The New Political Neutrality Policy…

June 3, 2023 by 27 Comments

… is mostly pretty similar to the old political neutrality policy.

Maybe you heard that on Thursday, the church dropped a revised political neutrality statement. You can find its new statement here.

I was curious how it had changed from the prior version and, as luck would have it, I had created a permalink to the church’s statement on February 25, 2023. (Why? Well, when I wrote my first book, I cited some website and, between citing it and going through to check my citations, it had changed. So now I permalink everything I cite in my books and articles.) You’re welcome to compare the two but, in the interest of making the comparison easier, I also blacklined the two.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Modern Era, Mormon, Politics Tagged With: , ,

What to Do About Ensign Peak Advisors

May 20, 2023 by 35 Comments

In my last post, I wrote about the 60 Minutes segment on Ensign Peak Advisors. As part of that segment, the interviewer asks Bishop Waddell, “But don’t you agree this would be a nonissue if there were more transparency?”

He responds, “No. Because then everyone would be telling us what they want us to do with the money.”

Frankly, I think he’s wrong. But for now let’s respect that. For purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that the church will maintain a significant investment portfolio. And whatever I think about it,[fn1] I’m going to be indifferent to whether and how it should spend down that portfolio. Because I think EPA’s current status, as an external tax-exempt investment advisor, is ultimately untenable, notwithstanding the fact that it’s legal.

What do I mean? Well, as a general rule, investment managers are for-profit, taxable endeavors. EPA is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. (Critically, “nonprofit” doesn’t mean it can’t earn a profit. Some nonprofits—including, notably, hospital chains—are tremendously profitable. The “non” in nonprofit means that the profit earned can’t benefit any individual. While this is a little over-simplified, it basically means a nonprofit can’t distribute its profits as dividends.)

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Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

60 Minutes, David Nielson, and Ensign Peak Advisors

May 17, 2023 by 48 Comments

Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired a 13-minute segment on Ensign Peak Advisors. And honestly, if you’ve been following the story closely (I have!), there’s not a lot of new information here.

But not a lot isn’t no new information. And, in any event, the piece featured David Nielson, the whistleblower from 2019, speaking publicly for the first time, as well as Bishop Waddell, First Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric representing the church’s point of view. (It also featured an interview with Phil Hackney, a law professor at Pitt and, full disclosure, a friend, colleague, and coauthor of mine.)

I’m not going to give a full rundown of the piece. I’ve written about the tax and securities issues previously. And anyway, at 13 minutes (half that if you watch it at 2x speed!), watching it isn’t a heavy lift. Instead, I’m going to highlight a couple things that I found interesting and important.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Significant Moral Consequences of Trump

May 12, 2023 by 41 Comments

Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the so-called Johnson Amendment, the provision in section 501(c)(3) that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. We really don’t know much about the purpose or motivation of the provision: it was introduced by the-Senator Johnson and approved, without debate, by voice vote, so there’s no legislative history explaining its purpose.

The substance of the prohibition is pretty clear, though: to qualify for tax exemption, an organization must do a handful of things and refrain from doing a handful of others. Under the Johnson Amendment, a tax-exempt organization cannot “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

And that’s it: a blanket prohibition on endorsing or opposing candidates. And what are the consequences for an organization that violates the prohibition?

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Filed Under: Current Events, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ainda Não Havia Para Mim, Rita Lee

May 9, 2023 by 4 Comments

It’s been long enough that I don’t remember their names. I don’t remember who I was with. I don’t remember which area it was (I think it was my second, in São José dos Campos, but I’m not sure anymore).

But I remember what happened. We were at a young family’s home. She was an inactive member of the church. He wasn’t a member. Both were friendly and welcoming. And on this visit, he pulled out his guitar. He started to play and sing. And I was introduced to “Sampa,” Caetano Veloso’s plaintive ode to São Paulo, his adopted city and my Mormon mission.

It wasn’t common, but occasionally on P-day, the district or zone I was in would get permission to go to the center of São Paulo; it was outside of our mission boundaries, but it was also, to a kid who grew up in the suburbs of San Diego, my first experience in a truly urban area, with all that brings with it. And a necessary stop on those trips to the city center were the informal markets that popped up on bridges and side streets. There were always a couple tables filled with (undoubtedly pirated) CDs.

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Filed Under: Media, Modern Era, Mormon, Music, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Pop Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Tax Day 2023!

