I enjoyed Jessie Jensen’s post a couple of months ago at BCC where she reported on a number of unusual names used for babies born in Rexburg and Idaho Falls in 2015. One question that came up in the comments was whether Mormons (or at least Mormons in Utah or Idaho) actually use more unusual names than people in other places do. I was interested in this question, and my co-blogger Katya pointed out that the US Social Security Administration (SSA) actually publishes data on how often different names are used in each state each year. So I thought it might be fun to look at these data, and see if they could help me attempt to answer the question.
Obedience
I decided a couple of days ago that I should write something for the blog, since it’s been a month since anyone posted, and more than 6 months since I posted. I wasn’t really feeling inspired about what to write about, so I started looking at some old drafts, and this one caught my eye. I started it 5 years ago, but it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about again lately, so I decided to open it up and look at it. After reading the opening paragraph (which I could have written this week pretty much word for word), I knew it was the one to finish.
I felt tonight like I should write a post (not because I feel bad about not having blogged in forever, though I do a little bit — luckily my blogmates are quite relaxed about things like that — but just a nagging feeling that I should write something), but there wasn’t anything in particular I felt like I ought to write about. I signed on and started looking through my saved drafts to see if there was anything I felt like finishing, but nothing stuck out to me. Then I got distracted putting kids to bed, cleaning up the house, etc, and left it alone until a few minutes ago, when again I felt like I should write something.
When I left off I was thinking about possibly finishing one post I’d started a while back that talked about one of the main themes in my patriarchal blessing — faithfulness. When I came back, however, I started thinking about the other theme in my patriarchal blessing, which I touched on briefly in that post — obedience. In that post I only mention briefly that obedience is one of the main themes of my patriarchal blessing and then move on. I remember that the reason for that was that I was somewhat uncomfortable with that being one of the themes of my patriarchal blessing, and I felt the same way when I re-read the draft earlier today.
You see, I’m not particularly comfortable with obedience. It’s not a principle I like very much, or one I’m particularly good at. Read More
Abdicating Authority to the Algorithms
Supporters of chicken patriarchy like to cite calling on family members to say prayers as an example of a duty that the father in a family, as the presider and priesthood holder, must perform. I suspect this is a preferred example because it carves out a required role for the man, but it avoids the offensiveness of men’s supposed duties that fans of paleo-patriarchy might cite, such as the duty to be the final decider in matters of schooling, employment, or spending.
Because this is such a oft-cited example (in blog discussions at least), it is with some glee that I report that as the husband and father in my family, I have abdicated this duty to an algorithm. And not even one of my own making! One of my kids came up with it. And to be fair, calling it an algorithm is making it sound way more complicated than it is. It’s a very simple system. In case you’re curious, here’s how it works. Family members are ordered by age, and each family member is assigned a number from zero to number of family members minus one. The day of the month is then divided by the number of family members, and the remainder is matched up to one of the assigned numbers to find who gets to say family prayer. For blessings at mealtime, the meal number (1, 2, or 3; no allowance is made for things like second breakfast) is added to the date. For example, today is May 26th. There are five people in my family. To decide who says the blessing on lunch, we take 26 (day) + 2 (meal number), divide by 5 (number of family members), yielding a remainder of 3, so this means it’s my second oldest child’s turn (since the family is numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 in age order). Read More
Support the Exponent!
The Exponent II blog is having a fundraiser this weekend. You’re likely familiar with them, but if you’re not, you should definitely check them out. They do amazing work keeping women’s voices alive and drawing attention to women’s issues. This is a great cause to donate to, and there are even prizes! Click on the link below to find out more.
The Pope Gives Ordain Women a Shot in the Arm
Pope Francis said a few days ago that he will organize a commission to look into having women serve as deacons in the Catholic Church. Now of course he wasn’t guaranteeing that he would end up taking any action, and deacons aren’t priests, and Catholics aren’t Mormons. But I still wonder if even this signal of people considering a possible change in another church might not bode well for the cause of Ordain Women.
Who Will Canonize the Family Proclamation?
