Category: Cornucopia

  • God on Times & Seasons

    As I was reading the Doctrine & Covenants on my way into work the other day, I learned (not to my complete surprise, I will confess) that God has already condemned this blog.

  • Bloggernacking and Man-dates

    There’s been quite a bit of buzz in the blogosphere at large about Jennifer 8. Lee’s New York Times piece on “man-dates.” Lee suggests that it is socially perilous for two heterosexual men to meet for dinner, without sports, business, or a bar to defuse the date-like-ness of the meeting. I don’t know how valid…

  • Further musings of a chiasm doubter, or, “Doubting chiasm, musing further”

    We’ve all heard of chiasm, that Hebrew literary device of repeating elements in reverse order. Since 1969, when Jack Welch first suggested that the Book of Mormon contained chiasm, some Mormon apologists have argued that the presence of chiasm in the Book of Mormon is evidence of its ancient origins. Numerous chiasm articles have appeared…

  • The Blogging Advantages of Murmuring

    By and large, the bloggernacle is can be a pretty whiney, carping

  • Of Popes, Post-Mortal and Otherwise

    John Fowles’s comment on the Pope (namely, that he “has been a true Christian his whole life and a marvelous example of Christian charity and love to the whole world….I am confident that he will make the right choices in the spirit world”), made at By Common Consent and picked up (out of context) by…

  • Regex question

    UPDATE: It’s working! Thanks to everyone who made suggestions. Also, as with any change to our filters, we’ve tried to be as careful as we can not to block innocent posts. But it’s always possible that I didn’t design or implement this quite right, and that it will inadvertently catch your innocent post. If it…

  • Half a million bloggernackers can’t be wrong

    Well, they can, perhaps, but we’d like to think that they aren’t. Lost in the technical issues last week was the fact that we registered our half-millionth visitor. I’m still often amazed at how much we’ve grown since we first started, in November 2003, with just four bloggers and a handful of readers. Not only…

  • Hearsay

    We’re told that we need to have a testimony of the gospel. And we’re told that we can’t rely on anyone else’e testimony — we must develop our own witness of the truth. It’s a formulation which is surprisingly consistent with the legal guidelines on testimony that one gives in a court case. Federal Rules…

  • Love and a fence

    They were all to their love. A silent, suffering love, eyes staring into eyes. Standing at a few inches from each other, the fence between them. A huge fence, of strong wire-netting that would not let a hand get through. Both were barely twenty years old.

  • Pope’s Personal Papers

    I just heard that John Paul II requested that his personal papers be burned. I don’t know if it’s the historian in me or just the fact that I’m a Mormon, but I gasped at this news. I couldn’t help being curious about why he would have wanted this record destroyed. As a self-consciously journaling…

  • A Numbers Game

    I think our Stake Executive Council must be scheduling its meetings right after the TV show “Numb3rs.” Either that or tax season is getting to everyone.

  • Time for a Link War

    In a blog comment at BCC, Ronan points out a disturbing fact. A google search for “Mormon Temple” is likely to be one of the first things a curious non-member does; but when you google the term Mormon Temple, the first site that comes up on the list is an ex-Mormon site. In fact, the…

  • Teaching Modesty to Children

    I posted the following you-know-where: I don’t have girl children, but I don’t let my boys wear tank tops or shorts above the knee.

  • Happy Birthday to Us, and to Jesus.

    The church is 175 years old. (The technical term is “terquasquicentennial,” in case you were wondering). And we also believe that Jesus was born on April 6th. (Don’t we?) (And is that a Julian April 6th? A Gregorian? An April 6th in some cosmic, platonic form? I’m not really sure.) Happy birthday to all.

  • Yet another technical update

    We haven’t had any resource problems for the past several hours. I’m cautiously bringing the main index back online. If it starts to flare up again, I may have to go back to the barebones index.

  • Dumb (Technical) Question

    Is there a program or utility that will tell me what parts of T & S are using server resources? Right now, I’ve got cpanel, and that’s it. So I can watch our resource use spike, and I can turn off plugins. And I can pull the index offline. And see if that helps any.…

  • Further Update

    Okay, that didn’t work. We spiked again, knocked out Apache again. I took down our index file and reverted back to the out-of-the-box default wordpress index. (Pretty, huh?) We’ll see if that helps. Maybe there’s a script in our index that’s crashing the site.

  • Server issues, again

    We just had a technical mini-crisis. I think it’s past.

  • Blogospheric discussion of conservatives in academia: Krugman, Kerr, Kleiman

    An interesting discussion has been taking place in the blogosphere. It begins with recent studies showing that very few academics are conservative or Republican. (The ratio is about 15 to 1). Paul Krugman’s op-ed in today’s New York Times suggests a few reasons for this imbalance, among them the influence of anti-evolution politics and the…

  • Thinking Mormon Philosophy and Theology

    A few days after I returned from my trip to New York, I packed the suitcases again–this time with the children’s pajamas and toothbrushes, too–and flew to Utah for the annual conference of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, where I was slated to read a paper.

  • Folklorization

    – And, Brother Decoo, could you come in your native dress? It’s this time of the year again. Circus by the aliens. Officially it’s called Cultural Heritage Night, or International Fashion Show, or LDS WorldFest. Mormons love it.

  • On Assembling a Basketball Standard

    My wife bought a basketball standard this winter. It was on sale, our oldest son had been asking for one for months, and my wife is a great basketball player. The only problem: assembly required.

  • Death of a Prophet

    When Pope John Paul II was named “Man of the Year” in 1994 by Time Magazine, I cut off the cover, framed it, and put it up in our apartment. We kept it up, from one apartment to the next, for a couple of years, and even at one point had a framed photo of…

  • An Open Thread on General Conference

    This is the place, as it were, for comments on conference. I’m going to stop typing and listen.

  • A Big Thing?

    Jim’s post “A Small Thing” and the comments it elicited reminded me that good Mormons not only can’t have beards, they can’t have tattoos either!

  • New Feature: T & S Karaoke

    We’ve been in close negotiations to purchase some used karaoke equipment from a despondent Steve Evans. Given the course of negotiation, we’re confident that we’ll close the deal soon. And so, without further ado, it’s time to announce our latest regular feature: Times and Seasons karaoke! Once we get a few technical bugs worked out,…

  • RIP, BCC

    Wow — I didn’t see this one coming. It is with a heavy heart that we announce a major shake-up in the blogosphere. Steve at BCC is calling it quits. We would say that we enjoyed reading BCC; that its posts were always top-notch; that it made the sunshine brighter and the birds song sweeter.…

  • Book Review: Green Eggs and Ham

    Theodore Geisel’s treatise Green Eggs and Ham (Beginner Books) is an ambitious work. It seeks to unify themes of longing, friendship, anger, acceptance, and culinary conformity. In addition, the book delves into Mormon themes — as one might expect, given Geisel’s little-known affiliation with the Mormon church — including blood atonement, polygamy, eternal progression, Kolob,…

  • Polygamy Restored!

    The leaks are just too many to ignore. It’s apparently official. Following the legal victories of alternative marriage advocates in state and federal courts, the Church will announce this weekend that the doctrine of plural marriage has been restored.

  • 12 Questions for Zelph

    We’re happy to announce our next installment in the 12 Questions series. Our new participant is someone you’ve all heard of, and whose name is often discussed in the bloggernacle itself. Yes, that’s right — we’re going to be doing 12 questions with Zelph. Zelph, as you all know, was a white Lamanite and a…