Thoughts?

(It makes me feel old. But I’m not the target audience, now, am I?)

The column is co-authored. Writing along with him are Joseph Bottum, a Catholic editor at First Things, and John Mark Reynolds, an evangelical professor.

The column is about the Bible alone.

The column treats the Christian tradition as somewhat normative.

The column claims authority for the Bible not because of divine witness but because its central message (fallen man, redemption through Christ) has been proven through centuries of experience.

This passage:

Those who tried to live by the Christian understanding have come to amazingly similar conclusions about what God wants in marriage. We have had centuries to try out many different ideas and test them against the text of the Bible and experience. Only traditional marriage has stood. The Orthodox of Russia came to the same conclusion as the Roman Catholics of Italy. The Pentecostals of Kenya came to the same conclusion as the Reformed Christians of Scotland. Over time, different accommodations have been made to extreme or difficult situations, but the ideal has been clear: God’s will is for marriage to be a covenant between a man and a woman. Nothing else will work.

The column is worded more, ah, vigorously then you usually get from church leaders (I’m familiar with the other authors and the wording is unusually strong for them too, if memory serves).

There are some interesting Mormon pointers, both in the passage I cite above and in this one that stops short of treating the Bible as an ultimate authority: “Suppose we were to take the Bible seriously–where it agrees with us, and where it doesn’t.”

All in all, the column is an unusual production.

I remember talking to a Stake President once who was gloomy. He said it was because as Stake President he was responsible for the welfare of everyone in his stake, not just the Saints, and he had no idea what to do for them.

Recently, I think, we’ve seen the Church start to worry that we might need to help save the country before we can convert it.

P.S. Getreligion.org has been all over Newsweek’s opinion piece.

P.P.S. The Atlantic had the same argument several years ago and we commented on it here.

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Comment warning.
Also I have this little quirk that makes me react badly to criticizing Seventies and Apostles and so on.

President Monson said that we have sewing rooms and dining rooms and play rooms and dens but we don’t have rooms for Christ. In my too-literal minded way, it got me wanting a chapel room in my house again.

Silent Night was beautiful in spite of us.

Today, it is estimated that there are nearly 7,000 spoken languages in the world, of which some 2,600 have a writing system.

He goes on to say:

Equally impressive is the effort to provide translations of the Book of Mormon to the world. Today, the complete Book of Mormon has been translated into seventy-nine languages, and selections are available in another twenty-three languages. This represents 99 percent of the languages spoken by Latter-day Saints. Efforts continue to translate this book into more languages to fulfill the Lord’s command.

What he doesn’t say is that, in terms of the work still to be done to fill the directive in D&C 90:11, that “Every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language.”

There are several ways to look at this, several different levels at which language is a significant factor in how the Church operates, or in the experience of LDS Church members. First, language is a crucial factor in missionary work–in how we reach out to others. Second, language is an important part of how the Church is run day-to-day. And third, language is an important part of the culture that surrounds the Church.

In each of these cases, the amount of resources and how well Mormonism is doing in meeting the needs of the World and of members differs greatly. Take these 7,000 languages, for example. As Holzapfel notes, just 2,600 of these languages have an associated written language. But, even more importantly, they vary widely in number of speakers. Just ten languages are spoken by more than 100 million native speakers, and at least 266 (per Wikipedia) and possibly as many as 347 languages (per Ethnologue) that have at least 1 million native speakers. While on the other end of the scale, more than 500 languages have less than 10 speakers and nearly 2,000 are spoken by less than 1,000 people. These latter languages will, of course, require the most resources.

But if we are to teach every man the fulness of the gospel “in his own tongue, and in his own language,” then somehow we must figure out how to reach those that speak even small languages. Unless I’m reading the scriptures wrong, it doesn’t say “in a language he can speak.”