I admit I breathed a small sigh of relief when this last General Conference ended without the Proclamation on the Family being presented to be added to the D&C. It seemed like it might have been an opportune time: the first annual (April) Conference following all the twentieth anniversary celebrations last year. So I was glad that it didn’t happen, but it occurs to me now that the question of the Family Proclamation getting canonized might be less about when it happens and more about who makes it happen.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Biblical Namesake
This is based on a talk I gave in my ward in February 2016.
I don’t think I’m giving away too much of my identity on the internet when I tell you that my name is Hannah. Growing up, I liked my name: it’s a palindrome, and, for someone of my age, it was relatively unusual. (I mostly only met Jewish girls my age with the name.) I also liked that, like my brothers, I was named after a Biblical figure; I liked the feeling of being part of history, a long chain of tributary Hannahs, and the sense of weight and importance it gave to the name.
I didn’t much like that Biblical figure, though. The lessons I got about her in Primary and even Young Women’s were always lessons about Samuel that framed her only as the faithful mother of someone important, not someone important in her own right. Moreover, every time her story was referenced the other kids looked at me, more or less surreptitiously, and teased me: “Ha, ha, you want to have a baby!” In Primary I did NOT want to have a baby, and this teasing oddly stung, to the point that I dreaded Hannah references in church. (From this I also learned that kids can tease you about anything; kids, don’t do this.)
Will It Play in Papua?
In another life I was a linguist, interested particularly in linguistic typology, the field of searching for true language universals—and thus some of the deepest building blocks of human language—through description and classification of existing languages into broad types and comparative features. Functionally, and a little flippantly, this means typologists write papers proposing models of how languages work, and then, almost invariably, other typologists familiar with the languages of Papua New Guinea write a response saying, “No they don’t,” with copious counterexamples. Think that all languages have a word for “blue”? Look at Dani. Think that there’s no language with doubly articulated stops? Look at Yeli Dnye. Think that the verb for ‘give’ always takes three arguments? Look at Saliba. Think that all languages count on their fingers or therefore bias towards base-10 numeral systems? Look at Oksapmin.
Why do Church leaders dislike the internet?
In Elder Ballard’s recent address to CES teachers, he warned his audience several times of the dangers of the internet to their students. For example, he admonished teachers to
Teach [students] about the challenges they face when relying upon the Internet to answer questions of eternal significance. Remind them that James did not say, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him Google!”
Wise people do not rely on the Internet to diagnose and treat emotional, mental, and physical health challenges, especially life-threatening challenges. Instead, they seek out health experts, those trained and licensed by recognized medical and state boards.
Why do Church leaders not want young people looking for for answers on the internet? One often-cited answer to this question is that they don’t like the information students might find–information that will likely contradict the carefully curated view of the Church and its history that is typically taught at Church and in seminary and institute classes. For example, students may learn that perhaps Joseph and Emma’s marriage wasn’t quite so idyllic as it is often portrayed, what with him marrying many other wives, typically behind Emma’s back.
Elder Ballard specifically mentions this problem of negative information in his address. He says that CES teachers should introduce students to faith-promoting approaches to controversial topics so that students will measure any more negative interpretations that they encounter later against what they heard first from their teachers.
I think Church leaders are concerned with more than just information when it comes to the internet, though. There are two other things that people also find there that I suspect they also dislike: validation and voice. Read More
The Mental Health System Strikes Back
I’m sitting in a small room on the fifth floor of the local hospital. I’ve had to change from street clothes to scrubs, and my possessions are being examined to see what I can keep. I didn’t bring in much; I turned most of it over to my sister Melyngoch when she left me in the ER. A nurse is sitting at a computer, answering question after question. I haven’t been in this particular hospital before, but I’ve been in enough similar places that the drill is familiar.
