Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur get all the press around here, but one of my favorite Jewish holidays usually sneaks in just before or just after the high holidays. This year in particular, with news of floods and earthquakes filling my heart and head, the festival of Sukkot seems especially worthy of Read More

This post is ostensibly by way of reminding our Southern California readership that it’s not too late to catch the last day of the Claremont Conference on Joseph Smith. It’s also an excuse for me to ruminate on the ever-engaging question of what sixteenth-century blogging might have looked like had they, you know, invented computers and the internet and everything. Here’s a possibility: Read More

A few recent highlights: -Lisa at FMH writes a Feminist Polygamy Manifesto — don’t miss it. -Aaron at BoH: Faker or fakir? -Bloggernackers (heart) Elise Soukup: DMI, Mormon Stories, and a nice interview at M*. –Chloroform in print on iPod. -DMI wants to start a discussion group about whether discussion groups are permitted. Clearly he has forgotten “the first rule of discussion groups is you do not talk about discussion groups . . .” -Reminder: Volunteers sought to participate in polygamy . . . survey. -Finally, if you like your navel-gazing with a healthy dose of snark, you may want… Read More

In many ways, the Doctrine & Covenants is my favorite book of scripture, and as it now stands it is the result of a failure. Read More

From the informative and helpful New Zealand Cult List Read More

Over at Volokh, Maggie Gallagher makes the curious argument that society needs marriage because without marriage, people would be having children out of wedlock. Read More

In last General Conference, Elder Uchtdorf reiterated the 1999 counsel of the First Presidency, a counsel that has actually been given since the 1950s. Read More

Like Nixon, Times and Seasons maintains a detailed “enemies list.” Read More

It seems to have been a bicoastal weekend for real-world discussions of the bloggernacle. John Dehlin gave a great talk on blogs at the Seattle Sunstone Symposium (pod cast here), and I gave a brief presentation to Naomi Frandsen’s “Saturday Night Discussion Group” (a name that carries all sorts of unfortunate disco connotations for me.) Lacking the technical sophistication do a podcast, here is a shortened version of what I said: Read More

While I was running errands with my children one morning last week, I glanced up at the rearview mirror to see my four-year-old daughter’s finger probing her nostril. I reprimanded her, gently, and asked if she needed a tissue. “No thank you, Mom,” she answered cheerfully, “This kind comes out only by a fingernail, right?” Read More

In its latest issue, Time magazine “assembled some of the smartest people we know to identify the trends that are most likely to affect our future.” Read More

This season The University of Notre Dame has been airing a student recruiting advertisement called “Candle”. Read More

Former T&S guestblogger, Naomi Frandsen has started a semi-formal discussion group for Capital-area Mormons. There first meeting will be this Saturday. Here is the announcement from Naomi: Read More

Ronan has a thoughtful post about his trip to Gettysburg and the meaning of war. For my part, I will always think of Gettysburg as the sacred soil on which I successfully wooed my wife. Read More

A long time ago, when I was a practicing lawyer, I concocted a scheme with another Mormon lawyer to raise an investment fund targeted at companies that cater to vices. Alcohol, tobacco, p0rn, etc. Read More

One of the more prominent strands of modern political philosophy is what has been called “luck egalitarianism,” which of course raises basic questions for Mormon theology. Read More

Slate has an interesting photo-essay on the architecture of mega-churches. One of the featured buildings is the Conference Center in Salt Lake City (known among Church Historical Department employees as the “meganacle”). I was struck by the following bit of commentary from the essay: The approach of the architects, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca of Portland, Ore., shows the influence megachurches have had on mainstream religions. I’ve tried parsing this several ways, but it seems to me that the only way of reading it is as claiming that Mormons are a mainstream religion, as opposed to the evangelical megachurches. Read More

Last year, on November 2, I was still undecided about whether to cast a vote for George Bush. Read More

“Intelligence” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words in the scriptures. Read More

We’ve talked about homeschooling before, but once was Bryce’s baby and the other was a peripheral issue. Because people ask from time to time, I thought I’d set out my thoughts about homeschooling in a friendly Q-and-A format. Read More

This morning I attended the funeral of a young man, much too young to die. Read More

First it was Ginsburg. Read More

Over two years ago, I posted a series of posts on reasons to support the ACLU, and whether a Mormon could or should support the ACLU, on my personal blog. The discussion that ensued was one of the contributing factors to the formation of Times and Seasons. Given that the conversation around here turns to this topic from time to time, I thought it might be useful to move that set of posts over here. They are lightly edited for context and updating. (For the original posts, see here and here.) Read More

Saturday afternoon on a rainy day in Antwerp. Read More