So the church just announced that they were reinstating the Saturday evening session of General Conference. To be honest, I had kind of forgotten that they ever got rid of the Saturday evening session of General Conference, probably because it happened, like, six weeks ago, and that’s ancient history for my middle-aged brain. But now that they mentioned it, I did recall them announcing they would discontinue the Saturday evening session now that every session was available for viewing on the internet because what’s the point of having a Priesthood session if it can’t be a secret from the ladies, amirite?  

The difference between the new Saturday evening session and the old Saturday evening session is that this new Saturday Night Conference will not be geared toward any particular group of church members, such as priesthood holders or birthing people 8 & up. (Was it okay that I said “birthing people”? Am I just trolling now? Signs point to yes.) It will just be another opportunity for “more gospel topics to be taught” and “more general leaders to address the conference.” Because if there’s anything people who’ve just sat through four hours of gospel teaching want more than another two hours of gospel teaching, I don’t know what it is.

A little less than two weeks ago, the church broadcast a Hill Cumorah Commemorative Devotional, acknowledging that the Hill Cumorah Pageant was no more, and celebrating its legacy. However, for better or worse that commemorative devotional was very much a product of the contemporary church–not the church in which creative, inventive, deeply devout, culturally oblivious, and definitely slightly crazy Mormons came up with the pageant, and kept it going, over the decades. I never saw the Hill Cumorah Pageant live (shout out for the Manti Pageant, however, my personal favorite!). Andrew Kay, a non-Mormon writer and a native of the Hill Cumorah region of New York, did see it however–saw it in 2019, in fact, in what turned out to be its final performance. The essay he has crafted about the experience, and what he has thought about it since–“Mormonism’s Sci-Fi Swan Song“–is the finest essay I have read about our church and our culture in many years. Using the pageant as a lens, Kay sees the American Mormonism that was–but isn’t so much anymore–whole: devout, campy, decent, rich, insular, plainspoken, charitable, practical, kind of racist, kind of sexist, and really very weird. It is a deeply compassionate essay, one that captures the vagaries of a genuine, comprehensive belief in a society where belief is mostly compartmentalized into discreet boxes for the sake of the believer and the non-believer alike. Here’s a taste: [Read more…]

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

This old Cal Grondahl cartoon, from many years ago, has been on my mind for while:

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Last week, a friend posted on facebook that the Gospel Topic Essay “Becoming Like God” was no longer live on the church’s website (though the Gospel Library App still had it). The link was broken or forwarded to a different page. I could tell by the subsequent discussion that people were talking about this elsewhere, as various screen shots of the sort that one copies and shares instead of getting your own were circulating. In particular people were pointing to a church newsroom piece that talked about how the church doesn’t teach that we get our own planet. Cue handwringing that the church is abandoning its cherished beliefs, or that retrenchment has led to ditching that particular essay, or that we are trying to appease Protestants by ditching the essay. Sometimes, however, a broken link is a just a broken link. But even if it weren’t, sometimes our beliefs change, and sometimes they should.

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A guest post from Christina Taber-Kewene

My husband of twenty years gazes back at me from across our cafe table with tears welling in his eyes. 

“I just don’t know that I can go back.” 

What began as questions and concerns as we evolved in our understanding of queer rights has grown into a pain that is eviscerating him. Our son is gay. Theologically and pragmatically, this means there is no place for him on the Mormon covenant path. The hetero supremacy of the church is wrong. We feel that. We know that. The pandemic provided space for us to spend a year away from church attendance, but with pressure from leadership mounting, and the pull of my husband’s role in the bishopric, a decision is imminent. 

“If we leave, we will never return. You should consider that,” I nudge back, gently. “Are you sure this is what you want for our family?” 

I am an old mom. Not by Mormon standards, but by legitimate biological standards. I am simultaneously dealing with kindergarten orientation and arthritis. My friends are starting to firm up their retirement plans, and I am firming up an understanding of how much string cheese and gogurt I currently have in the fridge. I have to use my big brain to outsmart my five year old, because if he decided to bolt, there is NO WAY I could catch him. I am an old mom.

