Zelophehad's Daughters

I wrote this two years ago and just happened to come across it today.  

My senior year at BYU was pretty darn lame.  But, you know, it was only lame because I made it lame with my panic.  You see, it was the first time I actually realized that I was going to be graduating…with a humanities degree…and I was still single…

The irony of the whole thing was that I was totally blindsided.  I was that girl who would shake her head sadly at those other girls in MFHD/ElementaryEd** who came to college to “get married.”

“You go to college to…GO TO COLLEGE,” I would intone philosophically at BBQ’s.

But, ya know what?  Come September 2005, I was in full scale panic. Read More

Today is a day when I wish to honor the crowning glory of God’s creation, that being which is supernal among God’s children, whose qualities mirror as no others’ do the supreme love, grace, and dignity of its creator; whose elegance, gentleness of soul, and unique reproductive capacities bespeak its divine origins.  I speak of course of Wombat, the shnuffliest and burrowingest of all Australian mammals, the most pudgy-nosed and adorable. God indeed has a special love for his wombats.

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On the Friday before Easter, I went to a Tenebrae service at a Luthern church on the other side of town. We sang hymns in minor keys and read through the passion story, up to the Crucifixion and ending there, as the candles in the church were slowly extinguished, and the sun outside the high windows sank below the horizon. When the service ended with Christ still in the tomb, it was nearly dark inside the church, and the last of the light outside was the deep, heavy blue just before nighttime has entirely settled; the congregants walked back to their cars in near silence. I had rarely felt so still, like the weight of the words and darkness had sunk over me, the hand of God had come to quiet all the seething inside that I couldn’t calm on my own. Read More

I mentioned in my last post that I found FMH in the spring of 2005. I periodically looked at the bloggernacle that year, but much of my time online was spent on another, mental-health related message board, and I didn’t have time to be involved in many more online activities. Also, while I was intrigued by Mormon blogs, I was also intimidated, and I have to admit that I was uncertain that I would find any welcome there. In Mormon contexts I’ve so often felt like an outsider, and I worried that the same dynamic would be at work online. So while I was interested to see people discussing such a wide variety of questions, I didn’t follow the blogs very closely.

I’m not sure what shifted, but in December of that year, I decided to start commenting on FMH. Read More

As I mentioned in my last post, I wasn’t planning to study theology when I went off to grad school. But once I started, I fell in love with it. I’ve blogged before about how it affected my faith more generally. But here I want to mention some of the issues that came up which were particularly related to my developing feminism, and mention some of the questions I was thinking about.

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I didn’t plan to go to BYU. In fact, I planned to go anywhere but BYU. As a teenager, I was determined to get out of the state of Utah. But when my senior year rolled around, and BYU offered me money, and I looked at the financial realities of my situation—it made sense. So in the end, I gave in.

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I first saw the Star Wars movies when I was eleven, shortly after my parents purchased our first VCR. I was an immediate and enthusiastic convert. My siblings and I watched the movies over and over—in the days before we owned them, we used to check them out from the library every week (my mother would ask, are you sure you don’t want to try something new? and we would inevitably answer, no). I can divide up my life into Before Star Wars, and After. Read More

When people talk about the reasons for uncivil behavior on the internet, anonymity is often mentioned as a culprit. If no one knows who you are, the theory goes, you’re less likely to censor yourself. And it certainly is ridiculously easy to find people posting under pseudonyms and tearing each other apart. (Just check out the comment section of most newspapers.) Read More

Some recent Facebook bloggernacle conversation has gotten me thinking once again about an issue that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time. (I probably started this post during the Prop 8 Blog Wars, but in classic ZD fashion, never got around to finishing it.) My original title was something like “Should We Have Compassion for Gays?” I changed it because I didn’t want to deal with the people who only read the title of the post before commenting. But that is in fact the question I want to think about.

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How do we describe women’s participation in the Church to non-Mormons? There have been a few recent published statements that have all attempted this and have, in my view, all gotten it wrong in the same way.

