The Mormon Church does not want even its own members to know how to pronounce Shimnilom (more…)

The power of the Proclamation on the Family is its doctrine. The Proclamation does not have powerful language. Its mostly written in passive-voice sentences and ‘be’ verbs. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life (more…)

In a recent ABC article, mother of three Robyn Paul has some good things to say about breastfeeding children beyond infancy. (more…)

The Church has a new website for youth, launched today. (more…)

This post opens the voting for Mormon of the Year. Votes will be taken until midnight Eastern Time on Monday, January 5th, at which time the voting will close.

The voting mechanism will attempt to restrict votes to one per person.

THE WINNER OF THE ONLINE VOTE IS NOT NECESSARILY THE MORMON OF THE YEAR!!!

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Last night around 9 pm I drove my eldest to her friend’s house, where she would borrow a dress to wear to the multi-stake New Year’s Eve dance (of course, nothing she owned was worthy).

Ah, church dances. The blaring tacky music, the duded-up kids shaking their stuff under the basketball hoops, the chaperones with pained expressions caused by the former and the latter. As I dropped off my daughter and headed home, I cranked up my stereo and reminisced. (more…)

In which I crowdsource my conscience. (more…)

OK, now that we’re looking at the Mormon of the Year, I’d also like to look at what the big news stories were for the year. In a lot of ways its been a very busy news year, with, by my count, three big stories dominating:

• Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy
• The confusion of the LDS Church with the FLDS Church in the news
• The Mormon role in the successful effort to pass Proposition 8.

But there were also smaller, important stories that happened during the year, especially if you include in News about Mormonism news about people who are Mormon.

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Its that time of year. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is traditionally the media’s time for reflection on the past year — the time when we see story after story on the best or most important stories of the year, or the most important person of the year (as Time magazine just named — no surprise there). I enjoy these looks at the past year, and given how much LDS Church members don’t usually know much about news that involves the Church, it seems to me these lists might be quite useful.

So let me pose the question: “Who should be the Mormon of the Year?” (more…)

Comment on the week in sidebar links.

God be thanked for the matchless gift of his only begotten.

Merry Christmas everyone.

If a story about football brought tears to my eyes, you know it’s gotta be good.

As far as holiday food goes, Thanksgiving tends to steal the spotlight. At our home Christmas Eve dinner is a true feast rivaling the best turkey-centered spreads our table has seen: (more…)

Merry Christmas from Christmases past! (more…)

The Church has put together a web page on the true meaning of Christmas. Please give it a look and pass on the link. (more…)

After the wise men came,

behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

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I know, I know. There’s so much to love about the jolly fella. But he keeps getting in the way. Or not. (more…)

The psalms are prayers. And some of them are real doozies. (more…)

There is only one Christmas. Each year it comes slightly more into view. (more…)

I often find walking in nature a spiritual experience, for want of a better term. Growing up, I think that I found my testimony in part by tramping through the Wasatch Mountains and watching thunder storms roll across the Great Salt Lake. Today, I am likely to have real moments of reverence and gratitude to the divine while watching mist play across the still waters of the James River in the early morning or enjoying the power of a big Atlantic storm slamming into my bit of the world. I realize that there are some real dangers with identifying God too closely with anything as randomly and — at times — wantonly destructive as weather and nature, but as an aesthetic matter such experiences are an important part of my religious life. Oddly, I have never had a similar reaction to a city. (more…)

Comment on the week in sidebar links

Your challenge: diagram the sacrament prayers. (more…)

Elder Porter of the Seventy has a column in Newsweek responding to a recent Newsweek opinion piece claiming that opposition to gay marriage was unbiblical. There are several unusual features about the column (more…)

Ross Douthat believes in angels and devils. Me too. (more…)

It’s holiday season, which means more friends and family and greetings, in person or otherwise, than usual. Add to that a few weddings receptions and you can get downright sore from all the hugging and hand-wrenching. Not to mention confused by the vast array of possibilities for saying hello or goodbye or Merry Christmas or Happy New Year to someone. It’s enough to make even the most seasoned anthropologist dizzy. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

Ross Douthat explains why meritocrats feel like they deserve their success. He says that you probably won’t succeed without the luck of good brains and good upbringing, but that then you have to follow that luck with lots of determination and hard work. Since the hard work and determination is closest to your success and the luck is so remote, you give all credit to the hard work. (more…)

Here’s your chance to comment on the week in links.

The “All Notes” link is now working, so you can go back to look at links that have been pushed off the sidebar.

This may be as good a time as any to remind you that if you hold your mouse pointer over a link on the sidebar, you can often see additional commentary from the linker. Check out my most recent link for an example.