April 18, 2023 by 18 Comments

As I was searching, trying to find an appropriate Tax Day 2023 topic to post on (not as easy as you’d think when you’ve been doing this for a while), I came across Fidelity Charitable‘s annual Giving Report.

What is Fidelity Charitable? It’s a sponsor for donor advised funds (a topic I’ve written about here). A DAF is essentially an account that a person sets up within a charitable sponsor. That individual can donate money to the account and take a charitable deduction for the donation in the year it’s made. The DAF itself doesn’t do charitable things, though; rather, it holds the money and, at some point, distributes it to actual charities. As a legal matter, the sponsor (that is, the entity like Fidelity Charitable) has the right to determine where to send the money. But the donor gets to “advise” about where the money should go. As long as the donor’s advice is within certain parameters (essentially, it goes to a 501(c)(3) organization), the sponsor will generally follow the donor’s advice.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , ,

On Amicusing Religious Freedom

March 14, 2023 by

Over that last decade, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been party to at least 15 Supreme Court amicus briefs.[fn1] (How do I know? I searched Westlaw’s Supreme Court briefs database for “Latter-day Saints” and “Kirton McConkie.” Then I counted back to 2013. There may be more, but I think 15 gives me a pretty good sample.)[fn2]

Of these briefs, three are focused on opposing same-sex marriage. One addresses the definition of “sex” in Title IX. And at least twelve deal with questions of religious liberty (though there is some overlap—a number of the religious liberty briefs deal with religious liberty in the context of laws that limit discrimination against LGBTQ individuals.)

And what does the church say about religious liberty in its briefs? It paints religious liberty as absolutely critical. In its Carson brief, it explains that “the Religion Clauses protect the full range of religious freedom and not merely freedom from official discrimination.” In Groff, the church asserts that “Americans shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and their faith.”

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Filed Under: Current Events, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Church Tax Exemption: An Explainer

March 3, 2023 by

It seems like every time there’s a church scandal—and especially one that concerns money—people start arguing that the scandal-ridden church (or even churches in general) should lose their tax exemptions. (If you want to see an example, search “mormon tax exemption” on Twitter.)

So how does tax exemption relate to churches, and especially churches that make a lot of money? I thought it might be worth a quick Explainer.

Why Are Churches Exempt, Anyway?

Fair questions. One reason is history—religious exemptions from taxation go back at least to the Bible. When Joseph imposed a 20% tax on Egyptian land, he exempted the priests from the tax.

Jump forward to the United States: while it hasn’t been a straight line, the exemption of at least some religious property from the property tax goes all the way back to Colonial days. And churches have been exempt from income taxation since the introduction of the modern federal income tax.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , ,

The Church, the Investment Advisor, and the SEC

February 21, 2023 by

By now, I assume you’ve heard that the church and Ensign Peak Advisors have settled an SEC investigation, with EPA agreeing to pay a $4 million fine and the church agreeing to pay a $1 million fine. (If you haven’t, you can see some excellent reportage on the issue here, here, and here, among other places.)

So what should practicing members make of this? I think it’s tough, and I’ll try to address that at the end of the post. But first, what exactly happened?

On Not Filing Form 13F

To understand what’s going on here, we need to start with Rule 13f. Under Rule 13f, investment managers must file a quarterly report with the SEC where (a) they “exercise investment discretion” over (b) accounts containing at least $100 million of (c) “13(f) securities.” (13(f) securities are basically stock traded on a securities exchange.)

Between 1997 (when it was formed) and 2019, Ensign Peak Advisors did not file a Form 13F.

But it’s not just that EPA didn’t file a 13F for 22 straight years. It’s that EPA, at church leaders’ behest, structured their investment to avoid the rules.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Modern Era, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

What We Owe to Each Other: Humanitarian Aid Edition

February 7, 2023 by

By now, I’m sure you’ve read about the devastation in Türkiye[fn1] and Syria. As of this writing, there are at least 7,700 dead in those two countries, a number widely expected to rise. In Türkiye alone, more than 6,000 buildings have collapsed, leaving an estimated 150,000 without homes. At least two UNESCO World Heritage sites, one in each country, have sustained significant damage.

In response to this utter devastation, the world has stepped up. The UN has dispatched aid teams. The EU, several European countries, the US, South Korea, Israel, Russia, Algeria, UAE, and Iraq (among others) have all sent or pledged aid.

