Awards
Lists of Brodie award winners:
X-Mormon of the Year 2012: David Twede
X-Mormon of the Year 2011: Joanna Brooks
X-Mormon of the Year 2010: Monica Bielanko
X-Mormon of the Year 2009: Walter Kirn
A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.
A MESSAGE TO ALL HOMOPHOBIC PEOPLE AND A LETTER TO MY MOTHER
A MESSAGE TO ALL HOMOPHOBIC PEOPLE Another 17 year old boy named Jack Denton Reese committed suicide on April 22 in Mountain Green, Utah after being bullied for being feminine and/or gay, the day before his boyfriend Alex Smith spoke at a panel about the bullying Jack experienced. The panel was held in connection with the screening of the documentary film, “Bullied.” Alex did not even know that his boyfriend had already killed himself the day before the panel convened. “You’ll always Read more [...]
Posted in Abuse, Christians, crime, Death, discrimination, Empathy, Family, Hate, Health, Homosexuality, Mormon Doctrine, Mormon Matters, Motherhood, Parenting, Secrecy, Sisters, Tolerance, Violence, Youth
Moral Nostalgia and the Movies
This post was inspired by A teenager speaks on new movie standards. In her recent discussion of the current state of movies, and particularly award winning movies, Camila B. states that she is concerned about “movies throughout the decades and the negative changes that I have noticed.” She then goes on to lament that “the corruption viewed daily by millions of people is disgusting.” The remainder of her post is pure nostalgia for the “good old days” when “movies portrayed beautiful messages, Read more [...]
Posted in Arts, Nostalgia, Sex and Gender, Violence, Youth
Inciting Violence – Glenn Beck and Fox News’s specialty
When I was in graduate school (2001-2007), my department regularly held symposia. Most of the symposia were members of our department or faculty at our university presenting their research. But occasionally we would bring in outside scholars to talk about their research. One of those scholars was Frances Fox Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She came and gave an hour-long presentation about how to help the poor and address issues of inequality, which Read more [...]
Posted in Glenn Beck, Hypocrisy, Violence
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Violent Rhetoric Edition!
Folks, sorry Sunday has come a little late this week! I’d like to claim that I was just so busy, but really it was a combination of massive Spring cleaning, plus a bit of getting sucked in by the call of the Legos, and then forgetting (until Sunday evening) that I had plans for Sunday evening. So, all I can say is that at least my apartment is a bit less cluttered, but my mind is, well, same as usual… Now that everyone has had some time to reflect on the Tuscon tragedy, we’ve see quite a number Read more [...]
Posted in Sunday in Outer Blogness, Violence
No more humoring violence-infatuated Mormons
Back in October 2008, I posted a public response to an email that a Mormon friend of mine received and then forwarded on to me for comment: Enough with the Emails from Mormon McVeigh Wannabes. An excerpt from my message to the Mormon author of that email rant: I’m very concerned, Brian, by the lack of daylight between what you’ve written above and the words Timothy McVeigh used to describe the “why” behind his hatred of our country. And my plea to the LDS leadership: Many members have Read more [...]
“If I see Harry Reid in the temple, I’m going to hit him.”
Hey, Mormons: Wilco Tango Foxtrot? (Comments are now closed at the original post, so please comment below) Serious kudos to The Millennial Star and John Fowles for taking on this topic in this M* guest post: Harry Reid fireside canceled because of politics IMHO, it’s a pitch-perfect response to this outrageous situation, and ought to be re-posted far and wide, at official sites such as the LDS Newsroom Blog as well as on every member’s Facebook page and family blog. Linkage: J. Read more [...]
Posted in civil discourse, Manners, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Tolerance, Utah, Violence
Book Club Discussion of “Under the Banner”
My book club recently read Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer. Despite my interest in all things mormon, I did not recommend this book to my group. I had read it before, and found it frightening. The Lafferty murders were especially heinous (to my mind) and disturbing on many levels. Other book club members had read “Into Thin Air” and “Into the Wild”, and had enjoyed both. As an aside, my book club meets at a local library, and is comprised of anywhere from six to ten people from various Read more [...]
Posted in Book Review, FLDS, Fundamentalism, Mormon Doctrine, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Polygamy, Violence
NZ man almost kills daughter for not attending church
I was saddened last week to see this story about a New Zealand man who hit his daughter in the head with a lump of concrete when she refused to go to the mormon church with him. Now, I think this man is an abuser, and would be an abuser no matter which religion he were in. This quote is particularly telling: He had been ejected from an anger management course because of his views and had an inability to understand “whacking someone on the head is unacceptable”. It’s just a sad story all Read more [...]
Nature’s Values
Our revulsion at the cruelty of the Supreme Leaders henchmen is a powerful refutation of the postmodernist credo that anything goes. After the enlightenment discredited the authority of tradition and religion, the notion that reason or civilization could provide an ersatz God has also collapsed. The efforts of analytical philosophy could neither remove the ambiguity from language nor provide mathematics with a foundation. While most people could not care less, much less understand, analytical Read more [...]
Who Deserves a Memorial?
Do LDS Missionaries who died while serving missions deserve a memorial? Samuel the Utahnite thinks they do, and, in fact, has created a web page remembering those who have died in the service of the LDS church since 1999. He reports that he has gotten numerous complaints from faithful Mormons about the page — almost certainly because he can hardly claim he’s sincerely honoring their sacrifice by putting their names on a page that calls Mormonism “a complete lie and total fraud!!” in the sidebar. Read more [...]
Posted in Baptism For the Dead, Death, Mission, Violence, War
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