By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I am confident that a poll of active Mormons would show that Mother’s Day sacrament meeting is, hands down, the one meeting of the year most fraught with difficulty for the people who attend. I have seen women leave the meeting in tears, and I know others who have learned, through sad experience, that it is best for them to take a break from church on Mother’s Day. I wonder if this phenomenon is uniquely Mormon. Do other Christian women struggle with church-going on this day? If it is unique to us, I wonder why we have a corner on the Mother’s Day anxiety market.

Over the years, I’ve heard some very good Mother’s Day talks, but I have also heard some that were cringe-worthy. I’ve decided to see if I can discern consistent reasons why the good ones are good and the bad ones are terrible. This blog post is the result of my musing. Keep in mind, this is from a male perspective, and my opinions might be worth exactly what you paid for them. Please use the comments to make your own contributions.
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As I have tried to formulate my thoughts about recent events, I have gained new appreciation for the guy with the shovel whose job it is to follow behind the circus parade after the horses and elephants have passed through. There is certainly a lot of raw material to work with. While there is much to regret, the really interesting question we need to answer is how this even happened in the first place.
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It has been interesting for me to watch the reactions this past week as news stories illuminated yet again the contested territory where the free exercise of religion meets civic considerations and obligations. As I observed other LDS people comment on these stories, I realized that in our recent past, we have experienced something even more egregious and more threatening than being pressured to refrain from performing proxy baptisms for Holocaust victims.

In the Vietnam era during the late 1960s,  all young men were required to register for the Selective Service and make themselves available for the draft. Young men who were healthy, single, and heterosexual were classified as 1-A, eligible for military service, and they were quickly inducted into the service to undergo basic training. There was a different classification for ordained ministers, 4-D, and a young man with that classification would not be drafted. Among LDS people, young men who anticipated serving missions often succeeded in getting their classification changed from 1-A to 4-D. But as the war grew more serious and more troops were needed, the Selective Service became more and more reluctant to grant 4-D status to our missionaries, and it notified the church that all our young men should consider themselves candidates for the draft. Read the rest of this entry »

January 29 marks the anniversary of the day in 1863 when the worst massacre of native Americans in our history took place in Utah territory.  Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a group of about 300 California volunteers north from Camp Douglas in Salt Lake City.  They reached the winter encampment of the Northwestern band of Shoshone on Bear River, about 4 miles north of what is now Preston, Idaho, early in the morning and attacked when most of the camp was still sleeping.

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Technology allows us to surround ourselves with music of our choosing any time we want.  The holiday season often means long drives in the car to visit relatives, and an iPod loaded with various kinds of music to fit the moods and tastes of the passengers can make the drive go quickly.  This past week has given me occasion to listen to many recordings from The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and also to listen to some of those same songs by other artists.  The purpose of this post is to describe the immediate, visceral reaction of the listeners to some of the MoTab songs, and also to speculate as to why this is a choir I both love and detest. Read the rest of this entry »

About a hundred miles west-northwest of Wichita is the small community of St. John, Kansas.  St John was once known as Zion valley, and this town has played an interesting role in the ongoing restoration of the gospel. 

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J. Golden Kimball served in the Southern States mission, both as a proselyting elder and later as mission president.  During his first term of service, he was at the mission office in Chattanooga in August, 1884 when latter-day saints were murdered at Cane Creek, TN.  He, of all people, knew what kind of prejudice and bigotry the Mormons faced in that part of the country.  And yet, in a sermon delivered in the Logan tabernacle in 1891, he said this:

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Now that everybody’s NCAA bracket is shot, BCC will allow you to exercise your gift of (non-)discernment for the upcoming conference weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago I had occasion to spend an evening in West Hollywood, California.  It was a Friday after work, and given that city’s reputation for flamboyant Gayness (I have an LDS friend who calls the place Hollyweird, Californicate), I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  As a worst case, I anticipated scenes of unspeakable depravity — a TGIF-style, alcohol-fueled Pride Parade Bacchanalia with rainbow-haired people French-kissing, buff, shirtless men wearing leather chaps and holding hands, dogs and cats living together — in short, a shocking confirmation of the very worst of our conservative LDS suspicions about The Lifestyle.  And as we turned off La Cienega onto Beverly Boulevard, my very worst fears were realized.

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Last week’s general conference featured two sermons which recapitulated the main themes of the speech given by apostle Ezra Taft Benson at BYU in 1980 entitled Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet.  In response to those sermons, J. Stapley wrote two excellent posts in the past week (found here and here) which reviewed each of the fourteen points and gave some brief commentary. These blog posts generated more interest than usual, resulting in over 200 comments. There has also been additional commentary at various places around the LDS blogosphere. Read the rest of this entry »

“You don’t know whether you have succeeded as a parent until you see how the grandchildren turn out.”

