’s 6 MB)  for the first time I can remember, the pictures were all in color. Not just the pictures of the speakers, but the candid shots of people in and around the Conference Center and Temple Square, and watching Conference in other parts of the world. I’ve always really enjoyed these candid pictures, and I appreciate the work of the photographers who I assume must take hundreds or thousands of pictures each April and October to be able to pull out and publish such fun and interesting ones. I’m going to miss the black and white format of the pictures, though. I don’t know the first thing about photography, but it does appear to me that black and white photographs can emphasize interesting patterns of light and dark in ways that are overwhelmed by different colors in color photographs.

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In General Conference

General Conference and the Sensus Fidelium

Author LynnettePosted on 18 Comments

A fun concept in Catholic teachings is the notion of the sensus fidelium, the “sense of the faithful.”  The idea is that the work of the Spirit guiding the church can be found not only in the teachings of ecclesiastical leaders, but also in the beliefs  and experiences of the members of the church, the community of faith.  Theologian Roger Haight explains that it includes “an active charism of discernment, a power of practical and possessive knowledge belonging to the body of the faithful by virtue of their concrete living of the faith.”  He clarifies, “This does not mean that in every matter of detail a majority of even a consensus of opinion in the Church at any given time is theologically sound.  But it does mean that the experience of the faithful is a source for theology.”1 Read More

  1. Roger Haight, “Sensus Fidelium,” The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. Richard McBrien (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 1182-3. [↩]