Category: Life in the Church

  • 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…

  • President Uchtdorf to First Presidency

    Frank McIntyre

    That is all.

  • The Form of Mormon Temple Ceremonies

    Ben Huff

    For a concrete idea of what Mormon temple services are like, comparing them with a Catholic Mass actually goes pretty far.

  • Joseph Smith, Again for the First Time

    Ardis E. Parshall

    Sometimes I have suffered from convert envy.

  • Watching conference

    Wilfried Decoo

    Stake conference in the mission field. Still the mission field, for although we are a stake, there is no stake center, only a chapel in some of the main cities, and rented rowhouses elsewhere. The stake covers some 10,000 square miles. Therefore we gather in this huge, sparsely lit movie theatre—theatre number 14 in a…

  • Women Who Know

    Patricia Karamesines

    … grow tomatoes in their home garden, and lots of them. Men who know grow them, too.

  • Little street vendor

    Wilfried Decoo

    She is a little street vendor who put up shop next to the entrance of the church with the long name.

  • Generations

    Dave Banack

    The tireless Kevin Barney is hosting a discussion of LDS apologetics for teenagers over at BCC, trying to get a handle on the tone, approach, and content of a fireside-type presentation to LDS youth on that topic. Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that one of the challenges is how the topics that get…

  • LDS Historical Sites

    Dave Banack

    A couple of months ago I heard a presentation on the general topic of historical sites that the Church owns and manages. I came with a pocketful of snarky questions but left with some appreciation for how tough the task is and (on the whole) how well the sites are set up and managed. I’ll…

  • How Much Should We Advantage Our Kids Over Others?

    Matt Evans

    When asked why they aren’t more generous with their time or money, many people answer that if they gave more, it would be at the expense of their own children. Sure, the argument goes, it would be great if I could pay an extra $100 to provide immunizations for kids in Africa, but my first…

  • Why Haven’t You Adopted an Orphan Child?

    Matt Evans

    For years I’ve been torn by the knowledge that there are thousands of orphaned or abandoned children desperate to be welcomed into a family like mine and our reasons for “passing by on the other side” when we see the “least of these.”

  • Quality

    Patricia Karamesines

    Warning: To write this post, I’ve had to get personal. I apologize in advance for that, but some points I make require grounding in my observations about personal experiences, many of which are highly charged. The stories and observations I report here in no way represent everything I think about these matters. More importantly, they…

  • BYU Summer Seminar

    Jim F.

    The annual summer symposium, this year “Joseph Smith and His Times,” will be held on Thursday, August 9, 2007. The symposium will feature papers by twelve summer seminar fellows on the theme “Mormon Thinkers, 1890-1930,” covering topics ranging from the influence of Herbert Spencer on Mormon thought to Mormonism and Modernity.

  • Who Owns That Church?

    Dave Banack

    There’s always an owner, of course — there are few concepts more disfavored in the law than real property without an owner. But when it comes to chapels and church buildings, the question of just who owns them can get messy. The latest example: a congregation in Orange County that is trying to leave the…

  • What if . . . ?

    Jim F.

    What if I didn’t believe in God? Would I still be a Mormon?

  • Memorial Quiz

    Frank McIntyre

    Kristine’s pop quiz prompts me to ask a similar quiz I’ve had on my mind. Think of this as Memorial Day come early. Feel free to cheat if you have to: Name your great grandparents. Name 5 of your great-great grandparents. Name 3 of your great-great-great grandparents.

  • The ordinary

    Jim F.

    However well we do in school or our jobs or in our church callings or in any endeavor, most of our lives are and will be ordinary.

  • Appropriate Requests

    P. Anderson

    Yesterday we met our new home teachers. After they shared their message, and before they asked to leave us with a prayer, they asked the common question, “Is there anything you need that we can help you with?” We answered “No.” We then said a prayer together and they left. When they asked that question…

  • From Russia With Love- Updated

    P. Anderson

    There is a certain sort of person that is just so self-absorbed and generally unaware that it just doesn’t feel wrong to gossip about them, they’d just enjoy the extra attention. In my childhood ward it was Brother L.- in that ward people traded gossip about Brother L. like baseball cards. In fact it feels…