Giving 10% of one’s income to charity is a concept familiar to Mormons (although paying tithes to the Mormon Church is not really the same as paying 10% to, say, Oxfam — no judgement implied). One Oxford academic has decided to go further. He has pledged not only to give up 10% of his income but also all of his income above £20k ($30k). Dr Ord predicts being able to donate £1m over the course of his life and thus save thousands of lives. His website (Giving What We Can) encourages others to donate at least 10% and usefully ranks charities according to their cost-effectiveness.

I find Ord’s decision inspiring and wish him well in keeping to his goal (the pull of Mammon should not be underestimated). He goes where tithing does not — hurting the rich (or in Ord’s case, the non-impoverished). Up-scaling our donations according to wealth seems like a justified way to discharge our obligations to the poor and remove the love of money from our hearts.

Could I do it? Probably not. Off the top of my head, I think our household of five could live comfortably and make room for future needs with no more than £50k ($75k) p.a. Tithing 100% (to the church, or to other charities, or both) of income above £50k is something I really wish I could aspire to. Even then I think £50k is too high a ceiling if I am to “give away [a relatively sacrificial amount of my possessions] to the poor.”

The kids often come home from church with some kind of souvenir: a bookmark (we must have 57 of them floating around), a picture, a scripture card, etc. Last week, my tweenage son brought home a half-carton of chicken eggs.

“My teachers brought some of their chickens to class,” he said. (Yes, live ones. This couple raises hens and roosters in their backyard.)

“What the heck for?” I asked.

“You know–’I will gather you as a hen gathereth her chicks.’”

Talk about object lessons.

My son was excited to show off his bounty, especially to his older sister, who is his willing partner in a perpetual game of one-upmanship. We all gathered around for a look. Three of the eggs looked just like the ones we get from the grocery store. The other three were much smaller, and ivory-colored.

“These three are fertilized!” he announced. “If we keep them warm for 29 days the baby chicks will hatch.”

And that’s when the drama began.

Daughter: What are you going to do with them?

Son: Eat them, I guess.

Daughter: You can’t eat the fertilized ones. That would be like eating a half-formed chick! That’s DISGUSTING!

Son: (looking slightly disgusted) Could we let them hatch?

Me: No way.

Son: Yeah, we don’t have an incubator.

Daughter: We could keep them warm with a light bulb.

Me: We don’t have food for the chicks, or a place for them to live. (Or, I might add, any parental desire to care for any more living things.)

Daughter: But we need to take care of them!

Son: (frustrated that she’s foiling him) But they’re not alive.

Daughter: But they COULD BE! If you throw them away, that would be like ABORTION!

Me: Honey, they haven’t started growing yet. It’s better to not let them begin growing than to hatch them and not take care of them.

Son: Yeah, they’re JUST EGGS.

Daughter: (Crying) You are being CRUEL TO ANIMALS!

Me: Go to your room.

The eggs await their destiny on the refrigerator shelf. Right next to the rotisserie chicken we’re eating for dinner.

Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday in November, the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day, which falls on November 11 every year. Each year my ward celebrates Remembrance Sunday with a peculiarly Mormon liturgy that is wonderful to experience.

That is not to say that the same readings, poems and/or stories are told each year in the same order, or the same hymns sung; rather, a liturgy for this day is prepared in advance along themes appropriate for the day. There are no talks but rather the meeting flows as printed on the program, with one reading or story or hymn following after another. Also, participation is not exclusive to subjects of the Queen — Americans and others from without the Commonwealth follow or precede Africans, Brits, New Zealanders, Canadians and others to give the readings. Our Remembrance Sunday this year proceeded as follows :

