Author: Rosalynde Welch

In October a young kid’s fancy swiftly turns to thoughts of treats. With four young kids in our home, you can guess what’s on our minds lately. At our house we celebrate a thoroughly domesticated Halloween, with no concerns about satanism or sugar, just plenty of candy corn and friendly ghosts and homely, homemade costumes. And trick-or-treating. But this year the calendar plays a trick on us: Halloween falls on a Sunday. We observe the Sabbath in a fairly rigorous but, I hope, joyful and worshipful way: we commune at Church, and we rest, read, play, walk, bike, share food and music, and make occasional family expeditions during the rest of the day. We don’t shop, swim, sport, party, or work (beyond the necessities) on Sundays. This is a fairly arbitrary regimen, and other Christians surely draw their lines in different places, but that’s how the Sabbath visits our home. We want Sunday to be a day of joy for our children, but we also want it to arrive with a reverent presence. So how does trick-or-treating fit in? On the one hand, it’s a lot like a party with costumes and candy and lots of raucous, secular fun. Some families in our ward have decided that they won’t trick-or-treat on the 31st, and are planning a substitute costume-and-candy activity on Saturday night. That’s a sabbatarian position I can respect. But I think there’s a communitarian argument to be made…

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This week the presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled the first solar-powered LDS meetinghouse in Farmington, Utah. The building is one of five green prototypes being developed for LDS chapels in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—and the building program will eventually expand across the US and around the world. The official press release cites other environmentally-friendly building innovations in the Farmington facility, including high efficiency heating and cooling system that can interface with the solar power equipment, xeriscaped grounds,  plumbing fixtures that cut water use by more than 50 percent, and Low-E Solarban 70 windows that block 78 percent of the sun’s heat energy. The parking lot will even feature special parking spots for electric cars. This is not the Church’s first foray into environmental building and design. The Salt Lake Tribune reports: Employing “green” technologies is not new to the LDS Church. Indeed, Tuesday’s news conference highlighted past earth-friendly efforts such as the geothermal plant built in the 1980s to power a California meetinghouse and the fact that rainwater has been collected since the 1950s at Pacific Island church buildings. I suggested last week that the LDS Church hasn’t really developed a unique environmental vocabulary, and indeed the publicity surrounding the new meetinghouse is framed in terms of the larger Christian notion of stewardship. But the LDS do have a robust tradition of frugality and practicality, and this innovation fits comfortably into that history:…

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I posted this on Civil Religion as an introduction to Earth and environmentalism in Mormon teaching and experience. Thought it might be of interest here, as well. Earth played a prominent role in Joseph Smith’s vision of the cosmos, beginning with the importance of Creation in what we call “the plan of salvation”.  The Genesis creation account is central to LDS temple liturgy, and our latter-day scriptures reiterate and elaborate that account in several key theological passages.  In Joseph’s understanding, the creation of the earth was collaborative and artisanal: Earth was not created ex nihilo, but organized from existing elements with an inherent spiritual dimension and destiny of their own. God the Father, the Supreme Creator, was magnanimous in his creative process and gave his spirit children a role in the spiritual labor.  For Joseph, this was no compromise of God’s sovereignty or denial of human creaturliness; on the contrary, it gave humans an eternal stake in God’s ongoing work of creation, which is to say salvation, just as it gave us an eternal stake in the welfare and destiny of the earth. Earth was created as a paradise, but with the Fall of Adam and Eve the earth too fell, susceptible now to corruption and death.  But through Christ, the earth’s eternal destiny, like Adam’s and Eve’s,  is a glorious one.  Earth held a central place in Joseph’s eschatology: he taught that at the last day “the earth will…

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Sunday evening I attended a screening of a preliminary cut of the documentary “The Soul of Kalaupapa.”  The film examines the ecumenical legacy of the leper’s colony  on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.  Kalaupapa was brought to recent prominence by last year’s canonization of Saint Damien of Molokai, the key figure in the community’s history.  Fred Woods, a producer of the film and an historian whose research focuses on Kalaupapa, presented the film and followed it with a lecture on the topic. The history of the place is compelling, and heartbreaking.  Founded in 1865 on an isolated peninsula of Molokai, the colony was a response to the era’s intense fears surrounding the spread of Hansen’s disease, the preferred medical term for leprosy. Between 1866 and 1969, over 8,000 people were forcibly quarantined on the Kalaupapa site.  Some patients, including children, were sent alone to make their way as strangers in this fearful new place, which they expected never to leave. Sometimes family members accompanied the afflicted as kokua, or helpers, knowing that they put their own lives at risk in doing so. A treatment for the disease was discovered in 1969, and residents after that were permitted to leave the settlement and travel as they pleased. But many chose to stay in the community that had become their world.  At present there are several dozen men and women remaining, though their numbers dwindle every year, and Professor Woods is working…

