When I picked up my manual to prepare to teach Gospel Doctrine this Sunday, I figured it would be a lesson about the spirit of Elijah (second week = section 2 = turning hearts, etc). I was surprised and delighted…
Tag: Popular Culture and Media
Who Should Be Mormon of the Year?
Its that time of year. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is traditionally the media’s time for reflection on the past year — the time when we see story after story on the best or most important stories…
Mormon Halloween: Its Origin and Destiny
I’m not sure whether or not Halloween is actually “Mormon” to any significant degree. Mormons generally participate in the holiday here in the U.S., of course. And we even have a few requirements of the holiday in a Church setting…
Essentials in Church Categorization
Marc Bohn’s post yesterday on how Mormonism is classified became a legal issue reminded me that the issue of how Mormonism is classified is anything but clear, especially when non-Mormons are doing the classifying. We say we are Christian, and…
A Compendium of Mormon News?
For the past couple weeks I’ve received email reports, forwarded to me from a friend, written by a lawyer who is LDS and who is prosecuting a counselor in a Stake Presidency in a ponzi scheme. The situation is sad,…
Key to the Culture of Mormons
Last Saturday I gave a walking tour of Mormon history sites in lower Manhattan, one of the services our stake history committee offers regularly. One stop on the tour is the location where an early LDS newspaper, The Mormon, was…
M Gets a Joke
A while back our household sat down to watch an episode of Monk. We like Monk because not only is it funny, it’s also sad and tender and offers good – sometimes very good – cultural satire. As I fed…
The Great Unity
Last weekend I went to the penultimate game in Yankee Stadium, and the next night watched the last game on television, complete with its post-game wake. Over nearly 20 years I’ve attended meetings there, letting a place and a culture…
Special Feelings (more on Mormon Language)
This morning I heard a member of Utah’s delegation to the Republican National Convention tell a radio talk show host that “there is a really special feeling among the Republican delegation.†Could you run that by me again?
“We lived after the manner of happinessâ€
The other day somebody sent me a YouTube link for a comedian I’ll call Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones was a chubby gramdma with hot flashes – not the kind of person you usually see doing stand-up. Most of the “funny 
The ordinary
However well we do in school or our jobs or in our church callings or in any endeavor, most of our lives are and will be ordinary.
Making Money off the Mormons: Sacrament Butt-pads
When I was a senior in college, I worked at Seagull Book and Tape, an LDS book and trinket store across the street from the LA Temple. (The pay was lousy, but working with books was fun. So it turned…
Movie Review: An Inconvenient Truth
A review in four parts:
Mormonsploitation!!
That is the name of a film series currently going on at the Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.
Go See “States of Grace”!
Dutcher captures the wrenching beauty of the struggle to follow Christ. “States of Grace: God’s Army 2” is really good. Go.
Anne comes home
I read and enjoyed Orson Scott Card’s book Sarah. In fact, that book sparked an interest in me to find out more about what exactly we knew of ancient times, both New and Old World.
Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, published last year, is not so much a memoir or autobiography, but rather a series of snapshots, each drenched in cultural references, that together create a approximation of Mr. Zimmerman’s character. One of those snapshots gives us…
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.”…
Film Festival Musings
Those of you who are more culturally aware probably know that there’s a film festival going on here in Utah. No, not that Sundance thing — I’m talking about the Fourth LDS Film Festival.
Ads Targeting the LDS Market
Since I often listen to KSL radio on the way to and from work, I tend to hear quite a bit of advertising aimed at members of the Church. Most of it is for products that are of little interest…