This international governmental response is critical. But governments aren’t acting alone here: many nonprofit and charitable organizations are also providing money, tents, warmth, medicine, and other critically-needed aid. (I wrote a little about the nonprofit response, as well as some questions around nonprofit aid, here.)

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Filed Under: Current Events, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Avoiding Affinity Fraud: The Las Vegas Mormon Ponzi Scheme

February 1, 2023 by

Today, the Washington Post published a story detailing an alleged Ponzi scheme that targeted Mormons. (It’s worth noting that one of the alleged fraudsters—the one who seems to have thought up the scheme—was not Mormon. The rest? Yep. Mormon.) Ultimately, Mormons and others lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Avoid Blaming the Victims

Before I go any further, I want to make something clear. Because I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that people are already formulating comments painting the victims of this fraud as greedy or as overly naive. Both reactions, while appealing, are wrong. The victims of this Ponzi scheme were, in fact, victims of people committing fraud. Blaming the victim of a crime for their victimhood is psychologically natural. But natural doesn’t mean right, morally or substantively. And blaming crime victims is neither right nor moral.

But also, both accusations miss the mark. Were the victims naive? Maybe. But remember Bernie Madoff? His investors/victims included banks, investment funds, charitable foundations, universities, pension funds, and plenty of other sophisticated people and entities. So dismissing victims as simpletons and naïfs doesn’t work.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Modern Era, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms

January 20, 2023 by

About a month ago, YouGov released the results of a poll asking how Americans feel about various religions. Respondents were asked a simple question: “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the following groups, organizations, or belief systems in the United States?” They were given a random sample of 17 out iof a list of 35 religions and could choose one answer to the question:

  • Very favorable
  • Somewhat favorable
  • Neither favorable nor unfavorable
  • Somewhat unfavorable
  • Very unfavorable
  • Not sure

Among the religions in the poll was “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church).” And how did we fare?

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Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Media, Polls, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Say It Again, Sam (a Plea to Bishops)

January 15, 2023 by

You know that moment: the person blessing the sacrament looks at the bishop. The bishop shakes his head. And, instead of standing up and handing the trays of bread or water, the person repeats the prayer. The congregation may be puzzled the second time through. By the third, fourth, or fifth time, they’re holding their collective breath, praying that this time he gets through it.

The first time, his voice is clear, notwithstanding the small error. The second time, if you listen closely, you can hear it begin to shake. And every subsequent time, the shaking gets worse.

So what’s up with that? Well, some combination of tradition and the Handbook. But we should back up a little: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t have a lot of liturgical prayers. By and large, we’re devotional prayer people. But we have a couple liturgical prayers. The big ones are the sacrament prayers and the baptismal prayer, two prayers that we get from our scriptures.[fn1]

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Filed Under: Anciently Revealed, Doctrine & Policy, Liturgy, Modern Era, Modernly Revealed, Mormon Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Profits, Bonneville, and the Church

January 6, 2023 by

Once upon a time,[fn1] a couple wealthy alumni left all of the shares of the Mueller Pasta Co. to NYU’s law school. The donation kinda freaked people out: a pasta company owned by a tax-exempt organization presented a possibly existential threat. Because the company didn’t have to pay taxes on its profits, it could charge less per box, undercutting other pasta companies and driving them out of business. (How? Well, in 1947, the top marginal corporate income tax rate was 53%. Imagine a pasta company charged 20 cents for a box of pasta and made 10 cents of profit per box. After taxes, they would have about 5 cents left. If Mueller didn’t have to pay taxes, it could charge 15 cents, a 25% discount. As long as it had similar quality, you’d probably buy the Mueller pasta!) Alternatively, it could charge the same amount, make twice the profit, and use that profit to buy competition and otherwise act as a monopolist.

Neither was, in many people’s mind, a good result. So Congress enacted the unrelated business income tax. What is the unrelated business income tax? We don’t need to go into a lot of detail, but in broad strokes: to the extent a tax-exempt organization earns income not related to its exempt purpose, it pays taxes on that income at ordinary corporate rates. The unrelated business income tax is meant to take away any unfair advantage that tax-exempt organizations would otherwise have competing with for-profit entities.

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Light, Dark, and St. Lucia

December 21, 2022 by

Last week, my family and I went to the St. Lucia services at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Andersonville. We’ve meant to go for several years but, since a friend’s sons were participating, we had the perfect excuse.

