On my post last week about how many kids GAs have, Petra asked about what the numbers would look like for women in general Church leadership positions. To answer this question, I’ve looked up the number of children that women in the General Relief Society Presidency (hereafter, GRSP) have had. To match the dataset I have for the FP/Q12, I included only women called since 1920.
Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD: Critique of “The Two Trees”
In this edition of Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD, we reprise Lynnette’s critique of Valerie Hudson’s talk, “The Two Trees”. Dig in!
(The original post and associated comments can be found here).
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I would indeed be ungrateful if I didn’t acknowledge the contributions of my co-bloggers; Petra read an earlier draft and made a lot of great observations, many of which are included in the footnotes, and Kiskilili and Melyngoch kindly allowed me to quote them.
Many of you are probably familiar with Valerie Hudson’s talk, “The Two Trees.” (You can go read it here.) In this talk, Hudson explains that one of the things that she values about the church is its feminism. In her words, she seeks “to review the main points of LDS doctrine that make this a revolutionary religion from a feminine perspective.” I can see why people are drawn to the talk; it has some powerful imagery. I have to give her credit for arguing for an equality that in some respects goes well beyond standard Mormon apologetics about women’s roles. I like how she emphasizes roles for both Heavenly Parents, and is not shy about bringing Heavenly Mother into her scheme. I also like that both men and women are explicitly connected to spiritual power.
The Problem of Women and Church Courts
CW: discussion of violence and sexual assault
Midway through my mission, I was transferred into an area and took over teaching the new member discussions to a recent convert, a young single mother with one child. The father of her baby was an immigrant who had married a local in order to get citizenship; he had never slept with the woman he married or even lived in the same house with her, but he had to maintain his “marriage” on paper in order to stay in the country. Because of this, he could not marry our recent convert, the mother of his child. This situation was, sadly, quite common.
Shortly after she was baptized, he came over to her apartment uninvited, drunk, and raving, and slapped her around. I do not know what he was angry about, but she showed me the bruises on her body. Later that night, they slept together. Read More
GAs Having Children and Talking about Having Children
In comments on Steve Evans’s recent post at BCC on how birth rates might be increased in accordance with GAs’ counsel to have more children, the question was briefly raised of how many children GAs themselves have. One commenter pointed to a post at By Study and Faith where Jared had found that younger members of the Quorum of the 12 have fewer children on average than do older members.
In this post, I will try to expand a little on Jared’s study by looking at FP/Q12 members over a longer period of time, as well as by trying to look at the link between GAs having lots of children and GAs encouraging Church members to have lots of children more explicit.
Carefully! Carefully with the plates!
I like to think that if J.R.R. Tolkien had been Mormon, he might have written a book about the hassles of getting the Book of Mormon translated. Such a book might have included the following song:
Chip the peepstone and break the plates!
Melt the sealed portion down!
That’s what Joseph Jr. hates—
Wave the sword of Laban around!
Cut the top off of the hat!
Lose page one through 116!
Smash the Urim and Thummim flat!
Refuse to put your farm to lien!
That’s what Joseph Jr. hates—
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!
Seven Modest Outfits from the Golden Globes
Sometimes it feels like “modest Hollywood” is an oxymoron. But this year, the stars at the Golden Globes proved that you can be modest even while putting on your swankiest get-up to get hammered and congratulate your filthy rich, extravagant selves on just being your filthy rich, extravagant selves. We at ZD tip our hats to these modest stars!
Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD: Ordaining Women
As Lynnette mentioned in her latest post, we are beginning a new feature: Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD, where you get to sample some real Bloggernacle comfort food. In this feature we’ll re-post classic postings from the first eight years of the blog. We hope you enjoy these delectable dishes as much as when they were first served up.
This first post is quite relevant to current events, and was written by Kiskilili. You can read the original post and associated comments here. Enjoy!
In his book Ordaining Women, sociologist Mark Chaves brings both quantitative and qualitative evidence to bear on his examination of women’s ordination as a general social phenomenon impacting the entire spectrum of Christian denominations. Mormonism receives no mention, perhaps because the issue takes on a different cast when applied to a lay ministry, but several of the issues he raises provide what strikes me as a useful framework for understanding our own church’s policy. Read More
Nacle Notebook 2013: Funny Comments
This post is a list of some of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle in 2013. In case you haven’t already seen them, here are links to similar lists from previous years: 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.
