Posts Tagged ‘ culture ’

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 [...]

Salt Lake City sees General Conference every six months. In the CofChrist, “World” Conference occurs every three years, and 2013 is the lucky year. A Community of Christ World Conference is far more of a legislative exercise than its Utah LDS analogue. It features worship, of course, and normally will have approval to changes and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yin and Yang are powerful concepts stemming from Chinese philosophy, and religiously from Taoism. I was recently reading a book that leveraged the concepts of Yin and Yang to explain why liberals and conservatives (in America) are both needed. The point is brought out that opposites are interconnected, interdependent, and their harmonization is critical to [...]

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 [...]

THE DOCTOR: Colonel Manton, I want you to tell your men to run away. COLONEL MANTON: What? THE DOCTOR: Those words. “Run away.” I want you to be famous for those exact words. I want people to call you Colonel Runaway. I want children laughing outside your door, ’cause they’ve found the house of Colonel [...]

Let’s face it. Although morality profoundly impacts American’s political views — making political and election issues an inevitable topic of attention for a Mormon blog — the idea of a Mormon being elected President of the United States has animated discussion on this site much more than would a contest between Barack Obama and a [...]

Not the program you might think. Rather, the kind of program some people had in mind for Salman Rushdie when he pointed out the contradictions of “The Satanic Verses”. Or, perhaps that should be pogrom, since there are death penalties involved. Certainly, Mark Steyn is one who has had his proverbial skin in the game, [...]

Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I sought mind-deadening through cable TV. I chanced upon a movie I thought would do the job — a murder mystery set in a mountain abbey in 14th Century Italy. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, the movie, The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and [...]

Seth Adam Smith, a private videographer who creates LDS-themed material and makes it available on YouTube, has written about the political and social connotations of being Nephite or Lamanite in a recent blog post. He makes some compelling connections to modern day with Christians and Muslims using the words of modern prophets, as depicted in [...]

“There is but one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power!” — Gandalf to Saruman. Hawkgrrrl recently summarized Jonathan Haidt’s thesis, expressed in The Righteous Mind, of how people develop pronounced liberal or conservative tendencies as a combination of both genetics and experience (see here). I also wrote about Haidt’s ideas about how [...]

Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]

The Community of Christ has begun “crossing the Rubicon” on LGBT issues, and there can be no reversing the action taken. CofChrist is committed to the theological precedent that priesthood can be compatible with participation in a legally recognized same-sex sexual relationship. On June 2nd, the Australian National Conference approved the following recommendation to the [...]

What makes a person unique? If people are unique, then why do we still find so much in common with others?

Just what is Mormon culture?  Recently, as I read Joanna Brooks’ memoir, I noted that there were several elements of culture that I shared with her (dance festivals – on a much less grand scale, open-minded BYU professors).  But there were many that differed from my own experiences (apocalyptic food storage, pioneer heritage, and Marie Osmond [...]

“Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It’s not fairness as equality of outcome. It’s fairness as karma — the idea that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad [...]

Science knows that the Norse (Vikings) colonized Greenland a millennium ago, but the colony didn’t stick when colder temperatures returned following the Medieval Warm Period. Average daily temperatures in Greenland warmed about 3 degrees F before the plunge back into a Little Ice Age (which itself only ended well into the 19th Century) that forced [...]

I still contend I was not being insensitive — just naive. I arrived on the East Coast in 1973 — freshly out of grad school — having been selected for the one job at John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab I’d wanted more than any other I’d even considered applying for. After my church had canonized [...]