St. Lucia Day, we learned, is a huge deal in Sweden. It celebrates Lucia, a 5th century martyr and saint, who, according to legend, brough food to Christians hiding in Roman catacombs, lighting her way with a wreath of candles on her head. The service included attendees singing Swedish hymns and carols, two choirs, some Swedish folk dancing, and a procession of this years St. Lucia, wearing a wreath of candles on her head, with her attendants, carrying their candles in their hands.

Ultimately, this is a festival of light, held on what, in the Julian calendar, would have been the darkest day of the year. And it’s an appropriate marker of the Christmas season. Jesus is, after all, the Light. He leads us out of darkness and allows us to see.

Darkness has been particularly salient since we moved to Chicago. My city sits almost on the eastern edge of the Central time zone. That means that today, the winter solstice, the sun set at 4:23. It’s not the earliest place to get dark, of course, but that is pretty early. If I were still in New York, the sun would have set 9 minutes later. Where I grew up, tonight’s sunset will be at 4:45. And for those of you in Salt Lake, the sun doesn’t go down until 5:03. And while it’s never entirely dark in my city, the setting sun makes it harder to see and, as a massive cold front approaches, harder to stay warm.

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Filed Under: Advent, Holiday Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

BYU and Cryptic Standards

December 9, 2022 by

A couple weeks ago, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that BYU-I was declining to renew[fn1] instructors’ contracts based on nebulous and unexplained criteria.

And yes, I understand that the BYUs have odd and specific contractual provisions, one of which is that employees’ employment is contingent on getting an ecclesiastical endorsement from their bishop. But here’s the thing: the bishops of the two instructors the story interviews did provide ecclesiastical endorsements. That is, the people in question went to their bishops. They answered the questions bishops are supposed to ask. Their bishops endorsed them. They had current temple recommends. They had done everything that the BYUs say they needed to do.

But they were told they weren’t renewed because they didn’t get “ecclesiastical clearance” and therefore didn’t qualify to teach at BYU-I.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Education, Gender & Sexuality, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Sorrow and Thanksgiving

November 24, 2022 by

On Election Day, I woke up to my daughter freaking out. Our cat had fallen down her sister’s ladder and was unresponsive. Almost instantly awake, we did a quick Google search and discovered that there was a 24-7 vet emergency room a mile or so from our apartment. Ten minutes later, we had Lemonade there. They rushed her to the back; she was severely dehydrated because of what we eventually discovered was a Lego head blocking her intestine.

Long story short, one surgery, two veterinary hospitals, and almost seven days later, we brought Lemonade home. That was a tough week—sometimes we thought she was almost better. Sometimes we were steeling ourselves for our young cat’s death. (2:00 am that first Thursday night—when we transferred her from the pet hospital where she had surgery to the pet hospital that had a kidney specialist was possibly the darkest moment.)

The day before we took her in, I’d been listening to Roy Ayers’s recording of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” And for a significant portion of the week, that song was on a constant loop in my head. It perfectly performed how I—and my family—felt. (A friend on Twitter suggested that my goal should be to have his “Lovely Day” replace it, which happened when I got her home.)

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Filed Under: Holiday, Mormon, Music Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The LDS Church Supports the Respect for Marriage Act

November 16, 2022 by

You may have heard that yesterday the church came out in support of the Respect for Marriage Act. For reasons I’ll describe in a minute, this support is, in my humble opinion, a big deal.

But before we get to why it’s a big deal, it’s probably worth looking and what and why the Respect for Marriage Act is.

In broad strokes, the Respect for Marriage Act is a replacement for the Defense of Marriage Act from the 1990s. (And I mean that literally—Section 3 of RfMA repeals a provision of federal law added by DOMA that expressly allows states and the federal government to decline to recognize same-sex marriages enacted in other states.)

RfMA replaces that with its opposite: under the RfMA, states must give full faith and credit to marriages performed in other states, and cannot deny marriage benefits on the basis of the “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin” of the married persons.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Gender & Sexuality, Modern Era, Mormon, Politics, Race, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Church Finances in Canada and Australia

November 4, 2022 by

Over the last week or so, a number of people have pointed me to investigative journalism regarding the church’s finances in Canada and Australia and asked my opinion on them. Which is flattering but, unfortunately, right now I don’t have a ton of spare time. So rather than go through in detail, I’m going to try to contextualize a little bit of what I think is going on.

And what I think is going on is two things. First, the church thinks of itself and, to the extent it legally can, operates as a single economic entity. Over the last several decades or so, it has consolidated its finances in Salt Lake (which significantly diverges from most religious organizations I’m familiar with, including other hierarchical religions like the Catholic church).

