By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Recently the Manhattan stake where I live has undergone a surge of growth.  In response to the influx of new members, new wards have been created, buildings have been erected, and there is every appearance that the stake will soon divide. 

The surge of members in New York City is undoubtedly exciting.  But these members are also shaping a Mormon community that looks scarcely like the one I grew up in.  The majority of these members are, like me, young singles, newly weds, or parents of young children who come to the city to pursue school or professional goals.  They are also unlikely to settle in NYC permanently.  Even those who do stay in the city for several years often switch apartments frequently and thus migrate from one ward to another.  If NYC wards are anything, they are resoundingly transitory phenomenons, with congregations whose faces change almost monthly as huge intern populations come and go. Read the rest of this entry »

9:00 p.m.
Who thought it was funny to give a bookworm convert her very first Sacrament Meeting talk the same week the magnum opus of one Mr. Harry Potter was released? Who. My Bishop, that’s who. And due to total lack of discipline and complete disregarded for my own goals, here I sit, 9:13 on Saturday night, no talk, a pile of notes, some e-mails and a thoroughly ingested, already dog-eared copy of The Deathly Hallows. Priorities, eh.

My talk was supposed to be spring boarded from a talk by President Faust from 2004- along the lines of making sure we’re getting the right spiritual messages. Yeah, I spent the last few days chewing my cuticles as I wondered where Neville got the Sword of Gryffindor at the very last possible minute, and wondering “Why Dobby, why?”- I think I missed the message…

It’s not the first time I’ve missed the message. Read the rest of this entry »

In my ongoing campaign to encourage people to subscribe to and read the Mormon studies journals, I am pleased to report that the latest issue of the FARMS Review has just returned from the printer. The electronic version has not yet been posted, but it should be shortly for the benefit of subscribers. (Presumably, as in the past, one or two articles will be made freely available to the public immediately, with the rest of the contents being made freely available eventually.) Read the rest of this entry »

Ahem. We want to encourage you all to come out and support the Bloggernacle Choir. The next performance will be at the Sheraton Hotel in Downtown SLC, Friday, August 10, from 9:30 pm until midnight or so, unless someone brings up gender roles or subtleties of Word of Wisdom interpretation, in which case, we’ll be there all night! Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few days my husband and I substituted Harry Potter for our nightly scripture reading. Read the rest of this entry »

SC Taysom continues his guest stint at BCC. Earlier posts here and here.

Things Mormon have a habit of popping up in unexpected places. My favorite example of this comes from Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot (1976). Read the rest of this entry »

In my wild and crazy youthful days at BYU, I once considering writing a satirical essay entitled, “An Immodest Proposal.” This was in the midst of the frequent debates regarding short-length, single-strap backpacks for girls, and tight t-shirts. The proposal was that BYU require all students to be nudists. This would have had many benefits: the lustful would quickly have to overcome their tendency to lust or face immediately public embarrassment; we would all much more quickly come in line as regards the healthful living prescriptions of the Word of Wisdom/; and you would avoid seeing pride creep into the community as a result of rich and sumptuous attire. Sadly, it remained only an idea in my head and was never fully written or published.

I mention this because I have recently learned that the one place in my life where I was part of widespread nudity has, in the interim, been closed to missionaries. I speak, of course, of the Russian bath-house, or banya. Read the rest of this entry »

SC Taysom continues his guest stint at BCC. Earlier post here.

This post asks lots of questions.  I am trying to tap the collective knowledge of the BCC readership. Read the rest of this entry »

All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes

My family and I are in that peculiar, protracted state of liminal anxiety that is moving. And it is Pioneer Day. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone, please join me in welcoming Natalie Brown as a permablogger at BCC. We’ve loved her contributions thus far and think she’ll be an amazing part of the community. Plus, her last name is Brown, which is apparently becoming a mandatory prerequisite for participation at BCC…

SC Taysom earned a BA degree in History from BYU and an MA and Ph.D. in the History of Religion with a specialty in American Religious History and Ritual Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published on Mormon and Shaker topics in Dialogue, the Western Historical Quarterly, and various other venues. He will participate this November in the inaugural panel of the Mormon Studies Consultation at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife and two children. Read the rest of this entry »