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The Atlantic’s food channel recently posted an article entitled Jello Love: A Guide to Mormon Cuisine (my co-blogger kindly linked to it in the sidebar).  The author lived in Utah for a time as child, and she knows whereof she speaks.  The piece is charming, nostalgic and mostly reality-based.  But I blog, therefore I quibble. Classic Mormon fare seems to have crystallized as a cuisine in the 70s or 80s, though I couldn’t tell you why that’s so.  In a lot of ways, its provenance is a bit of a mystery:  I doubt that any of the dishes originated among Mormons—they tend to be familiar in the Midwest and South—and none of them have obvious connections to Mormon history, except for their suitability for ward potlucks. One might expect Mormon cooking to reflect our practice of storing three-month or year supplies of staple foods—and in reality, “food storage” meals incorporating beans, wheat, and powdered milk do rotate regularly across many Mormon dinner tables.  But they don’t show up in the stable of “classic” Mormon foods. The writer of the Atlantic piece characterizes Mormon cuisine as “bland,” “packaged,” “processed” “convenience foods”—but I think the article is self-refuting on these points, as the dishes noted really don’t fit these descriptions.  Some ingredients are processed in the sense that they are canned or dried, but this is not a Sandra Lee-style convenience “homemade.” Nor, of course, are they of the enlightened, organic, local,…

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Last Saturday morning I attended an interfaith Torah study session, warmly hosted at the Shaare Emeth congregation and jointly led by LDS and Jewish presenters. The discussion focused on the week’s Torah portion, parashat bo, which recounts the story in Exodus 10 of the plagues visited on Pharaoh at his refusal to free the Israelites. It’s a challenging tale, both narratively and ethically, and Rabbi John Borak and Mark Paredes each shed some light on the special difficulties and rewards of those verses. As I listened to the speakers’ presentations, I was impressed, beyond any particular interpretive insight into Pharoah or Moses, by the fruitful differences between Jewish and LDS practices of scripture study. Rabbi Borak focused his discussion around the central moral problem in the story: the text states that God hardened Pharoah’s heart against the Israelites, implying that God is ultimately responsible for the suffering of both the Egyptians and the Israelites. From the Rabbi’s discussion handout: If we are reading this bit of Torah correctly, Pharoah is not responsible for the plagues and all the suffering that ensued from them—God is! It was God who ordained that Pharoah would not be swayed. And it’s not just the suffering of the Egyptians at issue here, but the suffering of the Hebrews as awell. This clearly seems to make God immoral. How can it possibly be that a moral, loving and just God would punish a people and their…

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As I’ve mentioned before, Mormons don’t follow the traditional liturgical calendar, but that won’t stop me from using this January 6, the twelfth day of Christmas and the feast of Epiphany or Three Kings Day, as a happy occasion to put up the one last Christmas post that escaped December. (It’s also a great reason to enjoy my Christmas decorations—and avoid the chore of taking them down—for just one… more… night.) Several days before Christmas I attended a concert by the St Louis Chamber Chorus at the Cathedral Basilica. I’ve attended this concert most years that I’ve lived in St Louis, and it’s always a spiritual highlight of my season. This year’s program was a counterpart to last year’s: the 2008 concert was titled “An Old World Christmas”; this year’s was “A New World Christmas.” The choir’s artistic director Philip Barnes designed a thoughtful program spanning the breadth of American—North and South—history, geography, religious variety and musical idiom. The project interested me on a conceptual level, and as I listened to the music I wondered whether there were any unifying theme, any identifiable “new world” flavor imparted to the Nativity. There isn’t, really, at least none that I could discern: American composers represent too motley a group, and too entwined with the old world, to really coalesce around a unified hemispheric approach. But the program was nevertheless tied together by a kind of cultural hybridity, an ugly but useful graduate…

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It’s a small object, not a simple one: a Peruvian nativity carving, fashioned inside a gourd from intricate wood figures painted in bright colors. It was on display at the creche festival last weekend; I lingered over it for a moment, pointed out the tiny llama to my children, and moved on long before its meaning had bloomed. The object is a simple commemoration of Jesus’ birth, that much we read on its surface. But it’s also a tale of the complex intersection of Christianity and globalization in the modern world. Any powerful set of ideas will make several curtain calls in the long drama of history. Christianity has taken the stage in the company of an empire or two, conflicts both local and far-flung, and migrations and social movements of all sorts. In our current scene, Christianity is one of the ideological actors competing to explain and direct an accelerating pageant of globalizing geopolitics. In a sense, Christianity has been waiting for this historical moment for centuries. Globalization promises a technological marvel: a world of regional economies and societies finally and fully integrated by a globe-girding network of communication and exchange. Expanding global markets, physical infrastructure, and networked electronic media make the peoples of the world more available to one another now than they have ever been. But as a technological process, globalization is sorely inadequate to meet its own grand promise: technology needs narrative to interpret and integrate…

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My co-blogger Sharon put up a most enjoyable post a few weeks ago. I liked it so much that I’m going to pay it the compliment of differing with one or two of its points. (In blog etiquette, after all, quibbling is the highest form of flattery.) Sharon points us toward a Christian anti-consumerist movement called Advent Conspiracy, which takes as is raison d’etre an apparent cultural contradiction. “What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists,” the site’s copy reads. “What if Christmas became a world-changing event again? Welcome to Advent Conspiracy.”

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