Year: 2024

So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers.  In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male.  These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed parts of elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even if it touches on some of the same themes. So here I will take the fact that the leadership positions are male as a given, and address where we go from there in terms of sex segregation of callings (I’m going to use sex and gender interchangeably here, so sue me).  At the outset, I should note that If we want to make the practice/doctrine distinction, which I typically don’t, this is clearly in the practice, and not doctrine, category, and if the Church were to change on this it wouldn’t cause any great consternation on my part. Still, all things being equal I think the current course is the wisest for two main reasons; both of them, I am sure, contentious no matter how carefully worded.  First, if leadership positions are reserved for men for gender complementarian reasons, it…

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I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of the Great Apostasy in Latter-day Saint circles. As far as what we canonically know from D&C in the core of our concentric circles of authoritativeness, God told Joseph Smith that all the other sects were “wrong” and doctrinally incorrect. We also know, per John the Baptist, that priesthood authority was “taken…from the earth.” However, the details beyond that are fuzzy. For example, we don’t know when it was taken from the earth. Commentary has traditionally assumed that it was sunsetted with the death of the apostles but we don’t know for sure.  Clement is a first-hand account of a good, devout man trying to make things work in the immediate aftermath of the apostles. For the first time the Christian community had to figure out how to run a church without apostles ordained by Christ. (Early Church historians suggest that Clement himself knew the apostles, but these claims were all documented 100-200 years after Clement if I’m not mistaken, so I’m putting that in the maybe/maybe not category). Of course, as seen from the New Testament epistles, keeping everybody on the same page was no…

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Back in February, I announced that I have a book about the Doctrine and Covenants that is scheduled to be published by By Common Consent Press this December. After a lot of hard work by a lot of different people, I am happy to say that is still the case! Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants is now available for pre-order for the Kindle edition (which should be released in a week), with the paperback version planned to be released in the near future.

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I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.  Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but they are not entitled to the same level of equanimity and peaceful quiet as if they, you know, just went into the cultural hall (I promise the adults don’t bite).  This hasn’t happened recently, but occasionally you go into the…

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister missionaries is shown to have a subdermal birth control, which the movie states would be a reason for Church discipline if known, which implies that either 1) the movie was implying that the sister missionary was sexually active, or 2) the birth control was used for hormonal regulatory purposes, and the movie producers were wrongfully implying that the Church prohibits the medical use of birth control per se. Whatever the case, the birth control knowledge of the missionaries had an actual part to play in the plot, so it might not have simply been prurience for prurience’s sake. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a sort of intended side effect of the sexual overtones throughout the movie, especially since the sexually explicit discussion is in the opening scene, possibly as a sort of click-bait. [spoiler alert end] The tension of the sexual combined with the wholesome is a common theme throughout time, space, and cultures. I suspect it’s one reason why there’s this destructive erotic interest heterosexual men across the world since biblical times have had with the idea of having sex with a…

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Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers.  In general this election has thrown a wrench in the “demography is destiny” ideology (I say ideology because there was never a lot of evidence to the idea that immigration would cause permanent democratic majorities; of course I’m partial but the DNC could have, you know, actually spoken to a demographer at some point, maybe?)  Still, this is one example where we are beginning to see the inexorable outcomes of demographic fundamentals in another way. To briefly summarize, according to some reports the largely neutral Amish were shaken out of their previous political apathy after health officials raided some of their raw milk outlets: registering in large numbers and voting republican, giving Trump tens of thousands of votes in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania. This doesn’t mean that they will vote republican forever, or that the democrats can’t find an angle to make a play for their votes, but in an increasingly secular world it shows the paradoxical power of small, highly fertile religious groups. In a world where modernity inevitably decreases fertility, the only highly fertile societies left are either those that are too poor to be…

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