You may have read the Salon article on Cleon Skousen, a great influence on the thought (?) of Glenn Beck. The article references Dialogue’s review of one of Skousen’s books, The Naked Capitalist. This roundtable review is one of the fieriest and most fun things that has ever been published in Dialogue, I think, so I’m linking to it from here so you can read the whole thing (the Salon link is to an incomplete version.) Here it is. Enjoy! Discuss!

This is another in an ongoing series of posts by members of Dialogue’s Editorial Board. Eric Samuelsen is Associate Professor of Theatre and Media Arts at BYU, and Dialogue’s Film and Theater Editor.

In Sunday school last Sunday, the lesson was about the apocalypse, the End of Days. It’s always a depressing lesson for me, because i don’t want to be around for the End of Days. I don’t want anything to do with the Apocalypse. I think it sounds terrifying–death and horror and disease and war. As Mormons, I don’t think we can even take comfort in the ‘neener neener neener, I’m getting raptured and you’re not’ vibe apparently some evangelicals take comfort in, because we don’t believe in the Rapture, unless we do.

But The Great Satan, Hollywood, apparently likes the Apocalypse a lot, I guess because movies showing the End of Days make money. I don’t actually know that apocalyptic movies make money, but i suspect they must because a) they mostly suck, and b) they keep getting made. The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Happening, Knowing–all about the end of the world, all starring reasonably big name actors, and all showing lots of death and carnage, often in voluptuous detail. How are we supposed to feel when we see images of miliions of people dying? Are we supposed to shrug and say ‘ah, it’s just CGI’, maybe marvel a bit about how cool CGI can look. And what about me? One might think that I would be particularly vulnerable to movies about death, because I’ve been really sick and death is close to my thoughts. And yet, my reaction to all three of these movies was to get the giggles. I thought they were funny.

The Day the Earth Stood Still was the best of the three, in part because it has Keanu Reeves, in part because it has Kathy Bates and John Cleese, and in part because the protagonist, Jennifer Connelly, can actually do something to stop the end of the world. In the Happening, poor Mark Wahlberg spends most of the movie wandering around pointlessly, because the Angel of Death, played in this case by grass (I’m not kidding: Grass. Lawn. Vegetation), basically kills everyone who’s not a movie star. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, who star in The Happening, don’t do anything differently from what all the other characters do in the movie; they survive because . . . they’re Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Or something. M. Night Shyamalan has made a very strange little movie here, sort of hopeless and horrifying, a movie where the Apocalypse involves mass suicide. We’re not killed by nuclear weapons or global warming or pandemic, we just all find horrid ways to off ourselves. At times, it’s close to unwatchable, but it packs a wallop. But it’s unsettling and unsatisfying, because the characters–who stand in for us–can’t do anything to stop it, and we don’t like that. Generally, dramatically, we root for volitional protagonists, characters who actively pursue an objective. In The Happening, no one does, because they can’t–your lawn is out to get you. This is also why I hate the Apocalypse, of course–i can’t do anything to stop it. Hate that.

But in The Day The Earth Stood Still, Jennifer Connelly actually can try to talk the Angel of Death out of killing everyone, with help from John Cleese. And that makes her a more volitional, and therefore more appealing protagonist. Plus, the Angel of Death is played by Keanu Reeves, and I love Keanu Reeves. He’s a strange actor, with limited range, but I, alone among essentially everyone I know, think he’s terrific, especially playing an alien with super powers, a part he was born to play. It’s like answering The Rapture by saying “it doesn’t matter if I’ve been saved or not, it doesn’t matter if I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, because i do other good things, I have other good qualities.’ And God–or Klaatu–accepts that argument and lets us live. Much more satisfying, perhaps not as convincing.

