Author: Stephen C

Om, the vocal essence of the universe according to various South Asian religions  Even if one does not accept the Church’s truth claims, it clearly has a knack for tapping into deep, primordial religious themes and principles that pop up across time and space. One of these is what I’m going to call capital-S and…

Every year the FBI publishes statistics on hate crimes against different racial/ethnic, sexual orientation, religious, and disability groups, including us. (As an aside, you know the FBI is peak woke [in the original, un-ironic sense] when they actually refer to us by the term requested by the Church [“Church of Jesus Christ”].)  So how do…

The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether: After an initial period of young people…

I’ve written about the implications of highly fertile, highly religious groups such as the Amish and Haredi Jewish community before. While Latter-day Saint fertility is higher than average, it’s not even close to those levels, and probably won’t ever be unless we revert back to Haredi-levels of communal insularity (or reinstate polygamy), which is a…

David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology Is it ever okay to criticize a faith? One can think of extreme situations that we can all agree on. The Aum Shinrikyo New Religious Movement (like most religion scholars, I bristle at the use of the term “cult,” since it disparages religions just for being small and new,…

It’s an old adage in Latter-day Saint circles that the Relief Society is the “oldest women’s organization in the world.” To be fair, I searched around briefly and could not find any current Church reference to it being the oldest, just “one of the oldest,” although I did find some speculation that it was the oldest.…

Joe Rogan is one of the top if not the top podcaster in the world today. He commands a huge audience. In the same way that being on Johnny Carson back in the day could make a career, so too is a spot on Rogan considered a golden ticket, especially in the comedy world.  He…

“Mormon Shakespeare,” Not the greatest, but I’m too cheap to pay the $30 a month for a Midjourney membership to make it better.  Occasionally you have an idea percolating in the back of your head that you intend to eventually develop and write out, only to find that somebody has already quite adequately made the…

Every year or so there’s some post or article about BYU performing boundary maintenance, and another one just dropped. I’ve already said most of what I have to say about this issue elsewhere, but I just wanted to point out that if you applied for a US sociology faculty position and it was discovered that you,…

A few years ago I wrote a post on spiritually moving great art. Since then I have kept a Google Doc where I keep copies of good art that I find, so I thought it was time for a part II. Don’t worry, this isn’t another excuse to be a shill for the glorious AI…

A little while ago OpenAI announced o3, a new (and extremely expensive) LLM. There’s a lot to say about its new capacities in a variety of domains, but the one relevant here is its performance on the ARC Challenge, a measure of general intelligence.  Without boring you about the technical details, previous LLMs have done…

The 6th Article of Faith can be interpreted along a continuum. On one extreme you might have a super strict interpretation that holds that Jesus had deacons, teachers, priests, and elders quorums, the whole bit, and on the other side, which I’m more partial to, is that Article of Faith 6 is true in a…

One of the more curious aspects of the temple ceremony was the charge to avoid “loud laughter.” [Note, I originally spoke in the present tense, but evidently it has been removed–with all the recent changes I somehow missed that]. It’s like only eating meat during the winter, one of those things that was indisputably, canonically…

The Ascension Lately I’ve dipped into literary depictions of the Savior’s life. Unsurprisingly given the subject matter, historically responses to literary depictions of the Savior have been quite polarizing, and sometimes controversial. For example, evidently The Man Born to Be King, an early, relatively milquetoast (by today’s standards) radio depiction of the Savior’s life, was…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking…

A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes.  I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and…

A few months ago I participated in a Traditional Latin Mass. More traditional-minded Catholics will genuflect when walking by or across the Host. As a non-Catholic I hadn’t considered what I should do until I found myself walking next to it and had to make a snap decision. On one hand as somebody who doesn’t…