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54 responses
The problem with “liberal Mormon” is not the liberal Mormons, whoever they might be, but rather the term used to classify them. It seems to me that the term is used as a catch-all for at least five mostly unrelated things. Read More
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3 responses
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13 responses
In Comparative World Religions (REL 151) my freshman year I was taught that the word “Holy” is derived, or related to the word “Whole.” The basic idea being that part of being a perfect Divine being is the state of being complete, whole, or finished. I’ve wondered in the past just what perfect really means for individual people. Especially as it relates to our ideas of resurrection, as outlined in Alma, “The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame.” Reading this account of a… Read More
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102 responses
“We’re talking about preserving the sanctity of human life. The state of Utah should lead the charge.” Read More
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20 responses
I always love teaching lessons in Priesthood, but I was particularly excited to see the upcoming schedule. The schedule sets aside the 4th week of each month for a general conference talk selected by the Bishop or Stake President, as usual, with the selected talk providing the lesson in both Priesthood and Relief Society meetings. The upcoming slate looks like this: Read More
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14 responses
I am the secretary in my ward’s young men’s presidency and occasionally teach lessons to our priest’s quorum. I recently taught a series of lessons on how to study the scriptures better. Read More
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11 responses
I ordinarily don’t post or even link to my Salt Lake Tribune column here on T&S. This one is a little different, though, because it’s about an extraordinary young Mormon man, and the Tribune being the Tribune, I couldn’t include all the Mormon elements I might have liked to. Read More
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78 responses
Last year, my wife and I began looking for a good pre-school for our four year old daughter. We looked into a number of different options, weighing the benefits of different programs. Ultimately, we decided to enroll her in a nearby private preschool that is operated by the local Grace Brethren Church, a Protestant denomination. Read More
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25 responses
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 my mind began to list all the things that we need or want- a grown up bed for our kid, someone to watch our kid this Thursday while I’m at the dentist, to figure out what is going on with my husband’s ear, help figuring… Read More
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15 responses
Over in the “Notes from All Over” sidebar, I linked to a Deseret News article by Carrie Moore which discusses a recent addition or addendum to the church’s oft-repeated state on political neutrality. (Scroll down to “Relationships with Government,” where you will read that “elected officials who are Latter-day Saints make their own decisions and may not necessarily be in agreement with…a publicly stated Church position.”) I was contacted for the article, and I have to thank Carrie for making me sound far more coherent than I’m sure I actually was; she put together a fine and thoughtful exploration of… Read More
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8 responses
Today my wife visited a ward conference in Grafenwöhr, representing the stake YW presidency. As of today, Grafenwöhr is a US servicemen’s ward; until now it’s been a branch. For a meetinghouse, the ward rents a local hall. Before it was used as a church, the building was a bar, and then a strip club. Also, Elvis once performed there, approximately where the young women now have their classroom. Some LDS meetinghouses have longer and nobler histories, but I would guess few have had such close brushes with fame. Read More
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64 responses
From my inbox: Read More
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15 responses
Last week I read _The End of the Spear_, a book by Steve Saint about evangelical missionaries who had gone to the deep Ecuadorian jungles in the 1950’s. The first five missionaries were killed by the natives, but the son a slain missionary (the author himself) returned to the place where his father died. Read More
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73 responses
Recently my husband and I came across a set of rather old LDS song books. As my ward’s primary chorister my favorite was The Primary Song Book: Including Marches and Voluntaries. The edition is missing the title page and so I’m not sure when it was published (and am at a loss as to how I would find out). Let’s just say that it’s really old. Among the very few songs that have survived from this edition to the current one are, “Give said the little Stream”, “I Thank Thee Dear Father”, “Can a Little Child Like Me”, and “Tell… Read More
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14 responses
Going without a car means giving up some control over the safety of yourself and your family, or the illusion of control. Read More
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54 responses
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 so normal to gossip about him that I’m having a tough time not filling this post with endless stories about stupid things he’s done. He was, in short, a tough person to get along with, and take seriously (I think it was his Dracula hairdo,… Read More
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This weekend, Morris Thurston will present on Joseph Smith’s legal trials, at the Miller-Eccles group meeting here in California. Read More
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15 responses
Our latest guest blogger is not quite a video-game character, but she’s probably the next best thing. She’s the blogger P. Anderson — also known as Starfoxy (and occasionally as Andermom) — and she has the following to say about herself: Read More
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39 responses
A regular reader asked me why Times and Seasons let yesterday’s anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, honored in much of the blogosphere as “Blog for Choice Day,” go by without any comment. I replied that probably the main reason was that everything has already been said which can be said here on that topic. Really, he replied? When? Oh, you recent arrivals, I thought to myself… Read More
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30 responses
Melissa and I can’t be the only LDS parents out there whose first reaction upon hearing that church has been cancelled due to bad weather is “Oh crap–what are we going to do with the kids all day?!?” Read More
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5 responses
Susan Wise Bauer has a review of (what sounds like) an interesting book. Read More
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9 responses
Arriving in Salt Lake City in 1898, a young preacher named James Hart tested the generosity of the people among whom he had landed. Read More
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My youngest daughter has discovered a trove of photos at her grandmother’s house, and she has been going through them Read More
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51 responses
Over the past several days, I’ve attended some magnificent presentations at Utah Valley State College in commemoration on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Besides asking myself the obvious (“Why aren’t we doing this kind of thing at BYU?â€), I have been taking notes and thinking about how my life can change because of the things I’ve heard and been engaged in. Read More
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32 responses
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post on the procedure for excommunicating the President of the Church. In doing a bit of research on the history of the church court system, I came across some interesting complications in the story. Read More
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75 responses
You’re being greedy. You’re acting like Madame Blueberry before she gets religion. Read More
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18 responses
The various threads about the position at CGU has gotten me thinking about what Mormon scholarship needs, and I think that it is probably not a chaired position in Mormon studies, welcome as such a thing might be (especially if it allows a prolific scholar to churn out a lot of high quality work on Mormon studies). Rather, I think that Mormons ought to look to the libertarian wing of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for models. Read More
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