Second, the church is obsessed with being financially opaque. It values its financial privacy to a degree that it can be harmful to the public’s perception. (I’m sure I’ve blogged about this, but I’ve also written about the history of the church’s varying levels of financial transparency/opacity for Dialogue.)

And these two things, I believe, underlie the stories coming out of Canada and Australia. And frankly, my quick blog post (written between getting kids up for school, getting them breakfast, and getting ready for work) may or may not be satisfying. It’s not meant to convict or exonerate the church. And pretty much everything I know about this comes from two articles. And I believe that the church should be more financially transparent, and that such transparency would be good for it in both the short and the long run.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Modern Era, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A Church Ombudsman

October 31, 2022 by

Several years ago, while we were waiting for the church to build a building in downtown Chicago, my ward met in a rented public school on Sundays. And honestly, it was a great location–the nursery was in the gym, with its basketball hoops and plenty of space to run (and/or toddle) around. Primary and adult classes met in classrooms, some with class pets you could watch if the lesson was less-than-completely interesting. And kids could play on the playground out back once church was over (and—shhh!—sometimes when their primary class took them out).

But, like many Chicago public schools, this school didn’t have air conditioning. Now for real, that’s not a big deal in Chicago. It doesn’t get super-hot here, and, when it does, the heat only lasts a few weeks. (Also, those few weeks of heat tend to be in the summer, when school’s not in session.) But it could be uncomfortable, especially in the gym.

And one day, the gym was air conditioned. How? What I’m told is that a member of our ward who was related to a general authority in Salt Lake mentioned the heat and, because of that personal connection, the church provided air conditioning.

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Filed Under: Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Rethinking Plagiarism

October 10, 2022 by

Last week, in the wake of General Conference, there was a mini-scandal: it appears that in Elder Bednar’s talk “Put on Thy Strength, O Zion,” he borrowed his interpretation of a parable from a 2016 article, sometimes even using that author’s precise words. He didn’t flag his intellectual debt in the oral version of his talk, though, and the original published version also failed to use quotation marks or footnotes for many of the ideas.

Now, I realize I’m idiosyncratic, but the first person who comes to mind when I hear about a plagiarism scandal is my friend and colleague Brian Frye, Dogecoin Professor of Law & Grifting Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.

Professor Frye is the preeminent plagiarism apologist in the legal academy. And his apologia pro plagiarism forces us to confront the question, why is plagiarism wrong? While the answer seems self-evident, he makes it clear that the question of the wrong of plagiarism is a lot murkier and harder to pin down.

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Filed Under: General Conference, Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

$906 Million

October 7, 2022 by

The church recently released its 2021 Annual Report. The church’s Annual Reports detail its humanitarian and social safety-net endeavors.[fn1] These endeavors should come as no surprise: as in years past, the church has been tremendously active in providing food, clean water, education, and vaccinations, among other things. It engages in these activites on its own and it partners with other charitable organizations.

The aid it provides is unsurprising because it’s the same kinds of things the church has highlighted in previous Annual Reports.

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Filed Under: Church Programs, Current Events, Economics, Modern Era Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Oman, A Possible Theology of Same-Sex Marriage Sealings

September 27, 2022 by

This morning, Nate Oman posted what may be the most important and consequential piece of Mormon theology I’ve read in a long time over on his Substack. In it, he explores whether and how same-sex sealings could fit in Latter-day Saint theology.

Those of you who know Nate will be unsurprised to find that it is a thoughtful, careful, insightful, empathetic, and fundamentally faithful exploration. He takes as his cue D&C 9, which both describes a stupor of thought as evidence that what we do is not aligned with God’s will and instructs us to study questions out in our mind to figure out what is right, then present our findings to the Lord for confirmation.

Nate also doesn’t let ideas off easy. While acknowledging that the church’s treatment of the LGBTQ community does not feel just or fair, he doesn’t consider that, of itself, a compelling theological argument for same-sex sealings. At the same time, he finds our assumption of “heterosexual exaltation” equally baseless.

Instead, he advocates what I will call a theology of humility. He sketches the gaps in our understanding and application of sealings both today and through church history, how those gaps undercut our easy assumptions, and why those gaps allow for same-sex sealings.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Gender & Sexuality, Joseph Smith Era, Modern Era, Mormon, Mormon Studies, Religion, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Faith, Reason, and CES

September 18, 2022 by

Last week, the Deseret News published an essay by Elder Clark Gilbert, the commissioner of CES. (Remember, CES is over the church’s secondary education system, including the BYUs and Pathways.) In it, he argues for the distinctive—and critical—role religiously-affiliated colleges and universities play in our broad network of secondary education.

