- Stephen C. on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “Kent Larsen: It seems like the Google Scholar sieve is pretty fine; much of my time with these is spent filtering out essays, websites, non-peer reviewed dissertations, etc., so if you’re an actual journal (and as we’ve discussed I’m very loose with that term) and you’re *not* getting indexed by GS you could really go a long way by figuring that out. But yes, if anybody has a more efficient way to comprehensively catch the latest articles/books I’m open to it. Mark Ashurst-McGee: I’m thinking about it, but I’m a good enough friend of Walker’s I might need to recuse myself.” Sep 3, 11:54
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “Alex Bass crunched some numbers on the BYU/Not BYU retention split (except I’m seeing that now now it’s paywalled). https://mormonmetrics.com/p/the-byu-effect?utm_source=publication-search. I think he found that there was a positive BYU effect.” Sep 3, 11:43
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “The blog apparently interpreted my “unequal” symbols as question marks” Sep 3, 11:01
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “To mirror JTB, in my *extremely* annecdotal experience, I can’t think of any youth in my recent wards who have skipped college and gone directly into the workforce, so my observations pertain to college-bound youth. Of those, perhaps 75% went to a BYU campus. And of those, approximately 50% have chosen to outwardly disaffiliate with the faith after graduation. (Inward distancing occurred much earlier but often after the start of their college career.) Most who chose non-BYU schools are still active members. I haven’t attempted to quantify any of this or go through every youth name by name, but I’ve been frequently surprised by the number of BYU students I know who chose to leave. Usual caveats: anecdote ? data and correlation ? causation.” Sep 3, 10:58
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “I should point out that relying solely on Google Scholar is probably not a great practice — For example BYU’s Literature and Belief journal usually has an LDS-related article in it, but it is NOT indexed anywhere (for reasons that are beyond my understanding). I also wonder about journals like “Latter-day Saint Historical Studies” — I don’t know what’s in it (everything recent is behind a paywall) or even if there is a recent issue. My point is that we have some holes that need to be filled.” Sep 3, 10:28
- on Seeing Responsibility in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 8/30: “RLD, that’s wonderful. FWIW, my wife also taught a bootcamp for incoming grad students (medical sciences) recently. In her case it was 8 hours a day for 5 days. In contrast, in my grad program in English there was no bootcamp whatsoever. I could have used one. As for “who is responsible for us having a good experience at church”, I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression — I’m trying to say that everyone involved has responsibility. I want local leaders to “sweat bullets” over who is giving a talk or treaching a lesson. But I also want those in the audience to be responsible and find ways of making our meetings useful, instead of blaming everything on the speakers and the leaders.” Sep 3, 10:23
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “Stephen, I’d love to see you review / get your take on that second book.” Sep 3, 10:08
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “A Southern department where 1/4 are LDS? Very different from my experience! But that’s really cool.” Sep 3, 07:53
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “In my *extremely* anecdotal experience, the number one indicator of staying from the kids I knew in high school is attending university. I can’t think of anyone who didn’t attend university who is still active, and those who did are still going strong. I’m in my first year of a PhD program in a large, public school in the South, and our (huge) ward is primarily composed of PhD students and professors (of the research active faculty in my department, almost 1/4 are active LDS). So I would wholeheartedly agree.” Sep 3, 06:19
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “Thanks Chad! Google Scholar is good about articles, but it’s really hit-and-miss when it comes to books.” Sep 2, 18:16
