Recently a T&S reader emailed me asking for my advice on the graduate school questions: is graduate education a worthwhile option for a young woman who intends to have children? I wrote back to her (rather astonishing myself at how much I found to say), and I’ve posted here my reply. Read More

Throughout the 19th century, Mormons tried various different communal economic arrangements that basically didn’t work. Read More

Today is Whitsunday, the Day of Pentecost, commemorating the day when the apostles “were all filled with the Holy Ghost,” as Jesus had promised they would be. I’ve written about Whitsunday before, about how I’ve never, to my knowledge, experienced any comparable spiritual manifestation or revelation, and also about those small gifts of belief that I yet hope are mine nonetheless. This year (coincidentally?), I find myself thinking about many related matters–about how much I yearn for some sort of clear answer or witness or sign or confirmation regarding what my family and I should do about this major decision… Read More

The pressure to give this book rave reviews is enormous. Everyone seems to love it (the Freakonomics website will lead you to plenty of positive reviews), and Steven Levitt is an undeniably brilliant economist — my hat’s off to anyone who wins the John Bates Clark Medal. But this is not a brilliant book. And not just because the title is stupid. Read More

Saint Judas by James Wright When I went out to kill myself, I caught A pack of hoodlums beating up a man. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot My name, my number, how my day began. How soldiers milled around the garden stone And sang amusing songs; how all that day Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away. Read More

I love the comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’. Sometimes I worry for our future because children are growing up in the world today without the company of Calvin and his stuffed tiger. I love Calvin’s musings on the virtues of math atheism (‘as a math atheist, I should be excused from this [homework]’), and Hobbes’ bemused look as he patiently listens to Calvin’s diatribes on the human condition. I completely identified with Calvin’s fiery outbursts as he fought to find his way in a world over which he had little control (‘You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket… Read More

Embedded in the ten commandments are at least two injunctions having to do with property, which makes it one of the main subjects of the Decalogue and presumeably of central concern for the Gospel. Read More

This weekend marked a victory of sorts. Read More

We call one of our bedrooms the Noah’s Ark Room because there’s a mural of Noah’s Ark on the wall. It was painted by our house’s previous owner for his son Noah, who lived in this bedroom from his birth until we purchased the townhouse in 2001 and he and his parents moved to a home nearby. Read More

Gordon’s post has prompted, not surprisingly, a torrent of discussion, which now seems to have veered off into a rather different streambed. I want to paddle up to a stream of the conversation that branched off a while back, taking another look at the presumptions behind the “absent mother.” Read More

I watched the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’ last night. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it is a chilling and accurate account of heroism in the face of the genocide that ravaged the country in 1994, resulting in an inconceivable number of deaths. For me, the most impressive aspect of this movie was that the movie effectively conveyed the horror, the despair, and the terror of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, but didn’t focus on grisly scenes of Rwandans being tortured and hacked to death by the side of the roads (putting aside the question… Read More

I have a pretty simple understanding of the Gospel, and I rarely come across scriptures that can’t be accommodated to my existing world view (or dismissed as scrivener’s errors!). Recently, however, I read a verse in the Book of Mormon that stopped me in my tracks. Read More

In the wake of all of these feel-good posts about mothers and motherhood (or parenthood), I thought someone should write something deflating. Happy to oblige. Read More

I don’t have a Mother’s Day post to contribute, really. Not a real one, anyway, and certainly nothing like the stories that three mothers have already posted here. But I do have a post that is tangentially Mother’s-Day-related. It’s mostly about a little girl. Read More

(Note: We seem to have something of a glut of Mother’s Day posts. By all means, read Julie’s and Kristine’s before mine.) Motherhood rose around me like a tide in the weeks after my daughter’s birth. Each night advanced toward me, implacable as a wave, my panic and dread rising like froth up a beach until the moment of submersion, when, wondrously, I found I could float. Few things in life have come to me as arduously as motherhood came, and nothing else has revealed itself as suddenly. Read More

As a child, I loathed Mother’s Day. This was because I spent most of the other days of the year resenting my mother, and tormenting her in the peculiarly horrid ways that bright children can torment their parents. Read More

The current issue of BYU Magazine, organ of the Alumni Association and tireless fundraising vehicle, is in mailboxes now–or, if your dining room table looks like mine, buried under gleaming drifts of your husband’s voluminous correspondence with the American Medical Association. Read More

This is a question from a friend who is looking for advice. He noticed that his teenage daughter had been spending a lot of time on a site called LiveJournal.com. When he checked the internet browser’s history, he discovered that she keeps an online journal. Should he read it? Read More

As my 15-year high school reunion looms dangerously close on the horizon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic 80’s movie of teenage sturm und drang: ‘The Breakfast Club’. For those of you who may have missed one of the 157 airings of the TBS ‘Dinner and a Movie’ versions of ‘The Breakfast Club’ (‘Twister’ is this weekend!), the story is about five teenagers all from very different backgrounds, forced to spend the day together in the school library one Saturday as punishment for various indiscretions or acts of violence perpetrated upon unsuspecting freshmen. Read More

Rewards programs are all around us. Use your credit card, get frequent flier miles. Stay at a hotel, earn travel points. Buy 10 pizzas, get the next one free. If we want more converts, why not create a rewards program for sharing the Gospel? Not just eternal or psychic rewards, but immediate, tangible, worldly rewards. 10 converts = Trip to the Polynesian Cultural Center 50 converts = Dinner with President Hinckley It would work, wouldn’t it? Read More

We don’t usually pay much attention to the Ascension. In some other religions, such as Catholicism, the Ascension has particular theological significance. For us, it’s sort of a theological afterthought. Part of this probably stems from the difference in focus — we don’t really discuss how or why he ascended, focusing instead on Jesus’s Atonement in Gethsemane and His Resurrection. And part may stem from our belief that He ascended and descended numerous times over this period, visiting the Nephites in America. But whether or not it has much theological significance, the Ascension is an undeniably wonderful event, with the… Read More

For most of the years I lived with my parents, my mother and I didn’t make much headway in establishing a healthy relationship with each other. But, now that I’ve moved out of the house, and as far away from Utah as I possibly could while remaining in the same country, I have gradually come to the realization that I was a pretty much an ungrateful wretch from the age of ten on. My behavior contributed to a lot of bad feelings and family drama that sometimes made life miserable for all of us. I love you, Mom. Sorry I… Read More