Sahar, my Palestinian Mormon friend, wrote me an email which, with her permission, I am posting here. She talks about the election of Hamas and her adventures scaling the security barrier around Bethlehem. (Sahar is currently a PhD student in Turkey and has previously posted at United Brethren here, here and here.) [Read more...]
Poverty and Resurrection
January 24, 2006 By
Poverty is perhaps the major curse of our world. The many millions of poor and even destitute people throughout the world certainly suffer from reduced quality of life in comparison with those of us who are lucky enough to live in better economic conditions. Perhaps even more vivid is the reduction in quantity of life that often accompanies poverty: according to the United Nations World Development Report, people born into the least developed countries in the world in 2002 had a life expectancy of 51.06 years; those born into high income countries, by contrast, had a life expectancy of 78.19 years. Would all those who would happily sacrifice 27.13 years of their lives please raise their hands? [Read more...]
My Divided State (a movie review)
December 2, 2005 By
Once upon a time, I was an angst-ridden college student living in Utah, shocked and appalled at what I saw as the BYU administration’s inexcusable hostility to academic freedom. I had just returned from my mission and English professor Cecilia Farr was being denied tenure under what appeared to be pretty dubious circumstances. Professor Farr had, among other things (or maybe not among other things, which was itself part of the controversy), publicly espoused a rather moderate pro-choice position on abortion (carefully clarifying that she agreed with the Church’s stand as to abortion’s immorality) and all Hell had broken loose. My vision of what academic freedom at a university should be (yes, even a Mormon one) was not consistent with BYU’s actions, and I was quite the unhappy camper. Although there were a lot of lessons to be learned from this episode (and a lot of different ways of framing the issues that were in play), one of the bottom lines, as I saw it at the time, was this: An inordinately large number of Mormons have an inordinately difficult time recognizing the difference between their passionately-felt political views and the religious doctrines of their Church.
It’s been quite a few years since I lived through the angst and irritation of my BYU days, but much of it came flooding back to me the other evening, as I watched THIS DIVIDED STATE, a documentary that has just been released on DVD. [Read more...]
Politics and the True Church
November 21, 2005 By
Logan and I recently had an interesting discussion in which, among other things, we discussed how the Church influences its members’ political activity.
Mormon liberals are lame, lame, lame
October 29, 2005 By
T&S’s ever-excellent notes from all over linked to this article at Meridian. In it Robert Bork shares his thoughts on the culture wars with a conservative Mormon audience, a perfectly acceptable and admirable thing to do. Except….
Maybe Republican Politicians Should Decide All Currently Pending Court Cases
April 1, 2005 By
As I speak to many of my more conservative-minded LDS friends, one political issue appears to dominate as the number 1 voting issue: Supreme Court Justices. While others like abortion and SSM also seem prevalent, my un-scientific and anecdotal evidence points to Supreme Court Justices as the number 1 issue.
Guest Post: Eschatology vs. Mormon Cultural Politics: No Holds Barred
February 21, 2005 By
Editor’s Note: HL Rogers is a bloggernacle neophyte, but since he’s a mormon lawyer, he should feel right at home. He suggested this as an idea for a guest post, and we’re more than willing to oblige.
I was sitting in my car the other night driving home from work when I heard a story about global warming on my NPR. The story described how the Bush administration has earmarked $6 billion to prepare for catastrophic events predicted by proponents of global warming. Of course my eyebrows shot up: Bush administration preparing for global warming? This story was too questionable to be believed without some fact checking. Of course, I’m far too lazy for that, so instead I began to wonder about Mormons, eschatology, and global warming.
Rock the Vote!
January 21, 2005 By
You all should take notice of the Bell Brothers’ Blogscar Awards, a chance to show your support for your favorite blog (ours). Vote now — click here! We may have lost the election, but we can win the bloggernacle!!
Liberal Federalism?
January 7, 2005 By
Richard Thompson Ford has an interesting article up on Slate, "The New Blue Federalists: the case for liberal federalism." His thesis is that while federalism is most oft-used as a conservative tool of judicial activism, it may also serve liberals equally well. It’s a challenging idea, but I can’t help but feel like it would ultimately be bad for the country.
Can You Support Families and Sub-Prime Lending?
January 4, 2005 By
Over the break I read Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren’s “The Two-Income Trap” which she co-wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi. It is a quick and easy read and, I think, an important book asking why personal bankruptcy rates are soaring to unprecedented levels. (If you are a careful reader like my wife, you will notice a hat tip to Nate Oman for “important assistance with the research work” in the acknowledgments section. Such acknowledgments have become jack-in-the-box events for me, popping up where I least expect it and confronting me with my own undistinguished career.) In their book Elizabeth and Amelia argue that the usual explanation for personal bankruptcy, superfluous consumption, is in fact a myth. Instead there are a myriad of contributing factors: the costs of a mortgage far outpacing gains in wages, healthcare costs, stay-at-home mothers moving into the workplace (because she can not bring in fresh income in an emergency) and, most important to this post, deregulation of the lending industry (Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp) leading to usurious interest rates.
Get it on, Falun Gong
December 9, 2004 By
One of the drawbacks of living in the BEST CITY ON EARTH is that you have to put up with a great deal of foot traffic. As someone who works in Times Square, it can be frustrating to wade through the hordes of tourists gawking at the billboards. Well, it’s recently gotten even worse, thanks to the pamphleteer armies of Falun Gong (a/k/a Falun Dafa, or Wheel of Law).
So what’s a liberal Mormon, anyways?
March 12, 2004 By
I guess if we’re going to be elitist and pride ourselves on being liberals, it might be helpful to set some parameters or definitions of some kind. Note that I won’t impose any definitions, of course, because I’m not some kind of dictator.
I found The Political Compass to be a reasonably reliable indicator of political/social leanings; I have a feeling that Mormons are going to be a tighter grouping on the grid of politics than Times & Seasons would indicate. In other words, we’re all pretty conservative – some of us just a little more so than others. Or perhaps the liberal/conservative distinction applies in terms of social politics but not in terms of economics? Anyways, I found the test to be interesting (I’ll post my own results later), and thought it might be interesting to y’all. [Read more...]
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