Tithing Settlement is a great part of the Christmas season. (more…)

I recieved one of those continuing education catalogs in the mail today (from Lehman College, not BYU), and glancing through it, I began to wonder why the courses are all very basic. The courses are all introductory, and seem to be for those looking to start a career in relatively low-skill professions. I suppose there is good reason for this–colleges offer courses that people want to take. But with the rise of the Internet and “distance learning” shouldn’t  the reverse be happening also? Shouldn’t these tools result in a lot of small, narrowly-focused courses, more academic in nature? Perhaps even courses that are more narrow and more open than what can be provided when students are seeking degrees? There might not be enough students at one university for these narrow courses, but there may be enough students at 10 or 100 universities or more.

For example, what about courses in Mormon Studies? (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

The Book of Mormon is a reliquary in prose. In some extensive sections and at some critical moments, what drives the narrative is the question: how did a set of golden plates, a steel sword, a ball of curious workmanship, a breastplate, and two translucent stones end up inside a stone box buried in a hill in the state of New York? For a religion that attaches little to no significance to relics, it’s striking that large sections of our distinctive book of scripture are concerned with the provenance—the origin and the later cultural significance—of a particular set of holy artifacts. (more…)

President Uchtdorf said that the angels came to the shepherds, the poor, not to the rich. At one point in my life that would have bugged me. Today I realized that the rich should want it that way. If you’re wealthy and still looking for something, you don’t want to be told that your wealth is all there is. (more…)

So we’re switching hosts this weekend. This means things are going to act funny for a while. Since we’ve been having recurring outages for weeks, this should be nothing new to our loyal fans. Hopefully, in the new world order our mindblowing traffic will stop bringing down our server.

Below is a forward I recently received about a perceived effort to eliminate the release time seminary system in an Idaho school district. The email is from a CES employee to parents of students in the school district encouraging them to oppose one of several proposed schedules currently under consideration that apparently would restructure the district’s trimester system and eliminate the class flexibility that enables the release time seminary program. It’s unclear whether preventing the Church from offering seminary during school hours was the intent of the proposed schedule at issue, but it nonetheless raises some interesting questions about the release time seminary program. (more…)

A call for papers, panels, movement sessions and choreography
Sponsored by the Department of Dance with support from the BYU Museum of Art

July 17 and 18, 2009 at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art and in the BYU Richards Building dance studios. (more…)

Elder Wirthlin died at 11:30 p.m. last night in his home. He was the oldest living apostle at 91. We invite you to share your memories and thoughts about Elder Wirthlin as we mourn his passing.

It’s an intellectual banality to point out that how one thinks of the present structures how one thinks about the past. The cliché, however, is useful when thinking about Mormon history. (more…)

Since I was rather critical of an Ensign article on the Word of Wisdom earlier this year, I feel obligated to point out that this month’s article on the Word of Wisdom is a much better piece. (more…)

Previous installments can be accessed through this link.
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Any minute now, it will begin: first one car, then another, then another will drive into our cul-de-sac and park in front of the house across the street. As they do on every holiday, the Bishop’s children are coming home. (more…)

Our Chief Magistrate has proclaimed that today be a National Day of Thanksgiving, to acknowledge those blessings of liberty, family, and friendship we receive at the hands of the Almighty God. (more…)

BYU’s Religious Studies Center recently announced that it had begun publishing books in Spanish, Portuguese, and German, an encouraging development, given how little is being produced outside of English. In his blog post about the news, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel writes:

Today, it is estimated that there are nearly 7,000 spoken languages in the world, of which some 2,600 have a writing system.

He goes on to say:

Equally impressive is the effort to provide translations of the Book of Mormon to the world. Today, the complete Book of Mormon has been translated into seventy-nine languages, and selections are available in another twenty-three languages. This represents 99 percent of the languages spoken by Latter-day Saints. Efforts continue to translate this book into more languages to fulfill the Lord’s command.

What he doesn’t say is that, in terms of the work still to be done to fill the directive in D&C 90:11, that “Every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language.”
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Enjoy that Thanksgiving turkey . . . while you can. You may be a vegetarian during the millennium. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

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Litigation has forced eharmony.com, a matchmaking site founded by evangelical Christians, to offer a gay matchmaking service. See here and here. (more…)

What will it be like for a marriage to continue past death into the eternities? What does it mean to have a perfected body, or to love an eternal being? Stephenie Meyer has an answer. Breaking Dawn, the last novel in her Twilight series, presents a sustained and vividly imagined view of one of the core elements of Mormon personal salvation.

[This post is going to discuss all the details of Breaking Dawn, including how it ends, so please stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]

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Rod Dreher, I think, has a it right. Conservatives ought to support same-sex marriage legislation. (more…)