Category: Cornucopia
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Bloggernacle Adrift?
For several years now, the Mormon Archipelago aggregator site (which used to be found here) has served as a relatively complete listing of LDS blogs and also provided real-time feeds listing recent posts. It has been something of an anchor for the Bloggernacle. It was handy to see new posts at larger blogs all in…
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Contraction
I want to understand one thing especially. All my work bends to it. I want to understand the contraction of religious belief as a positive religious phenomenon.
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Belief As Habit
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Charles Peirce argues that belief just is whatever it does.
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BSA: Morally Straight
The decision may come today. Will the Boy Scouts of America allow gay leaders and youth to participate in their program? I have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Some of them are great. Some I love. Some I’d rather not spend much time with because I find them annoying. After all, they are real…
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How Can I Use Church Music to Learn about the Plan of Salvation?
This is one of the teaching outlines from the new youth Sunday School curriculum for February. I thought I’d share how I plan to teach this lesson.
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Happy Ratification Day!
It’s a big day today—100 years ago, on February 3, 1913, Delaware ratified the 16th Amendment, meaning it had been ratified by the necessary 36 states. And, with the ratification of the 16th Amendment, the U.S. could constitutionally impose an income tax.
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One Day, The Past’s Future May Seem Just This (Un)Weird
It’s always fun to read computer/science/tech magazines from the 80’s, and see just how far things have come in 30 years, and what predictions were way off. Even more so from the 1950s. Sometimes the things they herald as bizarre and never-going-to-happen have come to be so taken for granted that I can seem really…
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Single Sisters Unite – and Babysit
The following appeared in a ward bulletin this past week. It was forwarded to me by a friend. Edited only to remove identifying information. [The friend noted: the person who wrote it is new and feels very inadequate and would probably feel horrified to know it was being discussed in the public sphere. But, well,…
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Quirky Questions in Mormon Theology: Can there be an odd number of people in Heaven?
Well, if they’re Mormons, there will definitely be a number of odd people in Heaven! ::rimshot:: So, let’s see. There’s a popular LDS belief that only married couples get to Heaven. But is that really church doctrine? And could there be an odd number of people in Heaven? Sort of. Maybe. Ish. D&C 131 reads:…
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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
(Assuming, of course, that Maria is a full-time ordinance worker at the Washington, D.C., temple.) Did you know that the Church owns an apartment building in Maryland? That it houses temple ordinance workers there? And that the apartment building is, legally, a convent?
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How a concussion made me think of Stephenie Meyer and Francis Hutcheson
Last semester, my first semester studying Greek, I sustained a mild concussion. I have mostly recovered now. I still have problems with bright lights that makes nighttime driving intolerable, but for the most part, I’m functioning normally. But for a few weeks there, I couldn’t think straight. It hurt to concentrate. Reading even a light…
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Earthly Father, Heavenly Father – Earthly Mother, Blank
This week a number of my Facebook friends shared a video from the Mormon Channel, titled Earthly Father, Heavenly Father. It kept showing up in my timeline, and finally I watched it. I’m generally a fan of the church’s public relations offerings, so I expected to like this short. I mean, who doesn’t love fatherhood?…
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Church History Conference
There is a Church History Conference at BYU March 7-8 entitled “Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith and the Ancient World” (see details below). I find two things interesting about this conference: 1. The structure of the conference itself. The Church History Department and the BYU Department of Religion are co-sponsoring the conference, and while most of the…
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On Complaining
Rosalynde here expresses some of the concerns that I have about the methodology of the Wear Pants and GC Prayer efforts. I want to add a few more thoughts:
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Literacy and orality in Mormonism
It would be surprising, and disappointing, if Mormons didn’t sound a bit odd when we speak, or if Mormon verbal art were indistinguishable from any other literary text.