And honestly, I found the essay deeply troubling.

Not, let me point out, because I disagree with Elder Gilbert’s premise. I’ve spent my entire academic career teaching at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. We’re a Jesuit school, and our sense of Jesuit identity is central to our mission and to the way we educate our students. This mission encourages us to center justice, as well as the well-being of our students, faculty, and staff. It motivates and permeates the education we provide.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Religious Liberty and Short-Termism

September 9, 2022 by

On Wednesday, a Texas district court found that the ACA’s mandate that insurance cover PrEP violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (Opinion here.)

A couple quick explanations before we go on: the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was a law passed by Congress to essentially overrule a Supreme Court decision. It was meant to provide religious practice with a higher level of protection than the Court was affording it. PrEP is a drug that significantly reduces the chance that a person will get HIV from sex or injection drug use.

A handful of people (and one corporation) challenged the mandate that insurance cover PrEP, claiming that their religious beliefs and practice required them to have access to insurance that didn’t cover PrEP, either for themselves or their employees. And, in the first instance, they won.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Religion, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Anti-Racism, the Bystander Effect, and BYU

August 29, 2022 by

Friday night, a racist BYU fan harassed a Black women’s volleyball player playing for Duke. Among other things, he threatened her and called her a racial slur that is arguably the most offensive word in the contemporary English language. And nobody—not the students surrounding the racist, not the game officials, not BYU’s athletic director, nobody—took actions to stop it.[fn1] (And it’s not like BYU officials didn’t know—Rachel Richardson, the Duke player at whom the racist invective was aimed, said that BYU’s coaching staff was told what was happening. And I’ve been to volleyball games at the Smith Fieldhouse—you can definitely hear what people shout.)

Utah’s governor expressed his “disgust” and sadness at the story, and rightly pointed out that we need to fix society so that “racist a**holes like this never feel comfortable attacking others.” And Sunday night, BYU’s women’s volleyball coach issued an apology and a promise to do better.

But the thing is, this wasn’t an isolated incident. And it’s going to happen again.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Education, Race, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Happy Birthday, Sister Jean!

August 21, 2022 by

In 2018, when the Loyola Ramblers burst into the NCAA basketball Final Four, my school burst into the national spotlight.

But it wasn’t just Loyola University Chicago: it was also the Ramblers’ chaplain, Sister Jean. She became a fixture on TV, on the internet, and even in the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum.

Today, Sister Jean celebrates her 103rd(!) birthday. Among other things, the plaza outside of the main Loyola Campus has been renamed in her honor and, on Tuesday, she’ll throw out the first pitch at the Cubs game.

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Filed Under: Current Events, Education, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Two Things the Church Can Do Now to Improve Its Response to Child Abuse

August 19, 2022 by

My cobloggers have offered excellent commentary about the disturbing news about child abuse coming out of Arizona. Everything from suggestions about how we could better help abuse survivors to systemic changes we can make to reduce the incidence of abuse to discussions of confidential confession itself to how the church could have better drafted its first press release.

All of these discussions are crucial as we attempt to protect our children and limit (or better, eliminate!) abuse. But the church’s most recent press release[fn1] crystalized something in my mind, and suggested two things that the church could do in the short term, as we work toward a long-term without abuse.

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Filed Under: Current Events Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Yearning and Trane

August 15, 2022 by

Yesterday I watched Chasing Trane, a documentary on jazz luminary John Coltrane. (I mentioned Coltrane my introduction to Coltrane in my tribute to Dr. Ray Smith.)

The documentary is a perfectly acceptable review of a fascinating life. And what really struck me was Coltrane’s spirituality. He was a religious seeker and, like Bach, he sought to elevate his listeners through his music, to bring us closer to the transcendent and the Divine.

And his approach toward religious transcendence is nowhere as explicit as in his suite “A Love Supreme.” (Jason K. wrote about “A Love Supreme” in a Mormon Lectionary Project post seven years ago.)

“A Love Supreme” is a different approach to religion than we as Mormons usually take, in our music or in our rhetoric. Our hymns are generally composed in four-part harmony with classic voice-leading. The lyrics comfort. The harmonies and melodies are familiar and comfortable. Any dissonance ultimately resolves.

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