For members of the Church, once they have heard the gospel and joined, the need for materials in their language only increases. Under the current model, where virtually everything in all languages is translated from English, the amount of translation resources needed is substantial. Translating the scriptures and missionary materials is more or less a one-time process, while General Conference and the Liahona require an ongoing effort. We’re fortunate that only 75+ languages (those that have full Book of Mormon translations) are needed to cover 99% of the Church population. Even so, lds.org has the pdfs of the Liahona in just 12 languages, and the majority of the 75+ languages with full Books of Mormon available also have only General Conference available (no Liahona, no manuals, no proclamation on the family, etc.) I don’t know how many translators and interpreters are needed to provide everything the Church provides in English (or even what is provided in Spanish), but I’ll bet its several translators and interpreters per language (just think what this would require for the 3,000 languages with more than 10,000 speakers).

In addition to materials, the distribution of language use among Church members can also be a significant concern. Here in the U.S., we have more than 600 Spanish-language units alone, often in  English-speaking stakes, and many other congregations have sizable populations that speak other languages. But this doesn’t exist just in the U.S.–many other countries also have these language problems, and many areas of the world (especially parts of Africa) will have these problems as the Church grows there. In all these cases, the local units have to expend the resources to translate material and interpret what is said in meetings for those that speak minority languages.

Beyond the Church itself, the culture among members of the Church can also require some additional resources due to multiple languages. Culture is built on commonalities, and translating allows different languages to have the same items in common. But unlike what the Church provides, there isn’t a clear source of funding for translating other items. Fortunately, in an ideal world, each language would develop its own culture around the Church, and only the most useful items would be translated from one language to another.

I’m not sure where this leaves us. If you can’t tell, it looks like quite a lot of work. And the resource demands will only get worse as the number of languages grow, probably with smaller and smaller audiences benefiting from these resources. Unfortunately, language use in the world follows a fat-head and long-tail distribution, with the largest languages accounting for most speakers and the smallest accounting for very few. Its relatively easy to serve the largest languages, and stunningly time-consuming to serve the smallest. I wonder if some kind of analog to the long tail model that Chris Anderson has written about will be necessary to really serve the smallest languages.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few decades as we work towards every child of God hearing “the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language.”

7. It seems like the Newsroom came online just in time to deal with heightened media interest in the Church generated by the 2002 Olympics, polygamous groups claiming a historical connection to Mormonism, and the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney. Was that just fortunate timing, or was there an earlier plan in place to beef up LDS Public Affairs and to use a site like the Newsroom to coordinate rapid and authoritative LDS responses to media questions and stories?

The Olympics certainly drove the rapid development of the Newsroom (originally media.lds.org). However, like all organizations, the Church certainly would have developed a media site anyway, but a significant amount of resources were poured into it to prepare for the Olympics. That content became the foundation the site was built on. Since that time, an increasing amount of emphasis has been placed on Newsroom due to both news events and the growing role of the Internet in disseminating information during the past decade.

8. A Pew Research Center report published in December 2007 revealed, somewhat to the surprise of many members of the Church, widespread misconceptions and unfavorable views of the LDS Church and its members. These results were widely reported in the press. Does LDS Public Affairs have any initiatives in place, using the Newsroom or other resources, to address those misconceptions and unfavorable views?

Correcting misperceptions about the Church is a primary ongoing function of Public Affairs, but nothing new is being driven specifically by the Pew study.

9. In posts and discussion at Times & Seasons it often becomes clear that the issues and challenges facing members of the international Church are entirely different than those facing members of the Church in the United States. What sort of challenges confront LDS Public Affairs when trying to respond to questions from the international media?

Public Affairs has offices in areas of the Church throughout the world that respond to questions from the news media in their own areas. One of the primary challenges is that, generally speaking, media outside the United States are less familiar with the Church than U.S. media. The Church has established many Country Web sites to engage with the media locally.

10. To what extent does LDS Public Affairs reach out to LDS and non-LDS scholars as a resource for responding to issues discussed in the media? For example, “Looking Beyond the Surface: A Scholar’s View of Mormonism” (October 5, 2007) and “A Mormon Worldview” (January 8, 2008) both include substantial commentary by scholars.

Often the Church will refer journalists who call to scholars who are knowledgeable about specific or general topics relating to Mormonism. From time to time Public Affairs also quotes scholars who have a deep understanding of certain subjects and can clearly articulate a subject from an objective viewpoint. And since a large segment of our audience is not familiar with the terminology used by Church members, certain scholars, both Mormon and non-Mormon, have widely-recognized credibility and possess a unique ability to communicate to outside audiences. Particularly when Church history is the topic of discussion, scholars can provide depth and context from an objective viewpoint, which helps journalists get an accurate picture of the story.

