Carmella is a devout Mormon who would describe herself as conservative. She is highly critical of feminism, worrying that it focuses on the wrong things, devalues the important contributions of women, and potentially leads to apostasy. However, over time, small things begin to bother her, and she starts dipping her toe into feminist waters. She notes that all the women’s organizations are presided over by men, and wonders why women can’t pray in General Conference. She becomes more concerned with the gender roles outlined by the church, and more skeptical of the priesthood/motherhood equation. She wants to know more about Heavenly Mother. She becomes more and more aware of the ways in which patriarchy is destructive. Her belief in the church slowly wanes, until she describes herself as agnostic at best, and she is uncertain that she can continue to be part of the church and still have integrity.
Dalton Discouragement
President Dalton’s much-discussed talk was particularly hard for me. It’s of course frustrating to hear that if you see inequities, the problem is your lack of righteousness, and if you want more of a voice in your own church, you’re insufficiently virtuous. But I’ve heard those sentiments so often that usually I can take the Teflon approach: roll my eyes, and get back to whatever I was doing. This talk, though, hit me harder, and left me more seriously wondering than I have for a while what the heck I’m doing in this church (even as my use of the phrase “what the heck” makes me feel ridiculously Mormon). Read More
Give Me a Break
Have you ever felt the need or desire to “take a break” from church?
Why or why not?
If you did, and you acted on it, what were the consequences (good or bad)?
Nacle Notebook 2012: Funny Comments
“What is God really like?”
When Beatrice and I were serving together as missionaries, we were lucky enough to be in a district that included the mission offices. The APs and office Elders were in our district, so more often than not we held district meetings in a cozy conference room in the main mission office building, giving us frequent occasion to see the Mission President and his wife.
Throughout our companionship, Beatrice mentioned to me that she had questions about the role of women as depicted in the temple endowment. We discussed it a few times in companionship study, and then – taking advantage of our proximity to the mission leaders – one day we decided to take the issue to the wife of the MP. To be clear, we didn’t openly dissect elements of the endowment that are considered private or sacred. We talked about the sorts of things that are commonly parsed on fMh, Exponent II, and here at ZD: the hearken covenant; women veiling their faces; the almost complete silence of Eve and lack of other female characters in the pre-mortal realm; and other, similar issues. Read More
Lynnette
Most of you out there in the Bloggernaccle probably know and love Lynnette. Of the rest, half of you just don’t know her half as well as you would like, and she likes less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Read More
“I am no man!”
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, Éowyn, a human noblewoman, disguises herself as a man and goes to battle, eventually facing the dreaded Witch-King of Angmar. Upon seeing her, armored like a warrior, the Witch-King scoffs, citing an ancient elven prophecy that no living man can kill him. Éowyn removes her helmet, showing herself to be a woman, and cries “I am no man!”* as she slays him.
I must confess, every time the debate over the pros and cons of gender-inclusive language resurfaces in the bloggernacle, my mind returns to that scene, and to the question I had when I first read The Lord of the Rings as a child: How did Éowyn know that the prophecy was referring specifically to human males, and not to humans in general? It wasn’t at all obvious to me. Read More
Merry Christmas!
“Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humored fellows said, ‘Good morning, sir! A Merry Christmas to you!’ and Scrooge said often afterward, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Scrupulosity
It was a Catholic friend who first introduced me to the term “scrupulosity,” a condition in which one is overly obsessed with personal sin. The topic came up because of my friend’s observation that I had some tendencies in that direction. I didn’t disagree. But I must confess that on some level I actually took the observation as a compliment. I secretly believed that it was an indication of a virtuous life. I must be a truly moral person, I thought, to be so acutely aware of my constant failings—and to be so unwilling to cut myself any slack for them. Read More
My life as a member of the church
The following is an excerpt from an interview between a member of the Strengthening the Members Committee and missionary rodent, shortly after she was taken into captivity
How long have you been following us?
