another county heard from

A midrash on the existential necessity of charity

2012-01-22T23:42:00.001-05:00

"Charity" by
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
courtesy of Wikipedia

Paul famously said "though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." Why not take him at his word? Without charity, a man ceases to exist. This is backed up by Mormon, who said if a man "[has] not charity he is nothing; wherefore he must needs have charity." In other words, if a man had no charity he would not exist; ergo, since he exists he clearly has (at least some) charity.

Mormon also spoke of "how great" the "nothingness of man" is. That's interesting, that nothingness can be relatively large. You can have different levels of nothingness! This clarifies the above point about how not having charity leads to being nothing. The less charity you have, the less you "exist" in some sense. Which actually fits with our intuition: we think of the least charitable people as missing a part of their heart, or incomplete in some way. They're not all there.

Charity, then, is an existential need. If we were to become entirely devoid of charity, we would suffer the eternal destruction of both soul and body. Conversely, the more we cleave unto charity and are filled with it, the more we find ourselves, the more we exist, the more perfect (read: complete) and divine we are. It's a spectrum from nothingness to Godliness.

God is brimming with charity, so he exists in the fullest sense of the word. His light, which is intimately intertwined with his charity, actually emanates into all things, providing them with life. This is why he wants to fill us with his love, why he commands us to be full of love/charity. This is the same promise that as we become Gods we shall receive all that the Father has.

We already have a portion of God's love within us. We know this because we exist. If we would continue to exist, and to achieve abundant eternal lives, we need charity. Charity never faileth. We, with charity, will never die.

The essence of Mormonism

2012-01-08T00:32:00.000-05:00

I was thinking yesterday about the essence of Mormonism. A lot of people think it's the Book of Mormon, or living prophets, or exaltation, or polygamy, or faith, or something or other.

I think it's sweeping and mopping. Or more specifically, the essence of Mormonism is getting up at 6 am on a Friday to consecrate a little bit of your time to cleaning a big, pretty building that we believe is sacred and call a temple. Because someone passed around a clipboard on Sunday asking for volunteers.

Yes, when I say "essence" I probably don't really mean "essence" there. But I think that sort of stuff--kind of boring but also kind of endearing in its sincerity--is a really really important part of Mormonism. Everyone just doing mundane, simple things. Running a church, keeping it clean, helping people out; probably not being very good at it but getting it done one way or another.

The "wealth redistribution" canard

2012-01-02T23:13:00.001-05:00

Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"
Woman: (taken aback) "Why, well... yes, I suppose I would."
Churchill: "How about for 10 pounds?"
Woman: "Mr Churchill! What kind of woman do you think I am?!?"
Churchill: "Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price."

Conservatives often decry "wealth redistribution," by which they mean taxing the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. "It's not fair," the argument goes, "to take more from one person and give it to someone else!" It is seen as an evil to be minimized (lower tax rates for the rich at least somewhat) or eradicated via a flat tax (everyone pays a certain percentage of their income no matter how much income they have).

However, as far as I can tell this is completely wrong-headed because of the simple fact that a flat tax would still be extreme wealth redistribution (I'm using "extreme" in the sense that it's a lot more than no wealth redistribution at all). That's because the conservative idea that a flat tax avoids wealth redistribution is either a) flat out wrong, or b) using words in a totally unnatural way.

The definition I gave of wealth redistribution seems pretty intuitive: taking more money from one person and giving it (or the benefits it buys) to another. But when you think about it, a flat tax would still do that, and on a large scale. To see this, assume you are Bill Gates and thus make $1,000,000,000 each year and under a flat tax you pay 10% of that, or $100,000,000, to the government. The government then uses it for providing roads, post offices, public transit, national defense, or whatever services you think government ought to provide. Now assume that I am a bum who makes no money at all during the year, thus avoiding any tax liability at all. I am still benefited by your tax money: I can still walk the streets lit well at night, the police will still arrest someone who beats me up or steals my stuff, I still get to use cheap public transit if I find enough quarters to buy a bus ticket, etc. In short, the money that was yours and was "taken" by the government is going to help me. Your wealth is being redistributed to me. I don't see why taking the same percentage from everyone avoids redistributing wealth; money is still moving from the richer to the poorer.

Of course, conservatives might argue that they're using "wealth redistribution" to mean "progressive taxation" (the correct term for making rich people pay higher percentages of income in tax). In which case I say: then use words to mean what they plainly mean! Conservatives win lots of political points by creating fears that the government is "stealing" money from more productive, innovating, "job-creating" people and redistributing it to the poor--sure sounds an awful lot like SOCIALISM to me! The problem is that their solution... still "steals" more money from the rich and redistributes it to the poor. I admit that the flat tax does so on a much lesser scale than progressive tax systems, but it indubitably still does it, and to a large degree.

So the real question is: how much redistribution of wealth do we as a society want? I'm not saying necessarily that the marginal rates we have right now are ideal, either morally or economically, but just that we should have a debate that answers the question of just how much redistribution of wealth is desirable. The only way to avoid all wealth redistribution is to have a "head tax" which is when everyone pays the exact same amount of money; truly no wealth gets redistributed under such a system: we all pay the same amount and we all get access to the same government benefits--something I haven't heard anyone seriously propose.* In other words, conservatives have already established what kind of party they are, now we're just haggling over the percentages. This isn't meant to be a slam-dunk against the conservative position--it's perfectly valid to argue that taxes are too high and that they should be lowered, and there may even be benefits to flattening out the tax system--but it is meant to be a plea that we all avoid scare tactics that don't make any sense on inspection.

In short: the specter of "wealth redistribution" to oppose progressive taxation is hypocritical demagoguery unless a head tax is advocated in its place (or no tax, but anarchy is a great topic for another post). Let's get down to haggling about the right price instead of calling the other party immoral thieves.

* Interestingly enough for the conservatives who point to tithing as divine approval for a flat tax, God also instituted a head tax in Exodus 30:13-15 for everyone 20 and older, so who's to say that isn't an even more moral way of doing things than a flat tax? Or if God's tax preferences change, why not have a progressive system now? [aka I don't think God particularly cares about the details of our tax system]

Commercialism: A Crucial Component of Christmas?

2011-12-25T22:54:00.002-05:00

Ah yes, commercialism: the perennial chestnut roasting over the Christmas debate fire. It's easy and commonplace to denounce its reach and prominence throughout the holiday season. I say it's easy because Christmas' true meaning really is to remember Christ's birth and the sublime gift that he was and is; and what with all the stress and shopping and travel and everything, it can be hard to remember much of that. I say that it's commonplace to bemoan this fact because every religious service around this time of year that I'm aware of does this to one degree or another. And this is a good thing: we all need more reminders to focus on the eternal and not put too much stock in the transitory.

But it's also easy and fun (in the mean, bursting balloons way) to point out that there has never been a golden age of Christmas, in which families did not stress out, Christ was foremost in everyone's mind, and there was no exploiting the holiday for commercial gain. Jon Stewart and Christopher Hitchens love to point out how Puritans banned the holiday in America, for one (two?). And who can really believe that children since time immemorial didn't put too much stock in the gift-getting part? But this idea that Christmas commercialism is nothing new has been especially on my mind today as I read a great (commercial) present I got today: Christmas at the New Yorker. Some examples from the 35 pages I've read so far:

One cartoon has a woman about to enter a scrum surrounding a "Xmas Sale $1.98" sign; she has a rope tied around her waist in the style of a mountain-climber; she's telling her husband, who's holding the end of the rope, "When I jerk twice, pull as hard as you can." The year? 1938.
A 1962 tidbit reads in full: "Overheard on Fifth Avenue, a cheerful soprano voice: 'It's nice to see the Christmas decorations going up. Thanksgiving will soon be here.'"
Searching for the center of Christmas in New York in 1962, John Updike wrote, with tongue in cheek, "We debated whether to head north, toward the great Norway spruce of Rockefeller Center, with its Currier & Ives prospect of skaters, or to head south, toward the gossamer, tree-shaped web of electric-light bulbs clinging to the front of Lord & Taylor. The latter seemed more crassly commercial, and hence more truly in the spirit of things, so south we went..."
The Christmas-themed cover from the Dec. 13, 1930 issue (pictured on the right), which depicts harried shoppers, frazzled mothers, and crying (presumably greedy) children with all the same fervor that we employ today to decry the same.

But romanticizing the past to make it sound rosier than the present (the so-called golden age fallacy) brings to mind two related ideas and makes me not want to pick sides in this fight.

First, there's the universal of coming-of-age process, the motif of a loss of innocence. We as humans need to remember a time that was more idyllic, an Eden to which we want to return. Christmastime is a great time to do this culturally, to wish for a more loving, caring world in which family is more central than it is now, in which money is not the true focus. This ideal is the most important thing to aspire towards, regardless of how well it tracks the historical record of centuries past.*

But the most interesting thing about this conversation is that it is really a debate about ritual. Religious-minded people want to promote "the true meaning of Christmas" (a phrase, by the way, that I truly believe in, aka those aren't scare quotes). But as this intriguing (and contrarianly-titled) blog post Celebrating the Commercialism of Christmas argues, "commercialism" of some sort is probably an important vehicle for that true meaning. The author draws the devastating comparison with Easter, which by all accounts ought to be the most celebrated Christian holiday, and concludes that the lack of both meaningful traditions and, yes, commercialism surrounding Easter doom it to an eternal second-rate status in too many people's minds.

Rituals are a vehicle for a deeper truth that serve an invaluable purpose but also come with potential pitfalls. Without any ritual truths are easily lost or thought of only in passing. Think of the proud, millennia-long Jewish tradition and how often it can die out: all too often, non-observant Jews' children will not identify as Jews, and certainly their children won't. Rituals like the passover keep their community alive. On the other hand, if too much emphasis is placed on the ritual (see, e.g., some pharisaical practices in the New Testament era) then the underlying truth can be crushed. In the Mormon tradition, temple rituals are central to our worship and are in large part what helped give Brigham Young and the apostles the nod over Sidney Rigdon in the succession controversy--the apostles controlled those, and those were what created a lasting, distinct church that would outlast Rigdon's offshoot branch of Mormonism.

I don't mean to argue that we should celebrate Christmas commercialism for its own sake, but rather that we consider whether all its secular and commercialistic trappings might not be a "ritual" that makes us really care about the deeper meaning of Christ's birth. Let's face it, the excitement of presents, both giving and getting, the beauty (and even the tackiness, at times) of the lights, the distinctive carols, the crazy stressful family get-togethers--they all make us anticipate the big day and give a greater opportunity to think about what it all means. They provide a context (and a foil!) for the extended worship of the Christ child.