I’m reading the questions over the nurse’s shoulder. She has to check boxes about my attitude. Am I hostile? Aggressive? Withdrawn? I can’t help but notice that all of the options are negative. She checks “other,” and writes, “overly polite and helpful.” I can’t help sighing a little—it’s a reminder that whatever I do, however I act, it’s going to be seen through the lens of dysfunction. She asks my name, to find out if I know who I am, and I answer her. She asks if I know where I am. In the psych ward, I say. She corrects me, explaining that this is actually the “stress care unit.” I just smile. I know perfectly well where I am, regardless of what they’ve decided to call it.
Predictions for General Conference
General Conference already got underway last week, but I’m a bit slow, so I’m just now getting to making some predictions for the remainder of the sessions. You can help me out by telling me which in each pair of possible events is most likely to occur in the remainder of Conference.
Which in each pair is more likely?
- President Monson talks about widows.
- President Uchtdorf talks about airplanes.
- President Monson talks about widowers.
- President Uchtdorf talks about spaceplanes.
- President Monson talks about Windows.
- President Uchtdorf talks about Linux.
On Being Lukewarm
Some things I proselytize for:
Reading.
To say I love books is to understate it somehow; reading’s influence in my life has been second only to my family. When I read, I learn, I enter new worlds, I bask in the beauty of words in the hands of masters (or, occasionally, wince at the stilted prose of amateurs). Most of all, I get a view into the hearts and minds of others. I’m naturally an intellectual person, prone to abstract away from emotions, even my own, and it’s easy to imagine myself, raised in a world without the windows of fiction, as cold, standoffish, and a little heartless. Books have trained me in the paths of compassion, offering me a chance to use my mind to connect, paring and shaping the natural woman with an effectiveness that ordinary social interaction could never have achieved. Everyone should read.
“A single standard”
US civil rights law prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of characteristics such as race and gender. Prohibited discrimination can take the form of disparate treatment or disparate impact. Disparate treatment is easy to spot: it is simply treating members of different groups differently. For example, an employer who refuses to hire women would be liable under disparate treatment. Disparate impact is typically more difficult to see. It arises when a test or procedure the employer uses has the effect of discriminating against members of one group versus another. An employer who gives applicants a speech test that is scored by software that picks up lower pitches better than higher pitches might be liable under disparate impact, as women would likely perform worse on the test. (Employers are allowed to discriminate, though, if they can show that the characteristic they are using to select employees is a requirement to do the job.)
I think the concepts of disparate treatment and disparate impact are useful for talking about how the Church discriminates. In using these terms, I’m not suggesting that members are like employees; I’m just borrowing the terms to have an easy way to refer to different types of discrimination.
Church Opposes So-called “February 29th”
This notice was intended to be published on the Mormon Newsroom today, but because of a technical error on the website, it was not released.
April 15–Although most in the secular world and even in other so-called “Christian” churches have succumbed to the use of the godless Gregorian calendar, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today announces the Christ-Centered Calendar Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Church no longer recognizes the unholy day of “February 29th.”
The Church withdraws recognition of this date going back to the founding of the Church in 1830, meaning that 46 authorized days are restored in place of the unauthorized days, which makes the current date on the Christ-Centered Calendar April 15th. In connection with this withdrawal of recognition, several new policies are also announced, all effective immediately. Church members claiming to have been born or married on “February 29th” are considered to be in apostasy, and face mandatory Church discipline. Children of such couples may not be baptized until they reach age 18, and even then only on condition of their formally renouncing their parents’ calendar choices. This policy will prevent children from becoming confused when they hear discussion of one calendar at home and a different calendar at church. Finally, Church members whose records claim that they died on “February 29th” have their ordinance work declared null and void. They are not eligible to have proxy temple work done in their behalf.
God Save the Queen…Through Her Husband
When I was a kid bored in sacrament meeting, finished with doodling on the program and desperate for entertainment, the hymnbook was my saving grace. (I know that’s supposed to be Jesus, but the hymnbook was much closer and more tactile.) Read More
Correlated Cards for Valentine’s Day
No, there have not been 30 talks about child abuse in General Conference since 1976
The Mormon Newsroom article on child abuse from 2010 that was recently published with a 2016 date (because of a “technical error”) includes the following claim, as evidence of how seriously the Church takes child abuse:
Since 1976, more than 50 articles have appeared in Church publications condemning child abuse or educating members about it. As wrenching as the topic is, Church leaders have given sermons about it more than 30 times at the Church’s worldwide conferences.
