The new group blogs in the ‘nacle are positively hopping. At Various Stages, the VSOM-ers are discussing the topic “Is it hard for you to say you’re Mormon? What baggage comes with that label?” Becca F. launches the topic with characteristic aplomb, and Sara and Kaycee continue on the high notes. (And on the question, so far the jury is very much out — no two answers are the same or even all that similar.) Meanwhile, at Ms. Tar, Grasshopper asks whether revelation is really intended to answer questions, and Baron discusses the value of simple answers to complex questions.… Read More

Yesterday I received an email announcing that my Contracts professor, E. Allan Farnsworth, had passed away. He was a genuinely kind person and a prolific scholar, and a generation of lawyers has relied on his treatise to get through consideration, the parol evidence rule, and the statute of frauds. I’ll always remember him, though, for scaring the heck out of me as a first year. Read More

My husband’s grandfather once uttered a one-liner that has made its way into family lore. Surveying a particularly, uh, well-endowed session of temple patrons, he said, “We may be a chosen people, but we are a corpulent people.” Read More

With the launching of Millennial Star, it now looks as though there are two group blogs that have more or less spun off from Times and Seasons, one of which tries to position itself to the “left” of T&S and one of which tries to position itself to the “right” of T&S. Or so it seems to me. Both blogs include bloggers who also blog at T&S (traitors!). Does any of this mean anything? Read More

And speaking of other blogs, congratulations to our Blogscar* winners: Nate (Best Blogger), Kris and Jim (Best Posts, though Kris’s is at an unauthorized location). In the blogs category, congratulations as well, to Heather, Lisa, and, well, us. Yay, us! We rock! I’ll accept the award on behalf of the crew, and say that I’d like to thank my Mom, and Dad, and my old stake president, and my mission trainer, and Al Gore for inventing the internet so that we could blog in the first place, and my kids, and my co-bloggers, and my goldfish, and . . .… Read More

Steve Evans at BCC has just launched a groundbreaking new idea for the bloggernacle: Interviews with interesting LDS figures! He’s starting with an “Eight Questions” interview with Dr. Brian Birch, director of the Religious Studies program at UVSC. The interview is quite interesting. And as for the source of Steve’s trailblazing ingenuity . . . well, I think I can tell you this — Steve confided to me, he feels that that kind of good idea must have come from some higher power. Read More

I find that in those dark times of the soul when I need peace and a nearness to God, I turn to seaweed and fermented cabbage. Read More

Perhaps when missionaries are faced with fence-sitting investigators, they should note the tax advantages of joining the Church. Read More

I just got back home after spending a week with family and friends in Arizona. These trips are always fun — seeing family members, playing with the kids, and so forth. They also result in a lot of interesting exchanges, which usually end up with me biting my tongue. Read More

I was up late last night, watching the coverage of the Iraq elections. My favorite image from the elections is here. We have talked about the war in Iraq from time to time on T&S, but no matter what you think of the war, you have to be pleased for the Iraqi people, don’t you? I mean, even the New York Times smiled for a moment. UPDATE: If you want to see the upbeat paragraph that the New York Times took out of its story on the elections, read Instapundit. This is really disgraceful on the part of the Times,… Read More

I’ve always thought that the rule against coveting my neighbor’s wife was a good one. It seems like a very useful sort of prophylactic measure against adultery. Coveting a neighbor’s wife is probably the initial act in many (or most) cases of eventual adultery. But as salutary as a find this commandment, I also wish it were phrased in a less misogynistic way. Read More

Sheri Lynn’s plaintive comment has me thinking about the difficulties of teaching Primary with today’s stimulus-saturated kids. Read More

Should I have written that? Christine Hurt, my co-blogger at Conglomerate has begun to chronicle the disappearance of the word “damn” from several commercial ventures. See here and here. Apparently, it is a naughty word. Read More

We seem to discuss issues of homosexuality ad nausum around here. Surprisingly, one particular subtopic that hasn’t really come up in the past is the real problem of anti-gay violence. Read More

Sixty years ago the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Behind the barbed wires, many of the survivors could not stand on their feet to greet the liberators. The average weight of an adult was 77 pounds. Emaciated, with hollow eyes, those breathing skeletons, covered with a thin layer of tensed skin, only experienced a shift in their nightmare, for the nightmare of their memories would last for the rest of their lives. More than one million people had been murdered in Auschwitz alone. Read More

Monday I joined 200,000 people at the annual ‘March for Life’ to protest the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. My wife wasn’t feeling well enough to go this year (she’s pregnant — with twins!) and the weather accompanying Roe’s anniversary was typically frigid and miserable (if the Supreme Court was going to make such a colossal moral error, couldn’t they have at least done so in April?), so it was just my son and me. We were excited because the Family Research Council was distributing thousands of posters with my Created Equal logo and we hoped the signs might… Read More

NOTE: I started this a few days ago, then decided it was dumb and put it aside. It may still be dumb, but it does seem relevant to how I think about the issues raised by Frank’s posting of Elder Eyring’s talk, and, I think it’s tangentially related to Nate’s Blogscar-nominated “On Authority” (for which you should all go vote at Intellecxhibitionist [sic]). And, alas, it should now be revised to begin, “My second-most-recent scuffle…” My latest scuffle with the longsuffering John Fowles has me thinking again about how to explain myself to people who think about the Church differently… Read More

I just found out that my children will be home from school again tomorrow. Turns out that there’s no place to put the 3 feet of snow that fell on Saturday and Sunday. Read More

Here’s some scientifictional thinking: At some point in the future, it is quite likely that doctors will be able to take a stem cell from an adult and use it to grow a replacement organ such as a kidney or heart. Read More

You undoubtedly have heard this metaphor: if you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out, but if you place the frog into cold water and turn up the heat, it will become accustomed to the increasing heat and eventually get cooked. Gross! Read More

I’m thinking about Hannah today. Read More