Knowing splits the difference. Nicolas Cage plays a physicist who finds a list of numbers that’s been locked in a time capsule for 50 years; as he looks at the numbers, he realizes that they correspond to the times, casualties and exact locations of a whole bunch of disasters. The final three series of numbers predict disasters that haven’t happened yet, and so Cage tries to prevent them, and can’t. The third set of numbers end, not with a number of casualties, but with the letters EE. Everyone else. Meanwhile, his son is seeing and hearing weird angel-like space aliens. Anyway, the first half of the movie works fine, in a ‘da Vinci Code/National Treasure sort of way; our hero’s trying to solve a puzzle, and then he’s trying to do something about it. Works great. Then the last third of the movie, it goes completely off the rails, dramatically. SPOILER ALERT: Turns out the aliens are going to save Cage’s 10 year old son and a cute female friend of his, and not Cage or the girl’s Mom. They’re going to save a few children, and allow solar flares to kill everyone else on earth. The last images of the movie involve an almost pornographic fascination with death and destruction–we get to see Manhattan get clobbered, for example. Then we see a wheat field, with cute wittle bunny wabbits, and Cage’s son and female friend gamboling. Then, just in case we missed the Adam/Eve symbolism, we see . . . ta da! . . . The Tree of Life! Yea! That’s supposed to be a happy ending. And it sort of is–the two kids really do sort of get raptured, though they’re raptured into a space ship by space aliens, and not into the sky, by Jesus. So i guess it’s sort of a movie for evangelicals. Except it’s such a strange mix of elements–the happy ending, the macabre fascination with mass death. Cage himself has a reconciliation scene with his minister father, and they die hugging, saying ‘this isn’t the end.’ But what does that mean?

In a way, the last third of this movie feels like someone found a sucky early draft of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and decided to film it. My wife and I got the giggles ten minutes before it ended, and decided afterwards that we’d enjoyed it more than almost anything else we’d seen lately. We’ve seen a whole lot of terrific movies lately, because i’ve been sick and Netflix has been my salvation. So after The Reader, and Frost/Nixon, and Defiance, and Gran Torino, and The Changeling, it was fun to see a really bad piece of Hollywood crap. But it’s interesting how the Apocalypse seems to be selling all of a sudden. Is it a sudden interest, by Hollywood, in what those folks in flyover states might actually believe in? is is new Age meeting Christian evangelism meeting, i don’t know, Scientology? Is is politics? (it can’t really be a reaction to Obama, can it? Too soon, much too soon, it takes years to baste these turkeys.) But it’s made for some interesting, if not actually good, movies.

On a historical note, how many times has the LDS General Conference been cancelled due to flu outbreaks?

Portia has the right answer.

Here is an article reporting the most recent instance from the Deseret News/Salt Lake Telegram on September 27, 1957.

From the next day, here’s the paper’s editorial on the cancellation.

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Stirling Adams guest blogs on bycommonconsent as one of the volunteer directors of the Dialogue Foundation, publisher of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

This is the first in a regular series of guest blogs by members of the Dialogue Editorial Board. Neylan McBaine is the Personal Voices editor, and the author of Seeds of Faith in City Soil: Growing Up Mormon in New York City in the Winter 2007 issue of Dialogue. She lives with her husband and three wonderfully literarily-named daughters in Brooklyn, NY.
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“Excuse me, are you Jewish?”

I love that question. It’s one I’m asked routinely as I walk the streets of my neighborhood, Park Slope, Brooklyn. Usually, I can see it coming from half a block away: two Hasidic men, perhaps one old and one young like a father/son Home Teaching duo, waiting on the corner as I approach the intersection of Union Street and Seventh Avenue. Their black coats and hats and the abundant facial hair on the older companion set them apart of course, but it’s usually what they’re holding that draws the most attention.

In September, soon after I moved to the neighborhood, the object in their hands was the ram’s horn of the shofar. A few weeks later, it was clusters of long branches in one hand and a lemon in the other. Recently I was taken off guard by two girls holding a Torah. “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” one asked, holding up the book. I had never been asked the question by a woman and I hadn’t noticed their long skirts and long, pulled back hair till we were passing on the narrow sidewalk. Away from the sides of their Hasidic men, they easily could have been sister missionaries.

Although tempted, I’ve never answered “Yes” to their question. I always try to say, “No, I’m not” in the kindest, most patient tone I can muster while hustling three kids down a New York street. I did, however, once ask what the branches and lemons represented since my knowledge of Jewish festivals fell short of that symbolism. Part of the celebration of Sukkoth, the Festival of Booths, Jews wave the branches — one palm, one willow and two myrtle — and the lemons in six directions to symbolize that God is everywhere and that the person waving the objects is a member of the House of Israel. “And what would you do if I had said I was Jewish?” I probed. As a Jew, I could have waved the objects there on the street so I could celebrate my heritage as part of the holy day.

