I don’t read The Ensign, but I do read Zelophehad’s Daughters. It was “To the Rescue,” an entry on ZD from last week, that clued me in to an essay by Thomas Monson from the October Ensign called “Our Responsibility to Rescue.” You can pretty much figure out the whole…
Author: Holly
The “We Won’t Tolerate Imperfection” Club
Facebook is all agog about The Not Even Once Club, a new children’s book by Wendy Watson Nelson, whose credentials include a PhD in family therapy and gerontology and 25 years as a professor of marriage and family therapy, plus being married to a general authority. Here’s the official plot…
LDS Doubt in the NY Times
Well, this should be interesting. The NY Times has a story published on the web yesterday discussing the ongoing brouhaha in Sweden involving members who have had a crisis of faith. There is a bullet-pointed list of major concerns: – Why does the church always portray Joseph Smith translating the…
Because They Couldn’t Very Well Say “Sorry We Insisted You Waste All that Time and Money”
As pretty much everyone already knows, today the Supreme Court declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and ruled that the private sponsors of Proposition 8 in California didn’t have the legal right to step in and appeal the ruling by a federal court that Prop 8 was unconstitutional when…
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a sociopath’s dream”
Read this deeply bizarre cover story from Psychology Today. Entitled “Confessions of a Sociopath,” it tells the story of a female Mormon law professor with an undergraduate degree from BYU. Here’s the most relevant part about the church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a sociopath’s dream….
He Puts Us in a Shark Suit
My last post asserted that God is a jerk. I think the evidence supports that assertions pretty well. But maybe he’s a jerk with a really great sense of humor? Maybe everything seems so ridiculous to us because it amuses him to watch us run around and be scared and…
Once You Figure Out God Is a Jerk
So, I heard some years ago that religious people tend to be happier and healthier. It didn’t especially jive with my experience, but hey, it’s what the scientific data say, right? Here’s an interesting piece from the NY Times, corroborating and explaining some of the benefits of “religious attendance” [or]…
Maybe Conservativism Is Hurting Religion After All….
Given that the “liberal churches are losing members because they’re liberal; conservative churches are growing because they’re conservative” argument is invoked every so often here at MSP, I thought people would be interested in this article from Religion Dispatches analyzing some of the problems with that claim. An excerpt: Hout…
Mormon Trolls, Gorgons and Orcs, and Being Tired of Good People
Currently the most posted story in my Facebook feed is this excellent NY Times op-ed from Ta-Nehisi Coates, entitled “The Good, Racist People.” Coates uses the recent frisking of Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker as an opportunity to analyze the racism of “good” people: In modern America we believe racism to…
The Tree-Hating Insane Inorganic Alien Trying to Destroy the Earth
Several years ago, at the recommendation of a friend, I read Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief by John Lamb Lash. It was a very, um, interesting book. Actually I guess outlandish might be a better term, but it certainly held my attention. …