In Missionary Work

More Thoughts on “Raising the Bar”

Author ZiffPosted on 24 Comments

The discussion of “raising the bar” in Steve Evans’s Friday Firestorm #24 last month at BCC got me to thinking about what the possible effects of this more stringent missionary screening policy might be.

The screening process that includes interviews with a missionary candidate’s Bishop or Branch President can result in two types of errors. A candidate can be approved to serve a full-time mission when he or she should not have been, or a candidate can be kept home when in fact he or she was qualified to serve. If the goal of the screening process is thought of as a medical test diagnosing “shouldn’t serve syndrome,” the first kind of error would be a failure to diagnose a true case (a miss), and the second kind would be diagnosing someone who isn’t a case (a false alarm).

So what does raising the bar mean for these two types of errors? Read More

In Mental Health, Personal Narratives

Some New Year’s Thoughts

Author SeraphinePosted on 8 Comments

Usually sometime in January, I write down a list of the things I’d like to try and accomplish during the upcoming year. It’s usually not a long list, and I’m not very intense about it, and I usually only accomplish one or two things on the list (and this is often based on the fact that one to two things on my list are things that I think I will likely accomplish). However, I enjoy doing some thinking about how my life has gone for the past year and what I’m trying to envision for the upcoming year.

Except this year I’m not sure if I want to write up a list. Read More

In Administrivia, Blogging, Christian Practice, Christmas

FMH Janet’s Worthy Christmas Cause

Author ZDPosted on

As we’re sure many of you are already aware, Janet of FMH is spearheading an effort to buy animals for those who need them through Heifer International. Her post, with further details, can be found here . As she explains, you can either make a General Team Donation to Team Bloggernacle, or, if you prefer, you can set up your own page for a mere $10 administrative fee.

In Equality, Feminism, Gender Issues

Exploring a Misconception about Feminism: Women’s Superiority

Author SeraphinePosted on 68 Comments

One of the complaints I often hear about feminism (on the bloggernacle and elsewhere) is that feminists say that women are superior to men, or that feminism is about advancing women above or ahead of men (etc.).

When I hear this I am confused, since in all women’s studies classes I’ve taught and in all the conversations I’ve had with fellow feminists, we have focused on men and women’s equality (and what that means, how best to achieve it, etc.). Read More

In Chicken Patriarchy, Gender Issues

The Trouble with Chicken Patriarchy

Author KiskililiPosted on 226 Comments

When it comes to patriarchy, the Church is all over the map. Husbands preside, but husbands and wives are equal partners. “While the husband, the father, has responsibility to provide worthy and inspired leadership, his wife is neither behind him nor ahead of him but at his side” (Boyd K. Packer). The two are “equally yoked” side by side, but the husband “provides leadership,” implying that the wife supplies the “followership”–not from a position behind him, but rather at his side: perhaps they are meant to walk sidewise? (This all sounds more awkward than a three-legged race.) Read More

In Gender Issues, Presiding, Statistics

Secular Usage of “Preside”

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

In a discussion last year at T&S about what it means for a husband to preside, Jim F. argued that it doesn’t really matter what preside means outside the Church because the word just isn’t much used outside the Church (and perhaps court). Kiskilili disagreed, saying that she thought that secular usage was more common.

At the time, it occurred to me that this would be a relatively simple question to get data to answer, but I put the thought on the back burner, so I am just now getting around to trying to answer it. I chose to search newspapers to attempt to answer the question, given that they tend to have a very broad target audience and are fairly widely read (although I know they aren’t read as much as they used to be).

1. Is preside ever used in a secular context? Read More

In Church Life

Enrichment Activities

Author VadaPosted on 11 Comments

I woke up today and for the first time in my life I actually wanted an Enrichment calling. Weird, I know.

I think one of the things that spawned this desire was the comment someone made recently on another blog (sorry, I can’t remember who or where) that they had activities where the pastor/priest/rabbi/whatever of another religion would speak to them about that religion, and then they would go and visit that leader’s church. I think this would be fascinating. Read More

In Gender Issues, Heavenly Mother

Why I Don’t Want to Believe in Heavenly Mother

Author LynnettePosted on 86 Comments

It’s high time I confess a heresy that may put me at odds both with many Mormons and with many feminists: I’m not really all that enamored of the idea of the divine feminine, of the doctrine that we have a Heavenly Mother.

I don’t recall when I first encountered the teaching that we have a Heavenly Mother as well as a Father—though I can say that the idea that Heavenly Father had multiple wives was one that rather horrified me (it still does). But even beyond the potential polygamy problem, the notion of an Eternal Mother was one that left me feeling a bit icky. I projected the kinds of saccharine rhetoric about women that I heard about church onto her, imagining a Mother who was always soft-spoken and dripping with sentimentality. I figured that if such a divine personage did indeed exist, I didn’t want anything to do with her.