The comments are in roughly chronological order. Most of the original comments are longer, and I’ve only taken excerpts. Each commenter’s name is a link to the comment in its original context, in case you want to see where they came from.
Fair warning: This is kind of a long post, so you might not want to start it unless you have a little time to spare. I hope you enjoy it! Thanks to everyone who contributed to making me laugh so much as I read the Bloggernacle this past year, including both the comments I’ve listed here as well as all those I had to exclude to keep the post to a manageable size.
ZD Hits Accountability (Maybe) and Goes Environmental
We formally started ZD on January 4, 2006, which means that today is our eighth birthday. I’m not sure what it means for a blog to reach the age of accountability, but here we are. Whether or not this will make us better behaved is anyone’s guess. And if eight years is only the average, rather than some absolute age of responsibility, we might actually have a few years to go.
Mild Molly Mormon
(As told by Norman the Mormon, hat tip to Shel Silverstein)
Mild Molly Mormon, quoth her first cousin Norman,
Grew up as good Church members do.
She was always in meetings, exchanging hail greetings
Preparing for ol’ BYU.
And while in her youth, the Church teachings, forsooth,
Played sweetly upon her young heartstrings, their truth
Suffused with real beauty and goodness, indeed,
Met her soul’s greatest longing and spiritual need.
But our church is much more than just Jesus and verity,
King Benjamin’s sermon, Mormon’s faith, hope, and charity.
“And that is where Mild Molly’s problems they started
As you will soon see,” Norman sniffed, heavy-hearted. Read More
Oh, Say What is Truth
“You can’t handle the truth!”
This famous retort by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men seems to me to echo the conscious or subconscious thoughts of some of our leaders when addressing difficult issues, such as the priesthood and temple ban for blacks of African descent, the multiple first vision accounts of Joseph Smith, or the sexist, racist, or homophobic statements of past or current leaders. Read More
Elder Oaks Shows Us the Way Forward
So gay marriage is legal now in Utah. At least for a moment, until the appeals begin. The Church’s response, not surprisingly, is to hope for the ruling to be overturned:
This ruling by a district court will work its way through the judicial process. We continue to believe that voters in Utah did the right thing by providing clear direction in the state constitution that marriage should be between a man and a woman and we are hopeful that this view will be validated by a higher court.
But this was just the response on day one. Longer term, I wonder how hard the Church will fight this. I mean, if they spent so much money (mostly technically out of members’ pockets rather than directly, but still) and time and goodwill to fight gay marriage in California, how hard will they fight when it’s in their own backyard? Or maybe Utah should be considered their front yard.
(An aside: I feel odd calling the Church “they.” I feel like I should be able to say “we.” I’m a Mormon. I attend and participate. But I have zero voice in or influence over what the general Church leadership does, so in this circumstance, I think it makes sense.)
I think there’s a better way, and it comes out of Elder Oaks’s talk in October Conference. He tells us:
man’s laws cannot make moral what God has declared immoral. Commitment to our highest priority—to love and serve God—requires that we look to His law for our standard of behavior. For example, we remain under divine command not to commit adultery or fornication even when those acts are no longer crimes under the laws of the states or countries where we reside. Similarly, laws legalizing so-called “same-sex marriage” do not change God’s law of marriage or His commandments and our standards concerning it. We remain under covenant to love God and keep His commandments and to refrain from serving other gods and priorities—even those becoming popular in our particular time and place.
His intent here is clear, I think. He’s pointing out that even if laws change to allow gay marriage, the Church will still oppose it, so members shouldn’t take cues from secular laws in deciding what’s right and wrong. But the point he’s also making, perhaps unintentionally, is that it doesn’t matter if all the laws change. The Church is fine being out of step with the laws. The GAs will be happy to give a bunch of talks where they dismissively call them “so-called” laws. So given this, why doesn’t the Church take a page out of this talk and just drop its opposition to legalizing gay marriage?
How to Disavow the Priesthood Ban
For many years the Priesthood ban has been a matter of embarrassment and consternation to many Mormons. It makes us seem close-minded and exclusionary as a church, and seems to contradict many of our scriptures and core teachings–God not being a respecter of persons, all are alike unto God, etc. We struggle to explain it to our non-Mormon friends, and sometimes wish that it had just never happened. And to add insult to injury, we’ve had to endure many folk-theories justifying the ban, theories that are non-doctrinal and even offensive at times. So, it has finally come time to fully disavow the ban, once and for all.
