No surprise, I know. However, I also can’t say that I’ve seen many violations here in my ward and stake — perhaps I’m just out of the loop in some ways, but I haven’t seen emails from fellow ward members using the ward list for political or marketing purposes. Nor has anything appeared on the unofficial ward facebook group. Many years ago I did see one attempt to start an LDS bookstore by putting flyers up in chapels, but I haven’t seen anything since.

Nevertheless, I’m sure that this happens, as Coppins makes clear in his article. [I should point out that Coppins doesn't make entirely clear the distinction between official resources, like the online ward directories, and the 3,500-strong "Colonial First Ward listserv," which is likely unofficial given its size (10x or more that of a singles ward) and the fact that it is apparently an email group like you can set up with yahoogroups or google groups (and many other places).] Unofficial groups like the ones he discusses are particularly ripe for issues like this, since no one will be called into their bishop for violating the policies of an unofficial group.

What is perhaps confusing in the case of the “Colonial First Ward listserv” is that, apparently, those on the list didn’t complain about the clear violation of the listserv rules! Surely not all 3,500 in the group want the political adds and solicitations (assuming that they actually read the email from the list). I’m sure that there are at least a few Democrats in the group, and I’d bet that more than a few Republicans wouldn’t be happy about the violation of the rules, if they noticed it.

Despite my preference for following the rules, I think there are times when I would support some, limited, violations of the policy — like for the struggling member trying to find an audience for his catering business or something. I can see how some situations might be reasonable exceptions, even if it means that one member can do it and I can not.

Also, its not always clear that these messages ARE a violation of the rules. Did the offender spam the ward list? Or did he just collect the addresses of those he thinks are his friends? Can you make your own email list, and just use the ward list to collect information for it? Why? or Why not?

Regardless, I’m interested in how often others see violations by Mormons of Church policy like this, or even violations of the policies or norms of unofficial groups, blogs, websites, facebook groups, etc. Does it happen much? How do you feel about it? What, if anything, do you do? Do you tell the Bishop when the bulletin board is used for personal gain? or do you just take down the offending item? Or are there times when you simply leave the item in place?

How do you handle these things when you see them? What have you seen?

I confess that I wasn’t familiar with Lomax until after I got married. The long and the short of it: Alan Lomax was a folklorist and an ethnomusicologist. He took his recording equipment around, and recorded people performing the music they performed. He recorded them talking. He taped their dancing. He worked to document and preserve cultures, both within and without the U.S.

His prodigious legwork provided the first recordings of, among others, Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters. He met and recorded Leadbelly in jail. He didn’t really create folk music culture, but he certainly introduced it to those of us who otherwise wouldn’t know it. In the end, the New York Times tells me, he collected 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs, and all sorts of memoirs.

—

The Church is amazing (though not unique) in its attraction of people from all sorts of cultures, countries, and regions. In my ward, we have Utahns, Idahoans, Midwesterners, Easterners, Californians. We have immigrants from Central America, refugees and immigrants from West Africa, members from Korea and Mongolia. We have people whose history intersects with the Church for generations, and people whose history intersects for months.

In 1997, speaking at BYU, President Hinckley said, “Bring all the good that you have and let us see if we can add to it.” It seems to me that this is a call for us, as church members, to become amateur folklorists and ethnomusicologists. Through our fellow-saints, we can learn and experience other cultures, and in our ward families, we can preserve the cultures the mix by virtue of geographic, and not self-selected, boundaries. And, by doing so, we can benefit from the good that people bring with them on Sundays.

But why? Why would Romney give the Church equity stakes in bad fast-food chains, second-rate pizza chains, and other such holdings?[fn1]

Taxes. Sure, there may be other reasons, too, but there’s a significant tax advantage to donating appreciated assets to charities.[fn2]

Remember, certain donors to 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, can take a deduction for donations they make to that organization. An example of how it works: assume that in 2011 I itemized my deductions, that I earned $100,000[fn3], that my marginal tax rate was 25%, and that I wrote a check to the Church for $10,000. As a result of my charitable contribution, I can deduct the $10,000, which lowers my tax bill by $2,500.

And, it turns out, I get the same deduction if, instead of writing a check for $10,000, I donate, for example, stock worth $10,000. I get a deduction for the fair market value of property donated.

