Category: Cornucopia

Paul Ricoeur, the French phenomenologist and scholar of hermeneutics, has passed away at age 92. He was a profound and important thinker, especially for those interested in addressing the problem of belief–in the Bible, the reality of evil, the possibility of justice, the meaning of life–in the midst of our skeptical, modern world. Several months…

Group blogging can be done in one of two basic ways: Topical or ad hoc. Ad hoc group blogs allow members to post at any time on any subject. Today Nate posts on sugar beets, tomorrow Jim writes about Heidegger, and the next day Kaimi is whining about gender issues. Topical blogs, as the name…

Are executions in the town square less moral than air bombing? Consider the following hypotheticals from the international law of war.

Quick, there’s still time before the next youth dance! Check it out! Hat tip to Metafilter.

In my Belgian environment, I’m an oddity. A university professor who is a Mormon. Colleagues and students whisper about it. They can’t place me in the normal spectrum of the centuries old allegiances to our society. They wonder: how can this scholar believe the rigmarole of that foreign cult?

See here for the announcement.

Should members feel entitled to correct their Priesthood leaders, based on their own understanding of higher authorities?

In 3 Nephi 16:1-3, Jesus proclaims: And verily, verily, I say unto you that I have other sheep, which are not of this land, neither of the land of Jerusalem, neither in any parts of that land round about whither I have been to minister. For they of whom I speak are they who have…

An update on the Oman garden is in order.

Of late, I have been reading about the Romans, a group of exceptionally creative — if frequently cruel — lawyers with a really good army. What is not to like? It has got me thinking a bit about patriotism.

This review contains good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news: Fire in the Bones is pretty disappointing.

I’m the primary pianist, and so I’ve seen R. nearly every Sunday over the past few years. She’s a bright and polite young woman who comes to church regularly with her mother. She just turned 12, and graduated from primary into young women’s. And like a typical 12-year-old, R. is just starting to turn into…

For me one of the enduring frustrations and perplexities of parenting children in public schools is the need to monitor sex education curricula. If you think that schools don’t need monitoring, you aren’t paying attention.

This Sunday is the dedication of the San Antonio Temple. My husband and I will get to participate in the dedication from our stake center, but it’s going to be one loooong day for my boys, who struggle with the Sabbath even when four hours of it is eaten up with Church meetings. So I’ve…

Recently a T&S reader emailed me asking for my advice on the graduate school questions: is graduate education a worthwhile option for a young woman who intends to have children? I wrote back to her (rather astonishing myself at how much I found to say), and I’ve posted here my reply.

Throughout the 19th century, Mormons tried various different communal economic arrangements that basically didn’t work.

Today is Whitsunday, the Day of Pentecost, commemorating the day when the apostles “were all filled with the Holy Ghost,” as Jesus had promised they would be. I’ve written about Whitsunday before, about how I’ve never, to my knowledge, experienced any comparable spiritual manifestation or revelation, and also about those small gifts of belief that…

The pressure to give this book rave reviews is enormous. Everyone seems to love it (the Freakonomics website will lead you to plenty of positive reviews), and Steven Levitt is an undeniably brilliant economist — my hat’s off to anyone who wins the John Bates Clark Medal. But this is not a brilliant book. And…

Saint Judas by James Wright When I went out to kill myself, I caught A pack of hoodlums beating up a man. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot My name, my number, how my day began. How soldiers milled around the garden stone And sang amusing songs; how all that day Their javelins measured…

I love the comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’. Sometimes I worry for our future because children are growing up in the world today without the company of Calvin and his stuffed tiger. I love Calvin’s musings on the virtues of math atheism (‘as a math atheist, I should be excused from this [homework]’), and Hobbes’…

Embedded in the ten commandments are at least two injunctions having to do with property, which makes it one of the main subjects of the Decalogue and presumeably of central concern for the Gospel.

This weekend marked a victory of sorts.

We call one of our bedrooms the Noah’s Ark Room because there’s a mural of Noah’s Ark on the wall. It was painted by our house’s previous owner for his son Noah, who lived in this bedroom from his birth until we purchased the townhouse in 2001 and he and his parents moved to a…

Gordon’s post has prompted, not surprisingly, a torrent of discussion, which now seems to have veered off into a rather different streambed. I want to paddle up to a stream of the conversation that branched off a while back, taking another look at the presumptions behind the “absent mother.”