While there are some obvious joint- and exhaustion-related drawbacks to this situation, there are glorious rewards too. I get lots of hand me downs from friends who have moved on to other stages of life–stages that don’t involve elaborate bedtime routines and occasional potty-training regression. I’ve never bought a bike for my kid, and occasionally, amazon packages just show up from friends with notes that say “this (toy/book/crafting kit) saved me when my kids were his age.”

While I’m so incredibly grateful for this kind of material generosity, I’m mostly grateful for their brutal and searing honesty. Old mom honesty has saved my sanity, and kept me from throwing in the towel. Thanks old friends.

“Zurch” = an affectionate nickname for online church meetings, a mashup of “zoom” and “church,” despite the fact that most of us didn’t use Zoom for church meetings. (My ward used YouTube Live, which I guess would make it “yurch” or maybe “yute-lurch,” but I like zurch better.)

I’m not going to lie to you, kids. I did not miss getting up early, putting on uncomfortable clothes, and going to church every Sunday. From March 2020 to August 2020, our ward didn’t even have an online version of sacrament meeting, which was just fine with me. No offense to sacrament meeting, but I just didn’t miss it. Of course, I had the privilege of being able to take the sacrament at home, which made most of, if not all, the difference. Our ward began limited in-person sacrament meetings shortly after it started broadcasting them. Due to the size of our ward, we started out in six groups, which meant you were able to attend sacrament meeting every six weeks. As state restrictions lifted, our groups got bigger and individual sacrament attendance more frequent, but when we weren’t attending in-person, my husband and I woke up to watch the 9:00 a.m. broadcast. Well, my husband woke up at 9:00 a.m. I usually woke up around 9:12-9:14 a.m. The kids never woke up for any of it, but we had our home-sacrament in the afternoon. It was not a hardship, by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m curious where folks are at as regards returning to physical church. I haven’t set foot in our building since the pandemic began. I’m now fully vaxed, but still feeling hesitant. I have to admit that remote church has a strong convenience factor.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

1) First things first: obviously, there isn’t any real world possibility for the (re-)emergence of Mormon socialism, or communalism, at the present time. [Read more…]

ON TEXTUAL RESTORATIONS IN THE JST

Kevin Barney

I have spent over 25 years of my adult life teaching in Church classrooms. Accordingly, I have heard many hundreds, probably thousands, of student comments in class based on the JST. And in something approaching 100% of those cases, the person making the comment simply assumes that the JST was restoring the original text (albeit in English as opposed to the original language). In most cases that is not even close to an accurate assumption. But I can’t really blame these students; the Church in its official curriculum doesn’t come out and explain to average members what kinds of things the JST usually represents; members are largely on their own in trying to figure out the JST. And while there are some good books on the subject, the average member does not read that kind of material.

The entrance to a nondescript apartment building is tucked between a sports betting lounge and a newspaper shop on a busy but unremarkable street. The sidewalk is crowded with scaffolding and construction materials; a neighbouring building is getting a new facade. Just to the right of the front steps is a brass plaque set into the sidewalk and engraved with four names: Karl Stein, Bruno Kleinrock, Cornelia Kleinrock and Susanne Kleinrock. Also included are their birthdays and a brief summary of their fates:

• deported 1942 to Riga;
• fate unknown;
• deported 1943 from Malines [Belgium] to Auschwitz;
• deported 1943 from Malines to Auschwitz.

Karl, Cornelia and Susanne were murdered in Auschwitz and, although it is not known for sure, it is likely that Bruno was too. They were Jews, and the plaque marks the address of their home in Vienna prior to their forced removal.

An official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently printed an editorial entitled “A fence at the top or an ambulance at the bottom?” in which emeritus General Authority Seventy and former Sunday School general president Elder Tad R. Callister expresses the hope that his readers would be “archdefenders of the nuclear family and God’s moral values” and weighs in on the importance we ought to attach to “the essentiality of the family unit to the well-being of society”:

If you were asked, “What is the greatest challenge facing our nation today?” how would you respond? The economy, national security, immigration, gun control, poverty, racism, crime, pandemics, climate change? While each of these is a valid concern and deserves attention, I do not believe that any of them strikes at the heart of our greatest challenge — a return to family and moral values. To put our prime focus on other challenges is to strike at the leaves, not the root, of the problem. It is, as some have noted, to put an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence at the top.