But that stock donation may save me more than $2,500 in taxes. Because we don’t know right now what I paid for the stock. Assume, for example, that I paid $1,000 for the stock I donate. If I wanted to get access to its $10,000 of value, I would have to sell the stock. I would realize a gain of $9,000, which would currently be taxed at a 15% rate, so I would owe $1,350 of taxes. In fact, if I sold the stock for $10,000 cash, and took those bills and gave them to my bishop, I would still owe $1,350 in taxes on my gain.

But the gain is not triggered when I donate the stock to the Church. So now I have a $10,000 deduction that saves me $2,500 in taxes, and I have a potential tax liability of $1,350 that will never materialize. And, because money is fungible, by fulfilling my tithing liability with property, I’ve freed up $10,000 of liquid assets to do with as I please.

And what does the Church do with Burger King stock? It has two options: it can put the stock in its investment portfolio, or it can sell the stock and use the $10,000 it realizes (and doesn’t pay taxes on—remember, the Church, like all 501(c)(3)s, doesn’t pay taxes on its investment income) to do whatever it would have done with the $10,000 in cash that I could have donated. I suspect, in general, that the Church (and, frankly, most charities) takes the second route.

—

[fn1] It may be that Romney didn’t donate all of those stocks, but his campaign acknowledges that he donated at least some.

[fn2] Note that, from this point on, any motive I suggest for Romney or the Church is pure conjecture: I don’t know Mitt Romney personally. It is within the realm of possibility that he had substantive non-tax reasons for giving the Church a share of Burger King. That said, I kind of doubt it.

[fn3] I should note that the amount of money I earn is something other than $100,000. But, for the sake of mathematical simplicity, every hypothetical person I deal with earns $100,000.

Over the summer, the Bloomberg administration announced that, for the first time in two decades, public school students in New York would be required to take sex-ed. The curriculum the administration recommended—HealthSmart (middle school and high school) and Reducing the Risk—include, among other things, lessons on abstinence and birth control.

Not surprisingly, the proposal has been controversial. It seems like sex-ed is one of the culture-wars topics that never gets old. But I’m not really a culture-wars person, and the real or purported controversy of New York’s most recent foray into sex education wouldn’t have really interested me except for one thing: the Bloomberg administration’s purpose for making this move. Specifically, the move was part of its strategy to “improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers.”

Sex-ed isn’t usually justified, in my experience, as a tool to achieve social justice, or an anti-poverty measure. New York, though, tied its sex-ed to improving kids’ economic potential.

How? In Creating an Opportunity Society (which I’ve mentioned before), Haskins and Sawhill say that families headed by a person who (1) graduated from high school, (2) works full-time, and (3) doesn’t have children out of wedlock has a 98% chance of escaping poverty.[fn1]

And comprehensive sex education seems to be fairly effective at achieving (3). And not just because it teaches kids how to have consequence-free[fn2] sex. Recent research suggests that teenagers who receive comprehensive sex education are 60% less likely to become pregnant or impregnate somebody than teenagers who receive no sex education.[fn3] Moreover, comprehensive sex education slightly reduced the the likelihood of teenagers having sex in the first place.[fn4]

So what does this mean to us as Mormons? The Handbook of Instructions says that parents are responsible for their kids’ sex education. But it doesn’t end there: it says that, if sex-ed is offered in the schools, parents should ensure that the instruction is consistent with “sound moral and ethical values.”

So we’ve got a moral responsibility to engage with schools’ sex education. And, I’d argue, our sound moral and ethical values at least force us to consider supporting comprehensive sex-ed. Note that I don’t mean this as a blanket endorsement of anything that flies under the rubric of comprehensive sex-ed.[fn5] But the numbers indicate that including information on contraception in a well-designed curriculum substantially reduces teen pregnancy, marginally reduces teen sex, and doesn’t cause kids who wouldn’t have had sex to suddenly have it. Even if we’re convinced our kids won’t have premarital sex (and I think that assuming that all kids will have premarital sex is condescending; some certainly will, but my personal experience suggests that it’s far from inevitable), supporting good instruction can potentially improve the economic and spiritual and emotional lives of the teenagers around them.

—

* I know that the phrase “social justice” riles some people up; I assume sex-ed gets a different group. If I included tax here, I’d have the perfect storm.

