This now-infamous question (slightly paraphrased) posed by President Boyd K. Packer at this past October Conference will, I think, reverberate in the minds of many church members for years to come and not just with respect to sexual orientation. I cant help thinking that Elder Packer may for many members…
Category: Parenting
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Happy Mothers’ Day Edition!
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…
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…
A Primatologist Looks at the FLDS
A real one this time!! (It’s not just me pretending to be a primatologist, as in my primatologist looks at the mathematical community post.) I was reading along in the book Parenting for Primates (which I discussed here and here), and I found that the author (Harriet J. Smith) devoted…
Family Values German Style
For myheadhurts and Everyone Else Who Is Looking for Meaning Beyond the Confines of Fundamentalism Celebrating the resilience of children despite parental pathologies, Wir Sind Helden has recorded another song that asserts humanity while facing life’s nastiness. Kaputt‘s credo is reminiscent of a John Irving novel. Although parents are dented,…
Mother’s Day Mormon
My brother-in-law is now an ex-mo, but his mother (my mother-in-law) won’t stop pestering him about returning to Mormonism (he’s only been openly out for about 6 months now; he was in the closet for about 6 months before that). He called her yesterday for Mother’s Day and asked her…
Motherhood in FLDS Culture
Carolyn Jessop puts the protest of FLDS mothers into perspective: I had eight children in 15 years, but I did not know what a miracle it is to be a mother. I had no way of knowing the deep gladness mothering gives. I didn’t know because in the FLDS, great…
Children — not possessions, not position, not prestige — are our greatest status symbols
OK, I know I probably shouldn’t be posting my own personal complaint about the talk that has already been deconstructed all over the Bloggernacle. But all this debate over career vs. getting your whites whiter than white seems to have missed what (to me) was the most disturbing thing in…
The Home Economics of Testosterone
On occasion of ECS’s post on Feminist Mormon Housewives about the benefits of home economics, I remembered how my father had taught my brother and me how to maintain our wardrobes. My father was a career soldier. Of course, every soldier has to be able to maintain his gear in…
Gay Marriage, Stronger Families
A friend mentioned to me recently that he is no longer cruising since he can admit to himself that he is gay. I am sharing that because my friend’s case illustrates the benefits of a rational and open approach to sexuality.