The Jewish missionaries are not on the street everyday, only during holidays when they’re trying to engage the vast population of secular Jews in Park Slope. But there are so many festivals on the Jewish calendar that their absence is noticed more often than their presence. After six months of living in the neighborhood, my children hardly comment on them anymore. As New Yorkers, they’re accustomed to seeing religion played out in public lives – through dress, through preachers on the subway, through the statue of Moroni hovering over Lincoln Center. When three women passed us in black burqas in the 100 degree weather of late summer, my oldest merely looked up at me quizzically. “For modesty,” I muttered quickly as they passed. My daughter didn’t give it a second thought. “Got it,” she nodded.

And that’s why I love being asked if I’m Jewish: because the Hasidic men with their branches and lemons, the women with their Torah, and the Muslim women in their burqas give me — and my children — the comfort of knowing that there are others out there who really do practice their religions. Many others may practice quietly at home, as do most Mormons who are not on proselytizing missions, but those who wear their religions on their sleeves give me the courage to be a bit bolder about what I reveal about my own faith, in conversation and example if not in my dress. I feel a kinship with my street corner neighbors, a desire to grab their palm and willow branches and cheer, “Religious nut cases, unite!” There’s no need to feel shy around here. After all, in New York, you can rest assured that someone somewhere is doing something stranger than you.

As the Juvenile Instructor has also noted, we’ve received an invitation in the inbox:

The Claremont School of Religion, the LDS Council on Mormon Studies and the Mormon Scholars Foundation are pleased to present: “Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision,” a conference featuring keynote speaker Terryl Givens and a panel of LDS engineers.

This would seem an immensely interesting conference. I am not aware of this technologically-oriented perspective ever being explored in a conference before. Very exciting. Details are as follows:

Keynote Lecture by Terryl Givens: Friday, 6 March 2009 at 8pm
Conference: Saturday, 7 March 2009 10am-5pm, Albrecht Auditorium in Stauffer Hall, Claremont Graduate University
925 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont

Claremont is in California.

Additional information:

The conference seeks to expand the discussion of Latter-day Saint perspectives on the attributes of God and the potential of man by examining the possible resonance between Mormon and engineering thought. In Mormon thought, God is the architect of the Creation and the engineer of our bodies and spirits. Man, on the other hand, is believed to be capable of growing to become like God. The conference’s governing question is: Where does engineering fit in the convergence of these two realms?

A panel of LDS engineers will discuss topics that include materialism, free will, models of spirit matter, quantified morality, spiritual underpinnings for a space program, the New God Argument, God as a perfect engineer, technical interpretation of Mormon physiology, transhumanism, Gaia and the paradisiacal Earth, and technical advancement leading into the millennium.

Last fall, I began to write a post addressing an aspect of the publicity surrounding Prop 8 that did not garner much attention on the bloggernacle but seemed critical to me: what does the recent focus on same-sex marriage mean for the future of Mormon feminism and Mormon heterosexual couples?  At the time, I pulled this post from publication in order to prevent unwelcome controversy from entering the BCC site.  But now that the immediate impact of Prop 8 is over, I think it is time to ask how the goals of Mormon homosexuals and married Mormon feminists might support or conflict with each other.  This post is not intended to pass a value judgment on any camp, and it certainly doesn’t presume to understand the complexity of desires amongst Mormon homosexuals and women, but it does seek to open a discussion.

Supporters of same-sex marriage and some strains of Mormon feminism all want marriage to be redefined and reconsidered, but it is unclear to me that all parties want the same kind of redefinition.  While both presumably want to see partnerships with equality between spouses, basic civil liberties, and a rethinking of “natural,” hierarchical gender roles, heterosexual marriage must generally find ways to reconcile the issue of childcare with equality in ways that do not as strongly factor into same-sex marriage.