In summary, ask me whether the ritual of baptism is important, salvific, and even "true": I'll emphatically say "yes." I'll quickly concede that water literally doesn't literally wash away our sins when we're baptized, but I'll still argue forcefully for the necessity of the ordinance--with an appropriate emphasis on the underlying truth it symbolizes. Likewise, ask me whether Christ's birth heralded the beginning of the most momentous life ever lived on this earth, and I'll emphatically say "yes." And now, I think I might just argue that, while decidedly secondary and not in itself of any lasting significance, perhaps the busyness of the Christmas season might just be a necessary means of promoting the celebration of Christ's miraculous birth and the eternal gift that he has given each of us.

Merry Christmas!

* A discussion of how historically accurate our discourse about the past needs to be in these regards is beyond the scope of this blog post; suffice it to say that I think the answer is: "it depends."

Jõuluingel

2011-12-17T15:56:00.001-05:00

Here's my contribution to Christmas this year:

The Estonian lyrics are available here (or on the youtube page) and here is my English translation:

On Christmas Eve, an angel visits each room
Flittering there in the candle's cascading glow
You can scarcely see her with your eye
But still you sense she wishes you well.

A tinge of Christmas wafts from the tree's branches
And in the angel's hair, a strand of tinsel glistens.
She pets the teddy bear in your hand,
Tells a fairy tale in your dreams.

You go to bed, feeling somewhat sad
But the tree remains in the room a while longer.
Upon waking you notice how
The angel's hair glistens there upon the branches.

On Christmas Eve, an angel visits each room
Flittering there in the candle's cascading glow
You can scarcely see her with your eye
But still you sense she wishes you well.

If I could start just one internet meme...

2011-12-02T19:31:00.000-05:00

Here's the thing: I like to talk about politics. I also have a facebook account. Thus I am prone to starting, and often contributing to, those annoying, endless, frustrating, pointless political facebook ~~car wrecks~~ posts. I promise I don't mean to.

The point is: today one (OK, OK--two) got started on my wall, and even after I bowed out, some new participants came along and started pouring--unintentionally I'm sure--proverbial gas on the proverbial fire. Seeing where this was going and not wanting to delete comments (damn you, deeply-engrained First Amendment ethos!) I resigned myself to my fate and just added a comment that read "Oh boy, this [thread] is gonna get worse before it gets better"* and a link to one of my favorite Simpsons moments:

I don't know that it will help any, but I like to think it's clever.

Go ye and do likewise.

* Alteration in original. <-- sorry, but I have to be precise like that. It's an OCD thing.

That was a family, according to your religion

2011-11-18T18:11:00.000-05:00

I loved this excerpt from a recent Daily Universe (BYU's student newspaper) letter to the editor. It begins by describing a quote from the director of a Swedish nursery that tries to be 100% gender neutral that put the author "over the edge":

“…When they’re playing ‘house’ and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble … we suggest two moms or three moms and so on,” she said.

It isn’t the action that bothers me — I know plenty of little kids who play house with multiple moms because everyone wants to be the mom. I’m bothered because the director’s goal is to make them feel as if a house should have two or three mothers.

It shouldn’t.

I want the world to remember what is right, what is good. Some things in this world should remain sacred; the family should always be sacred.

Because heaven knows no Mormon family ever had two (or--gasp!--three!) mothers! Wow...

My pre-mission Wikipedia time capsule

2011-11-11T19:28:00.000-05:00

I was an early adopter of Wikipedia since I was a geek my freshman year of college (2003-04). Back then, nobody knew about this weird encyclopedia anyone could edit, and there were still plenty of red links to create! It was heady stuff, let me tell you. I created, for example, the article on Pearls Before Swine! Compare my original entry with what it has become today :)

Anyways, I loved Wikipedia, so much so that one of the last things I did before getting set apart* as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in September, 2004, was to create a "time capsule" of predictions about Wikipedia and the world for when I got home two years later. You can view it here. I'm happy to say that my first prediction (that "Wikipedia will have grown in reputation and size to be a serious source of information for the average websurfer. We're talking Wikipedia as a household name.") absolutely came true while I was gone. However, one of them (cough cough my prediction that the Red Sox still would not have won another World Series cough cough) crumbled in under a month of my leaving for the MTC...

Fun stuff, eh? What are your predictions about what the world (or Wikipedia) will be like in two years?

* I created the bulk of the page on September 25, 2004--the day before I was set apart. However, you'll notice that the date at the bottom of the page says September 27 2004: I snuck online the day after I was set apart (when I wasn't supposed to be using the internet), made one more prediction (which didn't even end up coming true), and even had the gall to change the date on it to make my crime more obvious! My guilt must have been immense! :)

What makes a prophet a Prophet? Or: How I learned to stop worrying and learned to love repetition

2011-11-10T18:27:00.000-05:00

What makes a prophet a Prophet? Well, a lot of things. But I think that our support, sustaining, and hope play a vital role in it.

This is related to the scriptural reminder "seek and ye shall find." If we have faith and look for God's word in the teachings of the prophets, we will find it. The collective power in thousands of people coming to the Conference Center in SLC twice a year, and of millions more watching and listening around the world, create an atmosphere of faith in which godly counsel can reverberate in and increase in volume. And that's part of what makes our modern-day prophets Prophets. The expectations coming in and the ensuing discussion and study improve the whole experience.

This approach also helps me cope with the fact that--let's face it--a lot (almost all?) of what we hear from modern-day prophets is not new or groundbreaking in its substance. We already know we need to have faith, study the scriptures, love and serve one another, pay tithing, etc. But the expectation that we can hear God's voice in their words helps us get to a deeper level: we see old things in new ways that are more personal, a phrasing sticks out at us as more clear than previous explanations, our hearts are open to (sometimes completely unrelated) personal revelation from on high, and so forth.

I'm not explaining this very well. But I'm very grateful for modern-day prophets, seers, and revelators. I know that they speak for God and help us more fully understand and live Christ's gospel. Part of what gives them such strength and power is the sustaining votes you and I give them. So thank you!

Spooky poetry

2011-10-29T21:45:00.000-04:00

I got to participate in a spooky, halloweeny poetry night my ward did (how cool a ward is mine, no?). I read Edgar Allan Poe's classic The Raven (click the link: it's Christopher effing Walken reading it!). But as the night went on, I thought perhaps I should have done his lesser-known The Bells. I love it, so here it is:

I

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And an in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III

Hear the loud alarum bells-
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor,
Now- now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows:
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-
Of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people- ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells-
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-
Bells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Do you have any favorite Halloween poems?

Best. Description. of Depression. Ever.

2011-10-29T17:52:00.001-04:00

I'm not particularly a fan of Hyperbole and a Half, but this comic is great (for its explanatory power). I've never been that depressed, but the gist is spot on.

[oh and warning: some language]

A Thin Line (ba-dum ching!)

2011-10-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

I don't diet too often, but when I do, I'm afraid I'm walking a thin line between eating less and getting an eating disorder. I'll be back to my unhealthy overeating soon enough though, I'm sure.

To the Saints

2011-10-19T14:20:00.000-04:00

Here's to the Saints: the people who come to wherever you are, walk back up with you, and help you see things the way they really are again. God bless them that they can continue to be so utterly awesome.

Devil's advocate

2011-10-13T02:33:00.000-04:00

Mormon argument regarding same-sex marriage: "marriage" has meant the union of a man and a woman forever. We can't re-write millennia of history and tradition by now re-defining marriage as something fundamentally different to include a much broader group of people.

Mormon argument regarding Christianity: "Christian" has meant a belief in the Nicene Creed (and others) for millennia, but now we as Mormons want to be included in the meaning of "Christian" even though we disagree with those creeds and call them abominations, arguably re-defining the term to include a much broader group of people.

Discuss.

Just Sayin', Gospel Edition

2011-10-09T18:25:00.000-04:00

My gospel pet peeve for today: that Clive Staples Lewis quote that says

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Besides the false trilemma that I think this is (read the Wikipedia article for details), it also presents the difficult position for Mormons, if accepted, of what to do with the 1978 First Presidency statement that said

The great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God’s light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals.

So if Mohammed, a man who claimed to have a vision from an angel and receive new scriptures that were literally the word of God, can validly be considered a "great religious leader" who "received a portion of God's light" and "[m]oral truths," why can't Jesus be considered the same? Why do we not accept the Q'uran as scripture, but we think it's impossible to separate Christ's claims of divinity from his other great teachings? I just don't see it.

A note of clarification: I do believe Jesus was the literal Son of God, divine, savior, redeemer, etc etc, but I also think Lewis' trilemma is a specious argument in favor of that position.

Law Power

2011-10-07T19:28:00.001-04:00

Written for the Virginia Law Weekly, a law student-run weekly newspaper at UVA. Thus, the audience of this article isn't all that in line with the audience of this blog. Oh well.

Three men on a 1968 Mexico City Olympics medal stand after the 200-meter dash. Two African-Americans, heads bowed, boldly raise black-gloved fists in the air. You’re probably familiar with pictures of the event; maybe, like me, you even had one on your wall as an undergrad. Saturday evening, I got to hear John Carlos, the bronze medal winner in that picture, speak about his new book. I’m not going to be an Olympic athlete; I probably won’t ever get to bring international attention to human rights on anywhere near the scale that John Carlos and Tommie Smith did, but I was inspired to use this extremely influential bully pulpit of a Virginia Law Weekly column to think aloud a bit about how we as future lawyers can stand for something too.

First, why do people still care about what those men did in Mexico City in 1968? As with all enduring symbols, the image of that medal stand is multivalent. What values do you hold? You’ll be able to find them represented. Are you a member of a group that has been marginalized? The salute’s immediate context suggested Black Power, a declaration of sovereignty and self-worth from members of a group so long oppressed. Do you want to protect human rights around the world? Tommie Smith has said that it was, in fact, a human rights salute. Do you fight for workers’ rights? John Carlos wore his Olympic jacket unzipped (a breach of strict Olympic protocol) to honor the blue-collar workers he grew up with in Harlem. Are you concerned about the poor? Smith and Carlos are shoeless with black socks, representing black poverty. Are you religious? The two cited God as a source of strength in doing something they knew would create a tremendous backlash. Do you despise political correctness? So did they; many, including the audience that booed them, saw the gesture as an attempt to turn the games into a political platform. Are you a Second Amendment nut? Carlos’s hand, unlike Smith’s, wasn’t raised straight up—he said he wanted it cocked, ready to punch in self-defense in case someone tried to rush the stand. Whatever your cause is, you can find it on that podium — and you can probably also find one you don’t support. And whether you think they should have done it or not, no one can deny their courage.

