For ten years, a Baltimore non-profit called Thread has been working with the youth of that city. Thread’s goal is to “foster students’ academic advancement and personal growth into self-motivated, resilient, and responsible citizens.” It does this by seeking out…
Times and Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Levi Jones. Levi is an attorney with the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he handles general litigation matters. Prior to joining Commerce, Levi worked for several…
About a week ago, the first volume of the new official history of the Church was published. I finished reading through it this weekend, and I have to say that it is fantastic. The style of prose reads like a…
Today I am pleased to present a guest post from a good friend of the blog, Samuel Morris Brown. I learned to cook when my wife was recovering from cancer surgery. There’s a hollowness, kindred to cancer, hungry to swallow…
In October 2007, I returned home to Texas from my mission in Nevada. In April of the following year, the raid on the YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, TX, occurred. I didn’t think much about it at the time because, you…
Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, a Methodist minister, first published the Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible in 1904. In the book, he retells 168 Bible stories in simplified modern English prose. The author’s purpose was to provide a version of key scripture…
When I was 19 years old and a junior at BYU, I took a volunteer opportunity teaching a semester-long “life skills” class at the Utah State Prison. Maybe it’s not apparent from that one sentence how absurd it was for…
Most of us are familiar with the story of the prophet Elijah, who is particularly famous for his dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal. My favorite part of Elijah’s story comes after that, though, when he realizes that not…
Times and Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Michelle Lee. Michelle is a licensed therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently works full-time for her local school district, providing mental health…
My PhD dissertation was about bias in cost and ridership forecasts for transit projects. Before getting into any data analysis, I address the question of how we should even be evaluating forecasts in the first place. One response to evidence…
During the three years I was a transportation planning student living in Los Angeles (I completed the final two years of my degree remotely), I had fairly consistent access to a car, but I generally only used it as a…
I’m Mormon and my husband is not. He has his own religion that constitutes an important part of his identity, vaguely informs his religious beliefs, and minimally informs his religious practice. I would not describe him as religious at all.…
Times and Seasons is pleased to welcome Carole Turley Voulgaris as our latest guest blogger. Carole recently completed her PhD in transportation planning at UCLA and will be joining the transportation engineering faculty at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this winter…
A year and a half ago, I invited John Gustav-Wrathall, president of the support group Affirmation: LGBT Mormons, Families & Friends, to share his thoughts on the Church’s new policy affecting LGBT members and their children (see All Flesh from December 2015). Diverging responses…
This is a talk I gave in sacrament meeting on March 12, 2017. The topic was “Trials and Their Purpose.” I appreciate the thoughts and words of [the previous speakers]. I hope that you all can find some solace in…
A review of Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, by Gregory A. Prince Telling the history of a church can be tricky. Which elements arose from the culture of the time? Which manifest the direct intervention of the…
This third section of Taylor’s book is, to me, the most redundant, so I’m going to make up for lost time by condensing these four chapters into one blog post. In fact, I’ll leave Ch. 11 off entirely because it’s…
Links to posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 In the last several posts, we’ve covered how the enchanted, hierarchical world of pre-modern Europe slowly shifted in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries to a “disciplinary” society, where human beings began to perceive…
During the lesson in Elders Quorum this past Sunday, we discussed ways to enhance our study of the scriptures. As usual, I raised my hand and recommended that we study the scriptures within their historical and cultural context so that our…
The changes in construals of the self discussed in the last post were merely the flip side of new construals of sociality. This pairing helps correct narratives about the modern “rise of individualism” at the expense of community; individualism is…