Although the focus on same-sex marriage has brought to attention questions about the rights of consenting adults to form life-long partnerships, its focus on choice, privacy, and identity don’t address married women’s needs for more equity in the child-rearing process.  For women in heterosexual marriages, I believe that assertions of equality with men, while welcome and doctrinally necessary, are less needed than real social measures to help make such equity (especially within the workforce) a reality and to give women more real choices.  The focus on privacy in same-sex marriage seems sometimes at odds with the desire by many women for more public support for issues like childcare, and the rhetoric of privacy seems to provide fewer incentives for the state to support or subsidize marriage as an institution.

My point is neither to judge between what I perceive to be the desires of both camps nor to suggest that both cannot, should, or should not achieve their aims.  But I do want to point out that the desires of both groups in respect to marriage are somewhat different even if they share a desire for reform and fatigue with prescribed ideals about gender.  I am concerned that the focus on same-sex marriages is rendering less visible within the public/church eye the need to ask how marriage might be reconceived and fostered for the heterosexual majority.   Heterosexual marriages are, I think, “under attack,” but I believe the culprit is changing economic and social expectations rather than same-sex marriage.

As an organization, we are often failing to publicly invest in and to seriously address the needs of modern married couples.  As it becomes increasingly harder for families to economically survive with a sole breadwinner, and as women increasingly view careers as opportunities for growth that complement their roles as mothers, we need guidance and serious thought about how to preserve the best aspects of “traditional” marriage while adjusting to these changing social realities.  While same-sex marriage is a serious issue that deserves attention, even more attention is surely due to the changing needs of the heterosexual majority.

But the focus on same-sex marriage seems to have created a renewed sense of urgency within mainstream Mormonism to define and reassert traditional marriage norms and with them traditional gender roles.  That said, I am not sure that these reassertions have increased the pressure on women to actually conform to gender roles.  I feel that many Mormon women actually have found more power to define their marriages on their own terms as the focus on regulating intimacy has shifted elsewhere.  I am concerned, however, that the current controversies will make it harder for serious discussions about heterosexual marriage to occur in the near future.

The questions posed by homosexuality about the role of gender in God’s plan nevertheless seem to complement those posed by feminist Mormon women and to present a long overdue opportunity for us to seek further revelation about gospel paradigms that do yet adequately articulate a role for women and for non-heterosexuals.  Or, since I confess that I am tired of gender roles being dictated or revealed, they  might at least present a time to decide if the rhetoric of gender is worth preserving in its current form.  My hope is that the needs of Mormons of all genders and sexual orientations will in fact be complimentary; even if we cannot endorse solutions that please everyone, this is an opportunity to discuss an issue that has been silenced too long.

It’s a blustery 3 degrees F (-17 C) outside right now on the first Sunday of the New Year. In a moment I need to head into the wind for an meeting. But first, two New Year examples of BCC bloggers popping up in daily life in Utah County.

A few days ago we were playing a family game of hockey on a nearby pond. While one of us chased down a puck after an errant pass, the rest of the family paused to rest, and someone commented, “Can you imagine breaking through this ice to get baptized, and doing that for 7 days in a row!” That statement stems from a family home evening lesson we had based around J. Stapley’s and Kris Wright’s Journal of Mormon History article, “A History of Baptism for Health.” If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. Stapley provides an abstract in a previous BCC post. But, as it is necessarily short it can’t give a feel for the many fascinating details their research has discovered–including an example of a person breaking ice to get baptized seven times.

Then, on New Year’s day we were visiting with a group of families in the neighborhood. While chatting about snow-removal strategies, I overheard snatches of another conversation involving Kevin Barney’s recent Dialogue article, “How to Worship our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)”
With Kevin’s analysis of references to Asherah in the O.T. and his measured exercise in “religion-making,”this article also reads high on the “Honey, read this paragraph!” meter (and may show up in a future FHE).

So, Kevin, J. Stapley, and Kris Wright. Thanks for helping bring in the New Year.

Stirling

The moth-eaten parchment fragment fell from the false lid of the blackened old cedar chest, its letters atrophied, its ink faded. Curious, I reached for it, and thought for a moment that I saw black sparks fly from the fragment as my fingers touched it.