Peter Norman (the white guy) also deserves mention. He was the Australian silver-medalist and a vocal critic of his country’s own racist policies. He supported the two Americans wholeheartedly, wearing, like Carlos and Smith, a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization that urged African-Americans to boycott the games. He also came up with the idea for the two to share Smith’s pair of gloves after Carlos forgot his in the Olympic Village. Carlos said he expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes when they told him of their plan for the medal ceremony, but instead, he said, “I saw love.”

All three athletes were censured by the International Olympic Committee, disciplined by their national Olympic authorities, and withstood intense negative media coverage. Carlos and Smith received death threats. Norman was not invited by Australia to compete in the 1972 Olympic Games.

So what does that have to do with U.Va. Law? After all, most of us are going to end up working in law firms, where the bottom line is profit, not justice. No Law Weekly article is going to change that, especially when its author is hypocritically going to be one of those soulless corporate lackeys himself. But even if you aren’t going to be working at a non-profit, tirelessly advocating for those who can’t afford to wield significant legal power on their own behalf (and many, many props to you public service people who will do just that), something John Carlos said Saturday strikes me as appropriate for us. He talked about how sports were never his primary focus. He was good at them and worked hard at them, but he realized at a young age that his talent as an athlete was, for him, a tool for something more important. He knew that people don’t listen to some guy in Harlem talk about racial inequality, but they do pay attention to an Olympic medalist.

When you’re making scads of money (and relative to the world’s population as a whole, all of us will), what are you going to do with it? Some of us will use our wealth and influence to stop people like Troy Davis from being put to death. Some of us will be entrepreneurs, creating new technologies that create unimaginable opportunities for everyone. Some of us will be legislators, or draft legislation, and have the chance to influence society in ways large and small. Some of us will volunteer for local charitable organizations. Some will try to implement Ayn Randian capitalism to achieve ultra-efficient economies. Some of us will be the ones raising our fists to the sky, and some of us will be the Peter Normans, doing what we can to help.

I don’t care what it is, and I can’t agree with all of your projects, but I think John Carlos and Tommie Smith teach all of us something important: Think beyond yourself. Use your power for something you can call the greater good. We’ve all gone from bright-eyed world-changers to cynically resigned law students — even you, 1Ls! The disillusionment happens quickly, as Civ Pro grinds hope out of even the most stalwart idealists, and realism has its place. I’m hoping not to be naive. But think, at least sometimes, of this education we’re receiving as a gift — an opportunity to do something in the coming years to make the world better in some way.

Make sure you piss off The Man at least once with your black-gloved law degree.

In which I proclaim my non-racist-ness

2011-10-03T20:50:00.000-04:00

I confused an Asian girl with another one today. I fear that I mess up minorities' names they judge me, like I think "they all look alike." But really, I confuse white people all the time too. I still can't tell apart two of my white law school "Peer Advisors" (upperclassmen who mentor 1L's) from last year. Crap.

What Rules My Life

2011-10-01T14:20:00.000-04:00

The following is an exact transcript of an English class essay I wrote in middle school (9/29/98, to be exact) recently rediscovered by my parents in our basement. I was such a brat.

What Rules My Life

People often talk about how hard it is to live with a teenager, but they never seem to talk about how hard it is to be a teenager and live with your parents. Parents can be nice, but a lot of the time they are mean or annoying. For instance, I'll be up in my room, doing homework or listening to music, when all of a sudden my dad calls me to come down. I get up, put down my homework or turn off the radio and start down. After about two seconds, my dad will yell up

"Come on Austin!!!"

Which, of course, is exactly what I'm doing, so I yell back down to him

"I AM!!! I can't get there in two seconds!!!"

Which by then gets both of us mad. There are a lot of things like this that make my parents seem a lot meaner than they are. Take for example, piano lessons. I HATE playing the piano. I think it's boring, hard, and useless (unless I could get a job for playing the piano which I couldn't). But my mom, a piano teacher, couldn't possibly have a son who isn't another Beethoven or Mozart, so I've been taking piano lessons for about six or seven years, hating every minute of it.

Parents also make me do stuff like staying up 'til 10:00 to do English assignments instead of doing them in the morning, eating stuff I hate (like peas) and doing so many chores I could probably sue them for child labor and win (we're lucky to earn one hour of minimum wage in a WEEK!).

Then of course, there are grades. My parents have this idea that all their kids should get all A+'s on every report . [sic] They might let a B slip by now and then, providing it's a B+. In other words, we have to be almost perfect on our report cards. One little slip and they take away TV, computer, N64, food (well, not quite food YET, but maybe soon).

This is the end of my wonderfully fabulous essay about my parents, my Supreme Dictators for Life. Please give me a good grade, because if you don't, you never know. I might not come to school, one day, then the next, then the next. Finally you get curious and call home, but my parents completely deny ever having a son named Austin...

Sild on Katki

2011-09-25T15:57:00.000-04:00

Meie tahame taeva minna
Selle suure seltsiga

Ei saa minna, sild on katki
Nõnda minna me ei saa

Millega me parandame?
Siidiga või niidiga

Hõbeda või kullaga
Selle selge mullaga

Sest meie tahame taeva minna
Selle suure seltsiga

Viimne laps saab kinni võetud
Kelle oma oled sa?

Testimony booster of the day

2011-09-23T17:06:00.000-04:00

I swear, the number of Democrats/liberals/feminists (unbeknownst to the Elders* Quorum Presidency) I have been assigned to home teach over the last two years is statistically significant. It's great.

* Is it just me, or does it feel like there should be an apostrophe there? Every time I write it, it just feels weird.

Resolved

2011-09-20T10:46:00.000-04:00

I've been working on taking the word 'retarded' out of my vocabulary, but I've never been able to come up with a good (inoffensive) replacement... until now: 'daft.' If I can overcome the weird "are you British?" reactions, I think it would be a wonderful substitute.

What do you think? Feasible? Weird? Daft?

Lip-reading

2011-09-18T22:22:00.000-04:00

One time in high school, a friend of mine was trying to tell me something from across our history class. She was able to get my attention, but I had never become fluent (or anything near unto it) in lip-reading, the lingua franca of high school distance-speaking. She quickly realized I wasn't understanding, and shortened her message down to the most important word or two--still no comprehension on my part. She exaggerated the vowels, slowed it down, etc... Finally I just did an "Ohhhh! Got it!" face to get her to stop trying because it was hopeless.

That anecdote, writ large, is my life.

Future Inconsistency with Present Positions does not (Necessarily) Hypocrisy Make

2011-08-30T00:15:00.001-04:00

Today I briefly debated the merits of the "death tax" with a good friend. Of course, I know virtually nothing about it, but that's what makes debating fun, right? Well the point is that he was against it, I was in favor of it. And he was very against it. It was an interesting discussion, and I enjoyed it.

Only afterwards did I find out that someone close to someone he loves died yesterday. Youch.

While I'm certain this friend would be against the death tax no matter his personal circumstances, I'm sure those circumstances also played into the emotions he was expressing during the course of our debate. And it reminded me of something I've thought about now and again: how in certain situations I myself wouldn't agree with my (current) positions--and why that's OK.

I first realized this while thinking about the death penalty. In 1988, Michael Dukakis famously answered a question about the death penalty in a way that a lot of people thought was very cold:

And let's face it, they were probably right. However, I don't think his answer was true. If someone raped and killed his wife, Dukakis almost certainly would be in favor of the death penalty for the bastard. He probably would have strangled the killer with his own hands.

I think a much better answer would have been something that acknowledged the inevitable, perfectly understandable anger and natural desire for vengeance that would occur in such a terrible situation, but which also noted that someone so emotionally involved might not be the best person to decide the issue of ultimate punishment. I think that's what I'd say to anyone who asked me the same question. The family of a victim should not decide a convicted felon's fate. Let's make a rational decision about it; and that involves bringing in a neutral judge who, while certainly appropriately offended by heinous acts, has enough emotional detachment to pass a sentence that is best for everyone.

So today, while I'm rational, I can make the argument against the death penalty--and I don't think I'm being hypocritical to then also say "If my wife/mother/father/brother is raped and killed, don't ask me then to decide what the punishment should be; follow my advice that I'm giving today."

Same thing for a number of issues. I think it's a mature thing to realize ahead of time that you might do something rash in the heat of the moment. If someone close to my loved one died and the deceased's estate was heavily taxed before going to someone I felt didn't deserve to be given less than their full share, I might well disagree with the estate tax then too. But today, I say it's OK.

If

2011-08-16T20:33:00.000-04:00

If I ever manufactured an alcoholic drink (is that even the right verb at all???), I would totally call it "Regal Lager" and its tagline would be: "It's a palindrome, so it tastes just as good going down as it does coming back up!" Take that for what you will.

In which I share that rare specimen: good contemporary religious music

2011-07-24T01:24:00.002-04:00

Seafinch - I've Got to Make Things Right

I love this song for a lot of reasons. For one, it's the only song I know of written from Judas' perspective, and originality is a big plus in my book. I also love horns, so anything with a horn arrangement gets another bump.

I love singing along with the climactic finale ("Not even He / could forgive me") because it reminds me that it's not true in my case. Though at the same time, it has that taint of irony because the character singing it might just be right.

I love that it takes Judas as a human being instead of a caricature. One who made a horrible choice, yes, but one who is still human and realizes what he's done. It is masterfully tragic.

I feel like it's hard to get a good religious song nowadays--they all either hit you over the head with their moral, sound like crap, and/or are just downright sappy/cheesy/campy. Seafinch has a whole album full of the exception: religious songs that, if you weren't paying close attention to the words, could pass for solid secular music (see especially "It Might Be You"). The songs are sung from the point of view of the New Testament's marginalized or underappreciated characters (a number of women, for example, are represented) or the famous at their less-than-best (Peter's remorse from denying Christ).

