Church Policy

How much is too much?  How much is not enough?  How often do you go to the temple?  Do you think you should go more often?  Why or why not? Discuss.

I enjoyed my experiment with Mormonism and sexism so much that I decided to do the same with Mormonism and racism. The results were remarkably similar. One thing making this video got me thinking about was the light of Christ. In LDS scripture, the light of Christ is characterized not only as the force that [...]

We’ve been cleaning the chapels in most areas (except where it is not feasible) for many years now, although most of us remember a day when the church employed professional janitors to keep the building sparkling.  With so many people out of work, should the church change back to professional help? Discuss.

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 [...]

The week from 17 March saw the inauguration of both the new Pope, Pope Francis, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. To mark that historic occasion the BBC broadcast a debate entitled Christianity at the Crossroads. The panellists were: Matthew Parris (MP) – former Conservative MP; Dr Anna Rowlands (AR) – Catholic theologian; [...]

People refer to weak apologetics as mental gymnastics, being willing to cling to the improbable or outright absurd rather than cutting through the crap to the logical (yet possibly faith-shaking) solution.  And yet, we are also told that truth is stranger than fiction and that with God nothing is impossible, which gives eternal hope to [...]

The ordain women movement is focused on asking why females should not be ordained.  Let’s flip that around and ask why males are ordained. Discuss.

I decided to do an experiment: if you ran through all the explanations for why the structure of Mormonism isn’t sexist back to back, how long would it take before you completely contradicted yourself? Turns out about 30 seconds. For all we try and magnify the positive and downplay the negative, the fact of the [...]

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 [...]

How much detail is appropriate in a confession?  When does a leader go from being helpful to being pruriently interested in the lurid details of a confessor’s love life?  Where do you draw the line? Discuss.

Pending the birth of Princess Kate’s baby, Lady Cosima Rose Alexandra Windsor is currently 24th in line for the British throne. Lady Cosima is the nearly three-year-old great granddaughter of a grandfather of the current queen. I didn’t know that, and I really wouldn’t care, but I did easily look it up, and I could do [...]

In January 2012, I did a blog post about topics women in the church were discussing.  I identified 10 practices that some women saw as unnecessarily discriminate or that were in other ways causing women to question their value in the church.  This was in response to a request Pres. Beck made of Mormon Mommy [...]

It’s tough to be the leader trying to fill volunteer assignments in the ward:  food to take to the sick or bring to an activity, helpers for a scouting drive, people to clean the church, people to feed the missionaries. It always seems like the same handful of people do all the work. Some leaders [...]

This past week, Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote an excellent article entitled ”How Beards Became Barred Among Top Mormon Leaders.” I encourage you to read it. In the end, I have nothing more to add to it than the personal observations that sre very near and dear to my face. I grew my beard during a [...]

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 [...]

Who determines worthiness in the temple recommend interview?  The bishop?  The individual?  The questions? Other methods of discernment?  Can the bishop rightly withhold a temple recommend based on nothing more than a hunch or the Spirit even if probing reveals no wrong answers? I recently read a blog post written by a group of ex-Mormon [...]

In the 1980s, a talk counseled members not to attend R-rated movies.  Of course, they didn’t say anything about M16 or M18.  They didn’t mention M15 either.  Did this counsel affect your movie-going practices? Which R-rated movies do you consider “must see” if any?  What movies did you hate?  Which did you love? Discuss.

I was exposed to this idea on a couple different occasions:  disaffected or disbelieving members share their experiences that led to their de-conversion in a group setting.  It made me really uncomfortable, essentially for the same reasons that Testimony Meetings make me uncomfortable. Here are a few hallmarks of both testimony and untestimony bearing: Pressure [...]

The LDS church with some 14.7 million members is a fraction of the size of  the Roman Catholic church with over 1.2 billion. As with my last post however, I feel drawn to the similarities in the hierarchical organisations, and the institutions that assist with the day to day running of both organisations. The Catholic [...]

Mormons are often accused of having simple answers to life’s questions, answers that don’t hold up to scrutiny or that don’t fit all scenarios.  ”Correlation does not imply causation” (cum hoc non propter hoc, Latin meaning “with this, not because of this”) is a phrase used in statistical analysis to emphasize that correlation between two [...]