America

Last week, Stephen Marsh at Wheat and Tares posted about how arguments about Guns and Gays are similar.  Steve specifically said “people post disputed statistics for the harm caused by the parties they wish to regulate or deny. In both cases, those opposing regulation point to contrary statistics showing how good either guns or gay [...]

The headline is clear. Community of Christ will provide sacramental ordinances of marriage, commitment ceremonies, and ordination independent of sexual orientation in the USA. Specifically, after two days of discussion, the USA National Conference formally approved by a required 2/3rds majority the following recommendations to the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve: The 2013 USA [...]

Feminism makes some men very nervous.  They are afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing and being labelled a sexist.  They may feel like outsiders, unclear of their own standing as these conversations unfold.  Men and women alike may not be sure what feminism entails, but it can seem like a daunting list, one [...]

Several years ago, before the movies and the hype, I somehow stumbled into The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  After finishing it, I immediately read the second book in the trilogy, which had just been translated into English, but it ended in a cliff-hanger and wouldn’t be available in English for another 6 months or [...]

Some old traditions are a sweet, nostalgic throwback to an earlier time of innocence.  Others are just weird relics of an outmoded way of thinking.  You decide. Discuss.

About 3 ½ years ago, I wrote a post for Mormon Matters entitled “Prooftexting for Fun and Prophet.” As explained, prooftexting is using quotations from a document to establish a point or prove something whether or not that quotation is in context or not. While its use is pretty universally applied in many areas of [...]

Daniel faced a serious problem.  Darius the king had been tricked by his princes into outlawing prayer.  But Daniel felt beholden to pray to his God.  The society in which he lived restricted his personal freedoms more than his religious society did.  In fact, his religious community went underground due to the persecutions and restrictions of the [...]

Mystery guest number 1 was never a practicing Catholic. Mystery guest number 2 never believed in Temple rites. Now, there’s a good conspiracy theory. Sometimes a conspiracy theory turns out to be true. There is even a class of crime for which people go to jail that starts out “conspiracy to commit…”. But the conspiracy theories [...]

Today’s guest post is another from favorite commenter Hedgehog.  Many of us are familiar with the apocryphal tale of Leonardo da Vinci and the painting of the last supper, in which it transpires that the same model was used for both Christ and Judas, many years apart.  I heard it in a lesson at church, [...]

Marie Antoinette couldn’t get her head around the concept that peasants might resent a lack of bread. I mean, look at her bedroom! So, eventually, her head was forced to observe the resentment in a more detached manner. The Versailles life-style was unsustainable, even if the people living in Versailles thought they could stall the [...]

Upton Sinclair famously said:  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”  Do our convictions necessarily follow our self-interest?  To me, Sinclair’s caution is to always look at the monetary incentives associated with a course of action, not just the direct ones, but those [...]

In the 2012 election, 78% of Mormons voted for Romney (fewer than the 80% who voted for Bush in 2004), but 93% of blacks voted for Obama (down from 95% in 2008).  71% of hispanics backed Obama.  Whites voted for Romney more than Obama by 20% (more than the 12% disparity when McCain opposed Obama [...]

The response to trauma is instinctual, even if our instinctual responses are wired individually. God evolved our species’ instincts to do something fast –flee, fight, or freeze — because the lethal nature of most of the dangers that killed humans throughout history is immediately perceptible and requires immediate response. Instincts don’t do as well when [...]

A friend of mine found this note on her car this week with a Starbucks gift card:  ”To honor the 26 people who died in Newtown, CT, my family is doing 26 acts of kindness. You are number 3. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season. God bless!” What a great way to take [...]

Do you believe in destiny?  Manifest destiny? Discuss.

Well, not really. However, with recent reports that the US birthrate has fallen to a level not seen since 1920, one starts to speculate. As Pew’s research organization reports: “The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the [...]

As we wrapped up the latest Mormon Moment with the Romney defeat, I asked the question, “What Now for the Mormon Moment?” One of the articles we discussed was Stephen Manfield’s The Mormonizing of America from the Huffington Post. I thought it was an excellent article which characterized how and why Mormons are successful and [...]

In my last post on natural law, I focused on how changing minor “precepts” might make tremendous impacts on our theological understandings. I used cosmological models from general relativity to illustrate the point. Today, I want to look at things a little less, well, cosmically,  and review how changing scientific “precepts” over the last few [...]

What’s going on in Facebook this week?  I noted one other Facebook trend I hadn’t remarked on before, something I refer to as scrumping.  A former boss of mine, an Indian-British guy, told us about “scrumping” when he was a feckless youth in England.  He and friends would dare each other to steal apples from [...]

Today’s guest poster is Tatiana, a crazy-cat-lady engineer entrepreneur scientist flexitarian mom wildlife-sanctuarian public-healthian global-developer pro-nuke feminist liberal Mormon. Averting Human Extinction party platform: There are 15 key points. Energy: Work with utility companies to aggressively move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy including next-generation nuclear energy using reprocessed fuel. This will limit [...]