- Kent Larsen on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: ““I think we should “Keep Mormonism weird,” to crib from Austin’s unofficial slogan.” Have you looked at the unofficial slogan for the Sunstone Symposium??? (Hint: it’s literally “Keep Mormonism Weird.”) I think Armand Mauss’s 1994 book “The Angel and the Beehive” should probably be mentioned in this context as well. Mauss argues that Mormonism, like many sub-cultures, is in a cultural tension between assimilation and distinctiveness, and that its very survival rests on maintaining that tension — i.e., never assimilating completely, but also never becoming so distinctive that it becomes a threat to the main culture. Similar to Mauss’s work in sociology is a field in psychology called “Optimal Distinctiveness Theory”, which also suggests that each of us individually are in this same tension. I think these fields suggest that we need to worry about the overall distinctiveness of Mormonism, instead of what’s going on with individual elements of our culture. While REC911 is correct in thinking that some things are more important to our religion than others, any single item isn’t going to make the difference. AND, there are significant social and psychological forces that are pushing in each direction — we won’t completely assimilate without a large backlash towards distinctiveness. [Posts like this one might be a small part of that backlash.] Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to really measure these shifts between distinctiveness and assimilation. I wish there were — it would be nice to be able to say “we’ve gone too far” (in either direction) and back that up with data. By chance I attended a session at MHA recently that talked about a group of young LDS artists who were pushing hard for distinctiveness in their art. I really liked what they were doing, even though none of their work had the importance that REC911 asks for. But maybe such cultural things ARE actually important, in a social and psychological way instead of a gospel or doctrinal way.” Jun 20, 10:25
- on Finding Meaning in Sacrament Meeting: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/14?: “LHL: You made me laugh, so I’ll let your comment stay, even though it clearly violates the prescription in the last 3 paragraphs of the original post. rogerdhansen: I wish you had gone a little further and told us what that means for how you act/react in church. If our thoughts are not totally free, then are we all wasting our time? Should we find some way of pushing back against influences that aren’t helpful/productive/ good?? On a practical level, what does your proposition mean for us? RLD: I love the message behind your “fearless (filterless?)” reference. Indeed fearless often means filterless, and, in my experience, “filterless” can hurt others as much as they entertain and attract them. Seth, thank you. Your comment on ChatGPT is wise. I’m one of those who is very skeptical of the utility of these LLMs, but I do think we should recognize that using LLMs is a crutch that some people feel like they need. Like everything, how we use a tool is more important than the mere use of the tool by itself. And your comment on ways to ponder is exactly what I’m getting at. We should be thinking about more than ourselves when we go to church. We can think about why the speaker is saying what they are saying. We might learn something in the process, or at least gain some empathy for another.” Jun 20, 09:57
- on More Than Mercy: Robert Alter on the Covenantal Weight of Hesed: “So, let’s just go with charity?” Jun 19, 17:29
- on More Than Mercy: Robert Alter on the Covenantal Weight of Hesed: “Choosing the most negative possible way to understand a statement is just going to make you needlessly unhappy, Daniel H. If you read the post, it sounds like Russell Nelson was just attempting to incorporate scholarship on Biblical Hebrew similar to Alter’s into his remarks, which is the kind of thing people On Here regularly wish the apostles would do.” Jun 19, 16:03
- on More Than Mercy: Robert Alter on the Covenantal Weight of Hesed: “Daniel H, God has an infinite love for all of his children. But in order for them to receive the “transferable” aspect of his love — that which “sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of men” — they have to move towards him. That’s what the Lord truly desires for all of his children.” Jun 19, 15:19
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “@sure Anecdotal, but as a kid I hated primary. It made me hate the church and the gospel. I’m in the primary now and I see lots of children who feel the same way. Some primaries are good and some bad but sitting a child down and telling them what they are supposed to believe does not work for these kids. Becoming converted to the church required me to first disassociate it from my primary experience.” Jun 19, 11:45
- on More Than Mercy: Robert Alter on the Covenantal Weight of Hesed: “Hesed has become a fraught and cursed word in my mind ever since Russel Nelson defined it as “a special kind of love and mercy that God feels for and extends to those who have made a covenant with Him” To me this suggests that if you are one of the lucky 0.17% of people who for some reason made a covenant in this church, then God loves you more than everyone else, and you are worth more. This just goes against what I consider fundamental beliefs about God. Did Jesus not teach that all souls have immense but equal worth?” Jun 19, 11:20
