Category: Features
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A Mormon Image: Calle del Templo (Madrid)
Calle del Templo, which in English translates to “Temple Street,” is the street on which the Madrid Temple stands. ~ Gabriel González (http://gabrielgonzaleznunez.wordpress.com/) If you have a photograph you would like to submit for consideration in our A Mormon Image series, please see here for our submission requirements.
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A Mormon Image: Sunrise at the Corrientes Airport
With my assignment to the office of the Argentina Resistencia Mission, I helped pick up our new mission president. I snapped this photo as we walked to the terminal to await his arrival.
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Be Still My Soul
When I was 19 years old and a junior at BYU, I took a volunteer opportunity teaching a semester-long “life skills” class at the Utah State Prison. Maybe it’s not apparent from that one sentence how absurd it was for a sheltered Mormon girl from rural Canada to be teaching “life skills” to a bunch…
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A Mormon Image: Scriptures Deconstructed
A few years ago I left my scriptures on the roof of my car when driving home from church. When I realized what I’d done I returned to find the pages scattered all over the road. These were my mission scriptures and they meant a lot to me so I spent about an hour gathering…
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A Mormon Image: From on High
The title of and inspiration for this photograph of the Moroni statue atop Hill Cumorah in Palmyra comes from the text of Parley P. Pratt’s hymn “An angel from on High” (Hymns 13).
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On Silence: A Midrash of Elijah
Most of us are familiar with the story of the prophet Elijah, who is particularly famous for his dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal. My favorite part of Elijah’s story comes after that, though, when he realizes that not much changed as a result of his demonstration of God’s power–the people are still worshiping…
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T&S Welcomes Guest Blogger Michelle Lee
Times and Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Michelle Lee. Michelle is a licensed therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently works full-time for her local school district, providing mental health counseling and crisis management services to adolescents and their families, and also has a private…
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Three Types of Goodness and Truth
My PhD dissertation was about bias in cost and ridership forecasts for transit projects. Before getting into any data analysis, I address the question of how we should even be evaluating forecasts in the first place. One response to evidence that forecasts for transit projects have generally proven to be overwhelmingly biased has been an…
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A Mormon Image: The Kids Table Easter
I spent a lot of years at the kids table when I was young. Family dinners were a big deal. My grandmother lived for them. She was an excellent cook and a hostess extraordinaire. She would recite poetry and lead her guests in singing a few songs. She would also use her seating chart to try…
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Review: A Peculiar People, or How Protestants Viewed Mormons in the Nineteenth Century
So I finally got around to reading J. Spencer Fluhman’s book “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. I was expecting another account of “beat up the Mormons” episodes in the 19th century. Instead, it was an entertaining and informative review of how informally established Protestantism worked in the 19th…
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Reviving Our “A Mormon Image” Photo Series
We’ve decided to revive our long dormant photo series “A Mormon Image,” which features photos and other images that carry meaning for us because they resonate with our “Mormonness.” As part of this, we’d like to issue a renewed call for photographs to be considered for inclusion in the series. What qualifies as a Mormon image?…
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Access to the Temple
During the three years I was a transportation planning student living in Los Angeles (I completed the final two years of my degree remotely), I had fairly consistent access to a car, but I generally only used it as a transportation mode of last resort since I preferred to travel by walking or transit, and…
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6 Questions for Tom Kimball on the Kirtland Temple
The Sunday School curriculum is currently covering the Kirtland period of LDS history, including a full lesson on the Kirtland Temple. While we often treat that temple as part of 19th-century history, it is still around, it is still used for religious services, and it is available for public tours for visitors of any religious…
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Church and Hockey
I’m Mormon and my husband is not. He has his own religion that constitutes an important part of his identity, vaguely informs his religious beliefs, and minimally informs his religious practice. I would not describe him as religious at all. He would describe me as extremely religious. Sometimes people at church ask me if my…
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Welcome to Guest Blogger Carole Turley Voulgaris
Times and Seasons is pleased to welcome Carole Turley Voulgaris as our latest guest blogger. Carole recently completed her PhD in transportation planning at UCLA and will be joining the transportation engineering faculty at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this winter following her upcoming maternity leave. For the time being, she lives in the Seattle area…
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Guest Post: What Can LGBT Mormons Hope For?
