- Kent Larsen on Constructing in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 9/6: “Here’s a few of my thoughts in reaction to what I experienced in Church yesterday: As we went through our weekly introduction of new members and visitors, it occurred to me that we (or at least I) don’t always consider how our meetings look to outsiders. If we thought more about it, and asked others how our meetings look, I wonder what we might do differently One brother compared our beliefs to those of other churches, suggesting that our beliefs are unique in one area. I wondered if he really knew this to be true? Has he studied other religions? Or attended their services and asked questions? I don’t necessarily want to suggest that we need to shut up or not compare; rather I think we need to find out! To talk to other religions and understand what they believe better. In fast and testimony meeting a visitor, someone brought by the missionaries, stood up and said, among other things, that since he already had a church, he didn’t really need a church. Trying to put myself into his shoes, I wondered what the value is to searching or investigating other churches. Isn’t there something to be gained, even if we already have a church, perhaps one that we are committed to and believe to be the only Church? Perhaps the most amusing testimony of the day came from a brother who said that he was tempted to sleep in and miss church on occasion. But, in this case, church starts at 3pm!! I suspect that, like many people, he has some insomnia, and so sleeping at 3pm isn’t that odd. But without that context, I thought it kind of funny… ” Sep 6, 20:27
- on The Spiritual and Social Goals of the Deseret Alphabet: “More fascinating is Mormon->Mahr-mon” Sep 6, 14:12
- on The Spiritual and Social Goals of the Deseret Alphabet: “From the article: some pronunciations of BOM words based on the phonetic alphabet. CUMORAH -> CUE-MORAH LIAHONA -> LYE-AY-HOH-NAH DESERET -> DE-SEE-RET” Sep 5, 20:57
- on Seeing Responsibility in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 8/30: “No, I’m with you: everyone involved should take our church meetings more seriously. I think our speakers and teachers frequently don’t put in the effort they should because they don’t believe they can make a difference, but they can. And it’s a real rush to work hand-in-hand with the Spirit in preparing a talk or lesson. But when the leaders are sweating bullets about who should give a talk or lesson, it’s often not about who can do it “best” from the congregation’s perspective. Those people are usually well-known. It’s about who will grow the most in the process. And if that means the congregation doesn’t get the “best” talk or lesson, the Spirit will make up for it–if we want him to.” Sep 5, 02:55
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “In case it wasn’t clear, I mentioned the two journals I did because they are NOT in google scholar.” Sep 4, 15:47
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “To add to the anecdotes, the people I’m seeing struggle the most are in mental health fields, like psychology and social work. With the Joseph Fielding Smith/Bruce R. McConkie era firmly behind us, church members aren’t expected to believe anything about the world that’s contradicted by modern science. Yes, we believe in things for which there’s very little generally accepted evidence: Nephites, obviously, but also the resurrection and God himself. But that’s very different from being told your religion says the world is 7,000 years old while geology says it’s 4.5 billion years old, and you have to choose between them. A young member can now study biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. without ever being taught something that argues against their faith. Scientific fields that study people, individually or collectively, and then draw conclusions (as they should!) about how people should live or how society should function are another matter. The gap between what the church says and what the academy says isn’t as wide as some members suppose–the sociologists I work with generally agree that stable two-parent families are best for children and adults, for example–but LGBT issues and gender in general are huge areas of conflict. So it makes sense to me that while a university education in general does not reduce young members’ faithfulness, an education in certain fields has a good chance of doing so.” Sep 4, 14:51
- 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