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Just for fun: Read More

If you follow the bloggernacle, by this time, you are likely familiar with Ralph Hancock’s recent two-part article at Meridian Magazine (parts one and two) about Joanna Brooks’ memoir, The Book of Mormon Girl. (See discussions here, here, and here.) I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I found this essay seriously troubling, and I wanted to add my two cents. There is a lot to consider, but I want to focus on a few things I found particularly problematic: Hancock’s condescending tone and generally dismissive attitude toward Brooks, and his approach to issues of gender and feminism. Read More

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Recently the ZDs brought together a panel of experts in male reproductive health to discuss an important but sensitive issue that affects all of us, with implications for religion, hygiene, and public policy. This is an abridged transcript of that discussion.

Myrtle-Jane Merryweather, moderator

Harriet Appleworthy, MD

Lucy Quackenbush, PhD, child psychology

Rachel Goldfarb, professional mohelet

Eliza Piddlewit, author, Intact Makes a Comeback!

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More than ten years ago, now, I went through the most brutal emotional experience of my life—one that still haunts me on an almost daily basis. Under the circumstances, I was temporarily numb to almost any emotion.

The next Sunday, before Sacrament Meeting, a friend of mine in the ward came over to say hi and cheer me up a bit (although he knew nothing about my situation). In the course of our conversation, he made a joke and, for the first time in days, I laughed.

Loudly.

My roommate immediately shushed me and rebuked me for not being reverent.

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If whispers and soft music and seriousness float your boat, I don’t mind and I really will do my best not to disturb you. But I come from a family that’s been through all kinds of hell, and we’ve learned to laugh, because it sure beats crying.

When I was a teenager, I didn’t really like poetry. It seemed like a language I didn’t speak, a secret code that I couldn’t figure out. I dutifully read it for my English classes the way the way that one duly eats your vegetables, because they are Good For You–and, of course, because I was required to do so. When people (like my older sister Eve) told me that they genuinely enjoyed poetry, that just didn’t make sense to me.

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Now that I have made some general comments about the overall theological approach of An Experiment on the Word: Reading Alma 32, I would like to engage some of the specific content. As I said in my last post, there is a lot of great material. But two subjects in particular caught my interest: faith, and creeds.

Faith often gets talked about as a cognitive effort, a sort of forcing yourself to believe despite a lack of evidence. If something doesn’t make sense to you, or seems problematic, you might be told to “just have faith.” In such an understanding of faith, it is primarily intellectual in nature. It represents a lack—you only have to have it because you don’t have knowledge.  It requires you to ignore doubt, or see it as a threat. This kind of faith is fearful of new information which might challenge it. And notably, in such a model faith is a quality possessed by an individual, outside the context of any relationship.

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An Experiment on the Word (ed. Adam S. Miller, Salt Press 2011) is a product of the Mormon Theology Seminar, a short-term collaborative project in which a small group of people engage in a close read of specific texts. This particular book focuses on Alma 32. It includes a jointly-authored summary report of the conclusions reached by the participants in the seminar, as well as six individually-authored essays approaching the text in a variety of ways. Read More

One of the endlessly entertaining topics in Mormonism is the conundrum of figuring out what exactly constitutes “official doctrine,” and how we make that determination. I found myself seriously grappling with this dilemma early on in my theological studies, when I first attempted to write an academic paper on Mormonism for a non-LDS audience. I wrote, “LDS doctrine is x”—and then I wondered how I knew that, and what reference I should cite.  Of course, we have a lot of official-ish sources.  The scriptures certainly have a strong claim to authority—but sometimes they contradict each other, there is widespread disagreement regarding how many of them should be interpreted, and there are plenty of things in the canon (especially the Bible) that we overlook altogether.  The same could be said for the teachings of church leaders. I often look at recent publications or conference talks to get a sense of what is being currently taught and emphasized. But the boundaries of “official teaching” remain somewhat murky.  I do not see this as necessarily a bad thing. But the situation nonetheless poses challenges for anyone trying to say something coherent about LDS beliefs. Read More

Before commenting, I’d like to request that people please review the policies – please refrain from giving me advice (the questions I ask here are meant to stimulate discussion, they are not me actually asking for people to give to me personally solutions), questioning my testimony, or challenging my faith.  Any such attempts to do so will be moderated.

I was a junior in college when I first saw the movie The Incredibles.  It was a Saturday afternoon, I’d had a really bad day when plans for a project feel through in the last minute, and I was in a foul mood.  Wanting only to spend money on indulgence, I took a bus to the mall to see a movie.  I picked The Incredibles – it was new, it was popular, and it got great reviews.  What could I lose?

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