When Ideologies Collide

2011-07-02T13:20:00.000-04:00

I recently listened to a Mormon Stories podcast on mental health and religion by Dr. David Christian, a psychologist from Logan, Utah. It was very interesting; although I don't agree with all of it, I think it's a useful listen that gave me a lot of food for thought. If you don't feel like going through the whole hour and a half, just know that it advocates a pragmatic approach to religion: focus on what works for you in your life, and if something is harmful to you, don't believe/do it; get away from an "is it true?" framework and into an "is it useful to me?" framework. This is, of course, a very modern and "liberal" approach to religion and truth. It focuses on the individual and makes her or him the final arbiter of a personal and relatively relative truth.

While listening, I immediately thought of President Packer's (to some infamous) statements that "Some things that are true aren’t very useful" and that "a lot of things that are true historically aren’t very useful and don’t generate happiness." [1] These are statements made by someone universally considered to be "conservative" in his religious attitudes. They represent a worldview in which ultimate, objective truth exists and is not something individuals can define for themselves. Prophets are the ones who reveal a pre-existent, eternal ontological truth which individuals can choose to embrace or reject, but truth cannot be changed. [2]

So here we have a very liberal ideology and a very conservative ideology both embracing the same proposition: the utilitarian value of information can, and should, trump truth. What does this mean that two sides that wouldn't agree about almost anything seem to agree on this?

Well, I've purposely overstated the similarities a bit. A concise summary of the positions does make them sound almost identical, but the ends sought are quite different. Dr. Christian's goal is the greatest (objectively quantifiable) present well-being of individuals; Pres. Packer's goal is the greatest sum total of faith in Jesus Christ and in his restored church. Both are utilitarian arguments, but with different "goods" to be maximized. Pres. Packer's position, I believe, would also be that limiting access to "truth" is a temporary thing: ultimately, all truth should be known, but it's a question of milk before meat.

But despite the ultimate differences, I think there's an interesting tension here too. Neither side is committed to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth all the time. There is some compromise, of a sort, in both positions. These very liberal and very conservative approaches to religion both seem to say that a fixation on unadulterated truth can, at least in some situations, be opposed to the ultimate good.

Do you agree? Am I crazy? I think it's interesting to think about, at least.

A final thought is that Jesus said "I am ... the truth". Can we equate our approaches to coming to know Christ with our method of approaching truth? In other words, are there some things about Christ that, if we knew right now, would be more harmful than helpful? I think so, and it seems to be in line with learning things line upon line, precept upon precept. But it's also kind of disconcerting when put in such stark terms, huh?

-----------------

[1] These quotes come from President Packer's PBS interview with Helen Whitney. He has expressed similar thoughts elsewhere: here's an analysis of another (purported) related statement of his. Compare some of Elder Oaks' very similar comments to Whitney: e.g., "It’s wrong to criticize leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true, because it diminishes their effectiveness as a servant of the Lord" and "But not everything that’s true is useful. I am a lawyer, and I hear something from a client. It’s true, but I’ll be disciplined professionally if I share it because it’s part of the attorney-client privilege. There’s a husband-wife privilege, there’s a priest-penitent privilege, and so on. That’s an illustration of the fact that not everything that’s true is useful to be shared."

[2] See the awesome hymn, "Oh Say, What is Truth?" (number 272 in your hymn books, number one in your hearts). And as an interesting semi-aside to this whole post, see a classic post from Steven Peck, BYU biology professor and science activist, titled "Oh, Say what is Truth?--OK! I Will" which introduces some conceptions of truth and how they might interact with Mormonism.

Church history nugget

2011-07-02T01:10:00.002-04:00

Many people don't realize that, due to a secretarial typo, when Joseph Fielding Smith became president of the church he was originally sustained as a "prophet, seer, and relevator." Never one to question the wisdom of a calling, he made it a point to try to make things relevant--the most notable example being his famous "Multidimensional Calculus and the Eternal Law of Tithing" talk from the April, 1970 conference. That sermon attempted to make what was previously an obscure area of knowledge to most saints a bit more relevant. After the October conference of that year, when he was re-sustained with the more traditional "prophet, seer, and revelator" title, he focused much more on mainstream topics.

When did you choose to be straight?

2011-02-15T21:49:00.000-05:00

I like that video, and I was reminded of it when I read this fun questionnaire:

This questionnaire was invented in the early 70's to put people in the shoes of a gay person , but is also kind of fun in its own right . Check it out and you can post your replies. Also feel free to post this in your own blog, Myspace, crackbook, etc. as it is intentionally in the public domain.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. When and where did you decide you were a heterosexual?

3. Is it possible this is just a phase and you will out grow it?

4. Is it possible that your sexual orientation has stemmed from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?

5. Do your parents know you are straight? Do your friends know- how did they react?

6. If you have never slept with a person of the same sex, is it just possible that all you need is a good gay lover?

7. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality... can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

8. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?

9. Why do heterosexuals try to recruit others into this lifestyle?

10. A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual... Do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?

11. Just what do men and women do in bed together? How can they truly know how to please each other, being so anatomically different?

12. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?

13. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality?

14. Considering the menace of overpopulation how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?

15. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don't you feel that he or she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his or her leanings?

16. There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable you to change if you really want to.

17. Have you considered trying aversion therapy?

Everything, even blog posts, is a remix

2011-02-07T00:41:00.001-05:00

So there's a fun video series (2 of 4 of which have now been produced) called Everything is a Remix. Its premise is that every form of art owes so much to previous works of art that calling it a remix isn't too much of a stretch. It calls into question our notions of "creativity" but in a good way: I don't think it's saying that creativity doesn't exist, but rather that it's not quite so isolated as we think. Anyways, here's the most recent installation in the series, about movies. Part I, about music, is here.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

I like this idea, and I think it's pretty true. It reminds me of a paper I wrote in college for a class on the detention of Japanese-Americans of the West Coast during World War II. Specifically, it was about Topaz, one of the camps they were sent to in desolate central Utah. Seeing the remains of the camp (which were minimal) and thinking of the forced removal of thousands of American citizens and loyal legal aliens reminded me of a song by The Nightwatchman (a.k.a. Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine fame) called No One Left, embedded below. My rough draft was subtitled No One Left, as I recall, and I may have quoted a line or two from the song. As my paper evolved (I love watching drafts do that, especially the interplay between the title and what you actually write, and vice versa), I moved away from the idea so that it wasn't explicitly mentioned, but it remained an inspiration. Just the fact that a song about 9/11 by a member of RATM inspired the beginning of a written document for a BYU class about Japanese-Americans strikes me as a good example of the Everything is a Remix ethos.

Have you ever remixed anything like that? I know my sister once wrote a philosophy paper about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that's a great example. Or what's your favorite movie/music/art remix (preferably non-overt)?

Mormonism and Universalism

2011-01-25T22:17:00.000-05:00

I got my first request! In response to that post about John Lennon's song "Imagine," reader Adam asked about my thoughts on the extent to which Mormonism and Universalism are compatible (see how easy instant fame is? just ask!). I've thought a bit about that as well, and what better place than your own random blog to put some inchoate thoughts into writing and by writing ~~end them~~ clarify them.

First off, the obligatory definition of terms: I'll be using "universalism" to mean "everyone will be saved and get to heaven eventually." Hopefully that's what Adam meant, or he's going to get a whole load of tangent.

The best place I know of to start when talking about Mormonism and universalism is the Vision--more commonly known today as D&C 76*. In Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman discusses this universalist-esque revelation that sends such a tiny portion of people to hell as to almost be Universal in its scope. While Bushman notes--quite well, I think--that it is distinguished from universalist doctrines in important ways, it is also interesting to note the reaction from some members who thought it was too close to salvation for everyone: one member was excommunicated for proclaiming that "the vision was of the Devil came from hel[l]." This is a good reminder of how inclusive our basic doctrine is: virtually every single person ever to have lived on the earth will at least achieve an inheritance in a kingdom that "surpasses all understanding"--this is de facto universalism as far as most of Christianity (and the world) are concerned. So Adam, in a sense, Mormonism and universalism are very compatible, almost even identical. But I have the feeling that's not what you were asking, since that is basic Mormon doctrine that every Sunbeam knows.

Moving into speculation-land, then: can universalist doctrines apply to the really Mormon concepts of heaven? I mean, no Mormon is excited about making it to the Telestial kingdom, so can we reconcile universal salvation in the Celestial kingdom with Mormon doctrine? I propose that it is possible, though I don't make any guarantees that it's true.

There is an idea about the possibility of progressing from one kingdom of glory to another. It is controversial--Bruce R. McConkie called it one of his 7 Deadly Heresies (though he also called evolution one, and that is taught at BYU, so what does that say? :) He decried the idea that God is progressing too, which I also agree with) and Spencer W. Kimball, Joseph Fielding Smith, and George Albert Smith are also on record opposing it.

However... you also have James E. Talmage, Brigham Young (via Wilford Woodruff's journal), Joseph F. Smith, J. Reuben Clark, and B. H. Roberts in favor of it, with the Secretary to the First Presidency issuing a letter (twice) saying that the church has no official position on the question, plus Lorenzo Snow and Harold B. Lee saying things that seem to imply the possibility. (see here for most of the quotes (don't miss the first comment there as well for the Roberts quote) and here for Talmage's softening stance between editions of Articles of Faith).

My point with all these quotes isn't to prove the doctrine either true or false--there are pretty impressive people on both sides--but just to show that both are (I believe) valid options for believing Latter-day Saints.

Again, I don't claim to have a testimony about this issue, but as a generally merciful-leaning type I hope that there is progression available between kingdoms. True, the scriptures at first glance don't seem to support the idea (and even appear to debunk it), but I don't think it's quite that simple. D&C 19 makes it clear that sometimes God lets us believe things to be harsher than they really are so that we will be motivated to do what's right, which is actually beneficial to us. So yes, I do think it's possible that there will be progression between kingdoms and thus universal salvation in the Celestial kingdom. I wouldn't bet on it (a la Pascal's wager) but I hope for it. As it is, I highly encourage everyone to do what they can to get to the Celestial kingdom on the first go-round as it will make you happier sooner at the very least.

What about the sons of perdition? Can we create a true Mormon universalism? Well, D&C 76 describes outer darkness a lot like D&C 19 said hell is often described--that is, sounding like it's endless but really just meaning God-given (and thus very intense and long), so maybe even they'll get out eventually. As verses 44-46 say, only they who are consigned to that state will know the end thereof. As an alternative speculation, Brigham Young once voiced his opinion that the sons of perdition would be recycled (for lack of a better term) into their native element and get another chance at some kind of kingdom!