[fn1] Haskins & Sawhill p. 70.

[fn2] I don’t, of course, mean “consequence-free”; among other things, there are emotional and spiritual consequences to sex. But using contraception can significantly decrease the risk of pregnancy and, in some cases, STDs.

[fn3] Teens who received abstinence-only sex-ed were 30% less likely to become pregnant or impregnate somebody, but, apparently, this number was statistically insignificant.

[fn4] I should note that this makes some intuitive sense to me: I can’t imagine anything making sex seem less sexy to a teenager than a required high school class. I also can’t fathom how teaching about how to use contraception could possibly be useful to anybody: using a condom, for example, isn’t rocket science. But, on the other hand, I was once helping a home teachee move and, in the course of packing, we saw a couple wood phalluses on her shelf. Sheepishly, she explained that, in the course of her job as a social worker in prisons, she taught prisoners how to use a condom. So maybe condom use is not as intuitive as it seems.

[fn5] Although, frankly, from looking at the websites, the curricular subjects aren’t nearly as offensive as the HealthSmart website; seriously, what is it about public schools and horrible web design?

Why food? Because a lot of my life today revolves around food. One year, I was up until two in the morning the day before Thanksgiving making mincemeat ice cream. (I didn’t believe my wife that we were getting up the next morning at 4 to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Turns out, she was right.) Every summer, we can tomatoes and jams and chutneys so that we can have those flavors during the winter. And sometimes we invite people over for dinner just to have an excuse to cook something new.

What I remember: Christmas mornings, opening presents with my sisters and brother and parents, listening to Bing Crosby (or, sometimes, John Denver), eating nuts and chocolate candy and Vons eggnog (if there was any left) and, eventually, having a big brunchy breakfast. I want to say it was cinnamon rolls, or sometimes popovers. Maybe omelets. But it was definitely breakfast. I’m sure the lunches and dinners on Christmas[fn3] were equally good, but they aren’t what stand out in my memories. Rather, it’s the music, wrapping paper, family, junk food, and big breakfasts that I remember.

And I wonder, what will my kids’ memories of Christmas be?

—

[fn1] Delicious, btw.

[fn2] Not red onion marmalade, fwiw. This is the first (though not the last) time I’ve made it.

[fn3] Actually, I’m pretty sure that it was only one big meal Christmas afternoon, sometime around 3, that substituted for lunch and dinner, then maybe those Mormon scones—fried bread dough—before bed.

***

In the Church, we’re suspicious of debt. Sure, we get a pass on student loans, a modest house, a first car, but, as a general rule, our leaders discourage incurring consumer debt, and celebrate those who have escaped debt’s clutches. Having grown up a member of the Church, and having heard the various talks and lessons, I suspect most members would say that Alex made the better decision;Alex has the Fire and no debt. Pat, on the other hand, has both the Fire and the debt.

***

Assuming you agree with my intuition that, in general, Mormons would think that Alex made the better decision, I want to push that intuition a little:

(1) Let’s suppose, first, that Alex bought with cash because he has $200 just lying around. Pat, on the other hand, doesn’t, and the only way she can afford a Kindle is by borrowing. But assume Pat has a steady, if low-paying, job with amazing job security, while Alex, though making more money,has a 70% chance of losing his job in the next three months, with an uncertain outlook for getting another job in the foreseeable future. Does that change your (Mormon) intuition?

(2) Or what if Alex leaves all of his money in a checking account that doesn’t pay any interest, while Pat borrows at a low 3% rate, while she earns a 10% return on her money, which has all been wisely invested?[fn5]

(3) Or what if Pat isn’t just paying a low interest rate, but no (or a negative) interest rate?

***

What I’m trying to get at is the underlying why of our discomfort with debt. I understand for financial purposes why consumer debt is often a bad idea. Even in a (2) situation, most people don’t invest their unborrowed money; they just leave it in their checking accounts, so the fact that they could earn a higher return in theory doesn’t mean anything in practice.

And maybe our discomfort is purely a practical one, borne out of speculative investing in Kirtland and several generations of General Authorities who lived through the Depression.[fn6] But is there a religious explanation? Like we don’t like consumerism/worldliness? (But didn’t both Alex and Pat buy a Kindle Fire?) We’re theologically opposed to risk? Interest (at least its payment) is spiritually harmful?

