Tag: Advent

An LDS Observance of Advent

A recent spoof on Conan O’Brien that has made the rounds on the Internet highlights how little many outside the Church know about LDS practices. The hilarious skit, ostensibly in honor of a “Mormon Christmas,” points out that we really do not have many LDS-specific holiday traditions, at least not many that anyone can readily point to. There are ward Christmas programs a week or two before Christmas. There is the First Presidency Christmas Devotional at the beginning of December. And, as I wrote yesterday, for those in Utah, or perhaps farther afield thanks to PBS, there is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert. But there is not really anything that I would call an actual LDS worship service focused solely on Christmas. There are, perhaps, occasional exceptions. My mother recalls attending candlelight Christmas Eve services growing up in her ward in Cedar City, Utah. When I was a bishop we did a special Christmas musical and scriptural fireside one year when Sunday evening fell a couple of days before Christmas. I have heard of other ward families that try to do something more devotional than the usual “ward Christmas party,” one even on Christmas Eve, but I have not heard of any Christmas Day services except on the rare occasion that Christmas falls on a Sunday. The reality is that the focus in our community is, perhaps rightly, on family and family traditions. The challenge that many of us…

Truant Blogger Here at Last

First, apologies for keeping you all waiting. The Choir’s Christmas concerts were last week, which was also the last week of BYU’s fall semester. This week I am in the midst of finals. And in the few moments I squeeze out, there are family Christmas preparations to make! I am a complete neophyte to the Blogosphere, having hardly read much of it and having never contributed outside of a single stint on the Mormon Theology Seminar. Still, when my friend Julie Smith approached me, I told her there were two times of the year that I would be interested in participating: Christmas and Easter! We’ll see how this goes and perhaps you will have me back for Holy Week. Although some of the comments I saw posted to the announcement of my guest stint suggest that a few of you know who I am, I am not assuming anything . . . So, although I do not know whether it is typical to introduce oneself, let me share some of my background and then what I plan to share with you this next week. I did my graduate work in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania and then came back to BYU where I taught the full breadth of Classics (Greek and Latin language and literature, Greek and Roman history, mythology, civ, etc.) for nine years. Then, in 2003, I “got religion” as a result of writing…