Author: Stephen C

  • Faith Demoting Rumors and Mormon Sexual Urban Legends

    Stephen C

    This last semester I taught a class on sexuality and statistics (the Chair’s idea, not mine, but it turned out) at Catholic University of America, which is the closest thing to a Catholic BYU since it is directly owned and managed by the US Catholic Church.   Trying to be a good university citizen, I carved…

  • Fetishizing Doubt

    Stephen C

    While some in the Church fear or are anxious around religious doubt, I feel that in some circles the pendulum has swung too far the other way, so I thought I’d directly address what I personally consider to be some takes that I think are problematic.  Periods of doubt are required to develop a stronger…

  • Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay?

    Stephen C

    Anecdotally, it has seemed to me for a while that Latter-day Saint families in particular tend to have a lot of gay family members. I don’t know of any hard data that has done any kind of comparison-of-means by religion (the sample size would have to be huge, since we’re dealing with a minority within…

  • What Are The Odds of Being A Church Leader?

    Stephen C

    An issue that came up in my last post on church leadership as a marker of righteousness is that people are occasionally told that they are going to be the future bishops and stake presidents of the Church. There are a variety of problems with this: 1) it clearly implies a hierarchy when in theory…

  • Church Leadership Callings as a Marker of Your Standing Before God

    Church Leadership Callings as a Marker of Your Standing Before God

    Stephen C

      In one of my recent posts I talked about the connection between wealth and Church leadership; one of the issues that naturally rose to the surface in the comments was the connection between Church leadership and one’s standing before God.  On this issue there’s a somewhat uncomfortable tension between different truisms in Church teachings…

  • Religious Studies and the Church, Part III: Graduate Training as a Ponzi Scheme

    Stephen C

    The subject of education that does not pay financially is a sensitive one for me. Thankfully, my graduate training equipped me with enough marketable skills that I’m fine, but I’m close enough to people in other fields (sometimes adjacent to mine) that I’ve seen it not work out, and it can get very ugly.  Somebody…

  • Why Do Church Leaders Tend to Be Wealthy?

    Stephen C

    An uncomfortable apparent pattern in the US church is that Church leaders tend to be wealthier than average. I say apparent, since I don’t have any numbers, but this pattern is stark and widespread enough anecdotally that I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s true for the purposes of this post.  Assuming this is…

  • Religious Studies and the Church, Part II: Rabbis in the Marketplace, Celebrity-Scholars, and Firesides

    Stephen C

    In the Latter-day Saint community the renowned gospel scholar has traditionally enjoyed a lot of social esteem. Much of what I’d say here I’ve already said previously, but to summarize: our attention is being fractured into a million pieces, making it hard for any one figure to get more than a fraction of the attention…

  • Religious Studies and the Church, Part I: Intellectual Authority as a Shortcut to Ecclesiastical Authority

    Stephen C

    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is somewhat unique in that we don’t have a paid or professionally trained clergy. Nonetheless, there are Latter-day Saints who still pursue high education degrees in fields normally pursued by clergy trainees such as divinity, biblical studies, ancient languages, or religious studies (hereafter, for the purposes of…

  • The Future and the Church, Part VI: The Future of Religion Worldwide

    The Future and the Church, Part VI: The Future of Religion Worldwide

    Stephen C

    “The Future of Religion” is one of those big picture questions that has been addressed by a wide variety of intellectuals such as Freud, Rorty, and basically every European intellectual in the 19th century. (The fact that the end of religion has been right around the corner for more than a century now doesn’t help…

  • Of ProgMos and Pornography, and Latter-day Saints on Only Fans

    Stephen C

    In progressive discourse, the person (generally either gay or female) who challenges conservative religious sexual strictures is seen as a courageous trailblazer. However, as liberal Mormonism generally tracks the norms and values of progressivism generally, it too inherits the ambivalence of mainstream progressivism towards pornography. This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does…

  • The Future and the Church, Part V: When Will There Be More African Wards than North American Wards?

    The Future and the Church, Part V: When Will There Be More African Wards than North American Wards?

    Stephen C

    I took the recent congregation numbers by continent reported by the Church and extrapolated the growth by continent to look at the likely composition of the Church in the future. Now, this is not a sophisticated projection (to put it gently). All I’m doing is estimating the starting point in 2010, deriving the percentage change…

  • Under the Banner of Heaven: Review of First Two Episodes

    Stephen C

    I suspect a fear among some conservative Latter-day Saints is that a blockbuster, widely viewed movie will come around that presses on uncomfortable pressure points in a sophisticated way, and the 1-3 things that people know about the Church offhand will include whatever seeped into the public consciousness because of said blockbuster film. Similarly, a…

  • The Future and the Church, Part IV: China

    Stephen C

    Like US exporters eyeing a potential 1.4 billion person market, the Church entering China is one of those white whales for hopeful, growth-minded Latter-day Saints (except with the everlasting gospel of the living God instead of widgets, but you get what I mean).  Every so often (sometimes rather sophisticated) rumors will spread about how China…

