I am not a particularly spiritual person, but I am quite religious. I like to think that I am a Pharisee in the good sense of the word. Read More

It turns out that law-and-economics is not only the dominant theory of private law, but it also helps you think about the idea of Zion. Read More

I had a beautiful experience last week. I went through the temple with one of my Sunday School students/neighbors, a young man headed to the MTC on Wednesday Sept. 13. Last week, another of my SS students/neighbors left for his mission. There is one other member of the neighborhood of age to serve a mission, but he will not be doing it. He is my son. Read More

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A friend of mine is a dedicated genealogist. Read More

In 1950s America, Rose Marie Reid was a household name. She was born one hundred years ago today. Read More

I registered my two oldest children for school on Friday. The principal needed to know which church they belonged to so that he could assign them to the proper religion class. For a first and third grader attending public school in Bavaria, there is a class for Catholics, a class for Lutherans, or a course on ethics. Actually, we’re Mormons, I said, prepared to explain that I have only one wife and that we do use electricity. Read More

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has been described as “Napster for nerds,” and it has some things to say about Mormonism. Read More

Five years after September 11, 2001; five links in memory: Read More

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