Mormons are often reluctant, whether through zeal or sense of duty, to miss Sunday services.  And yet this commendable trait can turn into a public health problem when people attend church with colds or flues in tow.  Picture if you will sacrament trays being passed through hands of sick, coughing people, nurseries where children mingle, and meetings where binders are passed through rows of people holding Kleenex to elderly members. How can we change our culture to encourage people to stay home when their health poses threats to others?

Here are some ideas that we have brainstormed:

• Bishops could explicitly tell people to not come if they are ill.
• We could podcast services to those who cannot make it to church for health reasons.
• We could encourage the use of Purell when passing sacrament trays and request that parents with clean hands take bread and water for their children.
• We could have a lesson on how to use Sundays in a reverent way when one is too sick for church.

What have your wards been doing?

When the Christian Fellowship at my father’s school learned that he was a Mormon, they kicked him out.  He joined the Islamic Student Association instead.  While experiences like these undoubtedly happen, they also seem to reinforce an unfortunate trend:  Mormon students often belong exclusively to organizations like LDSSA or Ruben J. Clark Societies, while not belonging to or associating with other Christian groups on campus.  

The message this sends to the campus Christian community at large is that Mormons are not interested in engaging with other Christians, or are not in fact Christians.  Since discussing this problem with other Mormon students, it appears that Mormons often choose to isolate themselves because they feel that Christian communities on campus do not want them there or do not consider them Christian.  However, acquiescing to this feeling continues to allow others to define Mormonism for us.  If we fail to engage with others, then we lose valuable opportunities to define our religion on our own terms and to change widespread views of Mormonism amongst other Christian faiths.

We don’t necessarily need to join or attend all Christian fellowship meetings at universities (though we should worry less about doing so since at most schools you will not be kicked out).  But I am suggesting that at a minimum we ought to take more opportunities to work with other Christian groups.

In my Relief Society class today, women recounted how although they had a testimony that they should belong to the LDS church and of The Book of Mormon, they often struggled to have a testimony of Joseph Smith.  This begs the question, what do we mean when we claim to have a testimony of Joseph Smith?

The very phrase “having a testimony of Joseph Smith,” seems to elevate Joseph Smith to the divine status in which we hold other figures that we testify of—Christ, God, and the Holy Ghost.  The language pushes us towards seeing Joseph Smith as an infallible prophet, a semi-deity. But, of course, this view of Joseph Smith is incorrect.  We do not believe our prophets are infallible, and we do not believe that they are gods.

It seems, then, that what people typically mean when they say that they have a testimony of Joseph Smith is that they have a testimony that certain actions that Joseph Smith took to found our church were directed by God.  Our testimony is not in fact about Joseph Smith being sacred, but rather that we believe in the actions that God directed through Joseph Smith.  If this is in fact what we mean, then there is not in my mind a substantial difference between belief in The Book of Mormon or the church and what some people can a “testimony” of Joseph Smith.

Unfortunately, however, the phrase “having a testimony of Joseph Smith” obscures this meaning, leaving people with the impression that they should develop a testimony of Joseph Smith’s divine nature.  If this is not what we believe—and I don’t think it is—then we might do better to spell out more completely what actions, practices, or doctrines in fact form our testimonies.

The New York Times posted an article today on the complications that often result from fertility treatments.  Under current fertility treatment practices, patients are likely to implant multiple embryos, which leads to an increased risk of twins, premature babies, and other serious complications.  The estimated expense of caring for premature babies that were conceived through IVF was $1 billion last year, with the bulk of that expense being passed on to businesses and other consumers.  In cases where children suffer disability, society pays further costs in the form of services like special education.

This problem poses a number of difficult ethical questions about our reproductive rights and the costs of healthcare, but what interests me that most is that the article doesn’t seem to address at least one obvious way of reducing this problem.  While some couples need fertility treatments, and surely they offer wonderful benefits to those who do, other women need fertility treatments because they feel a need to postpone pregnancy.  This post is not designed to be critical of anyones choices, but given the immense cost associated with fertility treatments that we are all indirectly paying, can we make an argument that perhaps economically we would be better off creating a society where young women lucky enough to be in the position to have children could do so at a biologically optimal time without fear of derailing their professional pursuits?