Conducting: Bishop K.T. Opening Hymn: 78, God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand Invocation: By Invitation Stake/Ward Business: Bishop K.T. / Confirmation of Brother B.B.O. Sacrament Hymn: 190, In Memory of the Crucified Reading: Brother B.B.: Winston Churchill Exerpt Reading: Sister C (Sister Missionary 1): Matthew 22:35-40 Reading: J.O. (Primary child): Articles of Faith 1:12 Reading: A.B. (YM): Matthew 24:3-8 Reading: Brother E.O.: 1 Nephi 12:12-15 Hymn: 193, I Stand All Amazed Reading: Sister S.A.: Revelation 12:7-9 Reading: Brother A.M.: Alma 48:14

Reading: Elder D. (Elder Missionary 1): “The Soldier” Reading: Brother P.S.: Doctrine & Covenants 45:4 Hymn: 194, There is a Green Hill Far Away Reading: M.F. (Primary child): Mosiah 2:17 (memorized before church, read from pulpit due to slight jitters) Reading: Brother C.B.: Alma 3:45-47 Reading: Sister F. (Sister Missionary 2): Doctrine & Covenants 138:31-35 Reading: Brother D.T.: Alma 46:12-13 Hymn: 341, God Save the Queen Reading: Sister J.T.: Ether 12:12 Reading: Elder D. (Elder Missionary 2): “In Flanders Fields” Reading: Sister L.S.: Articles of Faith 1:11 Closing Remarks: Bishop K.T. Two minutes of silence Closing Hymn: 152, God Be With You Till We Meet Again Benediction: By Invitation

I look forward to Remembrance Sunday every year because I know our ward celebrates it in this way. The “liturgy” is a refreshing break from Sunday talks, even though the talks are usually enjoyable and uplifting. I think we should have a readings-based Sacrament Meeting about once a quarter. It mixes things up a little bit, allows us to dig into the scriptures and provides an opportunity for a greater number of people to participate in the Sacrament services.

We also have a readings-based “liturgical” Sacrament meeting the Sunday before Christmas. Easter would be the next logical choice and probably July 24 (I’m guessing many might at first think this isn’t a good idea but it seems like a good way for Latter-day Saints around the world to “remember how great things [God] has done for [their spiritual forebears]; for they were in bondage, and he has delivered them” (Mosiah 27:16) — this would be a Mormon-focused July 24, i.e. acknowledging and remembering the conclusion of the trek and finding shelter and security, and not a celebration of Utah). That would make four in a calendar year even though not strictly spaced out by quarters.

My uncles tease (more than half seriously) that my grandmother can’t drive past a cemetery without getting the urge to stop and look for ancestors. That’s a trait that she’s passed on to me. As we take road trips around the country, Mike and I spend a surprising amount of time in cemeteries, looking for graves — not only of ancestors, but also of figures in church history and U.S. history. All the cemeteries we visit are solemn and hallowed places, but few sites can compare to the acres and acres of orderly rows of veterans buried in America’s national cemeteries. It seems appropriate to reflect on some of these this Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, outside of the U.S.)

Although often photographed, I felt that the images I’ve seen fail to convey the sense of scale of these monuments when experienced in real life. (My own photos here hardly do any justice.) Even more meaningful for me, was moving beyond the experience of the whole and reflecting on the fact that each grave remembers an individual who gave service. In my own family, both my grandfathers are veterans of World War II, and I have ancestors who served in the World War I, the U.S. Civil War, the War of 1812, the American Revolutionary War, and the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Year’s War). I therefore feel a familial connection to these sacred grounds.

Beyond personal connections, our visits have made it clear to me that when you pay attention to the individual markers, they are not identical stones repeated infinitely — rather, each one is individual and each represents an individual. Up close, you immediately observe that each headstone includes an “emblem of belief.” In the oldest parts of the cemeteries, these are nearly all simple latin crosses (indicating that the individual was any kind of Christian), although right from the start there are a smattering of stars of David mixed in (representing Judaism), along with stones left blank (presumably for non-adherents).

Of course, as Mormons well know, not all Christians use the latin cross to symbolize their faith. And as you move from older sections of national cemeteries to newer sections, it becomes clear that America’s servicemen — along with increasing numbers of servicewomen — are increasingly diverse in their beliefs. And it’s also clear that the country is increasingly tolerant of that diversity.

