Category: Life in the Church
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New Mormon Blog at Beliefnet
Jana Reiss, former T&S guest blogger and author of Mormonism for Dummies, is running a new Mormon blog at Beliefnet: Flunking Sainthood. Put a link in your blogroll (do people still do blogrolls?) and visit often. Having myself previously hosted a Mormon blog at Beliefnet, I have some idea of the challenge the new blog…
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An Unexpected Gift
At 3:28 this morning we welcomed a new son into the world. As one would expect, congratulations and well-wishes have come flooding in from friends and family all day. And for all of these we have been moved and grateful. First thing this morning, however, we received a congratulatory gift we hadn’t anticipated. Women housed…
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A Mormon Image: Knocking on Dracula’s Door
Even Dracula and his minions deserve to hear about the Book of Mormon. by Dan Dubei
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Four Dead in Ohio
What if you knew her and / Found her dead on the ground? / How can you run when you know? Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. Have we learned what we should have from the tragedy?
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Requesting Priesthood Lines of Authority
In the course of an interesting email exchange today, I learned that a good friend and I had had similar experiences in trying to track down our priesthood lines of authority. After being ordained Elders, we both asked our fathers if they had copies of their lines of authority, both said they thought they did…
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This Mormon Life
Several weeks ago the NPR program This American Life aired a stunning segment on Gordon Gee, the Latter-day Saint President of Ohio State University, and his daughter Rebecca. The segment revolved around a series of letters Gordon’s late wife Elizabeth wrote to their daughter as she was dying of cancer. Rebecca was 16 at the…
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Mormons to Watch for the Next Six Months
Last year I looked at the information that many Mormons want to know each April, the understanding we want of the changes that have happened in the last six months and what that will mean for the next six months. Its time to do it again.
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General Conference for Kids
Our very own Kylie Turley has had her hands full of late, but wanted us to post a link to these fantastic General Conference activities for the kiddos. Enjoy.
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A Mormon Image: Elijah
The most recent baptism in our family. I wish I had a similar photo of our daughter, but, of course, I wasn’t in the change room with her.
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A Mormon Image: Joy On A Cattle Truck
This is a group of mostly single Latter-day Saints from D.C. and elsewhere who are on their way to volunteer in a remote Guatemalan village in the Polochic Valley– one of the poorest in the world. Many of the villagers from this area are themselves Latter-day Saints. The volunteer work done be this group consisted…
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Missionary work, common ground, ethics, and deception
A fascinating New York Times article and follow up blog post discuss negative reactions to a build-on-common-ground Christian missionary initiative among Muslims. The blog post details: An outreach technique that some Baptist missionaries use with Muslims. It involves stressing commonalities between the Koran and the Bible and affirming that the Allah of the Koran and…
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Sleep, Success, and Seminary
Sleep: it’s more important than you think, especially for teenagers. Here’s from George Will’s latest column, “How to ruin a child“: Only 5 percent of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get an hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.
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Higher Education and Mormon Culture
While discussing the development of Mormon culture at the recent Brazilian Mormon Studies Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, one friend told me that Mormon culture would really develop when there was an LDS University for members in Brazil to attend.
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Putting the Sunday in the Super Bowl
Some time ago on T&S, I survived a discussion on the history of Sunday (got no t-shirt though). That knock-down drag-out event included some talk of sports, but overall was pretty general. In light of the upcoming Super Bowl I thought it might be fun(?) to look at the rise of Sunday sport more specifically.…
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Feeding the Missionaries—in the Internet age
As life-long LDS Church members, my wife and I know the drill—how to feed the missionaries. Then, with our son serving an LDS mission, we got an email that changed everything.
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Testimonies of the Bloggernacle
A friend asked whether I was aware of any good collections of testimony or “Why I Believe”-type posts in the Bloggernacle. Nothing really sprung to mind, so I thought I’d issue a call for people to share their favorites here. I’ll compile a running bullet-point list below of the suggestions.
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Christmas with Autism
In April of 2008, our son Samuel was diagnosed with autism . . . But in this Christmas week, I wanted to share some specific experiences that we have had with our special needs child, first the challenges that the holiday posed and then the wonderful blessings that we have experienced together as a family.…
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Calling All Introverts
There’s hope! At least that’s the message of a couple of posts I read through lately (here and here) presenting an interview with Adam McHugh, the author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. By “Church” he means Evangelicals, not the LDS Church, but the discussion is still relevant to…
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Do We Need A Fifth Mission?
The news is out that LDS leaders are adding a fourth mission for the Church: caring for the poor and needy. According to an official LDS spokesman cited in the Salt Lake Tribune article, the new mission (or purpose or emphasis) will be included in the new edition of the Handbook of Instructions to be…
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I’m Sick and Tired of December
I’m not Scrooge and I’m not the Grinch, either—but December is enough to make me feel like one of those guys. It’s only December 6, and I’m feeling sick and tired of this month. Could we schedule anything else? Seriously. I cut back on parties and try to simplify, just like nice mommy articles suggest.…
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Your View of Mormons in the Media
I recently had a short discussion with a journalism student about how Mormons and Mormonism get covered in the mainstream media and whether new online media, including blogs, do any better. I’ll summarize my responses below, but I invite readers to offer their own responses in the comments. 1. How do Mormons feel about increased…
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Parents are people
It’s been a stressful time for us. My father in law had been battling leukemia for over a year, when he suddenly took a turn for the worse. FIL’s illness lasted a few more weeks, and he finally passed away. This has affected the family in a number of ways; most importantly for this post,…
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“Fathers do not mother”
Kaimi put up a sidebar link to a NYT piece on parenting. It had an interesting quote: “Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.”
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True Adventures in Turning the Other Cheek, Pt. Two
For the next several weeks, I attended church when I could. Participation often included lowering my eyes when the bishop or his first counselor walked by and gave me stern “We’re watching you” stares. In some ways the whole business interested me so I wasn’t suffering as much as some might suppose. But given the…
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Halloween Costumes and Inner Conflict
Halloween scares me. Of course, I’m scared of lots of things—poverty, cancer, rape, gang violence, Satan, etc. I thought I should admit that up front. Make of it what you will.
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President Monson wins the prize
So Slate keeps track of who it considers the most powerful octogenarians and President Monson tops the list. If ever there was a list where Mormons could shine that did not have to do with singing and dancing I guess it makes sense that it would be “powerful old men”. To loosely paraphrase President Hinckley, isn’t…
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Are the Books Available?
It is a bit of a coincidence that, as I prepared my regular list of the books and other media mentioned in General Conference, one of the LDS discussion forums in Brazil I follow was lamenting the decision to discontinue selling classic LDS works in Portuguese, like Talmage’s The Articles of Faith and LeGrand Richard’s…
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Diapers, Dishes, and Dusting
Yesterday, a Mormon Times article began with this opener: “For Finnish music star Mervi Hiltunen-Multamäki, trading in exotic concert locales, a prime-time TV show and platinum records for diapers, dishes and dusting was an easy decision. Maybe that’s because following the prophet has never been hard for her.”