The possibility of universalism comes up every so often in the bloggernacle (see for example, these discussions at M*, BCC, and NCT.) In reading these conversations, I’ve realized that my own universalist leanings are not particularly unusual, at least in the context of the Bloggernacle. (Further evidence of its apostate nature, some might say.) I think the theological debate is an interesting one. But in this post I want to bracket the question of whether universal salvation is possible in the context of LDS doctrine, and look at some of the more practical issues involved. The concern most often raised about the idea is that it leads to complacency. In a nutshell, if everyone is eventually going to be saved, what incentive do I have to be good? Why not eat, drink, and be merry? Is anxiety about salvation something positive, even necessary—something that will motivate me to live better in the here-and-now? Read More
Unfulfilled Promises
So, I’m not able to post much about anything that doesn’t relate to the reasons my life is currently falling apart. This post is connected to the post I made on “Trusting God,” but my questions and thoughts are slightly different.
What do you do when God makes promises to you (and you know it’s God), but those promises aren’t fulfilled? Read More
Implied Statistical Report Graphs
Over at T&S, Kent Larsen wrote an interesting post based on the Church’s statistical report from Conference. He compared this year’s data with statistical reports from 5, 10, and 25 years ago. Since I find this kind of speculation so entertaining, I searched lds.org and found statistical reports all the way back to 1973 to fill out the data set a little. To make the resulting data easier to look at, I’ve put some of the numbers Kent and the commenters discussed into graphs.
In Defense of Negative Feminism
One of the things that most struck me at the recent Claremont conference was the extent to which I was doing what I might call “negative feminism.” I’m using “negative” both in a kind of netural, descriptive sense (in academic theology, there’s a tradition of “negative theology” which emphasizes what we don’t know about God), as opposed to more constructive work which puts forth new ideas–and “negative” in the more usual sense of the term, in that I was in fact painting a rather negative picture of LDS teachings regarding the eternal status of women. The reactions I got were varied; some liked it, but others found it excessively gloomy. This has gotten me thinking about possible dangers with this approach, but also why I think it’s important. Read More
General Conference and the Sensus Fidelium
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
- Roger Haight, “Sensus Fidelium,” The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. Richard McBrien (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 1182-3. [↩]
Blessings of Understanding and Love
I’ve been wanting to put this post up for a while. The second annual World Autism Day gave me the impetus I needed to actually finish and publish it.
A while ago I was in the waiting room of a local children’s clinic, waiting for my son’s doctor’s appointment. There was another boy there with his parents and his grandmother. He was probably about 12, and while I’m not sure what exactly was wrong with him, he had some obvious developmental delays. I watched as his grandmother took him outside in the small garden adjoining the waiting room, and the boy expressed obvious delight in nature and the outdoors. When he came back inside he came up behind me and gave me a hug. It surprised me at first (I didn’t realize he’d come up behind me), but then I turned around, gave him a big smile, and said, “Hello.” He smiled back. His grandmother immediately rushed into a defensive explanation of him and his behavior. I just smiled and said, “I know.” Read More
Thoughts from the Claremont Conference
I spent last Friday at the Claremont conference, “Mormonism through the Eyes of Women.” It was an amazing experience. I’ve been to a lot of different Mormon conferences in the last couple of years, and presented at more than one of them, but none of them felt quite as intense to me as this one did. Perhaps because Mormon feminist theology is a topic which matters so much to me; perhaps because I hadn’t really presented publicly on the subject before (and I have to admit that I had some anxiety about doing it). But also, I think, because it was so exciting to be in a room full of people interested in talking about these ideas. I know that Mormon feminism is thriving; I see it on the blogs every day. But seeing it online isn’t quite the same as interacting live with a group of people who really care about the subject. Read More
Contemplating the Divine Feminine
(In case you missed our April 1 transformation)
Costs and Benefits of Patriarchy
As a feminist, I frequently blog about what I see as the problematic elements of patriarchy. However, I realize that many members of the Church (not to mention Church leaders!) see the situation quite differently. So I thought it might be interesting to simply see what I could come up with as far as potential costs and benefits of a patriarchal system. I realize that given my own views on this topic, there’s probably no way I can do this in a fair manner, but I’ll give it my best shot, and trust our astute readers to correct any misperceptions and point out things that I’ve overlooked. Read More
Better than Orange Juice
In the October 2000 General Conference, Elder Robert C. Oaks compared our reluctance to invite people to join the Church to a person’s reluctance to share orange juice with a guest:
Consider that you are invited to a friend’s house for breakfast. On the table you see a large pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice from which your host fills his glass. But he offers you none. Finally, you ask, “Could I have a glass of orange juice?”
He replies, “Oh, I am sorry. I was afraid you might not like orange juice, and I didn’t want to offend you by offering you something you didn’t desire.”
Now, that sounds absurd, but it is not too different from the way we hesitate to offer up something far sweeter than orange juice.