11. The PBS series “The Mormons” (aired as a pair of two-hour documentaries) received a lot of media attention in Utah and continues to generate discussion in LDS circles. The Newsroom post “Opinions on PBS Programs Broad and Diverse” (May 2, 2007) gave high marks to the series for its “serious treatment of a serious subject.” What does LDS Public Affairs think of the overall media response to that landmark PBS series? Does that response give rise to hope or concern about how the media will cover LDS media events in the future?

These two posts on Newsroom adequately answer that question:

• “Media Responds to LDS Documentaries“
• “Public Response to PBS Documentaries“

12. As a final question, please share what expanded future role LDS Public Affairs sees for the Newsroom or other online resources. Is there a Newsroom 2.0 on the drawing board? Are the short videos posted at the Newsroom (which can be linked to or embedded in weblogs or other sites) seen as the wave of the future? Elder Ballard’s December 2007 speech at BYU-Hawaii (“Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church,” December 15, 2007) urging members of the Church to share their faith in online forums understandably generated a lot of discussion on LDS weblogs. When should we expect the first official General Authority blog?

Public Affairs has been watching social media closely since it emerged. We are constantly working on adapting Newsroom to better function in a new media environment. We’re currently working on some specific changes to the site, in addition to some we have made recently, which have included adding social media sharing features. Video will be incredibly important in the future, there’s no question about that. We intend to produce more of it and to continue to make it downloadable and sharable. You’ll likely see more in-depth, video-rich stories like we produced about Church members in Texas. We also anticipate the site will become more “conversational.” Elder Ballard’s emphasis on Church members using new media is having an impact. For instance, according to Blogpulse, President Hinckley was the 3rd most mentioned individual in the blogosphere the day after he passed away. We’re also seeing thousands of blogs that are linking back to the newsroom site. One of our new Newsroom audiences is Church members who are using new media. We try to provide content that helps them to discuss the Church with their own audiences. How and when the Church will begin blogging officially has been discussed, but is yet to be determined.

We are constantly trying to improve Newsroom. We invite Times & Seasons readers to send us feedback and to register to receive email updates from Newsroom.

Note: Here is a link to the video of Elder Ballard’s “New Media” talk referenced above.

On the whole, as far as I can tell from being outside the primary and youth programs (I do have children in the programs), the idea seems to work, although I suppose for someone unfamiliar with our situation, and without much information about what immigrant communities are like.

You might think that the best thing for any ward is to let it stand on its own, staffing its own programs and training its own people. For our sister Spanish-speaking ward, that has been tried. The reason I think that this works is a simple observation about the immigrant community: Their children either don’t speak or don’t want to speak Spanish.

Like most immigrant groups that have entered the U.S. over the years, the children (depending on age) usually learn English quickly (if imperfectly) and often avoid speaking their parent’s language in an effort to be “real” Americans and to fit in with U.S. culture.

In the case of our sister ward, the ward, and many families in it, were split along linguistic lines, with parents preferring to speak Spanish because of their heritage, or because they aren’t comfortable in English, and the children refusing to speak Spanish to be more American or because they aren’t as comfortable in Spanish.

For a ward, the situation can cause difficult staffing problems. Its hard to staff a primary or youth program when the children need teachers who speak English, and the reason their parents are in the ward is that they don’t speak English. Most Spanish-speakers fluent enough in English want to attend English-speaking wards (at least in our stake), leaving no one to teach the English-speaking children in the Spanish-language wards.

Its a difficult problem, and I’ll bet that other Spanish-language wards face it also. I’d love to hear about what other wards and stakes face because of these problems.

But regardless of what others are doing, I think this solution works fairly well, at least for the situation we face here.

1. First, tell us how the Newsroom site at LDS.org got started and what the initial goals for the site were. Was LDS Public Affairs assigned the task of developing and managing the site from the very beginning? The site description at the Newsroom homepage identifies it as “the official resource for news media, opinion leaders, and the public.” Was that the original mission of the Newsroom?

