{"id":1878,"date":"2005-01-19T10:01:03","date_gmt":"2005-01-19T15:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2009-01-16T17:26:55","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T21:26:55","slug":"prodigal-artists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2005\/01\/prodigal-artists\/","title":{"rendered":"Prodigal Artists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First, let me say thank you to my hosts.  I feel like a celebrity.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks ago, the Deseret News ran a column in its Religion &#038; Ethics session about <a href=\"http:\/\/deseretnews.com\/dn\/view\/0,1249,600103089,00.html\">Mormons participating in the arts<\/a>.  The author, Jerry Johnston, put forward the theory that good Mormons will fail at convincingly portraying bad people.<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To their everlasting credit, when most LDS playwrights and novelists try to create a debauched, disgusting character, they fail miserably. They get it all wrong. It doesn&#8217;t ring true. But it does show what&#8217;s right with them as people. Their mothers and teachers have ruined them for the world. They&#8217;ve been compromised. At some point God put his seal on their hearts and &#8212; try as they might &#8212; they can&#8217;t break it. The world laughs at their attempts to blend in. They are doomed to be good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As pointed out in a <a href=\"http:\/\/deseretnews.com\/dn\/view\/0,1249,600104058,00.html\">letter to the editor<\/a>, that implies something negative about LDS artists who are successful at portraying evil.<\/p>\n<p>So, is it bad to be good at showing bad?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First, let me say thank you to my hosts. I feel like a celebrity. A couple of weeks ago, the Deseret News ran a column in its Religion &#038; Ethics session about Mormons participating in the arts. The author, Jerry Johnston, put forward the theory that good Mormons will fail at convincingly portraying bad people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,55],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn","category-news-politics","tag-popular-culture-and-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5667,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/5667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}