Well, it turns out that a recent internet post inspired me to propose a forthright and direct disavowal that does not ignore the messy and painful history behind the ban. I realize my disavowal is imperfect, but here goes:
Welcome to the Temple
I’ve been working in the temple baptistery now for 6 months.
And there are a lot of aspects that are really painful, just as I suspected there would be. Consider that in the baptistery, there is absolutely no role for women in the ordinances. (While there are more active roles for women in the ordinances in the other parts of the temple, there are also those very serious issues that do not make it worth it—there is a reason I work in the baptistery and not elsewhere.) Men do the baptisms. Men do the witnessing. Men do the confirmations. It is even an exclusively male-only job to feed the names onto the little projector (?!) and sit and the counter to say “Welcome to the Temple!” No matter how short staffed they are with men, they will never allow the women to feed names into the projector…or sit at the counter to say “Welcome to the temple.”
Women’s jobs are folding towels. Hanging jumpsuits. Folding towels. Distributing jumpsuits. Folding towels. Sitting in the locker room to direct people between the ordinances that are all performed by men. Folding towels. Rolling socks, folding sports bras, folding briefs….and folding more towels.
There are men’s voices, everywhere. Prominent. Confident. Loud. I can hear them in the baptistery even when I’m sitting in the women’s locker room, rolling socks. I hear them telling people where to go and what to do. I hear them always saying “Welcome to the temple.” Male voices. We’re supposed to remind the young women in the locker room to be reverent and shush them when they get too excited talking as they blow dry their hair or get dressed. But I can never do it—the temple needs more women’s voices even if all they are saying is “where is my sock” or “pass the hair tie.” I like it when I’m sitting in the locker room, rolling socks and finally, finally the male voices drifting in from everywhere else are drowned out by the women’s. Read More
Four Troubling Theological Assertions in the Book of Mormon
1.
Location: 2 Nephi 4
Situation: Nephi is led by the Spirit, and finds Laban fallen to the earth and drunken with wine. The Spirit tells him to kill Laban. Nephi doesn’t want to do it. So the Spirit explains that the Lord has delivered Laban into his hands and he has to go through with it.
Money quote: “the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” Read More
Making Space for Myself as an Uncorrelated Mormon–Part 3: Try This One Weird Trick
(Previous posts about making space can be found here, here, and here.)
A while back I listened to a podcast where Fiona Givens discussed the lovely book she and her husband co-wrote called “The God Who Weeps”. I highly recommend it–the God they describe is compelling, one worth seeking after, connecting with, and emulating. Anyway, I was struck by her confidence in her Mormon-ness, her self-assurance that her way of being Mormon was completely valid, even though it sounded quite different from much of the Mormonism that I experience in my ward and during General Conference.
Being Prayed For
The oral exam I took at the end of my master’s program was a nightmare. I couldn’t remember the answers to basic questions. I learned later that the only reason they passed me was because my writing was good, and my advisor persuaded them that it would serve no purpose to fail me. But it was a horrible experience. Read More
An Ordinary Life
First I must confess that I do in fact like the line in Little Women when Jo’s mother says to her: “You have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to lead an ordinary life?” But as much as I want to see Jo live an extraordinary life, I’m finding myself more and more wary of such comments. Because we live in a culture where everyone is expected to have an extraordinary life. To just be an ordinary person—well, that’s settling. As in Lake Wobegon, we are all above average. And we have people saying odd things like,
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”1 Read More
- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marianne_Williamson [↩]
Ritual Subordination: I Just Don’t Get It
I’m personally in favor of women’s ordination. But I can see why people have reservations about it. It’s a pretty radical change to make, and would involve all kinds of logistical complications. Most LDS women actually don’t want the priesthood, and are happy with what they can contribute in the current system. There’s also the question of whether women should be seeking priesthood from men in the first place, as opposed to having their own line of priestesshood. I still come down on the side of ordaining women, but I can see it as a complicated question.
I have a much more difficult time when it comes to temple liturgy that subordinates women. Honestly, I just don’t get it. Read More
Being Nice
About a dozen years ago, I participated heavily on a message board for people with mental health issues. I made a lot of good friends there, and I felt comfortable, like I had a place. And then another Mormon appeared. Since we shared a religious background, of course we ended up talking a lot to each other. But something went wrong. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what happened, except that I know that she inadvertently pushed a lot of my buttons with the way she approached things; unsurprisingly, she was much more orthodox than I was, and tended to talk in terms of how sad it was that others on the board didn’t have the crystal clear truth that we did. Read More