Category: Liberal Arts

  • Preserving the Veil from Survey Data

    Frank McIntyre

    Suppose I find that being Mormon raises income, makes your children nicer, and does all sorts of wonderful things. In fact, suppose God blessed every person who converted instantly and spectacularly with beautiful hair and perfect teeth.

  • Science and Nihilism

    Jim F.

  • Santa-god and the Second Naivete

    Jim F.

    I spent all of September and a good part of October finishing an essay on community for a journal on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and it nearly killed me.

  • Fixing the Minimum Wage

    Frank McIntyre

    It seems pretty clear that we are heading for a hike in the minimum wage. For the many of us who care about poverty reduction, which would be basically all of us, this could be a big deal. The problems with the minimum wage are that it:

  • The Opportunity Cost of Publishing

    Frank McIntyre

    In this excellent post, Rosalynde talks about the gender differences in subject material among Deseret Book writers. This renews the discussion brought up by Taryn Nelson-Seawright on the same difference existing in other Mormon outlets. Explanations abound for this phenomena, ranging from differing preferences to piggy discrimination, but most of them are sort of boring.…

  • Why Europeans look lazy

    Frank McIntyre

    It is a well established fact that Europeans perform vastly less formal market work than Americans. A less known fact is that this is a recent development— in the late 50s, Europeans worked about 10% more hours, but this has been in steady decline for 40 years, until now they work about 30% fewer hours…

  • Camels, Needles, Heaven

    Frank McIntyre

    Rich people who pay tithing are, by all accounts, still losers compared to the poor. Or, anyway, though their ten percent is a lot more money, it is money that had little effect on their life and so is not a very impressive sacrifice. Thus their salvation is put in jeapardy by diminishing marginal returns!…

  • How Wrong is it to Compare Yourself with Others?

    Michael McBride

    A growing body of research (mine own included) in various social sciences finds that people report higher happiness levels when they do better than the people around them.

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part II: The Edited Volume Retrospective

    Michael McBride

    The Mormon Social Science Association, under the direction of editors John Hoffman, Cardell Jacobsen, and Tim Heaton of BYU’s Department of Sociology, is currently putting together a volume of essays that retrospectively assess O’Dea’s 1957 classic The Mormons.

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part I: Strain and Conflict in the Church

    Michael McBride

    Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (1957) is a classic text in Mormon studies. So much that the Mormon Social Science Association is currently putting together an edited volume

  • Who took the LD out of LDS?

    Patrick Mason

    -or- What ever happened to the good ol’ last days? -or- Where have all the millennialists gone?

  • History and Scripture

    Jim F.

  • Peak oil and taxes

    Frank McIntyre

    On the Urban thread, Jonathan Green pointed out that the major issue with oil scarcity may not be how much oil we have in the ground, but how much we can pump in a given year. If we are maxed out on supply for a year, any oil disaster creates a huge crunch.

  • The Real Danger?

    John Fowles

    [NOTE: After initially posting this, I soon removed it because I was made aware that it was unnecessarily divisive. This was not my intent. However, I am putting it back up, unaltered, in the interest of debate. Additionally, one commenter pointed out that it was unfair to delete the post after people had commented, something…

  • Tomorrow morning, at 2 AM

    John David Payne

    Once a year, after enduring a grueling six hours of church in one day, I lay down to sleep knowing that during the wee hours of the night I will be robbed of one whole hour. It is time to forever abolish Daylight Saving Time.

  • Defining terrorism

    John David Payne

    By request, this morning I am going to talk about defining terrorism. The first important thing you need to realize is that there is no single widely accepted definition, either in academia or in the policy world. Everyone uses their own. So we’re going to talk about how you can build your own definition of…

  • Prophecy vs. History

    John Fowles

    Not too long ago, I stumbled across the PBS presentation of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel (2d ed. 1999). It reminded me of dealing with the book at college and enjoying the ideas presented and the sweeping take of world history that it offered. But while watching the presentation and contemplating the message…

  • Market Dominant Minorities in the Book of Mormon

    John Fowles

    Market Dominant Minorities

  • And Justice for All

    Jim F.

    I apologize in advance for writing about a topic that is at least closely related to, if not the same as Nate’s. But it is his fault. He made me start thinking about the question of freedom and its relation to justice.

  • The Mormon Bankrupt

    Frank McIntyre

    Utah has a very high rate of bankruptcy. In 2000 it hovered at around 7 filings per thousand people– twice the national average. This lonely fact has launched a thousand explanations for why Mormons have such a problem with defaulting on their creditors. Clearly, the thinking seems to be, this shows some of the rot…

  • The Quotidian

    Jim F.

  • Is Poverty Satanic?

    J. Nelson-Seawright

    One of the most important scriptural texts for the theological consideration of poverty is to be found in Alma 32. This chapter discusses Alma’s mission to the Zoramites. During a sermon on the hill Onidah, Alma is approached by a group of impoverished individuals who were “poor in heart, because of their poverty as to…

  • Hermeneutics

    Jim F.

    That’s a 25 cent word if there ever was one, something for college kids to show Mom and Dad to prove they got something for their money, something a grad student to lord it over others with in the commons.

  • Dear Jane

    Jim F.

    Dear Jane, I don’t know you—at least I don’t think I do—but I have been struck by your willingness to speak openly and honestly about your situation. My Sikh friends speak of “seekers.” You are genuinely a seeker and, so, a person deserving of respect, including the respect of response. However, I haven’t had anything…

  • Eternal Progression and Retrogression

    Geoff J

    If there is progression, there may also be retrogression; if there is good, there may be evil. Everything has its opposite. (John A. Widtsoe, Rational Theology, Chapter 15)

  • God’s Foreknowledge or Lack Thereof

    Geoff J

    Foreknowledge vs. free will

  • On being a bookkeeper in Zion

    Nate Oman

    As a young missionary, the Lord saw fit to inflict on me one the greatest trials that can afflict a Latter-day Saint: He forced me to become educated about Church financial controls and auditing procedures.

  • Give to the Beautiful

    Frank McIntyre

    We had a seminar recently from an experimental economist out of the University of Chicago. He has done a variety of cool things using field experiments. Let me mention the one he presented. The experiment involved sending people door to door to do fund raising for a (real) charity. The fundraisers (who were college students)…

  • Choose Your Own Adventure

    Frank McIntyre

    Let’s play a game. You can choose between two jobs. One pays $50,000 and the other pays $100,000. You know, or can guess, that if you take the first you will give about $5,000/yr in fast offerings and other gifts to the poor. If you make $100,000 you will give about $15,000. You will also…

  • Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

    Frank McIntyre

    Clearly, were there to be a famine, a one year food supply in the basement would look really good. What may be slightly less obvious is that the presence of food storage, even if nobody ever uses any of it for an emergency, can stop a famine from ever actually happening.