So Adam, does that answer your question? To sum up: Mormonism definitely includes saving virtually everyone in some version of heaven, and it's possible that it extends that to exaltation as well. Fascinating to think about, but important to remember that we should repent and work out our salvation as best we can today!

P.S. There was a great short story in a recent edition of Dialogue about a guy in the Terrestrial kingdom that touches on this subject. It's called "Eternal Misfit" by Roger Terry. I highly recommend it. If you're super interested, email me and I might be able to email you a pdf of it.

* As an aside, does anyone else hate the new online scripture format? I don't want to scroll through 75 section summaries to get to the link I want.

But if Not - Redux

2011-01-16T16:49:00.000-05:00

Last year for MLK Day, I transcribed Martin Luther King's awesome sermon "But if Not." This year, I've created a youtube video of the audio because there are only snippets of it on there already. Since I think a lot of people looking for MLK speeches and sermons use youtube to search for them, I figured it made sense to put it up there. Unfortunately, I had to split it into 2 videos due to the 15 minute time limit, but here they are:

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! What are you doing to celebrate?

Picture of Jesus

2010-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

I found this article, about a peculiar happening in the aftermath of the Provo Tabernacle fire, interesting. Obviously, it's a nice faith-promoting story that can bolster one's faith in Christ. Alternatively, one could ask why all (or many) of the other pictures of the Savior were fully destroyed (or, in the sarcastic words of one commenter on the Herald's site: "Oooooh. Jesus['] right hand is burned off. What does THAT mean?").

What the events mean to any individual says a lot about the individual but perhaps not as much about whether or not there is a God and whether or not He specifically intervened in this instance.

But I'm most interested in the response from the many Mormons who do see this as a sign of divine protection. I got the picture above from a friend's facebook (I don't know where she got it) who seemed to think it was pretty cool; the woman interviewed at the end of the Herald piece, Cynthia Dayton, got emotional describing the symbolism she saw; others are paraphrased in the story as calling the remains of the painting "remarkable"; it's apparently under "emergency conservation and stabilization" by the LDS church, so I guess someone somewhere in the hierarchy there feels similarly. My question is: why?

I don't mean that question in a patronizing way at all. It really is a cool story and could very well be divine in origin--I am a firm believer in the truth of this church and of Christ in particular, so why not? Weirder things have happened in Christianity. But Mormons traditionally have downplayed (sometimes we've verged on (OK, gone over the line towards) ridiculing) the "icon worship" of other faiths. I have heard Mormons (and, sadly, participated in it myself) speak derisively of Catholics praying to crosses or adherents to the Russian Orthodox faith confusing images of Christ with the actual Christ. Why then do we seem to want to jump at the chance to say that an inkjet print of a painting that shows a caucasian Christ (and which originally portrayed winged angels--something Mormons don't believe in) was protected by a higher power?

I don't think anyone believes that allowing this print to burn would have taken away from God's power or glory or our reverence towards Him. The only possible explanation would be that such an act would be for us, to remind us that God really is in charge of everything. While that could arguably be accomplished through this kind of preservation, it seems like miraculously protecting something that had real value--like a human life, or at least an original, priceless work of art--would be a better way of doing so (though of course the painting-saving method has the benefit of being open to interpretation and thus allowing us to choose faith instead of some rational explanation).

I think though that really, for all our talk of not having idols, of not revering mere images of the Lord (favoring instead to worship God directly), we do impute inherent holiness in our representations of holy people and places. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

We Mormons disagree with Catholics about the nature of the Lord's Supper: they believe it literally becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus, we believe it mattereth not what we eat because it's just a symbol of renewing our covenant to remember Christ and take his name upon us. And while that sounds nice in theory, it is tempered by what we really believe. I heard a funny story about a guy from my home ward who, when he was late to church and missed the sacrament, would just pop into the sacrament preparation room as the Teachers were cleaning up and take a piece of the bread and a cup of the water; he did so half-jokingly, like it wasn't ideal, but still better than nothing, as if the tokens had a spiritual half-life so that even though they weren't quite as potent as right after being blessed they still had some residual spiritual properties to them. Granted, we might not all give the pieces of white bread and plastic cups of water quite this much literal significance, we do give it more than nothing. We do show reverence towards the symbols. Again, this isn't a bad thing.

When we think of the symbols we use as really representing something very powerful, real, and holy, how can we not transfer some of that mysterious force to the symbols themselves? Doing so helps us reify those abstract and unseen concepts, to strengthen our faith in the hoped-for. It's hard to treat symbols of something holy lightly without also treating the holy thing lightly as well; it's really hard to separate our feelings towards one from our feelings towards the other. As long as we don't take it to an extreme and mistake mere symbols and simple images for the truths they convey, I think it can serve a useful purpose.

So while I might be a bit skeptical of how much God's hand held back the fire around the copy of a painting of Jesus in the burning Provo Tabernacle, I can recognize how that symbolism of Christ withstanding fiery darts carries a deeper truth to the hearts of many. Christ really can help us overcome our worries, our problems, our walls caving in, and anything else. If this recent story helps you believe that, then I believe it too.

In closing, listen to this beautiful Ben Harper song and think about how you can appropriately find strength through images any symbols. I especially love the lyric that says "I long to be a picture of Jesus." What a lovely thought, no?

Layers of Culture

2010-11-20T20:59:00.002-05:00

I've been listening recently to Girl Talk's most recent album, All Day (free download). I've heard of Girl Talk, but never sat down and actually listened to any of his stuff before now.

I love the way it's a compilation of layers and layers of culture--and not just recent culture, it samples the Stones, Cyndi Lauper, Nirvana, Madness, Simon & Garfunkel, and tons more. It melds mellow memories of listening to my parents music with the aversion I have to mindless modern pop into something entirely new. The hooks that pop up literally every few seconds trigger fireworks of neurons that don't normally fire up together.

Yes, Girl Talk didn't write any of this music. He just stuck all the songs on top of each other in an amazingly complex, 71-minute amalgamation, olio, mashup, whatever you want to call it. It's genius. It's a cultural fun-house mirror that bends the sounds we thought we knew into something that's alternately amusing, weird, catchy, funky, ridiculous, and grotesque.

Here's a sample:

Feel free to download the whole hour-plus-long album here (legally!), but be aware that it has cuss words strewn liberally throughout.

The Most Beautiful Music You'll Never Hear (Update: Now with 100% more audio)

2010-11-13T22:30:00.000-05:00

OK, you can hear it, technically, but you won't really be able to hear it in the way it should be heard because it's in Estonian and the lyrics are magical. So unless you want to learn a more obscure version of Finnish (or you were lucky enough to be born Estonian!), you'll never hear it.

But I want to share it with you anyways.

The Johanson Brothers, Märt and Jaak, play some awesome folk-inspired Estonian music. One of the songs from their awesome 1993 album Põhja Vahemäng (Nordic Interlude) is called Mu Süda Ärka Üles (Wake Up, My Heart). It's a traditional Estonian folk song and they do a wonderful and powerful arrangement.

You can read the Estonian words here if you'd like, but I'll provide you with a (liberal) translation into English here: (I'm using the words from the song, not from the online version--there are fewer verses and a few minor changes)

Awake, my heart
And praise the Creator in song
Who provides us with all that is good
And bears our burdens too

When I laid down to sleep
I buried my head in father's lap
Satan tried to catch me
But father denied him

"Stay calm," you cried
"My child, I will protect you.
He can't hurt you--
You will yet see the light of day"

Your word has come true
I have seen the new day
No harm came near me
Your might sheltered me

I thank you for this
and honor you greatly
I offer up to you sighings
and holy prayers

May your kindness remain always with me
May my heart be a temple to you
May your word nourish me
and show me the heavenward path

Awake, my heart
And praise the Creator in song
Who provides us with all that is good
And bears our burdens too

Trust me, it's amazing. Here is a youtube video I made with the music playing in the background (if anyone knows of a simple website for recording only audio so that I don't have to have a pointless video with almost no motion, please let me know).

T9 Subspellings

2010-10-14T14:01:00.004-04:00

You know how they say you can’t spell dysfunctional without the word ‘fun’ and other stuff like that? Well, if you run it through the T9 predictive text system, there are other interesting entertaining things that you can’t spell words without: as you try to type a longer word, sometimes a fun variant of the first part of it comes up first. For example, you can’t spell:

Info without God
Mormon without moron
Smart without soap
School without pain

I prefer the theological implications of the first to the second. I think we can all agree, though, that the final pair is the truest of them all.

Things Which, if I Were Only Slightly More Ridiculous, I Would Make a Page You Could 'Like' on Facebook:

2010-10-12T16:20:00.000-04:00

* that random, sharp intake of breath when you remember a really embarassing moment

* the smell of childhood toys

* pouring the last bowl of cereal from a box and not have it be all crappy and in tiny dust-pieces

* opening a big book directly to the exact right page

* having clothes you got from DI outlast stuff you bought from a real store

* scrapes from climbing trees

* finding a sock that you thought got eaten by the dryer in your shirt when you pull it out of the drawer a week later

If any of these actually already are 'likeable' on Facebook, please don't tell me. I have a very fragile faith in humanity at the moment and that kind of blow would likely be fatal to it.

What are the most ridiculous things you can come up with that would still be plausible 'likes' on Facebook?

Happy National Coming Out Day!

2010-10-11T10:43:00.005-04:00

I have a friend who once told me the spiritual trait she was most interested in cultivating (at that time, at least) was honesty. She wanted to be more honest with herself about what she did and didn't believe, and with her friends and family about who she was. Given the title of this post, you might assume I'm talking about a lesbian, but nope, she's straight. She just wanted to be more sincere and real. I think that is an awesome idea, truly something we should all be working on more. And I think it goes along great with National Coming Out Day, which is today!

Whether it's that you're gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or straight; whether it's that you're Mormon and you're worried about your co-workers finding out or that you're an atheist and you're worried about your co-workers finding out; whether it's that you actually love musicals or country music or ballet despite years of professing otherwise; whether it's that you secretly hate football or romantic comedies or fast & testimony meeting or your family's favorite board game in spite of social pressure to do otherwise; whether it's that you feel like you have a facade up when you act social and you're afraid people will find out that you're really not very outgoing at all but you can't change your public identity *now*!--WHATEVER it may be that you don't feel is sincere about yourself... come to grips with it today. Face it head on. It might be something that you want to embrace and tell other people about. Or it might be something that you want to work on improving but that you can't address until you accept that it's there. The first step is knowing yourself better and introducing more of your real self to the other people in your life.