[A guest post from Glen Henshaw, a husband, a father, an engineer, a lover and raiser of animals, and a longtime reader of the blog.]

We found this lamb, named Pearl, hiding under a bank of the creek that runs along the back of our property one morning last week. This is the near bank, which means she could not be seen from our side of the creek – we had to wade the creek or jump the bank to see her. Pearl was not making a sound, and it took some careful counting to realize she was missing, and some careful searching to find her.

I can remember the exact moment that I decided that the Bible was true. It was about ten years ago, while I was reading The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, encountering for the first tie the wealth of archaeological evidence that neither the Exodus from Egypt nor the conquest of Canaan ever occured. Rather, the evidence suggests, the YHWH cult emerged from within the native Canaanite population, grew to dominate the society, and then created a martial history for itself to give significance to the movement.

I cannot express the relief that I felt when I read these arguments. By that time, I had concluded that the Bible could not be true if the stories of conquest and genocide were historically accurate. I could not accept that the god of Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges–a god who favors one race of people over another and does not merely tolerate, but affirmatively commands, genocidal slaughter. I simply could not accept such a being as my loving and merciful father.

Dr. Rebecca Roesler is a Professor of Violin and Music Education at Brigham Young University–Idaho. She received a PhD in Music and Human Learning from the University of Texas at Austin, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from Brigham Young University. Becky has presented at national conferences in music education, and at the Mormon Studies Association, the Book of Mormon Studies Association, and she has published in Dialogue. Her latest publication in Psychology of Music presents her research in collaborative problem-solving within music ensembles.

I stare across my living room at the olive wood sculpture I purchased from Omar over two decades ago. I am still captured by its swirling, circling, compressed topographical lines, the tightness of the grain. I believe no wood on earth quite matches olive wood in beauty and complexity. It appears as tortured as its land of origin, home to people and peoples living on top of one another, tightly, in conflict, each claiming the same hill as theirs. Their history, their identity, their religion. Even if this wood is as old as some olive trees can be, it would have seen few lasting periods of human peace in its lifetime. 

I was lucky. When I was there, it appeared peaceful. Jubilant, even.

For as long as I can remember, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper has largely been framed in the church as a renewal of baptismal covenants. When my family was young I avoided giving my infants the bread and water as they were passed down the pews, but I wasn’t particularly scrupulous, and when they were old enough to want to participate, they did.  My memory is that many people my age and younger have wondered and argued whether having children wait until they are baptized before eating and drinking the sacramental emblems was preferable.  So here is my ask: have you or other family members chosen not to have your unbaptized children participate in the Lord’s Supper? If so, why? And how did it work out for your family?

I’ve had these two books in the queue for a while, Butler’s book by anticipation, Harris’s book by procrastination. They deserve separate posts but I want to get them off my to-do list. Butler’s book is not specifically directed toward Latter-day Saints (she does mention Mormons on a few occasions I believe but it is just in passing) but Harris’s book, if read in tandem with it, will, I think, show that Butler’s work is quite relevant to a Latter-day Saint audience. Both are available as audio books and their format lends itself this medium if you enjoy that.

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

Anthea Butler (Associate Professor of Religion, University of Pennsylvania)

Copyright 2021, The University of North Carolina Press

Amazon: hardcover $21.60. Kindle: $9.00. Audible audio book $12.24.

First, Butler. This is a short book, and it serves the purpose of the author: come to grips with a very broad issue but without leaving behind the mainstream reader. Scholars can read with profit however. I did. Racism in the evangelical American world has a long history. In some ways it extends back to the Reformation. But Butler begins with the nineteenth-century and the role of religion in the question of slavery, its support of the Peculiar Institution in the South especially in the Age of Jackson and in Reconstruction. The details of that story can be found in other specialized tomes but Butler does an excellent job of showing what happened in brief and how the racism of the antebellum world found its way into the twentieth century. Mormonism partook of much of that racism and it showed in church doctrines/speech/policies about race from the beginning (Blacks as descended from Cain, curse of Canaan, etc., etc.).

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