- Mary Ellen Smoot

For the first twenty years of my life, I lived next door to my grandfather.  Grandma died when I was three so I don’t remember her much, but I remember grandpa as a very kind, very old, tall and skinny man who had to use a cane to walk and even then had a very severe limp.  Grandpa was born in the last decade of the 19th century and in many ways was a very old-school Mormon.  He wore the old wrists-and-ankles garments, and he personally knew cohabs who had been incarcerated for the practice of plural marriage.  He prayed aloud five times per day — morning and evening, and he also said a looooong, kneel-down prayer before every meal.  I know this because as a young boy I would wake early, get dressed, then go next door to eat an early breakfast with grandpa.  I would then go home and have a second breakfast.  Score! Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago I was googling around on the Internet and happened to find an interesting discussion which might  be familiar to many Mormons.  There were two factions participating in the discussion.  The first group asserted that you could predict what kind of  person a baby would  become on the day it was born.  Baby A would grow up to be independent, assertive, and to value getting things done.  Baby B would become an adult who was non-assertive and more of a follower than a leader, but who would excel at empathy, listening, caring for others, and building inter-personal relationships.  The second group in the discussion claimed that this was all a display of confirmation bias and presented evidence which contradicted the claims made by the first group.

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And on why they are both ultimately unsatisfying athletic endeavors.

I do not intend to rain on anybody’s parade here.  Viva Espana, Hup Holland Hup and all that.  I appreciate the love that many have for futbol, and yesterday’s post from gomez was both enjoyable and enlightening.  And when it comes to football, I am, of course, a fan of the SEC, which is the best conference in NCAA football.  One simply cannot argue with four of the past five national champions — Florida twice, LSU and Alabama.  (And I think all you fans in your cute little conferences like the Mountain West and WAC and PAC 10 or 12 or whatever they are calling it these days are just so cute when you argue among yourselves.  Please continue.)  I am also a fan of the reigning super Bowl champs, the New Orleans Saints.  I say all this in order to demonstrate that my ugly Americanism is not a factor here.  Both futbol and American football have a serious and I believe uncorrectable flaw. Read the rest of this entry »

This post started out as a comment on John C.’s excellent post from three days ago, but as my comment grew in length, I decided, with apologies to John, to write a follow-up post. Read the rest of this entry »

BCC notes the passing of an authentic Mormon hero.  Brother Karl-Heinz Schnibbe died on May 9, 2010, at the age of 86, in Salt Lake City.

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This is a passage from a sermon delivered for Mother’s day by Susan Harriss, one of the first women ordained by the Episcopal church in the United States.

Happy Mother’s day, everyone! Read the rest of this entry »

Or, words and phrases we don’t need.

Have you ever listened to a presentation or speech and realized that you are hearing so much jargon and hype that the words themselves have become meaningless?  In my field of work I’ve listened to so many sales pitches which promise to synergize a new paradigm that will enable us to leverage technology so we can hit the ground running at the end of the day that my eyes now automatically glaze over.  The words are used to obfuscate rather than enlighten, and their very presence indicates that the speaker isn’t serious about what he is doing.

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Fewer than 600 people lived in Hancock county, Illinois in 1839.  They were farmers, mostly, and frontiersmen.

By the end of 1840, over 1,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints had moved into the county, settling primarily in the newly founded city of Nauvoo.  They came across the river as refugees.

By 1844, over 11,000 Mormons lived in Nauvoo and the surrounding area.  The largest non-LDS centers of population were Warsaw and Carthage and the population of those two towns together totalled only about 1,000.  Mormons outnumbered the old settlers by a margin of at least 10 to 1.

The old settlers were upset about all these foreigners just showing up and taking over.  Many of them came from other countries; they talked funny, acted weird,  and looked different.  Financially, times were tough and the newcomers had no jobs and no skills.  Most of them had worked in factories in the old country and there were no factory jobs to be had on the frontier, consequently they were often unemployed.  If they did find jobs, they were willing to work for less pay than others, so they dragged down wages.  Some of the Mormon newcomers lacked proper documentation, and many of them broke the law by trying to vote in elections, even though they weren’t citizens and couldn’t produce a birth certificate proof of citizenship on demand.  They dragged down the economy of Hancock county, first by inflating real estate prices to the point that ordinary citizens couldn’t afford to buy anything, and then, when the bankruptcy laws were liberalized, their leader took advantage and immediately declared bankruptcy, thereby repudiating the debt on thousands of acres of land.  Some of the newcomers also were convicted in a court of law of the crime of counterfeiting.  It was clear that the newcomers were poor, unemployed, and prone to crime.  And they cast their (often illegal) votes for the wrong candidates and parties.

Eventually the old settlers were able to use their connections in the legislature to get the Nauvoo charter repealed, and the newcomers found that their very existence in the county was a violation of the law.

You make the call.  Last week I bought a used car from my neighbor and it has this on the trunk:

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