By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

In The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver writes:

A mother’s body remembers her babies — the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It’s the last one, though, that overtakes you. … A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after — oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She is the one you can’t put down.

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Due to popular demand, Footnotes to the New Testament for Latter-day Saints is now available in two 6×9 hardback publish on demand volumes from Lulu.com:

Volume One (Gospels)

Volume Two (everything else)

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I have plenty of friends who have left the Church. Read the rest of this entry »

During the Fall of 2005, I got to spend a lot of time in the New Orleans area. In the months following Hurricane Katrina, the church did a lot of work there through the bishop’s storehouse and the Mormon Helping Hands. I learned some things about how the church operates during a catastrophic disaster, and this post is an attempt to describe some of those experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

One often hears over the pulpit (both LDS and non) that Jesus referred to God the Father in Mark 14:36 (cf. Gal. 4:6 and Romans 8: 15) with the word Abba, which is taken to be a familial diminutive and thus having the connotation of something like “daddy, papa.” I remember that when I first heard this idea, it appealed to me. It had a certain plausibility; the word for “father” in Hebrew/Aramaic is Ab (pronounced Av), and it is common enough to form a diminutive by an added syllable (as in papa itself). Indeed, abba in modern Hebrew is used as a familial diminutive. And I liked the idea of the possible intimacy suggested by the posited nuance to the word. Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you will recall, we recently discussed the use of serial newspaper advertisements to avoid financial liability for an estranged wife in 1840s Nauvoo. I have discovered a few more of them, all fairly rote, as if newspaper editors had boilerplate to provide in the event of the fateful grimace/nod. I have seen one exception, whether a function of poverty, editorial oversight, or idiosyncracy, I’m not sure, though I’m grateful for the delightful image.

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Twice in one week?!?! Can it be true? Yes, yes it can!

Our winners from the last poll were:
8. For the Strength of Youth, 12. Euphemisms, 10. Asking out via scavenger hunts/clues (seemingly by one vote), and 6. Pioneer day. All hail the upsets!

Today’s competitors are: Read the rest of this entry »

We decided to escape the city yesterday. We’ve been here five months and had not yet sampled the Austrian mountain air. It was a beautiful day, neither winter (we haven’t had one) nor yet spring. We drove southwest from Vienna into Styria and ended up at Austria’s Lourdes, the pilgrimage town of Mariazell.

Mariazell’s church houses the Magna Mater Austriae, a wooden, miracle-working image of the Heavenly Mother that makes Mariazell Austria’s most important pilgrimage site. The image, now surrounded in gilded finery, has offered Austria’s Catholics Marian grace since 1157.

I stood before Mary and watched as a few pilgrims bowed their heads in prayer before her. Some made use of the holy water. I thought of my daughter, named after the mother of Jesus. I remembered Nephi’s vision of the transcendent love of God embodied in the virgin from Nazareth. I reflected on the power of healing supposed to imbue this shrine and thought about my son’s haemangioma, my mother’s platelets, and my own chronically sore feet and hip.

‘Should I?’, I wondered…

Well, I learned some thing last week. First the polls had roughly 150 votes each after the first 48 hours, then gained roughly 20 more votes each over the next three days. Therefore, polls will now last 48 hours (assuming that I have time to keep up). Keep that in mind. Also, people love Cheerios more than having food delivered to their homes. Craziness, I tell you!

The winners from last time are: 9. Dear John Letters (beating 1. Arnold Friberg), 5. The Cultural Hall, 7. Cheerios in Sac Meeting, and 4. Temple Square. Take that, the Christus! We like our spaces big, spare, and featuring basketball lines on the floor!

Today’s combatants are: Read the rest of this entry »

Today (from sundown last night to sundown tonight) is a minor Jewish holiday, Tu Bishvat. I had never heard of this until I read an article about it in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. Read the rest of this entry »

Kristine N is a graduate student in the Earth and Atmospheric sciences department at Purdue University . She recieved a B.S. in Geology from Caltech and an M.S. in Geology from Penn State. Her master’s research, conducted with Kate Freeman and Chuck Fisher, focused on the sulfur stable isotope geochemistry and lipid geochemistry of sediments associated with vestimentiferan tubeworms in the Gulf of Mexico (which sounds far more pretentious than it really is). She is currently growing Sea monkeys for her PhD in an effort to reconstruct drought freqency and intensity in the Great Basin.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report on the physical basis of climate change on Groundhog’s Day. Already there are reports that those with a vested interest in discrediting global warming are offering to pay scientists $10,000 to “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs.” Read the rest of this entry »

In protest against the phenomenon so often described of building movie theaters in one’s own basement or disrupted or deleted family dinners, and of course bowling alone, I have recently been involved in what appears to be a very satisfying way to come together. With several friends and their families, we have begun a monthly potluck dinner we call “Show and Tell.” Read the rest of this entry »

Actual question I was asked once:

Subject: the number 6 and letter w in Hebrew

Is the number six symbolic of the letter w in the Hebrew langage? Thus, 666 means www such as in world wide web?

My response follows: Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a lot of talk about polls around here lately. Have you seen any of these? Read the rest of this entry »