Category: Cornucopia

  • What I Did Today

    1. Four loads of laundry.

  • Little street vendor

    She is a little street vendor who put up shop next to the entrance of the church with the long name.

  • Praising the man

    “No, we don’t worship Joseph Smith,” I explained to the investigator. “We respect him as a prophet.” “You mean, like Mohamed?” he asked. “No, more like Moses, or John the Baptist.”

  • Brigham ‘n’ Ethel 4Ever

    A woman — or, perhaps, a group of men and/or women — bent on a practical joke and signing her letter as “Ethel,” once wrote to Brigham Young from St. Louis to propose marriage.

  • Homework from Richard Bushman

    This summer I had the chance to participate in a workshop at BYU put together by Richard Bushman. Bushman wanted to gather together Mormon academics working outside of Utah to discuss the question of how we explain Mormonism. My own sense is that when we explain our beliefs — even to one another — we…

  • A Homosexual Duty to Marry?

    I know that this is controversial for some readers, but for purposes of this discussion stipulate that same-sex marriage in wrong. As an institutional shift it will damage the institution of marriage in ways that will harm society in the long run. Obviously, this is a hugely controversial claim, but for the time being just…

  • “The most difficult of all the many subjects”

    That is what B.H. Roberts called it when he reached the point in his monumental Comprehensive History of the Church where he had to confront the Mountain Meadows massacre, which occurred 150 years ago today.

  • Only in the Mormon Church

    When we first moved to our current ward, for an initial stay of only a year, I was asked to serve as a counselor in the elders quorum presidency before I had attended a single sacrament meeting here. A year ago, we returned to the same ward, and yesterday we discovered that that previous elders…

  • Dialogue Flood Article

    I have a vague recollection of President Benson telling a story about how (not) to do missionary work: he compared it to trying to convince a young girl to replace the doll she had with the doll you were offering her. He pointed out that ripping the head off of her doll to reveal its…

  • A French View of Mormonism, 1941

    I’ve referred a time or two to one of my heroes, Leon Fargier, the only Melchisedek Priesthood holder in France during World War II.

  • A modest proposal

    In order to prevent inadvertent exposure of nursing mothers’ breasts during church meetings to the bishopric, or to the deacons passing the sacrament — and the related possibility of those men having bad thoughts — scarves or blankets should definitely be used to conceal the nursing from male eyes. Thus, effective immediately, all deacons and…

  • Technology and Religion

    Get Religion has posted a review of an interesting Wall Street Journal article examining how cell phones are affecting Hutterite culture. The GR post uses that example to touch on the larger issue of religion and technology, which is one of those rare topics that hasn’t been kicked around the Bloggernacle much. Christian radio, televangelism,…

  • Of (pea!)nuts, nipples, and freedom: Imposing individual needs on the community

    Kage (err, KAGE) over at Tales posted recently about nut-free schools. She strongly supports the idea, given the possibility of an allergic reaction in vulnerable kids. Commenters have been even more adamant

  • Bushman to Claremont

    Claremont Graduate University has announced: Professor Richard Bushman has been appointed as the Howard W. Hunter Visiting Professor in Mormon Studies.

  • Of Perfect Organizations

    “No other organization is so perfect as the Mormon Church, except the German army.”

  • Lines, Circles, and Time

    Let’s think about lines, circles, and time.

  • The Number One Qualification

    There are all sorts of characteristics one wants in a Bishop. Ideally he’d be kind, honest, obedient, a good people person, in-tune spiritually, good at administration and delegation, care deeply about the youth, doctrinally aware, and so on. But all of these pale in comparison to what I consider to be by far the leading…

  • I don’t even know if Maria is her real name!

    My neighborhood erupted a little while ago. The issue was immigration. I found out about the eruption when I was doing my visiting teaching. I won’t go into the details of the neighborhood fight, just a few lines I heard as I prepared to do a typical visit. “Maria is illegal, you know. She has…

  • Dialogue about gay marriage

    This month’s Dialogue prominently features a discussion of gay marriage. Surprise number one: The lead article, by Randolph Mulhestein, is one of the best articles against gay marriage that I’ve read.

  • Cosmos: a personal view

    In 1980, when I was nine, for thirteen weeks running, I watched Cosmos on Sunday nights with my father.

  • Last Blast of Summer Reading

    Hard to believe it’s the end of summer, especially with temps around here expected to top 100 again.

  • Resolution No. 1

    It is the sense of Times and Seasons that the bowl system for college football makes no sense and that there ought to be a proper tournament of some sort.

  • A Public Service Announcement

    Stumble–because the world needs more ways to waste time online.

  • Announcement: The Great Bloggernacle (sorta virtual) Marathon Relay

    Each relay team will consist of 5 runners. Over the course of a 48-hour period, each team will, collectively, run and/or walk a marathon (26.2 miles). Here are the current (draft) rules. Feedback is welcome.

  • Getting in the way

    Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends. Sally: Why not? Harry: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

  • The Bell Tolls

    August 2007 has seen the passing of two fine Mormon historians

  • Larry Craig and the weird anti-Mormon commenters

    There’s some discussion online about whether Idaho senator Larry Craig (recently in the news for lewd acts) is LDS. According to his official biography, he is not. For some anti-Mormons, this isn’t enough. Here’s a (real!) comment from one blog:

  • Nephrite and Jadeite

    It was one of the last zone conferences I attended. President Gonzales paused in his talk, and then pulled out a small greenish-colored jade bracelet.

  • Where do I find “Official” History?

    The tension between “official” Mormon history and other sorts of Mormon history is a central narrative for a lot of Mormon intellectual discussion. D. Michael Quinn, for example, who is a fabulously tenacious researcher at times seems to have little in the way of a historiographic agenda other than to do “honest” history rather than…

  • The Times and Seasons Hat Trick

    This summer, Times and Seasons was fortunate enough to host three superb guest-bloggers: Dave Banack, of Dave’s Mormon Inquiry fame; Patricia Gunter Karamesines, who came to us by way of A Motley Vision; and Kathryn Lynard Soper, who blogs and writes at her pseudo-eponymous blog and the journal Segullah. We are proud to announce that,…