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a fellow student who is a conservative Christian about the theological differences between his church and Mormonism.  At the end of it, he invited me to attend a Christian fellowship meeting on campus.  I was delighted and surprised–I’m not used to Mormons being included in Christian groups, though whether it is because we are not wanted or because we self-isolate is often hard to say.

But one thing in particular struck me about this conversation–what was perceived to be our common Christian ground was less our beliefs, though there was certainly more overlap than not, than Mormonism’s conservative social values on topics from marriage to alcohol.  Although Prop 8 has given the church a bad reputation in some circles, on the basis of this experience, it appears that it has also opened new doors to fellowshipping with other Christians.  Whether the costs of Prop 8 are worth this opportunity and whether conservative social values should be the center of our religious belief are highly debatable, but I am curious as to whether others have found that it has also made being Mormon easier around other Christians.

Whatever choice you make, a teacher told me, is bound to be disappointing.  Even if you get precisely what you want, your satisfaction with that choice will never be as exciting as the possibility of having options to choose from.  He was right of course.  And consequently I struggle with decision-making, because each necessary decision forecloses as many opportunities as it opens up.

But now, whether through conscious choice or through the sheer momentum of paths taken, many of the major decisions of my life are over.  I’ve hardened into the life I will lead, and I’m old enough to look back on the flexibility of youth with nostalgia.  And while I sometimes miss greatly the excitement of endless possibility, I also find that there can be value in having a mindset that is to some extent “hardened.”

School teaches us to value new insights and to challenge all that we assume—to be anything but hardened.  But, this perspective doesn’t fully account for the utility that comes from automating our behavior and thoughts so that we no longer have to rethink and to remake each choice.  Codifying—in our heads, or, in society at large, in law—good insights removes decisions from the table in a way that forces us to behave well and frees up energy for other activities.  As I have “hardened” into the person I am, I am more efficient in my work, more secure, and, consequently, more able to think about others.  Taking away our agency was Satan’s plan, but transforming our insights into habits and rules that for a period of time we can shelf choices on those topics and move on to others is really not half so bad.

Wandering through our new ward building today as I took my shift on the cleaning crew, I found it hard not be impressed by how well the new building caters to the needs of families.  The cutest part of the building is in the nursery–there is a tot-sized bathroom, filled with a miniature toilet and sink.   There are diaper changing tables in both the men’s and women’s bathrooms (a change, my husband tells me, from the old days), a beautiful mother’s room, storage areas for toys, and a slew of energy saving devices.  In many ways, this building gives physical expression to the desirability of incorporating family life into our public interactions.

Most days, I’m a strong supporter of highlighting and catering to family needs. But recently I have found myself wondering if our success in making the family such a central part of our public gatherings has not also come with costs.  The ward building where I grew up had a cry room attached to the chapel.  Parents were expected to remove disruptive children from meetings and to listen behind the cry room glass.  But in my experience, cry rooms are now rare, and letting children remain in the chapel is far more common.  I had the chance to speak at a church function recently–and I couldn’t hear myself talk due to the noise.

As a feminist, I want to see a society where children and family needs are made central.  But as an adult, I also know that children–with all their joy, energy, and grumpiness–can be an exhausting distraction from worship.  Is there a way that we can fulfill our desires to incorporate children and families while also not losing sight of the need to create environments conducive for adult fellowship and worship?  To what extent can a Mormon ward, given our focus on the family and the child-rearing assistance we expect from church, cater more to adults?

In the wake of Kennedy’s death, I encountered a number or articles, signs, or emails that attempted to blame Kennedy, and often Obama, for what the writers perceive as a fatally flawed America.  Given the circumstances, the unseemliness of these messages bothered me.  But I am more concerned about the tendency they reveal: that we either blame our leaders for our problems or, in the reverse, worship them as our saviors.  Admittedly, leaders do have lots of power, their actions count more than ours, and they make easy targets for expressing our views.  But blaming our leaders, or relying on them to save us, risks becoming a substitute for our own participation in our communities as it minimizes the importance of other people to debates and attributing to leaders more influence than is due.

Let’s not do that.   Whether it’s leaders in our country or our church.  That is all.