As the sections move forward, distinctive emblems appear for mainline Protestant denominations, as well as for Orthodox denominations.

Among Latter Day Saints, there are emblems for both the LDS Church and the Community of Christ.

But more and more in the newer sections, non-Christian faiths (and even beliefs without faith) are also represented.

In visiting these hallowed grounds, we were expected to feel impressed by a powerful monument to service, and we were not disappointed in that expectation. We also left impressed by a compelling monument to America’s pluralism and diversity. That was not expected, but it was nevertheless just as welcome.

Thanks again on this day to all who have given and who continue to give service.

_______________________________________________________________

Note: Mike and I took all of these photos either at Arlington or Ft. Leavenworth National Cemeteries. In addition to those listed above, the government approves a number of emblems of belief which we did not locate: Aaron Order Church, Native American Church of North America, Serbian Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Konko-Kyo faith, Sufism Reoriented, Tenrikyo church, Seicho-No-Ie, United Moravian Church, Eckankar, Christian & Missionary Alliance, Humanists, Izaumo Taishakyo Mission of Hawaii, and Sikhism.

Happy Remembrance Day, all.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

We just got back from Montreal, where my wife gave an absolutely outstanding paper on ways the Nation of Islam employed food and diet to craft a new identity, to overturn the malignant, dehumanizing narratives of slavery. What made her talk more brilliant still (aside from its great analysis, outstanding sources, and impeccable delivery) was that it was in a panel on boundary maintenance in Islam. So amidst fascinating papers by Islamic scholars on medieval Islam and the scandals the Quranic word could generate for gender mores (what does it mean for a woman to pronounce a Quranic text that normally requires immediate prayerful prostration of all hearers, including men? Islamic jurists debated the question heartily) and other fascinating topics, this Mormon woman stands up, describes and analyzes the idiosyncratic and fascinating foodways propounded by Elijah Mohammed, and then, because Delta moved up our flight and customs at Montreal reportedly takes forever, disappears to find a taxicab.

That’s just part of the drama that was AAR. Unfortunately because of childcare issues and other obligations, we were unable to attend many of the other sessions we wanted to. Was anyone else at AAR? Anybody care to share some details?

BBC3 (the BBC’s youth channel) airs a series called The World’s Strictest Parents. It’s a reality show where tearaway British youths (“oiks” as the London mayor would call them) are housed with said Strictest Parents in an inverse of Nanny 911 (where a British nanny schools naughty American kids). In last week’s show, two kids are sent to Utah to live with a Mormon family. Enjoy:

There are archetypes aplenty including the feral British teenager and the American religious conservative. Whilst the Pecks’ Utah Mormon Nice is a bit much (and alien) for my tastes, the show ultimately celebrates their values and the positive effect they supposedly had on their British guests.

Blast it all, I’ve tried to thwart the inevitable but it looks like the dark ages are upon us (to use a variation on Godwin’s Law). Jane Jacobs, that wise, indefatigable social critic, tried to warn us, but would we listen? No. It turns out that only 48% of Americans believe in evolution (only 22% of Mormons!). More Americans believe in haunted houses than global warming, and there are still loads of wacky people running around scared of vaccines (often, all the while, holding up magical herbs and alternative medicines that will cure whatever ails you.) All of these represent a catastrophic failure of science education. It boggles the mind.

