Author: Stephen C

Latter-day Saint homeschooling families living outside the Mormon belt face a conundrum. For the uninitiated, many if not most homeschoolers actually do quite a bit of organized educational activities with other homeschoolers in what are called “homeschool co-ops.” Sometimes this is limited to activities while in other cases one of the parents will volunteer to…

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  Occasionally in Latter-day Saint discourse people that have lost their testimonies of the Church’s…

Blind leading the blind I’m not saying that religious studies folks are blind to things that matter, I just thought it was a good depiction of the religious studies treadmill in general, and I kind of just like the picture.  I have one of those Facebook friends who I’ve only met briefly once in real…

“Sacred Envy” is the well-known idea (at least in Latter-day Saint circles) of having the humility to recognize some positive attributes of other faiths, so I thought I would make my “sacred envy” list.  To be clear, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is my faith because I think it is the best…

And yes, if women ever receive the priesthood I’m sure it will also be given to sisters with extra fingers.  Female ordination is one of those issues that is built on so many premises that are themselves so potentially polemical that it would take a ten-part series to walk a true believer and a true…

In the Godfather Part III (I know, I know), in response to his protege threatening to knock off a competitor, Mafia don Michael Corleone quips “never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment.”  This is a common theme throughout the Godfather series, also embedded in the (in)famous “it’s not personal, strictly business” line. The cold-hearted…

I’m a sucker for those lifestyle influencers that show off their green smoothie stacks. Even though I know that 99% of supplements are scams that don’t pass the double blind, RCT standard, at the very least it’s still health-motivating to see somebody cram a bunch of greens into a blender (although, to save you time,…

Black man ordaining another Black man in the style of African folk art Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  The…

Longtime readers may recall that I started to do a series on “temple architectural heritages” a while ago. I eventually aborted it since the subject was too big and unwieldy. Still, I’m looking forward to the day when somebody puts together a glossy coffee table book with not just pretty pictures, but also the architectural…

There are few issues in the Church as touchy as modesty. Every society has their lines for what is considered in poor taste on the revealing side or conversely too demure in the other direction, while the Church is consistently a few clicks to one direction on that continuum, making this one of those issues…

  Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here. How often do members pray? This is one of those standard questions that…

Anecdotally, a common recurring dream among members (and a lot of ex-members) is the classic “return-to-the-mission,” where somebody is called to be a missionary again in middle age.  Dream interpretation can be irresistible to conjecture about, but any particular interpretation is ultimately non-falsifiable. While it makes sense that that particular dream is manifesting some Freudian,…

Many years ago I retreated to Rock Canyon just above the Provo temple to pray about something I was stressed out about that, in my adolescent universe, was a big screaming deal. I retired to the beautiful night-time scenery of the Utah Valley lights twinkling below in the twilight fully expecting some kind of comforting…

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  Polling data shows that a majority of Utahns support same-sex marriage (although, and we…

I was playing around with Google Ngram viewer, a tool that allows you to see the relative frequency of words across time in books, and came across the fact that we’re actually much less interesting in the year 2024 than we used to be. While it seems like the gentiles have this prurient preoccupation with…

Scene from Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” I’m not much of a theologian. Some of this is part Joseph Smith saying that if you stared into heaven for five minutes you would know more than has ever been said on the subject, and some of it is Aquinas’ cryptic comment…

I’m going to take advantage of blogger privilege to announce a Facebook group I’m starting for Latter-day Saint AI artists creating gospel-themed content to coordinate, showcase their work, and collaborate. I follow a number of AI art groups on Facebook that serious artists and graphic designers frequent, and people with an artist’s training and eye,…

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  The people who do believe that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy fall into…

Yes, I know, the “Jesus” in the bottom-right hand corner has a t, at the end, but still, it’s almost there.  I typically like to avoid making too many posts that take the form of  “what I think the Church should do,” in part because the gospel of the almighty God, creator of heaven and…

Fellow blogger Jonathan and I were talking on the back-end about Modern Language Association statistics (as one does in the bloggernacle), and he drew my attention to a dataset kept by the MLA that records the different foreign language classes taught in the US, so I ran some simple summary statistics to see where BYU…

I tried to get it to show a missionary swimming in a pool of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but it wouldn’t let me produce images that it deemed to be satirical of religious beliefs. Once upon a time there was a devout, hard-working, highly efficient religious organization that started stockpiling and investing money for the…

Griping about religion First of all, I don’t have a lot to gripe about when it comes to the Church or its leaders. This isn’t a holier-than-thou attitude, I’m sure that if I looked hard enough I’d find plenty with an organization as large and with as many moving pieces as the Church, just that…

A fun personal anecdote. When I was doing my postdoc at Baylor I was made aware that there was a dataset at the Kirtland Visitor’s Center that had information on early converts that would be useful. After back-and-forthing it with the missionaries there it became clear that it would be much more feasible for me…