***

Even if the avoidance of consumer debt is purely a practical consideration, we can see better today why it’s a good idea than we’ve seen in 80 years or so. But I’m interested in your take on whether it might be something more.

—

[fn1] Note that it’s exam season, so I’m kind of in exam  mode. Oh, and good luck to all of the T&S-reading students on your finals!

[fn2] Actually, they both want an iPad, but it’s priced way out of their league, and they figure a Kindle Fire is good enough.

[fn3] ;)

[fn4] Yes, I’m asking you to judge Alex and Pat, without knowing their hearts or their genders. If it makes you feel any better, they’re fictional, anyway: this is just a thought experiment.

[fn5] FWIW, Pres. Hinckley wouldn’t have changed his mind.

[fn6] It’s probably also worth noting that the Law prohibited charging interest. For those of you who know the Hebrew Bible better than I, was there any underlying reason that interest would be prohibited, or is it solely because God said?

That said, Dr. Bloom is right that the Church has changed a lot between 1844 and 2011.[fn1] Change is inevitable and, as Ecclesiastes tells us, is to be expected. And, frankly, there have been a number of changes that, even if they risk our Protestantization, I’m really happy about.

And I’m not talking Official Declaration 1 or 2 stuff—I’m going to assume that most of us are grateful that polygamy is no longer the sine qua non of the faithful member, and that all of us are grateful that we don’t live in the world of a racially-based Priesthood ban. And I’m also not talking about our wishlist of things we want changed. I assume most of us have one or two, even if they’re just wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if kinds of things.

No, I’m talking about less-prominent practices that the Church once had that have left. And there are two that leap to my mind:

Missionary Finances

I’m actually not talking about the standardization of mission expenses, even though that’s pretty nice, too. I’m actually talking about going on missions with purse and/or scrip. See, throughout the 19th century, and even through the first half of the 20th, missionaries would travel without purse or scrip. And that practice undoubtedly helped connect modern missionaries to early Christian missionaries, making the latter-day and the ancient churches that much more connected. But really, I liked having reais in my wallet as I went preaching in Brazil.[fn2]

Come to Zion

I’m also glad that the meaning of Zion has shifted from a literal physical gathering to a broader sense of Zion as being where the Church is organized. Why? Because I liked growing up in California, living in New York, Virginia, and Chicago. Moreover, I like that we’re full participants[fn3] in the world, rather than being cloistered and physically set apart from it. I realize that physical gathering has its power and its place. But I’m glad it’s gone.

—

[fn1] Between 1992 and 2011, on the other hand, not so much. This is beside the point, but I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what happened between 1992, when Bloom was gung-ho on Mormonism, and today, when we’re, in his words, on the path to “just one more Protestant sect.” The only major changes the Church has instituted during those two decades that I can think of are (1) the introduction of the mini-temple, (2) the changed logo, and (3) the Perpetual Education Fund. But none of these support the Protestantization of Mormonism. As James points out, the temple is a distinctly un-Protestant institution, and the mini-temples have made temples significantly more pervasive in the Mormon world. The emphasis of Jesus in the logo is mostly cosmetic; it may reflect a renewed emphasis on Jesus, but that’s far from un-Mormon. And the Perpetual Education Fund, while it looks a lot like microcredit (which, as far as I know, isn’t a particularly Protestant institution), also looks a lot like the Perpetual Emigration Fund, which is a particularly and historically Mormon institution.

Or maybe he’s thinking about the How Wide the Divide crowd; while that project seems to have a lot of BYU support, it hasn’t crept into my Church experience in any material way.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t changed, and changed significantly, since Joseph Smith’s days. But I can’t think of any material shift between 1992 and today. But again, this is all tangential to the point of the post.

[fn2] Okay, just one more: I’m glad we initiate the mission process, rather than being called during conferences. And that missions don’t last much more than 2 years. And that I won’t be asked to leave my wife and children to go on a mission. I do like a lot about our current mission procedures, especially in light of the way it used to be.

[fn3] I actually probably don’t mean full participants, but I do think that our rhetorical opposition to “the World” is overblown. Sure, there’s bad that we need to avoid (or, better yet, fix). Still, but for the World, we wouldn’t have jazz or iPhones or the Doughnut Vault or a ton of other things that I appreciate on a regular basis. And I’m glad I can both be a faithful and believing member of the Church and eat simply amazing doughnuts in Chicago while listening to jazz on my iPhone, or whatever.