I spend a fair amount of time poking through old General Conference talks, and this latter number—30 sermons about child abuse—seemed high to me. So I thought I would check it.
I used the lds.org search tool to search for “child abuse” (without the quotation marks), and limited the results to General Conference talks. The search doesn’t require the words to appear together, so I was casting a pretty wide net, not just looking for talks that had the exact phrase “child abuse.” In fact, I ended up having to discard a bunch of talks in the results because they never discussed child abuse even though they included both words (frequently they talked about drug abuse and mentioned a child in another context).
Mormon Feminism: Essential Reading
I think I ought to say here that I received a copy of Mormon Feminism from Oxford University Press in exchange for a fair review.
When I was in graduate school, far from the heart of Mormonism, one of my favorite pick-me-up-after-a-long-day-of-thinking hobbies was to swing by one of the many used bookstores near the university and hunt for treasures. One day, to my surprise, I found Brigham Young: American Moses on the Religion shelf. On another visit a few weeks later I found Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, and then during yet another visit Sisters in Spirit—somewhere in my secular liberal town, someone was reading and discarding Mormon history, and I was the lucky beneficiary. Read More
Mourning
When I was about 15, my bishop gave me some horrible advice. It was the kind of generic advice you might give to a teenager that in many situations would be harmless and probably even positive. But if he had known more about my personal situation, I’d like to think that he wouldn’t have said what he did. Unfortunately, he didn’t just say, this is something you might want to consider. He said, God is telling me that you need to do such-and-such thing. Because I’d always heard that bishops could be inspired on your behalf, I took him seriously. I did what I was told, and it was awful. And most awful of all was the message that it conveyed, which was that God didn’t actually care about my needs or experience. It reinforced destructive messages I was already getting about myself and some of the situations I was dealing with. My relationship with God was already full of landmines, and it added to the chaos. Read More
Your Favorite ZD Posts
We launched Zelophehad’s Daughters in January of 2006, so it’s ten years old this month. A decade! There are a lot of older blogs on the Bloggernacle, but I’m still kind of amazed by this. I don’t think I would have guessed when we started that we would continue for this long.
To celebrate our tenth birthday, I looked back at our posts that generated the most traffic. Here is a list of the highest-traffic1 post by each person who has blogged here regularly.
Apame: It wasn’t about pants…but then it became about pants. And that’s why I’m wearing pants.
Beatrice: Another Conversation Stopper
The Bouncer: LDS Church Leadership Agrees to Meet with Kate Kelly
Elbereth: The Five Universal Truths of Road Trips
Eve: Don’t Be My Ally*
Galdralag: For Kate
Katya: How EFY Promotes Immodesty
Kiskilili: If A Woman Strips Naked in a Forest and No One Sees Her, Is She Still Pornography?
Lynnette: Church Discourse on Homosexuality
Melyngoch: Seven Modest Outfits from the Golden Globes
Mike C: The More Things Change…
Pandora: Dona Nobis Aequalitatem
Petra: I Loved to See the Temple
Seraphine: Being a 30-something Single in the Church: Part V, the Law of Chastity
Vada: I Hate Breastfeeding
Ziff: Church President Probability Changes with President Packer’s Death
Of course traffic is far from a perfect measure of what posts are most enjoyed. If you like, please feel free to share your favorite ZD posts in the comments.
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1. I took data from our StatCounter plugin and subtracted out the traffic numbers for days close in time that had zero posts, so that kind of adjusts for the general traffic level at the time. We just have a free StatCounter account, so I didn’t have traffic by post page, so I just used total traffic on the day a post was written and also attributed to it some fraction of traffic for the next few days, but less if there was also a new post up in the next few days. Really, this is just for fun, so you probably don’t much care too much about my method. 🙂