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “Sorry for the length here. Sue: Before the three-hour block was instituted in 1980, there was Junior Sunday School Sunday morning (about an hour), and Primary on a weeknight (usually an hour, longer if we had to rehearse or something). I remember JSS had an opening song, a prayer song, the sacrament gem, a sacrament song (I forget the order of those two) and the sacrament, along with a few other things in opening exercises, and then usually a class, but sometimes a movie – I remember “John Baker’s Last Race” among others. Primary was pre-Primary (to keep us occupied until the meeting started), then opening exercises and then class. Both were padded out. I remember seeing the same filmstrips over and over again. Some were entertaining, and some had a moral lesson somewhere. I also remember cultural lessons (e.g., why some days are marked red on the calendar, or how people in say, China or Japan had different cultural norms). I remember there was a great deal of material that wasn’t religious at all. Sunday Primary basically combined the two. The total time went from 120+ minutes to 100 minutes, but the only things really cut were the prayer song and the sacrament, and they were replaced with more singing time. There was still a lot of repetition and fluff with the material. I remember still drawing and painting and playing Hangman a lot during Primary class even when it was on Sunday. On my mission I came to recognize that when there was Gospel being taught, the Holy Ghost was whispering in my ear all along (even well before I was eight) confirming the truth of it. But while that extended out to all meetings (including the weeknight meetings, which continued with Scouting for me right about the same time we went to the three-hour block), only the core Gospel truth really received that confirmation. When I was eleven and the last one in my year to graduate from Primary, the teacher would have me run (you guessed it) the filmstrip projector, and do whatever else to help, rather than sit through closing exercises in my own row by myself week after week. She said about that time (this made it into my mother’s book Mormon Wives) that Primary with the three-hour block was way too long, especially for the kids. What I’m trying to say here is that fifty-five minutes of Primary is plenty, if you actually focus on the Gospel and it’s not dragged down with all the time-fillers that were in Primary and Sunday School before the three-hour block. (Many of them ended only recently.) Not a Cougar: Looking back – I’ve been back in the same area I grew up in for a while now. Of those I grew up with here, a good chunk (not all of them the children of the migrating professionals who still dominate the local leadership here) of the youth went off to BYU or someplace else in the western states, and never really came back. I’m the exception on that, but it was basically kicking and screaming. I didn’t get a professional job here until I was almost thirty. While I resented staying here for that, I don’t think I could have been an assistant stake clerk for over twenty years anywhere else. Sure, at least some who stuck around are still involved, but not that many. While they wouldn’t ever deny their own Church membership, they never really passed it down to their children. One of my youth Sunday School teachers warned us that we need needed to develop our own testimonies because we wouldn’t be able to lean on our parents’ or friends’ testimonies much longer. Part of the problem, though, was that especially at that age and time, Church activity included a lot of hoops to jump through. Early-morning seminary was a big one. So was Scouting. The youth leaders pushed Scouting very hard – to the point that every unit in our stake had its own Varsity team – but many who were pushed through to Eagle Scout pretty much disappeared from Church after that. (I knew of at least one member who had finished the work for Eagle in a Church troop, but none of it had been properly documented, so he didn’t get the award and wound up quite bitter about the Church as a result.) Those who say now that seminary graduates are more likely to be actively involved as adults, mistaking correlation for causation. The same mistake was being made a few decades ago regarding Eagle Scouts. That really was not the case in my ward, though. The group a few years ahead of me produced six or seven Eagle Scouts, but the only one who actually went on a mission had found the Church through coming to Scouts with his friend and neighbor. My father was bishop around the time that group was wrapping up high school, and sat down with a couple of them – including that neighbor friend – about missions. Neither of them thought they were “good enough”. If they had gone, others from my ward might have too. Frankly, those two especially would have been better missionaries than most of the ones in my mission who grew up in someplace like Orem or Bountiful who had gone out because everyone else there did. A big problem through all of this was, yes, the migrating professionals in the leadership who set things up for the youth, that were really aimed just at their own children. While we were a majority of the “active” youth, in no way did we really represent the whole group. Overall, there was a cultural difference too, between those of us who on one end had been to the Church sites in and around Utah many times growing up, and the other end who had never been that far west in their lives. In the last couple of years, our ward (dominated by migrating corporate lawyers and their families) has had somewhere around 75-80 baptisms of new converts, mostly with a very different cultural upbringing to say the least, and a much “lower socioeconomic level”. Only about twenty of them come to church on a given Sunday, though. My wife and I are ward missionaries now, with an assignment to work with these new members, helping to plan their baptisms and trying to get up to speed with this new church they’ve joined. Hopefully we can get somewhere with some of them. The thing is though, even with only twenty or so coming on a given Sunday, our chapel and overflow are now packed every Sunday.” Jun 19, 10:24
- on Unsettling Settler Mormon Lifeways: A Review of Elise Boxer’s Mormon Settler Colonialism by Jason Palmer: “Having read this review, I have decided to become more colonialist than I already was.” Jun 19, 09:59
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “jader3rd, not to make this about homeschooling but most homeschooling families I know do not do it because they are scared of their kids interacting with non-member peers but because they think they can do education better than public schools. As for this article, I think the church as institution kind of has to become less weird given the legal and cultural constraints placed on it. But that doesn’t mean that local wards and stakes have to be just as mainstream-adjacent. There is a lot of room in the doctrine and the handbook for local flavor.” Jun 18, 23:42