Newsroom.lds.org began as media.lds.org a few years prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics. The primary goal was to provide resources to the thousands of journalists who covered the Church during the Olympic period. That original site was translated daily into 14 languages and included about 100 pre-written “story packages” for the international media to use when covering the Church. While the main focus was the Olympics, the site was created at a time when the Church was starting to develop a strong Internet presence.

The media site was and has always been a Public Affairs project. It’s unique among Church sites in that its primary audience is not necessarily Church members or those who are considering joining the Church, but “news media, opinion leaders, and the public.” The original media.lds.org site was directed more exclusively towards the news media than other opinion leaders and the public. Newsroom.lds.org tries to reach a broader audience to adapt to the Web 2.0 world and the emergence of social media, recognizing that those technologies have enabled many more people to shape opinion.

2. The term “official resource” in the Newsroom site description raises the question of just how official the content of the Newsroom is for members of the Church. It certainly offers journalists, for example, a reliable and quotable source providing an LDS perspective and response to issues and events that concern the Church. On the other hand, apart from quotations attributed to LDS leaders in many of the posts, there is no statement of who is authoring the posts or who has reviewed or approved them.

Newsroom.lds.org is an official source for information about the Church. Like Church publications, such as the Ensign, Newsroom accurately represents the beliefs, policies and practices of the Church. Even though attribution is not given for articles on Newsroom.lds.org, all items posted on the site follow a thorough review process so they can be reliable and official information. The focus for Newsroom content is to help “news media, opinion leaders and the public” understand the Church. It is written specifically with those audiences in mind. Newsroom content should be helpful to Church members in understanding and explaining public issues related to the Church. But there are other, excellent Church sites that provide gospel-related information specifically for Church members.

3. Some posts at the Newsroom, such as “The Religious Experience of Mormonism” (June 6, 2008) and “The Grand Enterprise of Mormonism” (July 8, 2008), seem to offer interpretation and guidance concerning scriptures and doctrine, as well as more general commentary concerning the mission of the Church. That sounds a lot like the role traditionally filled by First Presidency features in the Church News or the Ensign, or even by General Conference talks. Is this an intended role for the Newsroom?

The role of Newsroom is to help the news media and other audiences better understand the Church, its practices and doctrine. One of the great things about new media and the Internet is that it allows organizations (and individuals) to provide additional context and clarity on an issue or story that is often lacking in mainstream media news stories, because of space and other constraints. We’ve created the “Commentary” section on Newsroom, for example, to give more background on issues where just a quote or sound bite in the news doesn’t fully explain the issue. Posts on Newsroom do provide a Church perspective and an official voice helping to explain an issue, but they can be different than an authoritative statement from Church leaders. For example, Newsroom commentaries might explain existing positions and doctrine in terms the news media and public understand. Going back to the Ensign example, it’s like an Ensign article authored by staff or a Church member compared to an Ensign article authored by a General Authority. Because they’re both published in the Ensign, they both accurately represent the positions of the Church. The difference, of course, is that the General Authority article comes from an ordained Church leader. Some content posted on Newsroom is clearly labeled as being an official statement from the Church in general or from the First Presidency in particular. Other content, such as the “Divine Institution of Marriage,” is carefully reviewed and sometimes edited by the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve, but not labeled as such.

4. Recent posts at the Newsroom have dealt with very general topics like LDS theology (“Approaching Mormon Doctrine,” May 4, 2007) and the role of Mormon history (“Approaching Mormon History,” July 5, 2007). Other posts clearly respond to confusing or inaccurate statements on a particular topic addressed by the media in the current news cycle (“Answering Media Questions About Jesus and Satan,” December 12, 2007). How do you decide what topics or stories to address by way of Newsroom posts?

Public Affairs periodically addresses an issue when a story breaks in the news media that requires an official response or simply more context and clarification. “Answering Media Questions About Jesus and Satan” is an example of that. Other commentary topics cover issues that arise repeatedly and are not necessarily driven by current news events. These are intended to remain on Newsroom as background for journalists, bloggers and others who visit the site.