Well not completely. People like their beliefs. Changing them is uncomfortable and tiresome. I watch the climate change debates for example and stand dumbfounded that detractors misunderstand things so badly. Science works by ‘inference to the best explanation.’ It’s not individual pieces of the story that hold the structure together, it’s lots of little pieces of evidence, which in combination tell a coherent story and gives us a sense of how to bet on the physical nature of the world. That’s what science gives us, a sense of the way things probably are, i.e., how to make a wager. So the climate change story is not just global temperature measurements, it’s worldwide melting glaciers, ecological changes, rising ocean levels, increasing C02 above historical norms, shrinking ice caps at both poles, the world-wide dying of coral reefs due to ocean acidification, changes in species distributions (including plants, insects, vertebrates, and pathogens), changing patterns of drought and rainfall, satellite data, mathematical models etc. etc. etc.). There are all kinds of surges forward and backwards, (the world turns out to be much messier than we would like) but science gives us strong reasons to bet on a global changing climate. Detractors will often find one piece of evidence that does not fit the pattern and cry, “Refutation, refutation, refutation! We call refutation on you!” They aren’t required to make a coherent explanation of all the other things converging toward a single inference, no they have to just find something that breaks the pattern and discard the whole thing. Ignore the overarching story because a couple of things aren’t following the pattern (which in science we fully expect). Same with vaccine detractors. Find someone, somewhere, who has a bad reaction (and they occur at a rate of tens per million) by mining the internet and push it through as if this were the common story. Forget the harm from the disease, which occurs at the rate of tens per hundred if you get the disease, and just cry the ‘danger’ from the rooftops. Evolution skeptics follow the same pattern. Alas. What is to be done? Of course a goodly number of you have raised your hackles by this point and are ready to point me to people who are ‘unafraid to tell the truth’ and who will expose the ‘conspiracy of science’ to the light of reason. Blah blah blah. When they are ready to confront (and collect!) all the data in peer review publications, I and my scientific buddies, who have all been initiated into the Secret Society of Hidden Knowledge will be listening with open ears.

But this post isn’t about climate change (blessed be it), or evolution (All bow!) or the wonders of modern medicine (Hallelujah!). It is about why we believe the way we do. What structures our belief and more important when should we change our beliefs? Seriously, I worry about a culture that seems so unable to change its view in the light of new evidence. Once something is believed we seem to lack the chops to rethink, reevaluate, and reorient. The strength of science really lies in two things: An unrelenting openness and scrutiny (through a rigorous peer review process) that exposes its data, its methods, and its reasoning to the world; and a willingness to change in the light of new evidence. These don’t happen perfectly or without intransience, personality battles, stubbornness, cultural influences etc., but it’s the commitment to these things that has allowed science to push through its weaknesses to give us the benefits we enjoy on this side of the Middle Ages—you know, moon landings, ice cream, and cancer treatments, that sort of thing. But the popular trend seems to be heading towards a kind of superstition grounded in an inability to change ones mind in the light of new evidence, and to raise inappropriate suspicions based on misinformation, supposed conspiracies and malfeasance.

So for today’s topic consider the following questions:

How do you update your beliefs? Can new information change your mind? How do you assess the quality of that new information? Who do you grant authority to address your beliefs? If the information is abundant how do you decide what to pay attention to? Three areas: science, religion, what you believe about other people.

*** Note: I don’t want to discuss climate change, evolution or the evils of vaccination as such. We’ll discuss those later (and I’ll bring them up again, trust me), but now I want to understand what it takes to change your mind. Trolls on the above topics will be dismissed (mostly because of the grand conspiracy of science I’m secretly engaged in. I don’t want people finding out the truth about these topics).

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?

Those of you who have participated in the Bloggernacle for any length of time have no doubt electronically met my friend Bridget Jack Meyers (who goes by “Jack”). She’s an evangelical who attended and graduated from BYU in classics (the same thing I studied at BYU many years ago), which makes her a delightsome oddity and led to our immediate bonding. Now she’s pursuing graduate work in Illinois.

When she moved here, she underwent a process of selecting a new church, which I found fascinating, since for Mormons it’s just a matter of figuring out which ward covers the geographic area where you are moving to. She chronicled her search at her blog. The eventual winner of the sweepstakes was Deer Grove Covenant Church. Their website is here, and the picture you see there is exactly what it looked like today. When I learned it is located in Palatine, which is the village just to the north of where I live, I expressed an interest in visiting for a service, and several weeks ago we agreed on today as the appointed date. (I would have to blow off my own church to go; oh, darn!)

