Category: Cornucopia

I just got back home after spending a week with family and friends in Arizona. These trips are always fun — seeing family members, playing with the kids, and so forth. They also result in a lot of interesting exchanges, which usually end up with me biting my tongue.

I was up late last night, watching the coverage of the Iraq elections. My favorite image from the elections is here. We have talked about the war in Iraq from time to time on T&S, but no matter what you think of the war, you have to be pleased for the Iraqi people, don’t you?…

I’ve always thought that the rule against coveting my neighbor’s wife was a good one. It seems like a very useful sort of prophylactic measure against adultery. Coveting a neighbor’s wife is probably the initial act in many (or most) cases of eventual adultery. But as salutary as a find this commandment, I also wish…

Sheri Lynn’s plaintive comment has me thinking about the difficulties of teaching Primary with today’s stimulus-saturated kids.

Should I have written that? Christine Hurt, my co-blogger at Conglomerate has begun to chronicle the disappearance of the word “damn” from several commercial ventures. See here and here. Apparently, it is a naughty word.

We seem to discuss issues of homosexuality ad nausum around here. Surprisingly, one particular subtopic that hasn’t really come up in the past is the real problem of anti-gay violence.

Sixty years ago the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Behind the barbed wires, many of the survivors could not stand on their feet to greet the liberators. The average weight of an adult was 77 pounds. Emaciated, with hollow eyes, those breathing skeletons, covered with a thin layer of tensed skin, only experienced a…

Monday I joined 200,000 people at the annual ‘March for Life’ to protest the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. My wife wasn’t feeling well enough to go this year (she’s pregnant — with twins!) and the weather accompanying Roe’s anniversary was typically frigid and miserable (if the Supreme Court was going to make such…

NOTE: I started this a few days ago, then decided it was dumb and put it aside. It may still be dumb, but it does seem relevant to how I think about the issues raised by Frank’s posting of Elder Eyring’s talk, and, I think it’s tangentially related to Nate’s Blogscar-nominated “On Authority” (for which…

I just found out that my children will be home from school again tomorrow. Turns out that there’s no place to put the 3 feet of snow that fell on Saturday and Sunday.

Here’s some scientifictional thinking: At some point in the future, it is quite likely that doctors will be able to take a stem cell from an adult and use it to grow a replacement organ such as a kidney or heart.

You undoubtedly have heard this metaphor: if you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out, but if you place the frog into cold water and turn up the heat, it will become accustomed to the increasing heat and eventually get cooked. Gross!

I’m thinking about Hannah today.

I am probably the last person here to have seen Napoleon Dynamite, but my daughter rented it on Friday, and I saw it twice over the weekend. I am still laughing.

We interrupt this week’s sparring match on gender roles to alert you to something truly momentous in the bloggernacle–get on over to The Impossible-to-Spell Blog to cast your votes in the 2004 Blogscar Awards!

The book that most influenced me when I was a lad was The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck. I probably read it four times between ages 15 and 22. When the Book of the Month Club surveyed its members for the most influential book they’d ever read, it ranked number 3. (The bible…

We all hear members who say “well, you can’t do X because there’s a letter from Spencer W. Kimball on it . . .” It’s an interesting problem — how to treat statements of dubious provenance such as ostensibly-from-the-leaders, no-longer-publicized statements. A related issue is finding out if these statements even really exist. A church…

When looking through lists of scriptures most of cited in General Conference over the past 60 years, nothing is more remarkable than the rapid change in frequency of references to the Book of Mormon. The move toward the Book of Mormon could hardly be more pronounced. In just a few years, the Book of Mormon…

Growing up, I always knew better than to mess around with blogs. My parents would tell me, “If you only remember one thing, remember this — stay off of blogs!” And this was easy through high school and through my mission. No one was offering me blogs. In fact, they hadn’t been invented yet (which…

We’re happy to announce our latest guest blogger, Eric James Stone.

If you follow the links in William Morris’s post, you’ll note that the deadline is fast approaching for paper submissions for the AML conference. So if you’re sitting on that brilliant analysis of feminist themes in The Work and the Glory, now’s a good time to dust it off and send it in to AML.

Look. I know you. I know you are sick of reading thick tomes of Mormon history and detailed 19th century mission journals and the latest on Book of Mormon apologetics. I know that you want something a little more literary, a little more narrative-y, a little more … fun. But still, you know, high-minded and…