The Super Committee’s lame punt is just the most recent sign of the overall trend, though: at an institutional level, we haven’t even really admitted there is a problem, let alone started repenting. What do we need to repent of? Oh, there are plenty of things seriously wrong with the way we run our economy, including many of the favorite criticisms from both the right and the left, and the economy feeds into a lot of other things that are wrong with our society.

I’ll just mention debt for now. We borrowed like mad for the past fifteen years or so, on houses, credit cards, student loans, and government programs, and called it prosperity—short-sighted materialism (among other things), masked and rationalized with convenient economic pseudo-theory. I was getting nervous about this back around 1999, but by now a lot of readers will probably grant it to me, though there are plenty of theorists and politicians who say our problem is still that we need to spend more.

So if you’ll grant me that this self-deceptive over-spending is a pernicious vice, isn’t my schadenfreude still wrong? Jesus said that those who don’t forgive are guilty of the greater sin, and one of the most important and revolutionary insights of the Restoration is that God does not rejoice, but actually weeps over the suffering of the wicked, so I should too. I’m sorry, though, it’s hard for me to see the Dow at a little over 11,000 as an unbearable affliction. This is not like a war. It’s not even a famine, let alone a flood. It is certainly not the fire from the sky that Jonah was hoping for, and it might even save some of us from a longer-lasting fire. It just might be enough of a discomfort to make us re-think our priorities, and we are long over-due for rethinking.

Instead of Jonah, let’s look at Nephi, who prayed, “O Lord, do not suffer that this people shall be destroyed by the sword; but O Lord, rather let there be a famine in the land, to stir them up in remembrance of the Lord their God, and perhaps they will repent and turn unto thee” (Helaman 11:4).

This economic sand trap is a serious problem for some folks, no question, but it is mild in comparison with a famine. Moreover, the Dow isn’t even the economy. A decent amount of wealth, at least in the abstract, is bound up in the stock market numbers, but they change too fast for us to take them seriously as wealth, full stop. More than anything, the stock market is a barometer of where we think the economy is going, and so when it goes down, it isn’t so much a problem itself as the recognition and publicizing of a problem.

So, I’m excited that we are admitting to ourselves, in an implicit, confused way, that we have a serious problem, or at least that for the reluctant there is a highly public indication that there may be one. I’ll be more excited when I see people recognizing what we need to actually change. Will we as a nation actually turn back to God? That might be a bit much to hope for, but perhaps we will at least be less enamored with our idols of gold and silver, and some of our destructive ideas. Maybe we will stop seeing the stock market as quite such an important indicator of our wealth, because we will see that our real treasures are elsewhere.

Actually, I would be happy for more of us to just do the math, and there are signs that this, at least, is happening: credit card debt went down 11% from October 2010 to October 2011! Hurray! Some of us at an individual level, at least enough to affect the average, have started to change our ways.

She was right, and it would not be a good thing.

Strasbourg is and was beautiful pre-Christmas.* Several weeks passed before I fully acclimatized to the major time-change, and the schedule of missionary life, but I loved Strasbourg almost instantly. The eastern area of France bordering Germany is known as Alsace, and offers the best of both countries in terms of food, architecture, and other things. Parks are plentiful, the accent is easier to master, and doner kebab is cheap. Two wards meeting in an actual chapel with a basketball court were staffed by over a dozen hard-working missionaries who made me feel welcome as we did splits. My trainer, a stand-up guy, introduced me to the endless variety of bread, cheese, pastries, roasted chestnuts, and other delights as the weather cooled. On Saturdays, we played ultimate frisbee and soccer with other missionaries and ward members.
Things were happening in the ward; we had at least one solid person we were teaching regularly, who came often and participated more than some members. Work was hard, but had enough positive things going that I felt we had some energy. The ward choir we sang in was prepping some of my favorite classical Christmas music,  Es ist ein Rose entsprungen (or, D’un Arbre Séculaire, or, for the awful English title, “Lo, How a Rose is Blooming”), and I loved the tenor part. Life, it seemed, was Good.