So I get home last night, and my wife shows me an image of herself as a Simpson. It was really cool! She monitors the Wilco message board, and someone there turned her on to the Simpson Avatar generator at the Simpsons Movie Website. Just follow the instructions and you can turn yourself into a Simpson. So I tried it for myself; this is what I would like like if I lived in Springfield. Try it for yourself! Read the rest of this entry »

I got married on August 15, 1980, which means I’ll be celebrating my 27th wedding anniversary in less than a couple of months. And in all that time, I have never owned nor worn a wedding ring. Read the rest of this entry »

As what may have been a joke, a friend of mine gave me John & Kimberley Bytheway’s What We Wish We’d Known When We Were Newlyweds. In the section about couple communication,  they use a story in the Book of Mormon to help illustrate their point. I don’t agree or disagree with their interpretation. It’s one reading and it does help them prove their point, but it brings up the question of entitlement in scriptural interpretation. Are we allowed to make the scriptures mean what we want or need them to mean? Read the rest of this entry »

Before I joined the LDS church, I spent years researching and trying out other religions. Along that path, it’s no surprise that I found many things of value in other traditions. There were oddball (to me) ideas I stumbled on as well, but that’s another post another day.

While in college, I cared for a little boy from a Jewish family. His family often included me in holidays and invited me to simple Sabbath dinners. It was here I developed an appreciation for the tradition, heritage and beauty of the Jewish faith. As a matter of disclosure, had I not discovered the LDS faith, I was on my way to Judaism. Read the rest of this entry »

Millennialism goes through fits and spurts through Mormon history. The earliest Saints gathered in Zion expecting to be sheltered from the imminent storm. The Reformation and Utah War and later the repeal of polygamy were all interpreted as being signs of the impending doom. The World Wars and the Cold War captured the fancies of those who envisioned the last and archetypal confrontation of Good and Evil. Was 2000 AD going to be it? Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time I have struggled to figure out how to frame the comments I make within and about the church so that they seem supportive but might also lead to what I would deem as positive changes in our church culture. For a while now, I have operated on the model that couching my comments in terms of personal experience works best using the logic that while it is easy to argue with a person’s philosophical stance, it is hard to argue with how they feel about an issue or perceive an event they experience. For example, when I wished to explain to someone why I felt that the church could use more revelation on gender, I would explain to him/her how I felt great pain when I realized that I would not receive the priesthood, when I watched the young men receive much more attention than the young women, or when I could not learn about what the General Authorities told my Stake President about the state of the stake, since only the priesthood was invited to hear the news. Read the rest of this entry »

So I plop down in my normal pew and open the program to see who was speaking in Sacrament Meeting today. I didn’t see any names of speakers, and at first I was disoriented, thinking it must be Fast Sunday. But it’s the middle of July, so it couldn’t be Fast Sunday. And as I looked at the program more closely, I realized we were holding a musical testimony meeting today. Read the rest of this entry »

A persistent idea in Mormon thought is the proposition that women are inherently, on average, more spiritual than men. This idea can be found in many texts and discourses of Mormondom; a recent example arises in a discussion thread drawing on an excellent post by Kiskilili at Zelophehad’s Daughters. I have no doubt that an idea of this sort has a huge range of sources. This post sketches just one, with the purpose of showing that ideas about the superior spirituality of women can often arise from beliefs about women that are really quite malign. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing a paper, and in the course of my work I came upon 1 Nephi 11:21-22:

21 And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?
22 And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.

I was quite taken by the expression “the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men.” I had never noticed that fascinating usage before! Read the rest of this entry »

Normally, I’m not one for speculating about the afterlife. Clearly, how we think about it informs the decisions we make here – in fact, what we think about the afterlife most likely reflects what principles we most value – but I often find discussions about it a little futile. However, I find one phrase frequently repeated and agreed upon: “You can’t take your property with you, only your knowledge and talents.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is about honoring my parents.

As you may know, I live with my wife and sons in Helsinki, Finland. My parents and siblings live in the Los Angeles area, where I was raised. My children are my parents’ only grandchildren. Since the boys were born, we have seen each other once a year for two or three weeks at a time. I’ve recently returned from a three-week visit to California, my first in four years and our first ever as a married couple. (My brother had not yet met my wife.) Read the rest of this entry »