My people first came to this planet in search of intelligent life in the hopes of opening trade negotiations, and seeking a new avenue for allies in our continuing war–
A Few Days Before Christmas: Notes from an MTC talk by Cheiko Okazaki
Nearly a decade ago I was a missionary, serving for three weeks in the Provo MTC before moving on to a smaller MTC in Latin America for the remainder of my Spanish language training. While I was in Provo, Sister Cheiko Okazaki (1926-2011), the former first counselor of the Relief Society General Presidency, came and spoke to the Sister missionaries. (I was sad, after hearing her, that the Elders had not been invited as well.)
I have always loved Sister Okazaki’s thoughts. In her books and public speaking, she quotes often from the Bible. Her advice that day in the MTC was both practical and inspiring, a discussion of dealing with feelings of inadequacy and hypocrisy, of “putting on Christ,” and of navigating the need to forgive ourselves and others on our journey. It was filled with metaphors from scripture about clothing and Christian discipleship. Read More
The Politics (say it ain’t so!) of Pants
Sorry, friends: I apparently can’t stop myself from weighing in on Pantpocalypsalooza (term borrowed from someone cleverer than me), so if you can’t stand to hear any more about it, I’d stop reading now. Read More
“If You Don’t Like It, Leave,” and Religious Pluralism
One of the things that has stood out to me in wading through the comments on The Great Pants Uproar (not a great use of one’s time, I must say, though that didn’t stop me) is the number of people who have expressed the sentiment, “if you don’t like the church, you should leave.” I want to think about this idea from a theological angle, specifically what it means in the context of religious pluralism. Read More
Feeling Equal
An oft-made statement in discussions of gender equality in the church is something along the lines of, “I’ve never felt unequal.” (Or, if the speaker is male, “My wife/daughters/sisters have never felt unequal.”) Sometimes there’s a barb in it: “I’ve never felt unequal, so why do you? What’s wrong with your testimony?” But more often than not, I think it’s simply an honest account of a person’s experience, combined perhaps with a bafflement that other women have the concerns they do. Read More
It wasn’t about pants…but then it became about pants. And that’s why I’m wearing pants.
No, seriously. There are, at this very moment, a lot of people who are convinced that the end of the world is coming because of trousers. In church even! On ladies!
The Mayans predicted this! Read More
Names and Identities
When we started ZD nearly seven years ago, I don’t recall that we had much discussion about whether or not to use pseudonyms—I think we simply took it for granted that we would. Some of my co-bloggers spent some time coming up with creative names. Seraphine originally went by “S”, and I recall an extended email conversation about name ideas for her. In contrast, I was pretty boring; I decided to just use my middle name, of which I’ve always been rather fond. Read More
Introvert Church
What would a church designed by and for introverts look like?
Everything I Know about Feminism I Learned from the 1970s
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
On Mission Hierarchy, Gender, and Organizational Communication
In support of RAH’s Sister Missionary Leadership Project over at fMh, here’s a post about my mission originally published at Both Sides Now in July of last year.
In our mission we had APs and “Traveling Elders” who assisted with a lot of the nuts and bolts of mission organization (for a primer on the organizational structure of LDS missions, see here). They acted as extra eyes and ears for the Mission President (MP), traveling around the mission area and checking in with different companionships, helping to arrange apartments, discussing difficulties in different areas or companionships, etc. Because mission rules prevented the young Elders from visiting one-on-one with the Sister missionaries, the MP created a calling he dubbed the “Coordinating Sister.” It was the Coordinating Sister’s job, once or twice a month, to travel around the mission area with her companion, work with other Sister missionaries, and then report back to the MP. From my vantage point it was a very helpful calling, since mission culture and rules meant not only that Sisters were often more isolated than Elders, but also that they typically felt very inhibited about discussing problems in companionships with their District or Zone Leaders or even with the MP. (I should probably note that neither I nor any of my companions served as the Coordinating Sister.)
Read More
Optimally (un)reasonable commandments
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.