This has always struck me as a particularly poor analogy. It trivializes what I think are very real concerns we might have about sharing Mormonism with our friends. Read More
Thoughts on LDS Feminist Theological Work
A question which has been on my mind recently, as I have been contemplating some of the theological questions involved in LDS feminism, is that of methodology. In particular, what are the sources of authority which might be used in feminist approaches to the tradition? Too often, I think, LDS feminists—including myself—have a tendency to simply import norms and values from the varieties of feminism which are prominent in contemporary secular discourse, and then measure the Church against them. This inevitably leads to the criticism that feminists are advocating “worldly” values, and these are irrelevant in the realm of revealed religion. For example, popular terms like “rights” and “equality” may have deep resonance when invoked in the context of Western liberal democracy, but some question the usefulness of these terms in a Christian context. Read More
A (Very) Little Data on Mom Blogs and Nacle Blogs
This post is a comment on the Mom Blogs versus the Bloggernacle Blogs discussion at BCC last week. Specifically, when the question of size and exposure of different blogs came up, Vada asked if I could crunch some numbers on the question. Read More
Random Facts: Tell Us About Yourself
I’m feeling a little guilty because no one has posted anything here for a while (and our last post was even a guest post — thanks Beatrice!). But I’m also pretty much incapable of higher thought function at the moment, so you get to read some more random nothingness. There has recently been a fad on facebook where you post 25 random facts about yourself. I joined in, mostly because I had enjoyed reading what other people wrote so much. I thought I would share my list with you as well, and I would love to get to know all of you better by hearing some random facts about your life. Read More
Check out Exponent’s Best of the Blog
We’re a bit slow at the moment, we know; evidently all the ZDs have gotten distracted by other life matters (where are our priorities?) But if you’re looking for something fun to read, you should check out Exponent’s “Best of the Blog 2008.”
Talking About Gender Differences
This guest post comes to us from Beatrice.
In our society, we like to talk about the differences between men and women. It is the stuff upon which great novels and films are built. It can be used as a source of bonding with our same-sex peers “Oh, my husband does that too,” or it can be used to explain our relationship struggles “I just don’t understand why women do that.” Talking about the differences between men and women adds a certain richness to our lives and resonates with the way that we think about the world. There is something so appealing about the idea that “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” In church settings, there is an added layer to all of this. We like to talk about gender differences because it is an essential part of our doctrine. Women always were women and will always be women. Men always were men and will always be men. These inherent, divinely organized differences are the reason why men and women should play different roles in the church organization and in society. Read More
Political Memories
The first election I remember was in 1980. The Weekly Reader had pictures of Reagan and Carter, and our kindergarten class held our own election. I thought Reagan had a nicer smile and looked more friendly in his picture, so I voted for him. Several students in my Utah class were upset, because they wanted to vote for President Kimball and he wasn’t pictured. My teacher had to explain that “President” could refer to the President of the United States or the President of the LDS Church, and we weren’t trying to vote President Kimball out of office. Read More
To Be Healthier
Kevin had a nice post at BCC not long ago on losing weight. It is, after all the time of year for buckling down and deciding that this time, we’re going to do those hard things that we’ve been struggling with. While I’m fairly happy with my weight right now (I’m not quite where I want to be, but I’m steadily losing baby weight), it reminded me of a related goal I have this year: to be healthier. Read More
Generosity of Spirit
Last year as some of my fellow teachers and I were talking about the end-of-semester comments we have to write for all of our students, a teacher remarked that one of her favorite phrases to use (and which she reserves for special students) was “generosity of spirit.” She explained that there are often students in her classes who are not only smart and intellectually curious, but who also have a knack for stepping back and letting other students shine, who are willing to really listen to their classmates and respond to their ideas and concerns, and who approach their own work and fellow students with a certain kind of acceptance and understanding. Read More
Rearranging Zelophehad’s Daughters
If you’ve visited recently, you may have noticed that elements of our sidebars have been moving around. We recently upgraded our WordPress installation, so Lynnette has been tidying everything up in the aftermath, when of course some plugins failed and now have to be replaced.
But rather than rearranging pieces of our blog, I’m thinking more about rearranging the letters in Zelophehad’s Daughters to see what words I could come up with. If you’ve made a resolution, as I have, to waste more time in 2009 than you did in 2008, you’ll immediately see the value of such an undertaking.
So I’ve fiddled around with Zelophehad’s Daughters, as well as the names of some other blogs I read most, to see what I could come up with. I’m not nearly good enough to do complete anagrams, where all the letters are used. Most of my solutions are just partial, leaving one or more letters out. Also, since I did these all manually, I’ve probably made errors, so please feel free to point them out.
Here are a few of my favorites: Read More
Three Years of ZD, and an Invitation to Say Hello
Today marks ZD’s third anniversary. Our third year has been perhaps a bit slower than the previous two in terms of regular posting, but we’re happy that we’ve managed to stay alive (albeit with occasional long pauses between posts). Our approach to blogging, as you’ve doubtless observed, is random and haphazard. No one on ZD really presides (whether as a full-fledged presider or a chicken patriarch)–depending on your point of view, this is evidence of why presiding is unnecessary, or why loosely organized anarchy is a mistake. Read More