Be honest with yourself. What are your flaws? What are your secret talents? Who do you have a secret crush on? (Married friends: disregard that last one) Let the appropriate people know. That might mean you just need to tell yourself, it might mean tell your best friend, it might mean tell your family, it might mean make it your facebook status in ALL CAPS, it might mean mailing it in to PostSecret. You know what's right for this secret for you right now.

And to bring this down from the wholly abstract and impersonal, I'll come out about an aspect of my personality I haven't really shared much of publicly: I'm really bad at sharing my inner thoughts and feelings with people. I always say I want a confidant, but I never take advantage of opportunities to have one. It would require actually confiding things.

So there's something for me to work on. How are you going to come out more fully today? For best results, it should be something you're scared to tell people. Do it anyways!

Pumped for Church

2010-10-10T18:47:00.002-04:00

In high school, guys on the football team would listen to System of a Down or Metallica or something on headphones really loud before a game to get really pumped up.

Today, I listened to the Hallelujah Chorus right before church on my big fatty headphones with the volume turned way up. It was epic. I recommend it highly.

Jujitsu Faith

2010-09-26T11:38:00.005-04:00

This is something I wrote a little while ago for EugeneEngland.org. You can read the England essay this post is about here (pdf).

It might just be my memory adding details to make the story better, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to read the first Eugene England essay that I did. At least, it wasn’t assigned reading. I found it in a fine anthology called “Readings for Intensive Writers” that I had to buy for my freshman honors writing class at BYU in 2003–04 and, in a move that I’m sure would have made Gene proud, I soon started reading all the non-required essays it contained. Wendell Berry, Flannery O’Connor, Langston Hughes, Hugh Nibley, Lowell Bennion—the book was loaded with original, beautiful, moving writing. But none of those authors were the reason I later brought that book along for the plane ride to the MTC (again with the rebelliousness: what was I doing as a set-apart missionary reading non-Church approved materials?!). I brought that anthology along with my scriptures and Talmage’s Jesus the Christ because it contained Eugene England’s most famous essay, “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” It was the last non-correlated thing I read before entering the MTC (I knew they’d search out any contraband there, so I gave the book to my dad to take back home with him) and it served me well throughout those two years and beyond.
I wanted then and still want now to have the kind of faith that Gene talked about in that essay: a jujitsu faith that turns frustrations into patience, idiots and dullards into near-Gods, enemies into beloved fellowmen, and planks we must walk into springboards to Christlike natures. Gene is not naive; he doesn’t gloss over problems with the institutional LDS Church in the essay, which is why it is so powerful. He fully acknowledges faults and shortcomings—perhaps even plays them up a bit!—but then owns them and turns them to good. In fact, the bigger the problem, the more powerful a force for good it seems to become in his hands. If there is a more Godlike attribute, to be able to create light from darkness, I don’t know it. Gene had that Christlike ability to see—and more importantly, to cultivate—the good in people and situations.
The contrast Gene draws in that essay between his heady, academic years at Stanford and his more service-filled experiences as Branch President in Minnesota is a useful one for me. It’s easy for me to get bent out of shape around theoretical questions about doctrine and politics, but Gene is constantly reminding me about those lonely members on the plains of the heartland in my wards: the overwhelmed Relief Society president who would rather talk about how to convey the power of the atonement than about patriarchy; the gay member who just wants to meet faithful male role models, not think any more today about any injustices—perceived or actual—directed towards him; the new kid who just needs to be introduced to some other kids who he’ll get along with. The beauty of Gene’s work, of course, is that he tackles both the theoretical and the practical problems, but he never forgets that the immediate, real-life needs of his sisters and brothers come first.
I could ramble on and on about my gospel crush on Gene, but the most important thing I can say about “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel” is that it has helped me look for and find the atonement of Christ in my experiences with the Church. It has done that by giving me a framework to view negatives as opportunities. Just as Christ’s disciples came to understand that the pain they felt on that bleak sabbath when their Lord was buried in a tomb was ultimately necessary, Gene has shown me a way to appreciate disappointments and problems in the organization I love the most, to hang on even when it’s painful, and to turn the magnitude of obstacles to my advantage.

Do you have any favorite Eugene England essays/memories?

2010-09-19T21:00:00.005-04:00

God created the world. Mormons understand that to mean that God the Father* (who I'll refer to by the title Elohim) directed the pre-mortal Christ (Jehovah) who actually did the creating. This sounds fine to me, and I believe it.

Except the delegation continues, as we also believe the pre-mortal Adam (Michael) assisted in the creation as well. Further, while I don't know what the official status of it is, I know that a common LDS belief is that we all helped, to some extent, in creating the earth. I think this is a cool doctrine. I like it and I believe it.

The atonement is seen, I think, as a very unilateral thing in general Mormon thought. Jesus took upon himself all our sins, guilt, pain, sorrows, and death, and overcame them all. The only thing we did to contribute was to sin or feel sorrow--not very helpful :) We can apply Christ's atonement by repenting and forsaking our sins, then God will remember them no more and we'll be cleansed. I love this doctrine and I believe it.

I wonder if there's something akin to our deeper understanding of the creation that could also apply to the atonement. Can the prophetic imagery of plural "saviours on mount zion" refer to more than just baptism for the dead? (I'm not saying it doesn't apply to temple work--it does--but I think there's more too)

I love how Abinadi teaches that when Isaiah says that Christ will "see his seed" when his soul is made "an offering for sin," that his seed includes all prophets and all the people who have looked to Christ for a remission of their sins (Mosiah 14-15). Abinadi, in effect, says that Christ saw us, his disciples, while undergoing the atonement--and the inference is that seeing us helped him go through with it. Knowing that billions of people had been waiting for the atonement for millennia, and also that billions more would in the future depend on it, was a source of power to him at that time of greatest need. That can motivate us to be worthy of that trust, to live better, more divine lives.

Further still, I think of Father Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov. He said "Each one of us is guilty before everybody for everything, and I am more guilty than anybody else." And again, "There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God."

I'm not saying that we can effect The Atonement ourselves, any more than we could create an entire world in our pre-mortal state. I know that Jesus was the only one who could redeem us all and save us from the effects of sin and death. But is it not possible that Christ can ask us to become co-creators with him again, acting under his direction, but this time in the creation of a salvation of the world? Are we not taught to be even as he is, to act as he would act, to stand with those in need of comfort as he did?

I believe that as we 'take upon ourselves' other people's sins, sorrows, and grievances, we can also bear one another's burdens, if only by showing them some small sample of what Christ can do to lighten our yokes. We should feel a measure of pain when other people sin; it should wound our souls like it wounded Christ's; we are our brother's keeper. We should work to gain greater empathy by placing ourselves in the shoes of the sinner and the sinned-against. That is what Christ-like love is. In turn, we should look to our family, friends, confidants, in our own times of need. Christ takes our burdens upon himself, and I think he often gives us people who will show us a portion of what he is doing so that the reality of it can really sink in for us.

We can extend the immediate effects of the atonement into our lives and the lives of those around us. This seems to me like a wonderfully empowering and challenging way to apply the atonement in our lives. Certainly we can in no degree discount the necessity of Christ and his perfect sacrifice, but no longer do we need to see it as a wholly unilateral act. We can see it as an act in which we can play a part as well.

This can easily be taken too far, as an invitation for endless guilt that we are responsible for everyone's sins, but I think that when taken in moderation, it can be a lovely idea. I like it and I believe it.

*I have no doubt but that Heavenly Mother was included in this direction, and that Eve and other daughters of God helped throughout the process too.

C-SPAN: Will you become a human being so I can marry you?

2010-09-13T20:33:00.002-04:00

So if you haven't noticed yet, I'm kind of* nerdy. Going along with that, my three favorite TV channels are C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3. One of the proudest moments of my life was when whoever my cable provider was in Provo took C-SPAN2 off the air and I called in and got them to put it back on. It's a dramatic story, remind me to tell you about it next time I see you in person.

But this specific PDAific blog post about C-SPAN comes from me just randomly flipping through them while eating dinner today and seeing that next up was video of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf speaking in NYC. His talk was absolutely wonderful, informed, compassionate, strong, and warm. I recommend watching/listening here.

Where else can you get extended coverage of newsmakers speaking in their own words, without a filter? Nowhere. C-SPAN should be your favorite channel too. Unless you don't like news, in which case you should hate it.

p.s. C-SPAN: You really need to make your videos embeddable, c'mon!

*Extremely

Humor in the Book of Mormon

2010-09-11T09:46:00.004-04:00

If there's one element of our appreciation of the Book of Mormon we need to improve on, it's looking at it as a source for good humor as well as inspiration. Here are a few of my favorite Book of Mormon-related humorous scriptures/anecdotes.

My favorite funny verse in the whole book has to be 3 Nephi 3:13: "Yea, he sent a proclamation among all the people, that they should gather together their women, and their children, their flocks and their herds, and their substance, save it were their land, unto one place." I obviously have no idea what was going through Mormon's mind when he was abridging this history, but I really hope he was just getting kind of tired of summing up years of history so he threw in some sarcasm: "But just to be clear, they didn't gather their land together in one place."

One of my MTC teachers told us about a meeting they had with an investigator who was trying to decide if he wanted to get baptized. My teacher was with a new missionary for the day who didn't speak Estonian too well, but who nevertheless decided to speak up and share a powerful scripture to help this man decide to exercise faith and trust in God and join His church. Unfortunately, instead of 1 Nephi 3:7, he opened to 3 Nephi 3:7, and handed it to the investigator to read aloud. My MTC teacher was understandably shocked when the investigator started reading: "Or in other words, yield yourselves up unto us, and unite with us and become acquainted with our secret works, and become our brethren that ye may be like unto us—not our slaves, but our brethren and partners of all our substance." Not exactly the message the eager missionary meant to send.

A friend once pointed out a goof by Abinadi. Mosiah 12:1 reads, in pertinent part, "Abinadi came among them in disguise, that they knew him not, and began to prophesy among them, saying: Thus has the Lord commanded me, saying--Abinadi, go and prophesy unto this my people." Abinadi, you totally just blew your own cover!