Then, shortly before Christmas, I was transferred to a two-man town in Belgium called Verviers (VERR-vee-ay). 45 minutes away from other missionaries in Liège, the little industrial ville seemed to be near the arctic circle. My companion was depressed, having seen a missionary go AWOL to live with a French girl. The branch was small, dysfunctional, and met in a small but Mormon-feeling house. Mostly I remember a 10-yr old girl who liked to provoke missionaries, who closed the piano on my hands mid-hymn at least once. The mission president confided that he was considering withdrawing the missionaries and shutting it down. No choir sang. We tracted much, taught little, but one young couple with two small children always welcomed us. She was more friendly and sympathetic, but had lost all faith in God because of a miscarriage. He saw us as helping encourage his wife back into faith, but was less receptive to us as missionaries. That was the highlight of our non-LDS contact.

Belgian architecture, in that area, consists of long narrow streets, with narrow sidewalks, and endless row houses of dark brick. The weather got colder, the heavens closed permanently for winter, and dustings of snow on the ground quickly dirtied. From ground to sky, everything was despairingly grey. The transition from dim to darkness came around three each afternoon; To make matters worse, the APs, doing what middle management does best, misconstrued something the mission president said, and required everyone to wake up half-an-hour earlier every day to exercise. This somnalent curse would not lift for several months, and created perfectionist guilt when, after a few half-hearted pushups, we’d fall asleep on the floor by the heater until 8 am.

While we had a few moments of levity and brightness in Verviers, such as a MoTab Christmas tape and our “Christmas tree” constructed from some pine branches found in the street, twined onto the drying rack, decked out by a few Belge Francs worth of Christmas lights, these were merely stars in a black night. It was the darkest period of my mission, literally, figuratively, and spiritually. My struggles went deeper than what I have enumerated here, and I think I cried some bitter tears. Never have I felt more like crying out “o God, where art thou?” “How long, o Lord, how long?” My temporal suffering in hell was all the worse for having previously been in heaven. Better to start in the mission armpit and get transferred somewhere nice, than start at the pinnacle and establish that as the baseline norm for missionary life.

Things didn’t get much better until Spring began to dawn, and another transfer came. In retrospect, it strikes me that temporary (and, as they were, shallow ) feelings of despair, abandonment, and futility may be some of the best preparation for appreciating the spirit of Christmas and the mission of Jesus the Messiah. Though my discomfort was largely selfish, my wounds hardly mortal, my sins those typical of missionaries, my darkness nevertheless felt very real to me. Having been in the gloom, I could appreciate the light, instead of being distracted by the cultural trappings of Christmas.  Christ came, not to provide fleeting comforts or entertainments, but to “swallow up death in victory and wipe away the tears from all faces” to “heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.”

*If I can find any of my mission pictures, I’ll update the post.

2. Social networks. And I mean this on all sorts of levels. Facebook has brought me back in touch with friends from high school with whom I otherwise wouldn’t have any contact. But I’m also thankful for IRL social networks: my colleagues, my neighbors, members of my ward, my kids’ friends’ parents. I’m thankful for the community that can happen when the guy comes out to repair your internet, and it turns out he has a kid the same age as your kid.

3. The eternal potential of (1) and (2). It adds that much more to these relationships to know that they can continue.

4. North Face. For this Southern Californian, it’s nice to know I’ll be able to survive another Chicago winter.[fn1]

5. Jim Henson. I remember watching the Muppet Show with my family when I was a little kid, every week. Today, I have Seasons 1-3 of the Muppet Show on DVD, a handful of Muppet movies, a couple episodes of Fraggle Rock, and tickets to the new movie.

6. My job. These days, having a job is a blessing; I’m lucky enough to have one I love.

7. A God who allows me to have all of these things.[fn2]

How about you?

—

[fn1] Totally random story: when I left for BYU, the warmest clothes I had were my flannel shirt and jeans. Which would have been plenty warm in San Diego, but turned out not to be quite so helpful in Utah (and would be a death sentence here). Of course, as a cheap freshman, I waited until I went home for Thanksgiving to have my parents buy me a coat. So thanks for that, Mom and Dad!

[fn2] Note that this list is far from exhaustive; rather, it’s the first seven things that leapt to mind. Also note that, other than (3) and maybe (7) (but probably not), it’s not particularly Mormon, except that I am Mormon and these are things for which I’m thankful.