Read More

In Religion

Does Learning More About Mormonism Make You Dislike It More?

Author LynnettePosted on 24 Comments

In a discussion of Romney’s “Mormon Problem” on a recent Bloggingheads video, Amy Sullivan makes the following observation:

What really interests me about Mormonism is it’s very different from the situation Kennedy faced in that with anti-Catholicism, a lot of it was based on misinformation about Catholics and misunderstandings, and there, learning more about it, hearing Kennedy talk about his relationship to his faith and the lines that he drew actually did put some voters at ease. Whereas with anti-Mormonism, it’s practically the only bias where learning more about it actually makes people who were opposed more opposed—because they have kind of a vague sense that Mormonism might be a little weird to them, and that they might not agree with things—but they don’t really know the specifics of it. Read More

In Academia, Art & Literature, Belief, Religion

The Western University and the Secular Compromise: Some Implications for Literature

Author EvePosted on 12 Comments

This afternoon one of my students met with me about his next paper, which he wants to write refuting The Da Vinci Code and defending the divinity of Jesus Christ. I found myself struggling to explain to him why he can’t write such a paper to fulfill a university assignment. I tried to help him think about possible lines of argument he could pursue that would allow him to discuss his beliefs in intellectual and secular terms. It is my pleasant responsibility to help him master the norms of the university, and that means learning to speak, think, and write about religion in terms accessible to public consideration, in the terms of rational argument and empirical analysis. On the one hand, I deeply respect those terms; I’ve chosen with great joy to spend my six-day-a-week life examining the world in them. And learning to think about one’s beliefs in intellectual terms can be a vital and invigorating experience, although there are far too few spaces in the borderlands between the university and the church where believing students can bring the disparate pieces of their lives together; as a believing scholar, I long for more such spaces. But on the other hand, perhaps we secular educators (among whom I must count myself, insofar as I teach a secular subject in a secular context) sometimes rush too quickly over the losses incurred in the secular environment. The most essential expressions of religious belief are generally precluded by secular norms; in an important sense we allow every possible discussion of religion except what it most essentially is. Read More

In Legal Issues, Polygamy

What would the church say about making polygamy legal?

Author VadaPosted on 32 Comments

I was reading this article about laws that are no longer really enforced, of which anti-polygamy laws are one. I’ve read about this other places, too. The only time anti-polygamy laws are prosecuted is when someone is being prosecuted for something else (i.e. they’re prosecuted for enabling statutory or other rape, or for misusing the welfare system, or something, and since they’re also a polygamist, that charge gets tacked on, too). No one really wants to prosecute anyone for having more than one spouse unless they’re doing other things we don’t approve of. And the next logical step to our society’s acceptance of polygamy as a valid life choice (even if most people don’t want to participate in it) is to make it legal to make that choice.

What do you think the church would do/say if there was a push to get anti-polygamy laws off the books? Read More

In Presiding, Secrecy, Temple

Secrecy and the Economics of Religious Devotion

Author KiskililiPosted on 21 Comments

Religious secrecy is nothing new; ancient mystery religions enjoyed a long history and vital following, and even some early Christian groups apparently did not reveal key doctrines to catechumens until after baptism. A number of instantiations of institutional secrecy in the Church can be identified, among them the veil over the handbook of instructions and the lack of public information on how tithing dollars are spent. But what interests me here is the significance to community dynamics of the conducting of secret ceremonies. Read More

In Art & Literature, Language

Why I Love Poetry

Author EvePosted on 14 Comments

This semester I’m taking a course in French phonetics in mild defiance of my department’s new stricter graduation timelines; I’ve already fulfilled the language requirement, and I simply want to improve my pronunciation. It’s fascinating. As I told Lynnette enthusiastically over the phone last weekend, “We’re learning all about where in the mouth you say the different vowels!” Not being one of the family’s language nuts, she said, affectionately and dryly, “How boring!” (Acid criticism from a woman who teaches Thomas Aquinas to grad students.) And we both had a good laugh. Read More

In Art & Literature

How Do You Read Books (and Watch Movies)?

Author ZiffPosted on 22 Comments

I just picked up Tyler Cowen’s Discover your Inner Economist, and found that he has some rather unorthodox suggestions for how to get the most enjoyment out of reading books and watching movies. He argues that when it comes to these experiences, the major limiting factor is the scarcity of our own attention. Cowen’s approach? Quit early and often if something loses your interest:

When should we finish a book we have started? In this regard I am extreme. If I start ten books maybe I will finish one of them. I feel no compunction to keep reading. Why not be brutal about this? Is this book the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world? For me at least, the answer is usually (but not always) no.

Read More