I was asked to prepare and give a talk on my Grandmother Jolley’s life story at her recent funeral. In going back through her history, one thing struck me more than anything else: that the Salt Lake City she grew up in was crowded with people whose names, today, sound like a hit parade of a Mormonism gone by. Read More

We want to give our hearty thanks to Tyler Johnson, who took a break from his wonderful blog Mormon Hippocrates to grace Times and Seasons with a brilliant series of posts on achievement, spirituality, survival, and God’s grace. Thanks in particular, Tyler, for sharing your father’s story (though really it was a much larger story than that) with us; it made great reading. We hope to see you around T&S often in the future! We are also pleased to announce that, after a long and delightful engagement, Margaret Blair Young–fine scholar, wise teacher, thoughtful author, superb blogger, sympathetic listener and… Read More

Linguistics, the study of language’s inner workings, is a source for concepts and technical vocabulary that are also useful for thinking about religion, because language and religion are both, among other things, mental constructs for making sense of the world around us. Each provides categories with which to organize the way we think about life: singulars and plurals, nouns and verbs, sinners and the saved. Read More

Alive with new spiritual splendor, Teresa immersed herself in the Gospel. Active in her Denver ward, she found special joy serving in the House of Lord during the Denver Temple dedication—she attended every dedicatory session, savoring the succor she found. One morning, as a session ended, she called my Father in tears and said: “Kimball, I heard Papa—you remember his tenor voice?—singing in the choir.� Read More

My cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Church, is a JAG officer in the Utah National Guard, assigned to the 1st Corps Artillery, currently serving in Afghanistan in support of Task Force Phoenix. Translation: he’s a citizen-soldier, normally a city prosecutor in Orem, UT, now sent to Afghanistan for a year to help train and support the Afghan Army; his particular task is to work with other JAGs in getting the local military justice system, for which there is as yet no case law and barely even a legal foundation, up and running. He leaves behind his wife, Janae, and his… Read More

This time Nathalie wears a miniskirt. On Sunday, in Church. In spite of last week’s interview. In spite of the one the month before. And other months. For quite some time the matter had been about her bare midriff. Now the miniskirt. Read More

In an attempt to establish a new life, Teresa enrolled in a self-realization program. There, her new spiritual advisor directed her to “face her childhood values” by attending, just once, an LDS sacrament meeting. And so, for the first time in many, many years, Teresa showed up at a ward in Denver, Colorado intending a short, perfunctory visit. The Bishop, however, invited her to talk. The gentle conversation that followed ended: “Teresa, you’ve done nothing for which you can’t be forgiven–please come back.” Read More

Taryn Nelson-Seawright has originated a lively thread on BCC presenting some new data on the gender disparity in Mormon Studies and inviting ideas on the reasons and remedies for that disparity. Read More

Since getting married eleven years ago, my wife and I have moved eight times. Read More

The next few days pulsed with surreal happenings. My Father, barely off the airplane, attended his mother’s funeral the Friday after returning home and watched from the stand as the throng filled the chapel, then the gym, and then spilt into classrooms and hallways. My Mother, then just a friend, showed up at my Father’s doorstep with a casserole and time to talk. Letters came from the First Presidency, the Missionary Executive committee, and from President Jensen, who said, in part: Read More

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Generally speaking, we tend to think that the institutional structure of the church is either administrative or pastoral. Read More

This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of my youngest brother’s birth and death. In his honor, I’m posting my mother’s narrative of his brief life in ours. Read More

When my Father finally arrived in Denver, Teresa was not at the terminal to greet him. Confused, my Father claimed his luggage and waited a few minutes before he was paged. When he found her, Teresa was in hysterics; she grabbed him and, looking at him through streaming tears said, pleadingly, as if he might fix whatever was wrong, “Kimball, mom and dad are missing.â€? My beleaguered and bewildered Father spent the night comforting his sister, even as he fought his own doubts and sorrow. The next morning, an entourage including family, friends, and a general authority were waiting at… Read More

On Kaimi’s Ensign thread, a conversation about the kinds and quantities of power exercised by the sexes has been simmering. Julie suggested that we open another thread for that discussion, and I’ve obliged. Read More

Alas, my other lives (teacher, wife, mother, producer [for the moment] and writer) are calling me, so I will contribute less frequently to T&S and other blogs–though this has been really fun. I promised to publish a post about writing the trilogy with Darius. I’ve written elsewhere about some of that experience–the miraculous parts–and thought I’d write here about the more difficult parts. The most obvious difficulty I dealt with in writing about Black Mormons and the history of the Church in regards to race was the research. Not the research per se–I loved doing that–but the things I read,… Read More

Ernesto has hit the East Coast and is currently plowing its way through the Southern Chesapeake. As it happens I live in the Southern Chesapeake. Read More

My Father has never been one to speak much of himself; he is almost painfully shy about being honored, even in private. Not surprisingly, then, I have only ever heard snippets of his life story. Still, I have become acutely interested of late in better understanding my heritage generally and my Father’s story specifically. This summer, with his begrudging permission, I read through his old journals and letters, marveled as I watched his story come to life, and tasted—though distantly—the deep sorrow and joy that run like rivers through his history. Read More

MySpace recently overtook Yahoo as the most-visited website in the US. Read More

Kiskilili poses the following very interesting question: Often appearing to be caught between pronounced sacramentalist tendencies (ordinances effect real change that goes beyond their symbolic import) and an underdeveloped theology regarding the significance of our so-called “non-essentialâ€? ordinances (no transubstantiation for us!), we seem at a loss to explain clearly the difference between a non-priesthood holder reciting the blessing over the bread and water of which people then contemplatively partake, and the same situation when a priesthood holder pronounces it. Implicit in Kiskilili’s question, it seems to me, that the presence or the absence of the priesthood must make sense… Read More

The September Ensign rocks. No two ways about it. Read More

I spent most of grade school attending the remedial classes for the learning disabled because I was, well, learning disabled. Read More

Barbara Kirkham Jolley, my mother’s mother, died on Monday. She was 86 years old. Grandma Jolley’s husband, Joseph Arben Jolley, died eight months ago, and by all reports, she had put little effort and had even less interest in living ever since. Just days ago, she fell and broke her hip; when she heard that she would have to receive surgery, she was happy: “I hope,” she told my mother on the phone, “that I will go to sleep, and never wake up.” Which is exactly what happened. Her body didn’t quite come out from the anesthesia, and was put… Read More

Our theology–or, more accurately, our perception of it–helps to determine our response to mental illness. Consequently, we must ensure our unexamined religious assumptions do not rob us of compassion or persuade us to premature and unwarranted judgment. Let me give some examples. Read More

What follows is a summary of some of my research notes. I have been reading Puritan legal history of late, looking for ideas and ways of thinking about Mormon legal history. Read More

Up until about a year ago, if you had asked me why I had studied German, I would have said that I started in the ninth grade and just didn’t know when to stop. At BYU, my major in mechanical engineering lasted about 20 minutes into the first orientation meeting, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to study after that, but I didn’t worry too much about finding another major at the time. I thought I would figure out what I wanted to study on my mission. Read More

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In her thoughtful and enlightening book Leaving Eden, Amber Esplin tells the story of a young girl named Judith. Near the end of the novel, Judith’s brother dies and she confronts the chasm that opens in his absence. Though Judith must at first face the bitter sadness that inevitably accompanies death, she finds some catharsis in the Gospel and eventually settles into a tenuous peace. She finds, in fact, that her brother’s death gives substance to the spiritual forms that had formerly seemed, to her, quite unreal. This epiphany grants Judith a new perspective on life; in the novel’s closing… Read More