Most of the commentary that I have read on Elder Packer’s talk (and I have not read widely) treats the decamped rhetorical question as an emotional and political flashpoint.  But I think it’s more productively understood as a confounding question of theology, even theodicy.  The removal of those nine words from the published version does nothing to resolve the underlying doctrinal problem. First let me say that I understood Elder Packer’s talk to take up implicitly but very clearly the question of the origins of homosexual desire. Others interpret it differently, but that was how I heard it at delivery,… Read More

The friends and former students of Professor Richard Lyman Bushman invite submissions for a conference, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, to be held June 18, 2011, at the Springville Art Museum in Springville, Utah. The summer seminars led by Professor Bushman beginning in 1997 pursued the theme of “Joseph Smith and His Times.” Participants were asked to connect the Mormon prophet to the religions, philosophies, and cultural formations of his period. More recently the seminars have posed the same question for Mormonism as a whole. How is Mormon thought to be situated in its broad cultural environment? For… Read More

I used to worry that my kids weren’t listening to a word of General Conference. Now I worry that my kids are listening to every single word of General Conference. Read More

I got that familiar little thrill we all feel when one of our favorite hymns is sung in General Conference, as our first session this morning opened with “Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise.” (I was especially happy to have caught it since we experienced significant technical difficulties getting the conference to stream, causing us to miss both the intro and Pres. Monson’s subsequent talk – in eight years of internet streaming conference, I’ve never not had technical troubles, except one time, in the middle of the night, in a smoke filled internet cafe in Alexandria, Egypt). This is one… Read More

Consider this editorial in the Deseret News.  (I mean it.  Follow the link, read the article, and come back.)  Intellectually there is quite a bit going on in these paragraphs.  First, it is addressing the immigration debate arguing in effect that the rule of law is undermined by both widespread flouting of the laws and attempts to relentlessly enforce laws that are unfair.  Both points are well taken in my opinion and in my mind they point toward a policy of better enforcement of considerably more liberal immigration laws, something I would certainly support.  The interesting stuff, however, comes in… Read More

Elder Dallin H. Oaks spoke recently at Utah’s Constitution Day celebration. His talk, titled “Fundamentals of Our Constitutions,” discussed the role of the constitution, as well as a variety of other topics relating to law, religion, and the public sphere. The talk is well-articulated, as Elder Oaks’ talks tend to be, and sets out some specific ideas about politics which bear further discussion. For the moment, I wanted to focus on one particular portion of the talk. Elder Oaks writes that: Another great fundamental of the United States Constitution is its federal system, which divides government powers between the nation… Read More

For a decade we lived in Boca Raton, Florida — a city with a synagogue on every corner where you were much more likely to be invited to a bris or bar/bat mitzvah than any other religious ceremony. Boca had a single ward that varied between fairly thriving (when IBM had a campus there) to barely surviving (when they moved out) and spots in between. But few in the area seemed well-versed in Mormon culture or doctrine. One day I hosted a meeting for the room mothers for oldest daughter’s kindergarten class. When the women walked into the living room,… Read More

– – – I saw this photo on Reuters. What struck me most was the head scarf she is wearing. Here is a woman who, by joining the fight against the Taliban, is not rejecting her heritage. She is actively pursuing a new world, but not at the expense of her faith. The war in Afghanistan is often depicted as a war between the “backwards religious” and the “enlightened secular”, as though religious devotion cannot coexist with modern liberal democracy. This woman, by wearing the scarf that symbolizes her faith, defies that too-convenient dichotomy. She demonstrates that the definition of… Read More

A few years ago, the confluence of the Mitt Romney campaign and Proposition 8 (and to some extent Harry Reid) focused sustained national attention on the church and its members. The church’s profile has only continued to grow since then, raising a variety of questions about assimilation, retrenchment, and the future of the flock. Mormonism has long inhabited a liminal state between cultural insider and outsider. Armand Mauss’s pioneering work The Angel and the Beehive charts the church’s uneasy relationship with mainstream status, a cycle of ebb and flow driven by the specific benefits and drawbacks on each side of… Read More