During the nineteenth century, courts within the United States began to move towards a system of liability based on “negligence.” Rather than being liable for all damaging actions that people caused to their victims, people would now often be liable only for damage or injury that they caused while not behaving in a way that was sufficiently careful and appropriate for the activity in question.  Some historians attempting to explain why this shift to negligence liability solidified during the nineteenth century have pointed to the needs of the dawning industrial world: industry and modernization would be impeded if people were liable for all the injuries their dangerous new machines, factories, and pursuits would foreseeably inflict in this busy new world.  So in order not to impede the development of these new activities, we would now often just be liable for the harm that we negligently caused, accepting as a price of modernity that some of our actions would result in harm that society would choose to not hold us responsible for at the expense of those we hurt.  Whether or not this thesis is accurate, its core idea that people would be liable for the consequences of some of their actions and not for others should be interesting to Mormons who put “agency” at the center of our theology.

Mormonism, with its 19th century roots, takes as its main story the idea that an individual through the exercise of his agency has the ability to become like God.  We make good and bad choices for which we can be held accountable.   Without a belief that people are accountable moral agents, Mormonism is basically unthinkable.

But the question is, is our sense of who we are and who we have the potential to be, predicated not only on our ability to choose to be responsible for some actions, but also on the fact that we have opted not to see ourselves as responsible for or connected to all the consequences of our actions?  For example, we might eat meat, buy clothes produced in factories that are bad for workers and for the environment, or have caused by our voting a war, but we have opted (at least until recently) not to morally hold ourselves personally responsible for the death of animals, poor treatment of workers, or war.  In other words, does a modern belief in the individual require both that we believe in our agency and disassociate from some of the extended consequences of our agency?  And, more Mormonly, do religions like Mormonism acknowledge that we must disassociate ourselves sometimes from the consequences our actions produce through mechanisms like praying for God’s intervention or forgiveness?

Recently, I reviewed the May 4, 2007 LDS Church statement that gave the news media and members guidance on how to interpret what constitutes church doctrine. Amongst other assertions, the statement indicates that GA opinions made on single occasions are not meant to be binding.  The statement helpfully narrows the scope of where media and members should search for doctrine: “With divine inspiration, the First Presidency … and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles… counsel together to establish doctrine that is consistently proclaimed in official Church publications.  This doctrine resides in the four standard works of scripture (the Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, official declarations and proclamations, and the Articles of Faith.”

I take this statement to mean that doctrine is what is consistently proclaimed in church publications (although I am not quite sure what counts as an official publication) and what resides in the texts mentioned above.  In general, I find this statement helpful and appreciate the limits placed on what counts as binding doctrine.  But, as a thought experiment, what are the consequences are of narrowing the scope of doctrine to what is consistently claimed in church publications?

In order for something to be consistently proclaimed in church publications, the claim must be made repeatedly over (an unspecified amount of) time.  This fact makes me wonder if one consequence of narrowing where to look for doctrine is that members might be inclined to give less weight to current statements by the prophet and other GAs and perhaps undue weight to statements that have been repeated throughout history.  Of course, this consequence is part of the point—it might be unwise to take any given pronouncement by a GA too seriously.  But it does seem to place more weight on teachings that have a history than on new revelations or messages that might come, and it leaves open the question of when something is said consistently enough to be elevated to doctrine—or when it ceases being repeated so as to perhaps not be doctrine?

Perhaps more interesting to me is that the statement emphasizes that doctrine is proclaimed consistently in official church publications.  Part of the reason why certain statements have been consistently repeated in the past is that they were published in a book form during a time in which most members had the same books in their shelves, because books were expensive, harder to update than in digital printing, and because few media outlets existed where people could turn for other reading material on Mormonism.  In other words, the nature of former models of print publishing means that as a group we are far more likely to be familiar with and to continually cite statements from older books published when audiences had fewer choices.  Since media is now far more fragmented and there is even a wide array of official church publications, it seems less likely that we will all hear the same messages. In other words, it seems plausible that the requirements and business of print publishing might have caused certain statements to enter into doctrinal texts and culture and to gain more current weight than might be warranted.    Does this at all trouble the idea of looking at what is consistently proclaimed in official publications for doctrine?

Finally, what burdens does it place upon us as readers if doctrine is to be found by looking for what is consistently proclaimed in official church publications?  Should we be reading for trends, empirically studying what is most frequently expressed in official publications, since whether a statement is doctrine or not rests in part on how many authorities said something over a span of time?  Should we be making more of an effort to read broadly over the many kinds of official publications now released, since otherwise we might miss these trends?  Should we complain less about repetitive talks, since apparently repetition gives statements doctrinal weight?

What other consequences might this statement entail?