It took me years to translate it from Ugaritic. I finished the task at midnight on a moonless night. As I wrote the last word, the door suddenly slammed shut, and an icy wind blew across my neck, and I thought I heard maniacal laughter echoing through the halls. I pulled my coat tighter, and began to read.

10 lbs potatoes
1 lb carrots
4 stalks of celery
4 parsnips, if desired
4 medium onions
2-4 cloves garlic (or 2-4 tsp chopped garlic in oil)
Butter
24 oz crema mexicana

Peel and quarter the potatoes. Peel the carrots and halve them; ditto parsnips. Chop the celery into small pieces. (You’ll want to more or less obliterate the celery, otherwise it doesn’t mash well.) In a big pot, boil the potatoes, carrots, celery, and parsnips together until the potatoes are soft and starting to come apart if mixed. Drain them carefully, using a wooden spoon and the pan, not a colander (they won’t survive a colander). This will leave some water in the pot, which is fine.

At the same time, in a separate frying pan, melt butter. Add the garlic, plus the onions, chopped finely. Brown on medium heat till browned; then lower heat and continue to brown another 5-10 minutes. You want the onions to be almost a paste. (But you don’t want to boil them, because you’ll lose flavor that way.) Once the onions are almost dissolved, add a quarter cup of water or wine to the pan. This will blend with the onion/garlic mix and the toasted butter to make a very tasty brown sauce. Add another quarter cup. Let it simmer for a minute.

Mash the potatoes slightly with a masher or spoon. Add cream to the potatoes, and stir. Add onion mix to the potatoes, and stir in.

Add additional spices and salt to taste. (I usually end up adding a few teaspoons of garlic salt and of Landry’s garlic/herbs mix.)

Eat.

The fragment, amazingly enough, was a mashed potato recipe! And immediately after the recipe, the following curious text:

These are the Devil’s Mashed Potatoes. To the righteous, they will taste of silt and ashes. But to the wicked, they will be sweeter than Heaven’s own nectar.

Scratching my chin, I headed towards the kitchen.

Personally, I don’t put much stock in silly superstitions. I’ve tried the recipe myself, and they’re delicious. I even brought them to the ward party, where they were quite the hit.

You should try them some time. Let me know if you like them.

A scene from the check-out stand at a local Macey’s grocery store:

I assume that behind the blue rectangles that decorate our local magazine racks there usually lie images that are thought to offend buyers because too much flesh is exposed, or too explicit a reference is made to this or that technique.

Not so this time. In each of the 6 racks that contained this issue of this magazine, it was obscured. I kindly asked the manager-on-duty if it was covered due to customer complaints or for another reason; she didn’t know (and didn’t find the cover offensive).

Recently a sociology graduate student in Mexico posted a question to the ASPMS list asking for pointers to articles discussing the church’s system for youth education (or CES in general), or to discussions of “institutions of socialization within the church.” He is working on a master thesis project which compares religious education among Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in a particular region in Mexico (Veracruz). He also asked for recommendations on how to make a comparison between socialization strategies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons.

A BYU history professor and student provided a bibliography with some relevant texts. Others pointed him to the half a dozen recent Dialogue articles on the Church in Latin America. But, even in these bibliographies, and in quick electronic searches I conducted through past issues of Dialogue, Sunstone, BYU Studies, and the Journal of Mormon History, I found surprisingly few discussions of the Church Education System. (Our “institutions of socialization” could be interpreted as including Primary, the Young Women organization, Scouts, the BYUs, etc., so there are, of course, more articles that address that wider ambit.)

Do you have any suggestions for this Mexican researcher with an interest in the academic study of Mormonism, including ideas on comparing Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses?

References he was pointed to include:

LaMond Tullis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1987.

Efrain Villalobos Vasques, “Church Schools in Mexico.” In F.L. Tullis, ed. Mormonism: A Faith for All Cultures. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978.

“Church Education in Mexico.” Ensign 2:9 (September 1972).

Janine Boyce, “Messages from the Manuals- Twelve Years Later” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 27:2, Summer 1994 (available on line)

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Stirling Adams is one of the volunteer directors of the Dialogue Foundation, publisher of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. For the latest in Mormon Studies articles, essays, fiction, and poetry, visit the Dialogue website.