My last example is from a wonderful little remembrance of lessons learned from Hugh Nibley by Boyd Petersen. I'll just quote from Petersen's remarks:

Hugh often stated that "if you take yourself seriously, you won't take the gospel seriously and the other way around." One of my favorite examples of this comes from Curtis Wright, who was a graduate assistant for Hugh. One time Wright came into Hugh's office and found him there absorbed in reading the Book of Mormon and laughing. Wright asked Hugh what was so funny, and Hugh replied that he had found an error in the Book of Mormon. "You did, huh?" Wright responded. "Yes," Hugh stated and handed the scriptures to Wright pointing to Alma 42:10 which says that "man is carnal, sensual and devilish." "What's the matter with that?" demanded Wright. Hugh responded, "They left out stupid."

Do you have any good memories of laughing related to the Book of Mormon? I believe strongly that as we look for humor in the Book of Mormon, we'll appreciate it even more as a book to live by.

Long set-up spoonerisms

2010-09-09T11:54:00.002-04:00

Marley was a good kid, taken all together. His parents weren't around much and didn't show much feeling towards him one way or the other, so he hung around other kids' houses after school a lot. Well, mostly the Chans' house. Mike Chan was his age and their areas of troublemaking didn't overlap too much so they mostly stuck to typical, harmless stuff. What's more, Mr. and Mrs. Chan loved Marley and loved to have him around. It was a running joke that they'd pretty much adopted him.

But one day Marley messed up big time. We're talking called in to the principal's office, cops consulted (though they didn't have to come), parents summoned, the whole nine yards. When Marley's dad, Mr. Brown, finally showed up--he couldn't be torn away from work until an hour and a half after the school called--he was greeted by a red-eyed Marley. After speaking with administrators, he took Marley home and went back to work; didn't say much, but you could tell he was upset--though it's unclear whether it was because Marley had been so bad or because he had been interrupted at his big important job.

Marley wasn't too worried about his dad's reaction, or his mom's later that night. What he really dreaded was what the Chans would say. So he didn't go over there for a whole week. He avoided Mike at school. Mr. and Mrs. Chan were getting worried and pressured Mike into getting Marley to come over again. Finally Mike cornered Marley before school and got him to promise to come over that afternoon. There would be fresh-baked cookies.

Marley walked very slowly the four blocks north and one block west to the Chans'. That last left turn was especially hard as the modest one-story came into view. But he did it. He missed the Chans too.

It didn't take long for Mrs. Chan's motherly affections to get Marley to cough up what happened. They were surprised but knew that Marley was sorry and that it wouldn't happen again; they quickly and completely forgave him. But he still wasn't any happier. They asked what the matter now was, and his answer tore at their heart-strings:

"I feel like I've dirtied your family's reputation. People almost think of me as a Chan because they know you guys take care of me and now that they've seen what I've done they'll think less of you. That's what really eats me up inside! I'm a terrible member of your family!"

The room was quiet, nobody quite knew how to console him for a moment. But Mr. Chan was able to give voice to what all of them were thinking:

"You're a good Chan, Marley Brown."

Constrained Theology

2010-09-08T12:12:00.004-04:00

I went to a Bible study session last night with the school's Christian club. It was a lot of fun, for many reasons. One thing that I particularly enjoyed was how it forced me to engage in what I'll call "constrained theology."

This idea is a riff on constrained writing, where certain things are forbidden or a pattern is enforced. One of my favorites examples is haiku: you're constrained to write a poem three lines long in a 5-7-5 syllable pattern.

The Bible study was constrained theology because when we were talking about how Paul didn't get his faith just from a vision I couldn't bring up Alma 5:46. When we discussed how we receive inspiration I couldn't bring up D&C 9:8. And so on.

But of course, that didn't mean I couldn't participate, I just had to constrain my scriptural citations to the Bible. It reminded me of James Talmage in Jesus the Christ--he didn't have the Joseph Smith translation available to him (or at least he didn't trust it if he did--the LDS church was worried the RLDS church might have made alterations to the manuscripts when they published it) so he had to deal with all the tough passages in the New Testament as they were. He ends up doing a wonderful job interpreting them honestly and persuasively, but his understandings are now somewhat obsolete because we now just look at the JST footnote and don't struggle over those hard passages. But the point is that because Talmage was constrained, he wrestled with the tough questions and still came out on top. I fear that we look today too easily to "easy" answers that clean up all the possible contradictions or paradoxes in scripture, the JST being just one small example*.

I believe there's a lot of value in the wrestle. Constraining myself to using only the Bible to support my views was a good time to remember that. There are still tons and tons of examples to be drawn from the Bible to answer the questions I mentioned above, but because there are such pat answers in other scriptures we Mormons tend to overlook them. It was great to look at the Bible in a new and more independent light last night and remember that there's a lot of answers in there that I don't know as well as the answers I know in the Book of Mormon and D&C. Hopefully I can work on getting to know all scriptures better and also remember not to let a simple answer be the end of a difficult question.

* Not that I'm against using the JST, but I think it should be one factor to be weighed in understanding a verse, not a complete replacement for the original verse we have.

Why I love Twitter

2010-09-07T18:59:00.006-04:00

Note: This is not meant as an argument for you to love Twitter too. It's just a statement of fact.

This morning, a friend of mine tweeted "I like honey. I like nuts. I like cheerios. I like honey nut cheerios." I can just imagine him walking down the stairs with a simple, happy smile on his face, chanting this little mantra in his head, looking forward to starting off a productive day with a delicious bowl of a favorite cereal. A typically meaningless tweet, yes?

But then, not three minutes later, he tweeted, simply "Somebody stole the milk."

The heartbreak! The horror, the horror! The juxtaposition of these two, simple statements made me laugh out loud at the bitter irony of life's little moments.

And to think, I never ever would have known about this without the stupid invention of Twitter. My life would just be a little less colorful today. So I am grateful today for useless inventions, because sometimes they end up being the vehicle for a bit of happiness to come into my life. Three cheers for Twitter!

The Book of Memento

2010-09-05T11:52:00.002-04:00

One of the problems I have with reading the scriptures consistently is that if I know the plot, my mind tends to switch to autopilot and skim. It's very difficult for me to concentrate on words I've read dozens of times.

So recently I started the Book of Mormon again, but from the end reading backwards. I'm into 3rd Nephi now and I can report that it's going quite well. It definitely breaks up the monotony of beginning with the same story every time (though as I've mentioned before, I think that shared experience has a larger meaning) and smacks of Memento, the deliciously clever movie where you see all the scenes in reverse chronological order. Ether was especially interesting because it's such a microcosm of the whole Book of Mormon--ending with a bloodbath and seeing how it came to that, chapter by chapter. It's like flashbacks that fill in the motives behind the climax you already witnessed. I like it.

How have you studied the scriptures in unique ways?

Being a Burden

2010-09-04T11:51:00.000-04:00

A (virtual only, unfortunately) friend wrote a blog post recently that struck home for me. It concerned depression, which I've mentioned once or twice before. The part of his post that really struck me was this line:

Lately I've been having dreams of suicide. I don't mean to scare anyone because I'm not on the verge of doing anything rash during my waking hours.

I've had similar feelings in the past*. If you've ever contemplated in a distant way or had a dream about suicide, who are you supposed to tell about it? It seems like if you mention it to anyone they'll get super overly worried about you and semi-flip out. (This is assuming you're nowhere near actually attempting to take your life--if you're ever seriously thinking about suicide, tell somebody--anybody!--about it and let them help you.) So if it's not a really serious thing, but still something to worry about (and I believe any thought/dream of suicide is), how do you go about telling someone about it?

It just feels so taboo to mention if you've ever considered the idea, however remotely. It seems like it would turn you into a burden that your friends have to worry about non-stop. So I am proud of Abelard for being brave enough to mention it and help break down those fears. I think more people would feel better about sometimes feeling that way (as opposed to letting that fact just drag them down further) if they knew other people felt that way too. Another reason Postsecret is so awesome. The end.

*I'm doing quite well right now, though, so nobody need worry.

Reconsidering Gender, Part V - Gender is Eternal

2010-09-01T21:26:00.004-04:00

The Proclamation on the Family states that "gender is an essential characteristic of premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." This isn't in conflict at all with the thoughts I've been outlining on gender as an important part of our identities, but one that isn't always so easy to fit into strictly defined categories with clearly delineated boundaries.

The sentence before that potentially presents a bit more trouble. It states that everyone "is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents." Seems like we have a solid binary there, though interestingly enough one drawn on a spiritual and not necessarily physical level (not sure if that difference ends up being important, mind you, but it could be). One possible reconciliation is that this statement reflects the culture it was written in and isn't meant to convey the ultimate understanding of gender. Or it could be referring just to biological sex and mean something like the generally accepted biological definition of male, which is anyone who has at least one Y chromosome and everyone else is considered female. Or maybe I'm just completely on the wrong path--I certainly wouldn't discount that theory.

It feels like getting down into the details of harmonizing less rigidly binary theories of gender with Mormon theology is speculation on top of speculation. While one level is interesting enough, it seems to me that adding layers of admitted speculation on top of each other is just building on sandy foundations. So, on that note, I'll more or less punt on the issue that was supposed to be the conclusion of this series. Lame, I know. Sorry. Just like a man to run out on his responsibilities though, isn't it?

Reconsidering Gender, Part IV - Continu-What?

2010-08-31T20:35:00.001-04:00

Part I - Introduction
Part II - Binary Breakdown
Part III - A Gender Continuum

This is the part where things get sketchy and especially tentative. It's always easier to tear something down than to build something else in its place, right? (But knocking down the Lego buildings was always my favorite part!) Anyways, here are my thoughts attempting to not just throw stones at traditional gender theory, but to contribute some positive ideas as well.

Gender could be thought of as something like the gender continuum but with lots of different continua instead of just one (note: this is your cool plural of the day). Instead of placing people's gender on a single continuum with masculine at one end and feminine at the other, we have one continuum for each trait we typically associate with gender. Yes, that is a lot of continua. So there's a compassion continuum, a nurturing continuum, a competitiveness continuum, a hairiness continuum, a likelihood to cry continuum, a who-you're-attracted to continuum, a chromosomal continuum, and so on. There are continua for emotional, physical, mental and many other kinds of characteristics. Everyone has a position on each of these continua, and you can think of gender as the conglomeration of all your continua. Men might tend to have positions that tend to one side on certain continua while women tend to have positions on the other side of those continua, and some of the continua might be gender-neutral (at least, in Western culture--things like small feet would be seen as more feminine in China in previous centuries, for example).