  • The Church Should Not Be Your Project

    The Church Should Not Be Your Project

    Stephen C

    In Latter-day Saint parlance “making somebody your project” is the act of approaching your relationship with them mechanistically; only viewing your relationship with them through your ability to get them from point A to point B spiritually, and generally it’s frowned upon because the friendship is insincere.   On a similar note, I sense that some…

  • Spiritually Moving “Great Art”

    Spiritually Moving “Great Art”

    Stephen C

    I don’t really get art. I couldn’t tell you whether a painting was done by a renaissance master or the local community college art teacher. While some of this is probably due to sort of an emperor’s new clothes style tastemaking by elites, I’ll concede that some of it may be due to my tastes…

  • The Future and the Church, Part III: Artificial Intelligence

    Stephen C

    To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, gains in machine learning technology are a “known unknown.” Unlike some other future changes and development, we are reasonably confident that the machine learning revolution (also known as artificial intelligence, but that is a loaded term) of the past 10 years will continue at least over the medium-term. I’m skeptical that…

  • Scattered Thoughts on Conference

    Stephen C

    Asking and seeking are clearly not the same as demanding. The former is Joseph Smith at 14, the latter is Martin Harris with the lost pages, and I think this distinction is evident to most people who watched the talk in good faith.  Earlier I talked about how it seemed that many of the brethren…

  • “Royal Families” in the Church and Spiritual Special Sauce

    Stephen C

    And think not to say within yourselves,We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. –Matthew 3:9 The mythos of the Latter-day Saint royalty that I bought into while growing up in the Utah of Utah went something like this:…

  • The Future and the Church, Part II: Longer Human Lives

    The Future and the Church, Part II: Longer Human Lives

    Stephen C

    There has always been a need for those persons who could be called finishers. Their ranks are few, their opportunities many, their contributions great. …I pray humbly that each one of us may be a finisher in the race of life and thus qualify for that precious prize: eternal life with our Heavenly Father in the…

  • How Old Are Latter-day Saint Bishops?

    How Old Are Latter-day Saint Bishops?

    Stephen C

    Last time we used Duke’s National Congregations Study to see how racially representative Latter-day Saint bishops were of the Church. Today we’ll look at how old Latter-day Saint bishops are compared to their peer congregational leaders in other traditions. If we take the two most recent waves (2012 and 2018) of the survey and calculate…

  • The Future and the Church, Part I: Reproductive Technologies

    The Future and the Church, Part I: Reproductive Technologies

    Stephen C

    Series that dives into future technologies and trends, and what they might mean for the Church. Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, where Jewish women pray for fertility. “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”-Matthew 2:18 My wife and I would love to have a large family, we would have…

  • In Defense of Boundary Maintenance at BYU

    Stephen C

    BYU’s recent policy changes that appear to be geared towards reinforcing the institution’s Latter-day Saint character are causing consternation in some circles, so I thought now would be a good time to be the bad guy and make a case for why proactive faculty boundary maintenance is needed for an institution like BYU to fulfill…

  • Are Black and Hispanic Men Called as Bishops as Much as White Men?

    Are Black and Hispanic Men Called as Bishops as Much as White Men?

    Stephen C

    The other day I realized that Duke University’s National Congregations Study, which includes about 87 randomly sampled LDS wards, has information on the race and ethnicity of the “person who is the head or senior clergy person or religious leader in your congregation,” which I assume in the Latter-day Saint case is the bishop, so…

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part IX, Free Will

    Stephen C

    Free will is one of those issues where you have to think deep and hard about your definitions. Many philosophers will subscribe to one definition, but not another, so sometimes the whole debate on whether we have “free will” revolves around semantics that you can’t do justice to in a single post, so I won’t…

  • Glory to Ukraine

    Glory to Ukraine

    Stephen C

    “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.” Mahatma Gandhi Glory to Ukraine.

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part VIII, Time and God

    Stephen C

    When I was a Wikipedia editor years ago the Joseph Smith page stated that “[Smith] began teaching that God was…embodied within time and space,” and they cited Busman’s statement to that effect. I removed the “embodied in time” and explained that this is arguable, citing Alma’s statement that “time only is measured unto men.” (As…

  • On “Good Anger”

    Stephen C

    A pattern I’ve noticed in political and sometimes religious discourse lately is the concept of “good anger.” This isn’t the calm and measured, but firm response of Christ before the Romans or at the temple, but a deep antipathy with bite to it. The acidity of this anger is not considered a weakness, but is…

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part VII: Fine Tuning

    Stephen C

    The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.-Freeman Dyson As noted in a previous post, fine tuning is a problem that has received mainstream acceptability within the scientific community. To summarize, for complex matter…

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part VI: The End of the Universe and Getting Out of Bed in the Morning

    Stephen C

    There are a variety of “end of the universe” scenarios that physicists currently see as most likely:  Heat Death Because of a mysterious energy in the universe (aptly named “dark energy”), the universe’s expansion is speeding up. As things expand they cool down, so the heat contained in the universe will gradually dissipate until there…