For years I would receive family letters and see that my cousin Eve’s husband, Dwayne Matheson, was once again taking one or two of their daughters to Guatemala on a service trip. He’s in construction and has the time to do that sort of thing in the winters, and he has made it a point to bring his older girls along with him. Their oldest child, Aimee, a senior at Clearfield High School, has been there four times, most recently going alone over her last spring break and working in the only existing child care center in Quetzaltenango. I have been so impressed by that commitment to service, and have thought what a wonderful experience that must be for their girls. [Read more...]

A friend shared with me this article from Christianity Today, Drew Dyck, “The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church” (November 19, 2010), which has the tagline More than in previous generations, 20- and 30- somethings are abandoning the faith. Why? The title to this post derives from the large number of young people who grew up Christian, but now check “none” on surveys related to religion. [Read more...]

This Saturday the Church’s new handbook is going to be unveiled in special training meetings beamed to stakes all over the place. Boxes of the new handbooks are sitting right now deep in the bowels of your stake center. Someone in Church distribution, apparently on the theory that BCC is an administrative unit of the Church, actually sent a box of the new handbooks to the BCC offices. While regular Church officers are sworn to secrecy, I don’t remember anyone putting the cone of silence over our little group. So we’re going to go ahead and let you in on some of the changes you’ll find in the pages of the new handbook. To wit: [Read more...]

Yesterday I was talking to a fellow ward member on the train coming home from the City. Our conversation got me to thinking about times in my life when it would have been easy for me to cease engagement with the Church. Most of my siblings and both of my children have gone that route, and it easily could have happened to me as well. But at critical junctures in my life certain things have come together in a way that has allowed me to remain a faithful, believing Saint. I thought I would try to catalog some of the circumstances that have conspired karma-like to keep me within the fold. [Read more...]

To set the stage, I’m going to quote a number of relevant entries from my mission journal. These entries are from my time in Grand Junction, Colorado, in 1978. I have changed all names: [Read more...]

Salt Lake City–A group of bloggers held a press conference today in front of the Mormon Tabernacle to announce they had entirely fabricated the Mormon religion, a faith previously believed to date back to the early 19th century. [Read more...]

I had lunch today with a lifelong friend, who happens to be an atheist. He alerted me to the new Pew Forum survey on religious knowledge, with its finding that atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons scored the highest. He thought that was a predictable outcome based on the relatively high education levels of those groups. I agreed. [Read more...]

I first attended the annual conference of the John Whitmer Historical Association years ago when it was held at Nauvoo. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I had a great time. Fond memories include seeing Jan Shipps and Liz (the UoI press person) walking from the temple and picking them up and giving them a ride to the Joseph Smith History Center, and sitting through a terrific presentation on the Nauvoo Charter in the upper bedroom of the Nauvoo House where Emma died. For whatever reason, I hadn’t made it back, until this year’s edition that just concluded in Rockford, Illinois. [Read more...]

The Salt Lake Tribune ran a couple of articles about the opening of Leonard J. Arrington’s massive 50-box “diary” (really more of a scrapbook). You can read them here and here. [Read more...]

Mormons are, so far as I’m aware, the only Christian religion that has a specific priesthood office of “Seventy.” The charter for this is to be found in KJV Luke 10:1: [Read more...]

Some years ago a youngish man, who only lived in our ward a short time, was giving a talk in sacrament meeting. I don’t really recall the talk, except that he mentioned in the course thereof that it is acceptable to pay one’s tithing on one’s net income. After he sat down, a SP counselor, who was presiding, stormed up to the podium and red-facedly “corrected” this scandalous misinformation, telling us forcefully and in no uncertain terms that we are to pay tithing on our gross incomes. Ironically, however, as I’m sure you all know, he was wrong. (So much for the protection of having a presiding authority on the stand ready to remedy such mistakes.) The Church’s official position has long been that we are to pay 10% or our “increase,” which has been interpreted to mean “income.” No one is authorized to make any statement other than that. Which is to say that how we calculate tithing is simply between us and the Lord. [Read more...]

In the fevered dreams of my pre-hormonal, prepubescent youth, my deeply felt lust focused on two material desires: I wanted a tent and a mini-bike. It was such a disappointment to dream about these things and then awake to the realization that no, I didn’t really own them. I eventually would actually obtain a tent, but I never did get the mini-bike. Which is just as well. Because eventually I got something even better–an actual motorcycle. [Read more...]

So a long time ago, say maybe 15 years ago, I’m sitting at home one evening when the phone rings. It’s a young woman I don’t know, who is clearly distraught. She has just left her institute class for the night, and she was deeply troubled by something the instructor had represented in the class. “Go on,” I said. [Read more...]

I often see pictures of service projects, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with masses of LDS volunteers wearing those yellow shirts that say “Mormon Helping Hands.” I’ve long had sort of a vague sense of envy when I see those pictures. It seems as though those folks are doing important work, and yet having a genuinely good time while they do it. [Read more...]

The summer of 1984 after my second year of law school I clerked for an insurance defense firm in Rock Island, Illinois. It was really a lovely experience and I recall it fondly. [Read more...]

I love movies and watch a lot of them. So it may be surprising that I don’t have a big DVD collection. I usually go to a couple of first run movies a week at the theater, and then I’ll see some older movies on TV or using On Demand during the week. So I don’t really feel the need for a major DVD collection. [Read more...]

A correspondent wrote in convinced that Muhammad is mentioned in Song 5:16: [Read more...]

Our belief that a husband and wife may be sealed together in their marriage relationship for all eternity is one of our major selling points as a religion. This is sort of one of those Truman Madsen “Are Christians Mormon?” things, in that many average Christians believe that their marriage relationships will continue in some sense in heaven, even if that runs counter to official dogmatic theology. This is one of our selling points. [Read more...]

I’m a big believer in the value of scholarly and intellectual humility. Having been a classics student, I especially appreciate the exposition of this virtue in Plato’s Apology. Socrates, in his defense before the Athenians, describes how the Oracle had declared him to be the wisest one in the land. He surely thought this must be some sort of mistake, as he lacked any particular wisdom, so he went around entering into dialogues with politicians, poets, and others, questioning them so as to understand the depths of their wisdom. And eventually he realized that the Oracle was true, if only in a certain and limited respect. For while the people he questioned were not wise, they certainly thought themselves so, whereas Socrates himself had no illusion as to his own wisdom. So knowing that he did not know was a type of wisdom in itself, which Socrates concluded he did have in abundance compared to the self-important men of the marketplace. [Read more...]