Author: Stephen C

Years ago I discussed the highly plausible possibility that Latter-day Saints are disproportionately gay (at least for males), because our large family sizes mean we have a higher chance of having older brothers, and older brothers, or the “fraternal birth order effect” has been shown to have a significant influence on male homosexuality.  At the…

A controversial image, but I think it makes the radical love point quite well.  The infamous Nickel Mines massacre of Amish schoolchildren–and the community’s supernal forgiveness towards the killer and his family–is familiar to Latter-day Saints through President Faust’s 2007 address “The Healing Power of Forgiveness.”  For those of you who do not remember the…

One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer’s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies. Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled…

Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit.  I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (Judaism on Trial, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top…

First off, apologies for all the AI posts, but the big AI players do this thing where they drop their latest products right next to each other to try to steal the news cycles from each other, so AI alternates between droughts and floods.  So on that note, the other big news besides the resolution…

Hahne, Madeleine Ary. “Factors Influencing Climate Change Beliefs among American Latter-Day Saints.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 29, no. 1 (2025): 19-48.

The New Testament is basically contradictory about the divine nature of Christ. On one hand Christ clearly talks to God as a separate being and identifies his will as being separate from God’s (Luke 22:42), but elsewhere he refers to himself as the Father in a very literal, I-am-physically-the-same sense (John 14:8-14). And then we…

For what seemed like forever the moat protecting the jobs of illustrators from AI was the fact that it was hard to nail down consistent characters. You could maybe, with clever prompting, get one frame to kind of look like the other, but it didn’t really work, which is why a lot of early AI-storyboard…

Book of Mormon in Elvish per Scripture Central In terms of translating sacred scripture, we have nothing on the Protestants. One of the go-to sources for describing and cataloging languages, the publication Ethnologue, was originally started (and is still used, I believe) as a tool to help Evangelical Christians record which languages still needed Bible…

I don’t consider myself a terribly spiritual person. This isn’t as self-deprecating as it sounds, in part because although we tend to conflate “spiritual” with “righteous” or “good” they’re technically distinct concepts. I do the right things for the most part and my heart is in the right place, but I don’t have that kind…

It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. The visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith provided one of those so-rare glimpses into the aetherial beyond when Joseph Smith tried to describe Moroni with the…

Note: It looks like we’ve missed our monthly “cutting-edge research” installment, but I haven’t forgotten…there was just no peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the Church this month! Hopefully to be continued next month. One of the more interesting studies in political science was the famous diplomat parking paper. In New York City and Washington DC…

The 2024 PRLS just dropped. Taken every 8 or so years, the PRLS is one of the primary sources of religious beliefs and practices of Americans. While there are other, larger and more consistent surveys that either have a larger sample size (the CES) or a larger range of questions (the GSS), the PRLS is…

In AI world Anthropic recently released Claude 3.7 with extended thinking. The “extended thinking” function is the fruit of a realization in the AI labs that if you give the AI longer to think their responses are more thorough and accurate, so in addition to expanding the compute size you can expand the compute time…

What happens when a leader of a faith does not actually believe in its founding precepts?  Presumably this kind of situation would be rare, but I recently finished reading a history of the Nation of Islam, and was struck by the parallels and sometimes contrasts between its recent history and that of the Community of…

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…