A year and a half ago, I invited John Gustav-Wrathall, president of the support group Affirmation: LGBT Mormons, Families & Friends, to share his thoughts on the Church’s new policy affecting LGBT members and their children (see All Flesh from December 2015). Diverging responses to this post gave rise to the idea of hosting a conversation on the blog about…
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Which are the most influential General Conference talks?
After most General Conferences, there are one or two talks that really stay with me. Some of those talks enter the language of many members, such as Elder Oaks’s framing of choices that are “good, better, best.” Is there any way to identify the most influential talks? We could begin with who influences the influencers.…
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Soccer and Sunday
General Conference seems to come and go so quickly now. This must have something to do with the ease of streaming it live into every home — 10 hours of Conference in one weekend is more than enough for most of us. Once upon a time getting the Conference Ensign was a treat. Not so…
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Three big things (and some little things) this lifelong Mormon learned from Matt Bowman’s history of the Church
How do you tell the story of a 200-year-old movement in a single volume? In the summer of 2011, Matthew Bowman received a call inviting him to write such a volume in under three months. The result — The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith — is an accessible, even-handed volume that uncommonly gives…
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“Neither Shall There Be Any More Pain”: Trials and Their Purpose
This is a talk I gave in sacrament meeting on March 12, 2017. The topic was “Trials and Their Purpose.” I appreciate the thoughts and words of [the previous speakers]. I hope that you all can find some solace in our various messages, even if the answers are a bit incomplete. The purpose of trials—or…
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Loosening the iron grip of the King James Version of the Bible?
A couple of years ago, Elder Richard Maynes (of the Presidency of the Seventy) quoted Matthew 13:44 in his conference talk: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” But wait…
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Can Mercy Rob Justice?
We’re all familiar with Alma 42 and the notion that mercy can’t rob justice. I was reading this today at church and was struck by a context that often doesn’t get mentioned. In the ancient world relationships often determined actions. This meant special treatment for friends and especially relations. In Greek philosophy and plays you…
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Telling the stories of the Church’s history
A review of Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, by Gregory A. Prince Telling the history of a church can be tricky. Which elements arose from the culture of the time? Which manifest the direct intervention of the divine? Is that even a sensible distinction? On the one hand, some Church leaders have…
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Listen to the stories of those who hurt because of the ghost of eternal polygamy
a review of Carol Lynn Pearson’s The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men I don’t think about polygamy much. I have no interest in participating in it (in this life or another). It doesn’t come up much in my conversations, except as I discuss my polygamous ancestors…
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Conditional Love Is Back
The recently announced LDS doctrine of conditional divine love comes from President Nelson’s 2003 Ensign article “Divine Love,” in which he stated: “While divine love can be called perfect, infinite, enduring, and universal, it cannot correctly be characterized as unconditional.” No additional commentary was added until the October 2016 General Conference, when two apostles, citing…
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The Nova Effect – Secular Age, round 7
This third section of Taylor’s book is, to me, the most redundant, so I’m going to make up for lost time by condensing these four chapters into one blog post. In fact, I’ll leave Ch. 11 off entirely because it’s mostly an exploration of the section’s themes through case studies in Britain and France. In…
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Sacrament Prayers: A Close Reading
A while ago my dad had pointed out some features of the sacrament that somehow I’d missed in all the years I’d been partaking. A few of these were examples of something that’s right before you the whole time yet somehow you still miss. I thought I’d share them with you. We get our sacrament…
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Classroom Discussion: Productive or Not?
The LDS Sunday School General President posted this short article at LDS.org (in the Church News section). Here is his observation about LDS classroom discussion: [W]e hear of many inspired classroom discussions. Occasionally, however, we hear of discussions that are open and lively, but at the conclusion there has been little, if any, doctrinal focus…
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Book Review: Through the Valley of Shadows
Although Samuel Brown’s new book, Through the Valley of Shadows, is not a book that focuses on Mormonism, I jumped at the chance to review it for Times and Seasons simply because the subject matter fascinated me. Death, after all, is something that we all face, and I was already tangentially aware that technological advances…
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The Anthropocentric Shift: Secular Age, round 6
Links to posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 In the last several posts, we’ve covered how the enchanted, hierarchical world of pre-modern Europe slowly shifted in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries to a “disciplinary” society, where human beings began to perceive themselves as rational agents and masters of their own will and destiny, and increasingly related…