In honor of this special day, Outer Blogness (and the Bloggernacle) are full of touching tributes to mothers and cute pictures of baby animals. And adventures in motherhood. (Also, let me plug my own mom’s cool history blog.) Naturally, this holiday leads us to reflect on Heavenly Mother, with some…
Category: Family
BYU in the 1970s
In “The Feminine Mystique”, Betty Friedan wrote about the “problem with no name”. Women (mostly middle class white women) had left the workforce after WWII to work full time at home. And yet some women found themselves unfulfilled and often depressed. Some had lost their identity by devoting their lives…
The Day I Sang about the Latter-Day Glory with the C of C and with the Polygamists
Wherever people talk about Mormonism, you always hear about the fundamentalist Mormons: the polygamists. On the LDS-interest Internet there’s tons of discussion of modern-day polygamy usually in a hand-wringing what should be done about them kind of way. Naturally, I was glad when I finally got the opportunity to meet…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Navigating Relationships Edition!
Is it just my pattern-seeking brain, or does the conversation in blogspace tend to converge around different themes? There was something in the air this past week that inspired the Bloggernacle and Outer Blogness to contemplate how to deal with relationship problems caused by differences. Naturally the focus was on…
We each have our reasons for staying or leaving
I posted this elsewhere not too long ago, and it seemed to get positive feedback, so I thought I would share this experience here and get your thoughts about it. During a conversation with my wife in the car after meeting some fantastic believing/disaffected couples for dinner last week, I…
An Interesting Encounter
Earlier today a young man entered my office seeking my adviceThis is not unusual for someone in my line of business. But it is a rare day when someone comes to me, in my capacity as an apostate, seeking advice regarding of all subjectsreligionparticularly the Mormon religion. But it happened…
Temple Marriage, Civil Marriage, and my marriage
When I got married — back in 2000 — the “gay marriage” issue was hardly on my radar. Ever since reading Stephen J. Gould’s Creation Myths of Cooperstown essay (back in my BYU days), I’ve tended to be wary of “just-so stories” that give an instantaneous creation point to something…
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…
Emil, Is It You?
My mother Gudrun Bachmann was born on June 9, 1939. When World War II begun with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, she was less than three months old. When Germany surrendered on May 9, 1945, she was one month shy of her sixth birthday. Besides a treasure…