5. How are the positions that LDS Public Affairs takes in the posts at the Newsroom actually coordinated? Is there a senior LDS leader or a committee of leaders that reviews and approves posts, or does the supervising individual or committee merely establish policies that guide the Newsroom managers, who then make independent publishing decisions? A related process question is how — given what some might assume to be a slow-paced bureaucratic management structure — you seem to be able to regularly post substantive responses to media stories within a short 24-hour news cycle window.

The level of approval required depends on the nature of the item being posted. Routine stories are approved within the department. All content is also reviewed by Church Correlation, the same body that reviews other Church publications such as magazines, curriculum, etc. There’s an understanding at all levels that the process needs to move quickly to accommodate the speed at which news and other information is traveling.

6. Please comment on how the mission of the Newsroom has evolved since its inception several years ago. For example, the site seems to have become an important resource for quickly disseminating authoritative statements of senior LDS leaders to the general membership of the Church, such as the statements on political neutrality or stem-cell research posted in the “Public Issues” section or the February 21, 2007 post “Missionary Safety.” It seems like that use of the site was not one that was originally anticipated.

Public Affairs can now provide more public information about the Church because we are not constrained by the filter of the news media. The Internet, and specifically the Newsroom site, allows us to post additional contextual and background information, even entire interviews that wouldn’t be included in a news story. The interview Public Affairs conducted with Elder Oaks and Wickman on same-gender attraction is a good example of that. The Church wanted to provide an exhaustive interview on that subject to help readers understand the Church’s stance on the issue. While a news story would have reduced the interview to a few quotes, we were able to provide 15 single-spaced pages on Newsroom. So one of the ways the site is changing is that, in addition to providing resources for the news media to use in their stories, Newsroom has become a news source in itself, which is just as accessible as any news website.

It’s hard to know why BYU would choose to prolong the Chad Hardy PR disaster. The best explanation is that BYU administrators watch late night comedy shows wondering, Why Aren’t There More Jokes about BYU? Or they sit around wondering how they can really give the Men on a Mission franchise a shot in the arm with a huge dose of free publicity. This law suit will guarantee Hardy, who’s shown he understands the media well, a half dozen news cycles over the next year or two (announcing this letter, the filing of the law suit, BYU’s response, the hearings, the ruling; the appeal, BYU’s response, the hearings, the ruling).

After BYU’s administrators help Hardy sell an extra hundred thousand Men on a Mission calendars, expand his product line and make him a national symbol of Freedom of Expression, they’ll probably realize Hardy didn’t accept their fight because he wanted the diploma.

The emails we have sent out to faculty across the country to date have all dealt with current issues in the academy. It has always been our intention, however, to provide occasional lessons about AAUP history, especially when the past is still with us.

This year is the tenth anniversary of one of the AAUP’s more remarkable cases–the 1998 censure of Brigham Young University. The full report is on our Web site. Let me give you a few highlights in the hope they will draw you there.

A young faculty member was up for tenure at BYU. Though there was some discomfort with her feminist interests, her department gave her a strong recommendation based on her teaching, research, and citizenship, and that view was endorsed by the college. At the next level up–the University Faculty Council–the tone changed. Objections were voiced that she had violated the tenets of the Mormon Church, most notably by publicly acknowledging that she prayed to “Heavenly Mother as well as Heavenly Father.” Hardly a confession that would earn you a newspaper headline in most American cities, but at BYU it led the Council to claim she had weakened the moral fiber of the university. They recommended against tenure and the BYU president concurred.

The AAUP requires that any doctrinal limitations on academic freedom be laid out clearly in writing. We concluded that BYU had failed to do so adequately. Her statements on prayer constituted descriptions of her personal vision, not advocacy. The university also did not grant a hearing that adequately investigated her allegations that her academic freedom had been violated and that she was a victim of discrimination based on her sex.

To the extent displeasure with her feminism had contributed to the tenure denial, her academic freedom had indeed been violated. But we could not get the BYU administration to reverse its decision. Our annual meeting voted to censure them in 1998.

There are many lessons in this case still relevant today. We often forget that very different value systems can prevail across thousands of American campuses. Continued vigilance is necessary to sustain national standards for academic freedom. That is the task the AAUP has taken on since
1915.

Cary Nelson, AAUP President