Following up on Nate’s good idea of links to posts that date to the early days of T & S (when we had very few readers), here is a post of my own from the early days of T & S, suggesting some possible reasons why church members seem to be unusually susceptible to financial scams. (continue to original post…)
From the Archives: Has Mormon History Taught Us Anything?
Times & Seasons has now been around for more than a year and in that time our readership has gone from a dozen or two visitors a day to somewhere between 1500 and 2000 visitors a day. Hence, there are some early posts that I suspect many readers never saw. Here is one post from those early days, that I think some of our new readers might be interested in. (continue to original post…)
Peter
Today is my son Peter’s birthday. He is named for Peter in the New Testament, because, while Jesus may have loved John the most, I love Peter best of all. I love him because he is so willing to get wet.
Remember the Pain
Alma has a great description of repentance. He writes: And now, behold, when I [repented], I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more. Is this a good thing?
Dealing with Abuse in the Church
Over the last few years, there has been a barrage of accusations, civil suits, and settlements involving child sex abuse that have crippled Catholic dioceses all over the country, both financially and spiritually. Our Church has experienced the same types of issues, but, so far, on a much smaller scale.
Violating the First Amendment
What I’m about to tell you are two true stories in which public employees clearly violated Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment. The names and a few other details have been changed to protect the guilty.
Fireworks
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. (And while we’re at it — when are the rest of the muckety-mucks over there going to adopt nifty monikers? Hmm, then again, if Ryan Bell is coining the nicknames, perhaps we’re best off leaving well enough alone . . .)
12 Questions for Philip Barlow
We are pleased to announce Philip Barlow as our next participant in the Twelve Questions series. My initial encounter with Professor Barlow’s work was almost seven years ago as a first year Bible student at Yale Divinity School.
A Memory of Professor Farnsworth
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.
Marrow and Fatness: LDS and BMI
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.”
The Failure of Times & Seasons or the Danger of the Daily Me
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?
Blogscars
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 . . . — *The joy at winning the award is mitigated by the silliness of the name “blogscar” which sounds like either a bad attempt to say “boxcar” or perhaps the mark of a wound received from blogging. Perhaps a better handle can be found?
Eight Questions at BCC
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.
“Told you I did…
Reckless are [they]. Now… matters are worse.” “That [blog] was our last hope.” “No…. There is another.”
Seaweed, Fermented Cabbage & the Spirit of God
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.
12 Questions for Terryl Givens
Professor Terryl Givens–who has another book out within the last month, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Greenwood Press)–has been kind enough to answer twelve questions for us.
Taxes
Perhaps when missionaries are faced with fence-sitting investigators, they should note the tax advantages of joining the Church.
Biting my Tongue
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.
The Iraq Elections
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, in my opinion. UPDATE: For the other side of the NYT story, see here.
Not Coveting My Neighbor’s Wife (and other feminist concerns)
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.
Sunday School Lesson 6
Lesson 6: D&C 6, 8, 9, and 11 You will find study questions for D&C 6, 8, and 9 in the materials for lesson 5.
Primary in the Age of the X-Box
Sheri Lynn’s plaintive comment has me thinking about the difficulties of teaching Primary with today’s stimulus-saturated kids.
Joseph Smith, Justice Frankfurter and the Great Writ
It is time for the post that you have all been waiting for, the one of the place of Mormonism in habeas corpus jurisprudence.
The Millennium will have come by then
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during my first feeble attempts at writing science fiction, I sometimes encountered members of the Church who objected to science fiction about the future because “the Millennium will have come by then.” In their view, for me to write about something happening a hundred years from now was essentially a denial of faith — unless, of course, the story took place during the Millennium.