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Guest Post: Mental Health, Mortal Life, and Accountability Part 2: Causes and (Mis)Attributions
[This is the second in a series of guest posts on Mental Health, Mortal Life, and Accountability. The other installments are available here: Part 1:”Exceeding Sorrowful, Even Unto Death” (Mark 14:34), Part 3: Fractured Images of God, Self, and Others, Part 4: Accommodations in LDS Activities and Meetings, and Part 5: The “Greater Sin”/ Sane Repentance & Forgiveness] The church’s…
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MR: Samurai Jesus: A Review of Takashi Miike’s “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai”
The Mormon Review vol. 5 no. 1 is presented here, with Jonathon Penny’s review of Takashi Miike’s 2011 film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. By Jonathon Penny Open on a gaunt, intelligent looking man—Tsukumo Hanshiro—seeking the indulgence of a retinue of samurai at the palace of a feudal lord. He claims to be a ronin, a…
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Should Women Pray in Public?
So it looks like All Enlisted (the people who brought you “Wear Pants to Church Day”) is now starting a campaign to have a woman pray in General Conference. It prompted this repost from BCC which references this piece from Rosalynde Welch. I want to look at just one line from Rosalynde’s essay:
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Guest Post: Mental Health, Mortal Life, and Accountability Part 1:”Exceeding Sorrowful, Even Unto Death” (Mark 14:34)
[This is the first in a series of guest posts on Mental Health, Mortal Life, and Accountability. The subsequent installments are available here: Part 2: Causes and (Mis)Attributions, Part 3: Fractured Images of God, Self, and Others, Part 4: Accommodations in LDS Activities and Meetings, and Part 5: The “Greater Sin”/ Sane Repentance & Forgiveness] Not many years…
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Guest post: Failure, by Nate Curtis
No one sets out on a path with the intent to fail. In late 2009 I took the last major hike with my father before he died. We decided to do the Tapeats Creek/Deer Creek loop, a trail in the Grand Canyon that we had done several times over the years, and is considered by…
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Finding My Heavenly Mother, Part 4 (Literary Edition)
Also see part 1, part 2 and part 3. In a 1944 essay (“Is Theology Poetry?”), C.S. Lewis remarked, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” As one who embraced Christianity later in life, Lewis had…
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Why I Listen to Screamo
So here’s a piece about multidimensional optimization algorithms, a genre of music named after and including a lot of primal screaming, and my mission. Several examples of said musical genre, screamo, are included so I hope you have a broad audial palette. I’ll start with a short story from my Mormon youth. On one particular day…
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A Mormon holiday: Purgation Sunday
As others have noted, Mormonism does not have much of a liturgical year, and the role of holidays in Mormon theology is quite attenuated. I propose we designate the first Fast Sunday in January as Purgation Sunday.
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A Mission Epiphany For Epiphany Eve
Snow White. If on Christmas Day of 1975 you were for some harebrained reason outside on the frozen Belgian tundra and you squinted up your eyes against the shiny white landscape to look east from the edge of the little town called Zichem, then you would’ve almost certainly noticed in the houseless distance the improbable…
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The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Would you like to learn more about how to not just brownout when you kneel down in prayer? It’s a good New Year’s resolution: learning how to be still and listen for God.
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Resolved:
I generally hate New Year’s Resolutions, mostly because experience has taught me that I will fail to carry through. I don’t like failing. It seems that we usually pick for resolutions something about which we are conflicted. The resolution may be about losing weight, which is the conflict of habit and genetics against a health…
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The Council in the Preexistence (medieval Antichrist edition)
In the twelfth century, Walter of Chatillon wrote a rather pessimistic appraisal of the world’s condition.
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A Mission Dream For the Last Day of Autumn
Five-Sense Gray. 9:15 in the morning in the very late autumn in Belgium. It’s barely and unenthusiastically light because the sun has just come grudgingly up (if you call ten feet above the horizon up), and because the heavens are so blanketed with clouds that whatever slivers of rays manage to get through are absorbed right away…
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A Letter to a Friend
Below is the text of a letter that I wrote about a year ago to a close friend who was in the midst of a crisis of faith. I have edited it to remove any identifying information: Dear Friend, It was a pleasure to talk with you earlier. I am sorry to hear about the…
