Category: Cornucopia

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, don’t forget to check out Sunstone West this weekend. Tonight’s program includes a showing of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, and tomorrow’s program includes a list of speakers and presentations on some interesting-sounding topics. I hope to see some of you there.

My father used to point to the ceiling in our living room and claim he could still see a dent made by my head as I jumped up in excitement over discovering that my call was to the Switzerland Geneva Mission.

Although she had immigrated to Boston, the story of Misha Defonseca didn’t get nearly as much press last week in the U.S. as it did in Europe, when she joined a long line of self-confessed fakes

One of the distinctive features of the Book of Mormon is its pervasive anxiety about literacy

The Church says it intends to discipline the missionaries responsible for these photographs. Given that they appear to have returned from their missions, what is that discipline likely to be? Beyond that, while these pictures certainly aren’t respectful or in good taste, how many returned missionaries out there have similar sorts of photographs sitting in…

A few recent comments over at BCC have elaborated on a theme that one hears from time to time on the internet: “I didn’t get the whole scoop on LDS history while I was in Primary.”

Elder Packer’s article in this month’s Ensign closes with some thoughts on Evolution that have the potential to stir up a debate on the issue within the Church after several relatively quiet years.

How about the one about the frog in boiling water?

Remember that one about youth being generals in the war in heaven?

Among my many other vices, I like to read poetry.

Should a psychologically healthy person be happy, cheerful, carefree? If you are not cheerful is there something wrong with you? Let’s see what Mormon scripture has to say.

Today’s news carries a deja vu article: Surveys show high rates of depression in Utah, and some psychiatrists wonder if Mormon culture is part of the cause. (The story runs under a pretty direct illustration that shows an apparently depressed woman and a photo of the temple in the background.)

I’m frequently asked how to homeschool kindergarten, so I thought it might be useful to post it for future reference.

The Salt Lake Tribune recently ran a column written by Grant Palmer arguing that Christian salvation turns not on the performance of ordinances but rather on an ethical life. Theologically speaking, the article (as Dave has pointed out nicely) is a pretty pedestrian, anti-sacramental, and essentially Protestant reading of the New Testament. The really interesting…

Mormons contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign over the past year and half in some pretty eye-popping numbers (see, e.g., here and here). As such, I decided to comb through the campaign finance contribution records to see who exactly some prominent Mormons were donating to this past election cycle.

Once upon a time, The Great Apostasy by Elder James E. Talmage was on every Mormon’s reading list. But somehow that topic went out of fashion for a couple of decades — no LDS books treated the subject and it received considerably less attention in General Conference talks. Suddenly, the Great Apostasy seems to be…

SMPT is meeting at the University of Utah on March 27-29, and the conference program is now posted on the web. Featured speakers include Stephen T. Davis of Claremont McKenna College and Jad Hatem of Saint Joseph University, Beirut. The conference is free and open to the public. Davis will also deliver a Tanner-McMurrin Lecture…

An Onion article out today, like most good Onion articles, works off a premise that’s largely true. The headline reads “Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers From Several Religions” and the money quotes are:

The Church issued a press release today annoucing the creation of a “Church Historian’s Press” to handle the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. (The press release also mentioned “works related to the church’s history and growth.”) I am not quite sure what the rationale for this is. Previous volume of the papers were published…

Times and Seasons welcomes its latest guest blogger, Marc Bohn.

The name Thomas has a tortured history in Mormonism.

A medical bleg from a bloggernacle regular in need: My oldest daughter is expecting her third child. She has not slept (except for three hours) in twelve days.

In the online Deseret News: “Today in the Bloggernacle,” with links to posts at BCC, Nine Moons, and Millennial Star. I’ve seen similar posts in recent weeks (such as here and here) under different titles but with the same format, so this appears to be a new regular feature. Just one more reason to check…

I thought that one of Richard Bushman’s most provocative arguments in Rough Stone Rolling was his interpretation of the temple endowment, and I’ve been surprised that it hasn’t generated more interest.

Regina Spektor’s contribution to the underrepresented lyrical genre of speculative historical romance suggests, from the perspective of Delilah, that the story could have ended differently:

Angela Hallstrom’s debut novel, Bound on Earth, is worth reading.

Earlier this month, Thomas S. Monson was set apart. This coming conference, church members will be asked to sustain him as President of the church. And members will almost certainly sustain him. But what if they didn’t?

How often do you want to “fix things” for someone you love because you (think you) see so much more clearly than he does?

The temple treats the Garden story as a universal story. Whatever the reason for that, you can make a good case that in some sense each of us has been in the Garden and fallen. In fact, as we’ve discussed here before, making the Garden story a universal story can make sense of the contradictory…