Category: Life in the Church

  • Reverence Practice

    Kylie Turley

    The bishop is worried about ward reverence. He should be, truth be told.

  • For Our Central Texas Readers . . .

    Julie M. Smith

    An Adult Religion Class will be offered this Fall in the Primary room of the Pflugerville Building on Thursdays from 8pm-9:30pm beginning on August 28th. The class will cover Psalms 1-89 and will be taught by me. The class fee is $16.25. Questions? Email me at my first name AT timesandseasons DOT org.

  • Single Purpose

    Julie M. Smith

    I thought Ardis’ comment deserves a bigger audience:

  • MMM for Youth?

    Kylie Turley

    I don’t want to debate the ins and outs of the tragedy at Mountain Meadows. It was horrific no matter how you cut it. My more immediate problem is personal

  • “Mothers Who Know” Still Spurring Debate

    Dave Banack

    Georgia isn’t the only place with skirmishing this weekend: “LDS leader’s address still causing controversy,” a long article at the Deseret News, recounts the comments of five Sunstone panelists (and one unfortunate commenter) to LDS Relief Society President Julie B. Beck’s October 2007 Conference talk “Mothers Who Know.”

  • Teas

    Kaimi Wenger

    It’s a lot more complicated than just “tea” these days, isn’t it?

  • Posts You Might Have Missed 5

    Dave Banack

    If you’ve been on a cross-country trek visiting in-laws or golf courses (or both) instead of reading new blogs posts, here are a few good posts you might have missed.

  • Death and Doctrine

    Kylie Turley

    I have an uneasy relationship with death.

  • iTunes Gospel

    Marc Bohn

    So my colleagues have caught on to my secret plan to convert them all.

  • What is Our Marvelous Work Today?

    Ben Huff

    The development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has always been marvelous, but our sense of just what it is doing has changed quite dramatically from one decade to another. When Joseph Smith first went to (what in hindsight we call) the Sacred Grove,

  • Carl and Mathilda

    Craig H.

    Let us praise pioneers. Of all sorts, but today especially the traditional sort. I myself am thinking of Carl and Mathilda, whom I came to know through one of those wholly unexpected spine-tingling unbelievable fantastic experiences.

  • What’s Your Master Status?

    Craig H.

    No, it’s not the same as Master Race, so banish that association from your head. Instead it’s a useful sociological concept (who knew?) which not only has come in handy for writing my current book, but goes a long way toward explaining why we get along, or not, with liberals, reactionaries, gays, homophobes, gun-nuts, gun-controllers,…

  • Woe, Revised

    Julie M. Smith

  • Quorum Fun

    Craig H.

    A few months ago this was the calendar, word for word, sent out to a nearby quorum in a sleepy suburban ward (hint: it’s in the US). March 15th: Concealed Weapons Class, 1pm at the [deleted] home. Joint activity with the High Priests. Punch and cookies served. (Okay I added the punch and cookies bit.)

  • Girls’ Rules

    Craig H.

    My older sister was a great athlete in the old days (before Title IX), and just retired as the athletic director at a high school. Talking with her the other day gave me the idea for this post, so blame her if you don’t like it (isn’t that just like a little brother?). I thought…

  • Church halts sending North American missionaries to Russia

    Marc Bohn

    Last week BYU Newsnet posted and then pulled offline an article announcing that North American missionaries were no longer being called to serve in Russia. The move left many wondering about the state of the missionary program in Russia with some tempered hope that perhaps the Newsnet article had jumped the gun on a situation…

  • How Sacred is Conscience?

    Craig H.

    Any guest or new blogger obviously runs the risk of repeating topics that have been worn into the ground. Apologies in advance if that is the case here, but it seemed to me that possibly missing in the current debate, er, discussion, over a certain issue in California and how church members ought to respond…

  • Reading Psalm 137 as a Microcosm of Discipleship

    Nate Oman

    Psalm 137 is one of those wonderful and paradoxical passages of scripture that contains within itself a universe.

  • Going for Gold | Olympic Moments

    Dave Banack

    Mormon Times posted a list of LDS athletes who are headed to the Summer Olympics. An impressive group — I hope they all make their respective teams and countries proud in coming weeks.

  • FTA: Dating, Jane Austen, and the Virtues of Chastity

    Nate Oman

    Like most rugged and red-blooded American men I have long enjoyed the work of Jane Austen.

  • The Temple in European Mormon Sociality

    Jonathan Green

    The temple plays a role in the social life of European Mormons that is significantly different in a couple of ways from the usual American experience.

  • Sunday School Inequality

    Frank McIntyre

    This week I went to an excellent lecture on inequality. Clayne Pope, retiring economist, pointed out that while income inequality in the U.S. has been pretty close to the same for the last 200 years, leisure-time is now concentrated more heavily among the poor, while education inequality and lifespan inequality have both dropped like a…

  • Making Peace with Missionary Work

    Russell Arben Fox

    Tweny years ago today, June 15, 1988, I entered the Missionary Training Center and began my 24 months as a missionary assigned to the Korea Seoul West Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’d like to take this moment to offer all my mission companions, every missionary I knew, both my…

  • Called to leave

    Wendy Ulrich

    My grandmother, mother, and I all served missions, so I was delighted when my firstborn announced her intention to serve, submitted her papers, received her call. Little did I know.

  • “We lived after the manner of happiness”

    Wendy Ulrich

    The other day somebody sent me a YouTube link for a comedian I’ll call Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones was a chubby gramdma with hot flashes – not the kind of person you usually see doing stand-up. Most of the “funny” email forwarded to me makes me sigh and hit the delete button. Mrs. Jones made…

  • A Bastion of Mormonism

    Dave Banack

    Being mildly depressed about blogging at the moment, I decided to go trolling for a “good news” story to post. Here it is, a story about SVU from the SL Trib: “A bastion of Mormonism in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  • Shortage and storage

    Frank McIntyre

    With the recent spike in food prices, a three year old post demands new life. Here it is: 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…

  • Gospel culture and the others

    Wilfried Decoo

    How do ‘we’ as Mormons learn to view ‘others’? We can try to answer this question from the angle of various approaches to the concept of “gospel culture”.

  • Mormon identity and culture

    Wilfried Decoo

    The following is part of a larger study on the concept of “gospel culture”, which I have been working on. In a previous post I presented the question “How American is the Church?”, which yielded very interesting comments. For the present post I excerpted some further parts on culture and Mormon identity, with various questions…

  • Great Sermons: Out of Obscurity

    Frank McIntyre

    This talk was given early on in Elder Maxwell’s time as an Apostle and I think it is an excellent example of what I liked about him. “Granted, there is not full correlation among the four Gospels about the events and participants at the empty garden tomb. Yet the important thing is that the tomb…