So I printed off my mapquest directions and drove up there. They temporarily meet in a high school while they work on rehabbing a building of their own. I walked through the front doors of the high school and saw a pleasant bunch of people milling around, and eventually I saw Jack waiving at me (she’s quite tall and so hard to miss). Her husband Paul, whom I’ve met before in Provo, was there (he attends once a month with Jack and attends his LDS ward the other weeks), as well as their (very cute!) three-year old daugher, Harley. Jack needed to take Harley to the nursery, which as I understand it she absolutely loves. That gave me a chance to meet and chat with the pastor, a woman named Melissa Wall. I told Melissa I had followed Jack’s search on her blog, and that I was confident she was going to select Deer Grove, which she in fact did. (Jack is what is called an egalitarian as opposed to a complementarian; if you’re interested in that topic, search on those terms at her blog.) Melissa was very personable and a delight. (She is also simply gorgeous. When Jack came back, she asked me how I liked her hot pastor. She and Paul joked that Paul decided she could attend this church when he met her. That banter put me at ease, because I didn’t want to say anything about how pretty she was, but their joking about it allowed me to acknowledge that, yes, I had noticed.)

At that point it was time for the service to start (10:30 a.m.). We walked into an auditorium with stadium-style seating, which was a good thing, since our little group was all tall and we could sit without obstructing anyone’s view. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I thoroughly enjoyed the service. They had a “worship team” of about 8 people, younger men and women, who would lead us in the musical numbers. There was one guy on guitar, a bass, drums, and a girl on violin at certain points. I panicked a little bit, because there were no hymnals laying around, and more than half of the reason I even go to church is so that I can sing. But as it turned out they broadcast the words to the songs on a big screen up front, and the songs were very easy to follow. It was obviously very different from a Mormon service, but I enjoyed it for exactly that reason.

There was a table down front with an open Bible and a number of burning candles, which caught my notice since we Mormons don’t allow candles due to our fire insurance policies. They didn’t do communion; Jack told me they do it about once a month. When they do it, you go down front and dip a wafer in a cup of grape juice and partake in that manner.

I honestly felt a little bit nervous about the offering. Mormons don’t do an offering during their services, and so I was worried that I would breach some sort of offering etiquette. I asked my wife about it before I went, and she kind of looked at me in disgust (she grew up Lutheran) and said not to worry about it. When I went to Willow Creek before the offering they gave a little speech about how this was for members of the church and guests were not expected to contribute, which I very much appreciated. Well, at Deer Grove they gave the same speech, so all my worry about doing the right thing turned out to be for naught. As a visitor I very much appreciated that they had thought about this from the visitor’s perspective and communicated the information we needed to have.

Pastor Melissa then preached her homily. If you would like to hear it, look under Sermons at the website I linked above. I thought her sermon was excellent, and as I listened to it I was actually taking mental notes of things I would like to do the next time I am asked to speak in church. We become so accustomed to our lay speakers that we kind of forget how powerful a well prepared and given sermon can be.

There was one point during the service where they did something I’ve never seen before, called “prompted prayer.” The assistant pastor began saying a prayer, during the course of which he would prompt the audience by raising a subject (such as the tragedy at Fort Hood), and then he would go silent and individuals in the congregation would speak out and pray for the group on that subject. It was quite fascinating.

When the service was over, Jack picked up Harley from the nursery. They had pie after, but I wanted to rush home for the Bears game, which was a big mistake, as they were terrible and lost badly.

Anyway, I had a great time. It was fascinating to see such a different style of worship, but one which clearly brought the spirit of God. I tend to be a little bit jaded about Mormon services, so just experiencing something new and different was wonderful. And I was also happy to lend some support to my friend in her new church home. I especially appreciated that I was received so warmly and with such graciousness.

What experiences have you had visiting other churches?