A question that keeps coming back to me: does God write? Read More

This post is not two months early. It’s two weeks late. Around here, Christmas cookies and candy and multiple varieties of Stollen have been available in grocery stores since the last week of September, and the local hypermarket has a whole aisle devoted to Christmas decorations. Read More

Julio stood behind the blue door, waiting. Blanca stood there too. Read More

Do you ever have one of those odd moments when you are seeing something unfamiliar and suddenly it becomes extremely familiar? Or perhaps you see something very familiar but it suddenly reminds you of something equally familiar but totally different? I had one of those experiences today. Read More

I’ve been thinking about President Packer’s Sunday talk–mostly centered on the idea that we have nothing to apologize for in LDS history and should proudly defend our heroic, pioneering past. Read More

Contact between religions is a lot like contact between languages. One way for two language communities to interact is through invasion. Read More

Some of our readers may have felt like this cartoon when Dave Landrith’s last blog met a(n un?)timely demise. Fortunately for those readers, Dave has now made like this cartoon — the resemblance is uncanny, really — and started a new party blog. Fellow inmates travelers include a random John, John F., annegb, danithew, and Proud Daughter of Eve. The blog’s tagline suggests that it is written by peculiar people; truer words, I am relatively sure, were never spoken. Also, it looks really spiffy. Welcome (back) the bloggernacle, folks! Read More

My daughter loves to play on the hardwood floor next to the stone hearth behind the wooden rocking chair. She is one. I keep on thinking this is an accident waiting to happen and tend to move the chair, spread the toys away from the hearth, and sit down beside her just in case. Read More

It’s been great to have Seraphine as a guest blogger these past few weeks. Her posts have covered a variety of topics and have never been uninteresting; I suspect that her posts on feminism will continue to draw readers and commenters for some time to come. (All of Seraphine’s T&S posts are available here.) For now, though, Seraphine returns to the garden from whence we borrowed her, the always-interesting Zelophehad’s Daughters; readers who enjoyed Seraphine’s posts here are advised to look for more over at ZD. Read More

An amazing documentary premiered on byu.tv today between sessions of conference. Read More

I have been thinking all weekend about Russell’s post attacking the Mormon legislators who voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The post was a rant. Russell is disgusted and outraged, but there was more to the post than that. Russell didn’t simply think that the Mormon legislators were wrong. He thought that they had betrayed their Mormoness at some deep level. I’m trying to figure out whether or not there is any value in what Russell has done. Read More

“[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February� –-Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill Read More

My childhood was split between northern Virginia, outside of DC, and the international community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I went to high school at The Cate School near Santa Barbara, CA. I met Kristine during a year at MIT, took a great class on scripture study from Jim at BYU, and just missed Melissa in the Japan Tokyo South Mission, finishing my service a little before she arrived. I met Adam at the University of Notre Dame and completed my PhD in Philosophy there in 2006. I specialized in ethics and wrote my dissertation on happiness and friendship in neo-Aristotelian… Read More

Continue discussions from yesterday, or start new ones. Share with us what you’ve gotten out of conference, or what you hope to get. Read More

Thoughts? Opinions? Impressions? Insights? Share them here, from either the morning or the afternoon sessions. Read More

A seminary teacher once told me: Before conference, write down a question you need answered. Think carefully, ponder and pray about what the question should be. When you have your question, write it down on paper. Pray that an answer will be given in conference. Then, as you listen to conference, listen for your answer. What (if you don’t mind sharing) will you be listening for, this conference? Read More

I have been thinking about Marilynne Robinson lately … Read More

I can’t believe you people. Read More

There are two very similar stories of miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes in Mark’s Gospel. Read More

During my senior year of college, my life fell apart. Depression had entered my life months before, and I had been trying to ignore its growing bleakness, hoping that it would go away if I pretended it wasn’t there. Read More

Here’s the lead from an article in today’s New York Times: “IN the 1830’s, when men’s pants were first tailored with buttons visible down the front of the fly, the Mormon leader Brigham Young discouraged the population from wearing them, calling them ‘fornication pants.’” Read More

Opening Exercises: my girls stretched on hard chairs, schooled hands still seeking their phones; leaders whispered, heads together, in the back; we settled into our common rhythms—every week the same. Read More

-Feminist Mormon Housewives runs not-one, but-two recent posts on how to answer questions and return to the church from inactivity. (Because feminists really want to undermine the church and all that.) -You already knew that Family History Centers were good for filling in dates on charts. (As in, “what’s the birth date of my great-grandfather?”) Bookslinger finds that they’re useful for getting another kind of date. Really! (Dating via genealogy centers — what are they going to think of next, baptism for the dead?) -Finally, don’t miss Eve’s poignant and thoughtful post about seeking for happiness in a “secondary” choice… Read More

For those engaged in the perennially fun pastime of Mitt Romney watching, one of the more interesting places to go is the Evangelicals for Mitt blog. Read More

When I was in college, I dabbled a bit with genealogy. Read More

I’ve enrolled my two oldest children in a German elementary school. They have until Christmas to learn German and catch up to the rest of their first- or third-grade classes before the risk of flunking out gets to be too high. Read More

I am eating an egg and thinking about all those women. Read More