Author: Rosalynde Welch

How I spend my Sunday nights, and what it means for the future of Mormon thought.

Mormons make an appearance at the important SBL conference.

Why are babies busting all over?

From time to time I’ve heard it delicately suggested that the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church curriculum is, not to put too fine a point on it, bland pablum, and stale, to boot. These pundits have not read last week’s lesson.

I’m pretty sure I discovered it at Big Lots yesterday: Tweeterz, which consist (according to the packaging) of candy-coated triangular shaped bits of Twizzlers. Any contenders for the title?

Actually, goodbye first.

We’re pleased to have Jenny Webb blogging with us during the next two weeks.

A couple of interesting blurbs appear in the “Study and Faith” newletter accompanying the most recent issue of BYU Studies.

Taryn Nelson-Seawright has originated a lively thread on BCC presenting some new data on the gender disparity in Mormon Studies and inviting ideas on the reasons and remedies for that disparity.

This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of my youngest brother’s birth and death. In his honor, I’m posting my mother’s narrative of his brief life in ours.

On Kaimi’s Ensign thread, a conversation about the kinds and quantities of power exercised by the sexes has been simmering. Julie suggested that we open another thread for that discussion, and I’ve obliged.

I gave a talk yesterday; the text is pasted herein. It’s long, but easy reading, I promise.

The current issue of BYU Studies publishes for the first time a very interesting letter from one of the first Hawaiian converts, Jonathan (Ionatana) Napela, to the Prophet Brigham Young.

A dear friend of mine recently wrote to me, confiding that she’s been coming to the slow and vertiginous realization that she’s never had a strong testimony of the gospel, despite a life of exemplary activity in and service to the Church. With her permission, I’ve shared my response to her letter below.

In the comments to Julie’s dialogue with Randy B. on the meaning of “preside” in Mormon discourse, she issued (and re-issued!) a challenge to any interested reader: find a statement from a 20th-century Church leader showing that our concept of presiding has teeth. Never one to pass up a challenge—particularly one that will allow me…

I’ve brought my children west from the alluvial soil of Missouri to the sandy chapparal of Southern California for a few weeks. The first-order pleasures of being home include conversation in our domestic dialect marked at every intersection by shared memory and emotional habit, and free babysitting. Among the second order pleasures, though, are the…

This morning the five-year-old was first, in the kitchen just before nine.

I’ll admit it: I really am more likely to bring my scriptures to church if I know I’ll get a cookie for it.

This week’s New Yorker features an interesting article by Peter Boyer on the crisis facing the Episcopalian Church in the United States after a New Hampshire diocese elected the openly-gay Gene Robinson as bishop. (This post, by the way, is not principally about gay issues.)

I’m very pleased to present the second Times & Seasons baby of the month, my daughter Mara Gwen.

Mid-march is the season of the burning bush: the crocuses are done, the daffodils are almost on, but for now it’s the forsythia that owns the day.

Dr. Richard E. Bennett, Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, will be the featured speaker at the Miller-Eccles Study Group tonight, February 24, and tomorrow night, February 25, at two locations in Southern California on the topic of 19th Century American militias and Mormon militias.

Last night at 6:30 PM Pacific time, most members of my family dialed in to a conference call to Provo, Utah—to the lobby of Stover Hall on BYU campus, to be specific. My brother Benjamin—seventh child, sixth freshman at BYU, fifth missionary, third son, and a few days shy of nineteen—was about to open his…

The high point in my Church career so far came at age two, when I stood and recited the first four Articles of Faith from memory in Sacrament Meeting . Alas, early precocity did not usher in mature perspicacity, and I confess that these days, while I can still recite most of the Articles as…

So which books molted beneath your tree and emerged Christmas morning? Let’s have them all, the good, the bad, the remaindered and the regifted.

So my sister Rachel, having graduated the MTC, has just had her first real transfer.

I recently read an article by Robert Winston, a British writer and television presenter, exploring the implications of evolution for religion and asking whether our earliest ancestors gained some competitive advantage from their shared religious feelings. Winston’s stuff was just okay, I thought; it was something else that caught my attention.