Category: Church Leadership and Policies
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“Something That’s Unholy and Evil”
Spoiler alert. One of the most powerful scenes dealing with abortion in cinema is in the Godfather Part II (much more nuanced than, say, Cider House Rules, which is basically the pro-choice version of a preachy 1980s seminary movie.) In it Mafia don Michael Corleone’s wife admits that the child he was looking forward to…
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Over-the-Top Leadership Acclamations
In some sectors of the orthodox world there is a tendency for people to effusively exclaim how great a Church leader or Church leaders are. Of course I’m not opposed in principle to making such statements, but I’ve wondered who the audience or what the purpose is of such acclamations. If the purpose is to…
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Early Christians, Female Ordination, “The Same Organization That Existed in the Primitive Church,” and Current Offices
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…
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In Defense of Gender Segregation of Certain Callings
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…
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Is Anybody Excommunicated Anymore?
I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here. A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him…
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An Influential Letter You’ve Probably Not Heard Of: Wilford Woodruff to Heber J. Grant, March 28, 1887
Over the last century, for better or worse, we have had four men who became president of the Church while health concerns and/or advanced age made their capacity to carry out the role of Church president questionable. (George Albert Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, Spencer W. Kimball, and Howard W. Hunter are the four I have…
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Addressing One Part of the Female Ordination Question
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…
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Transportation of Car-Less Members, Giving Rides, and Jesus Vans
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…
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The Church as the Knights Templar and #MakeItATrillion
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…
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Griping about Church Leaders and Policies in Front of My Kids
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…
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Brigham Young’s Early Journals
While the Joseph Smith Papers project is, in many respects, wrapping up, other presidents of the Church—including Brigham Young— have begun to receive more attention and papers projects of their own. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Ronald K. Esplin discussed some of his observations about the first…
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New Apostle
It’s not a terribly novel insight, but the recent calling of Elder Kearon to the Quorum of the 12 is another sign that the Church is breaking out of the relatively limited geographical Mountain West area in spirit as well as in raw numbers, and that the increased diversity of the Church is trickling upwards…
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A Book worth tracking down: “Drat! Mythed Again”
Drat! Mythed Again: Second Thoughts on Utah by: Steve Warren Most people, I find, have never heard of this book, but it’s one I referenced often growing up, as we had a copy in my house. My parents weren’t sure exactly when they picked it up, but it’s 1986 copyright date indicates it had to…
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How Much Longer Will President Nelson Live?
President Nelson could very well become the first centenarian President of the Church. But what’s the chance of that? What about the chance of reaching 101? For him to be the oldest General Authority of all time he would have to live to be over 106, the age that Patriarch Emeritus Eldred G. Smith reached.…
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Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith: A Review
Joseph F. Smith (1838–1917) is a towering figure in Latter-day Saint history, so I have waited and hoped for an academically rigorous biography about him for years. Stephen C Taysom delivered on that hope this year in Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith.
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Is Elder Uchtdorf More Liberal?
A common belief in pop Salt Lake City Vaticanology is that Elder Uchtdorf is one of the more progressive members of the Quorum of the 12. This may be true, but for being such conventional wisdom there is very little hard data to back it up, which is the case for most speculations about the inner-workings…
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Do People “Follow the Prophet” When it Goes Against Their Ideology? A Quantitative Analysis of Vaccines in Utah
I’ve had a sense for a while now that people tend to exaggerate the influence of the Church on Latter-day Saint and Utah politics. Its influence is important to be sure, but some have this image that half of Utah is ready to jump when 50 North Temple Street says jump, and I’ve always thought…
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Weaponizing Church Titles Against the Church, and Passive Aggressive Clichés
Recently I’ve done a series of posts explicitly identifying different rhetorical strategies used in social media spaces around Church topics (One on apologizing for others, and one on disingenuously citing prophets and invoking one’s church heritage). I didn’t mean for it to be an ongoing series, but I’ve just been noticing these more and more,…
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In Defense of Tracting
Missionary methodology is one of those things in the Church that people have strangely strong opinions on. For my part, on a meta-level I recognize that Context matters What works in one location (and time) might not work in another. Missionary strategy is complex Because of #1, figuring out optimal missionary strategy is hard, and…
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Is the Church Overbuilding Temples?
Growing up in the 90s, Church growth was conceptually tied to temple building, with announcements of additional temples assumed to be a proxy for the growth in temple attending members. While we aren’t privy to the more precise numbers that would be required to know the true state of Church growth like the number of…
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Gangrenous Limbs and the Body of Christ: A Defense of Excommunication
The meme is from a friend in response to a Dutch rabbi’s harsh response to documentarians trying to shoot footage in his synagogue for a piece on Jewish excommunicant Baruch Spinoza. I’m not posting it to make a point or as some kind of an argument; I just thought it was funny. Recently, whenever there…
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Nepotism in High Church Offices
Nepotism is the most natural of vices and needs to constantly be proactively guarded against, or else it will almost certainly creep into any large institution. In the early Church there just weren’t a lot of options to choose from because it was so small, but as the Church becomes larger and more diverse it…
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Family Size is The First Thing Reported about Mission Presidents–and That’s Good
I noticed the other day when looking up a recently called mission president that the mission president bios follow a pretty standard format: name, age, number of children, past church callings, and background. Now, this is one of those things that was probably decided by a mid-level official in the COB, so I don’t want…
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Church Leadership Callings as a Marker of Your Standing Before God
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…
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Why Do Church Leaders Tend to Be Wealthy?
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…
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“Royal Families” in the Church and Spiritual Special Sauce
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:…
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In Defense of Boundary Maintenance at BYU
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…
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“Bishop Roulette” vs “One Size Fits All”
“Leadership roulette” (or “bishop roulette”) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader. This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities…
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What Happens If All the Apostles Pass Away?
Many countries have continuity of government plans for what to do if the leadership suddenly dies in some sort of a catastrophe. The United States famously has a “designated survivor” that is in a secure location during the State of the Union so that somebody in the line of succession can be preserved if the…