This would make it clear that the genders "woman" and "man" are vague and fuzzy at times, and that's OK because this concept of gender isn't an either/or choice. Ultimately, one can simply self-identify as one or the other, or neither, or come up with some other name for another general type of position on these continua. Our gender doesn't determine who we are or what we have to look or act like, rather our gender follows from who we are.

In this theory, traditional gender becomes a short-hand for classifying ourselves, not unlike saying "I'm outgoing" or "I love reading," but not meant to define us particularly rigidly. We happen to know that most outgoing people like parties whereas introverts don't, but it's also OK for an outgoing person to not be comfortable in large groups. People who love reading generally read a lot of books, but some might just really enjoy reading every once in a while and that doesn't make them a hater of reading. So a woman could say she isn't much of the nurturing/mothering type and that wouldn't lessen her womanhood. She would just be a person who happens to have one of her continua positions closer to the stereotypical "man" side, but that wouldn't be weird because we would all realize that no one has all their continua weighted towards just one way. We could better celebrate people as individuals--yes, the words "man" and "woman" would still be useful, but they wouldn't be thought to completely describe someone, they would be understood as just a first clue into who that woman or man is in her or his totality.

I believe we as a culture have already started to think of gender in this way. The old stereotype that girls don't like sports is fading fast, for example, and guys who can cook are sexy nowadays (I wish I could cook!). There is still a lot of baggage left from the old, rigid, binary gender way of thinking, though. It's still seen as strange, in my opinion, for a dad to stay at home and raise the kids while the woman works for a living. Granted, I'm now kind of conflating gender with gender roles, but the general point stands. People are starting to have less definite conceptions of gender, and I think it's moving towards something like this gender continua theory I've laid out.

What are your thoughts? Does that make any sense? (I really would like to know, it mostly makes sense to me, in my head, but I'm not sure I communicated any of my ideas well at all) Where does this framework fall short? Is it coherent?

In the last installment in this series, I'll try to make sense of this more complex understanding of gender within a Mormon framework.

Reconsidering Gender, Part III - A Gender Continuum?

2010-08-29T18:27:00.004-04:00

Part I - Introduction

Part II - Binary Breakdown

The first instinct, for me at least, when considering that a simple binary model of gender is insufficient, was to just say "Hey, we'll just make a gender continuum!" The thought here is that you would have two polar opposite points on a continuum--archetypical man and archetypical woman--and a person's gender can be located anywhere along that scale in between those extremes.

This might be helpful for those "hard cases": someone born with ambiguous genitalia might be right about in the middle of the continuum, effeminate men would be (as the adjective implies) closer to the middle but still on the "man" side, and other cases might be resolved similarly. Case closed!

Not so fast, though. Who decides what the extremes are? As my picture shows, is manly man required to be super-buff and a protector while a woman has to cook and care for dozens of kids?Are those really what men and women fundamentally are? This is just the same problem as the basic binary model: we still can't define what must be there for a woman to be a woman or for a man to be a man. A single woman who has no children cannot in any rational way be called less of a woman than the mother of ten.

Even if we could define the prototypical man and woman, a continuum is still too limiting because it assumes that you can rank every person as either more manly or more womanly than anyone else, and that is just ridiculous--if two men are identical except one loves football and has a high voice while the other loves opera and has a low voice, how do you rank them based on their differing attributes? They send such mixed messages! It seems pretty clear to me that a continuum model for gender is only slightly better than a simple binary model. So if that doesn't work, what will? I have a possible idea, but it will have to wait for Part IV.

Reconsidering Gender, Part II - Binary Breakdown

2010-08-27T21:33:00.007-04:00

Part I - Introduction

Newton, interestingly enough, died in Middlesex--an apt transition into why it appears that a binary approach to gender is insufficient in general.

I’ve lately been trying to define the difference between the genders (beyond just chromosomes or genitalia) and it’s really, really hard to say that “All men are ____” or “All women are _____.” Statistically, you can make arguments (brain size, approach to problem-solving, tendencies to listen or sympathize or interrupt, etc) about the differences between genders, but I can’t think of any characteristic that is fundamental to either masculinity or femininity. There are always some men or women who don’t have a certain trait stereotypical for their gender but who are still very much men or women. It gets confusing because we, as laypeople, sometimes use 'gender' synonymously with one's physical sex and other times we mean something like personality types.

I’ve asked a few friends if they can think of any characteristic that all men must have or that all women must have in order to be a man or a woman. So far, we haven’t come up with anything. By all means, if you can think of anything that every woman does (nurture? listen well?) or every man does (be aggressive? provide for a family financially?), I’d love to hear your thoughts. Suffice it to say, though, that when you get down to it, the two categories of man and woman can’t really be defined beyond “I know it when I see it” except, again, perhaps statistically. A stay-at-home dad who is 5’4’’ without much body hair or muscle mass can still have a deep bass voice and be a wonderful father to his children. And someone who is tall, muscular, and aggressive can be no less a woman than a demure home-schooling mother of nine.

This is why I feel like binary gender theory is incomplete. It is an impossible-to-fully-define shorthand into which we shoehorn the people we meet. And that fundamental flaw is apparent even before we get into the hard cases. For example, what do we make of gay people? Is a man who is attracted to men less of a man? I don’t think so. Further still, what of hermaphrodites or people with significant intersex characteristics? Or people who have all the physical characteristics of a female but have always felt that, deep down, they were a man? Yes, such people are a relatively small minority, but we can’t just ignore them when it comes to gender (or anything else, of course) any more than we can ignore the fact that stars are not where they should be during a solar eclipse according to Newton. Where do these people fit in the binary gender model? They don’t.

Can we find a model of gender that accommodates those who don't fit comfortably in the binary system? In part III, I'll take a first stab at just that.

P.S. For further thoughts on why a simple binary system causes problems, see this recent post at Mormon Matters.

Reconsidering Gender, Part I

2010-08-27T21:10:00.005-04:00

In 11th grade, I took physics. We learned how to calculate everything from how far a rock would fall in one second if thrown with an initial downward velocity of 2 m/s to what the escape velocity is for the earth. We used equations first published by Isaac Newton in 1687. Those laws of physics were good enough to get men to the moon--sadly, they apparently weren’t good enough to get women to the moon, but that’s another post. My point is: Newton’s laws are powerful because they work. So they are true, right?

Well, technically... no, they aren’t true. It turns out they are just approximations of what’s actually happening. The reason they work so well is that unless you’re getting anywhere near the speed of light (186,000+ miles/second) the difference between what Newton predicted and what actually happens (a.k.a. what Einstein predicted in 1905) is so small that we didn’t even have the technology to detect a difference until the last half century or so, much less have any expectation to find any discrepancies. My point is: Newton’s laws are true for all practical intents and purposes except in the most extreme circumstances. They almost always work.

For centuries, Western culture has operated under a binary model of gender: woman and man, and never the twain shall meet. But what if this is approach is akin to the Newtonian model of physics? Clearly the man-woman dichotomy is useful. It helps us make sense of our lives and the people around us in a myriad of ways. But there seem to be circumstances where it begins to feel more like an approximation than the final say.

So with that introduction, I’m going to toss around some tentative ideas about gender. It’s an attempt to (begin to) lay out a theory of gender that does to the binary theory what Einstein’s theory of relativity did to Newton’s theory: replace it in theory but yield to it for simplicity in almost all cases, because I think a binary understanding of gender almost always works, too.

Disclaimer(s): these ideas definitely are not set in stone, I don’t know how much (if at all) I believe them, they might not even be very original (I haven’t done very much research into theories of gender), but I figured I’d blog about them. Because what is the internet if not a place to sound off on half-baked pet theories? So this is Part I of a series of posts: watch this space for the actual substantive thoughts soon. In upcoming installments I'll talk about why I think the gender binary fails to capture all of the human experience, what gender could look like beyond the either/or we have now, and maybe even how it intersects with Mormonism. I hope you'll chime in along the way with your thoughts, emendations, or remonstrances.

Two Much Honor

2010-08-26T17:55:00.006-04:00

UVA has an honor code and I like it a lot. One interesting thing about it, beyond the actual code of conduct, is that it is entirely student run: students wrote the honor code (and can amend it), students report possible violations, students investigate the reports, students advocate for defendants and prosecute cases, and students make the decision about guilt or innocence (and if you're found guilty of cheating, it's automatic dismissal from the University). This strikes me as a great example of Joseph Smith's famous dictum about how to govern such a large body of people: "I teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves."

At first I was sad that BYU doesn't follow a similar method. [Of course, the BYU honor code was instigated by students and originally was based exclusively on academic honesty, Ernest Wilkinson was the one who appropriated (some might say hijacked) it into an administration-run system that expanded to include things ranging from modesty to advocating homosexuality as moral.] But then I thought about it and I think I actually prefer it the way it is now.

To some extent, and in an idealized world, I do wish BYU's honor code were run by students. But... I also worry that if we handed that duty off to students today it wouldn't work too well in practice, in fact I would argue that in many ways it would be more strict than it is today. I mean, I could just see too many people who are the hardcore-"honor" types taking over the enforcement and not showing any mercy on people who leave a person of the opposite gender's apartment at 12:15, or on people who support civil unions for gays, or who wear tights underneath a skirt that doesn't reach their knees. While I admittedly haven't had any personal run-ins with the honor code office under the current regime, I would think administrators, who have had a lot of experience with people in bishoprics and relief societies and wards in general, would have a bit more mercy on things.

Or maybe I'm way off.

If it were up to you, would you have BYU's honor code enforced entirely by students? Are my fears of honor fundamentalists taking control and ruling with an iron grasp paranoid?

What your Subconscious Knows

2010-08-23T10:01:00.004-04:00

I've started law school at the University of Virginia and, among many crazy-cool things going on, I wanted to briefly blog about the doors here. Specifically, the doors to a big inner courtyard at the law school.

The law school is a big square of four connected halls with a nice big pleasant courtyard in the middle of it all. The weird thing is that the fire marshal has designated the courtyard as "interior" space, so in the case of a fire you would have to leave the courtyard (through the building) and go to the "real" outside. What this means from a practical perspective is that the doors between the courtyard and the building open into the building.

Now, I know that doesn't sound like a big deal. We're all used to glancing at doors we're approaching and determining if they have a push-bar or pull-handles and acting accordingly. We don't even think about it, so who cares which way these doors open? I've found that my subconscious overrides that action when the doors in consideration are doors to the outside. The concept that, if I'm exiting a building, I can just push the doors and they'll open is deeply embedded in my mind. But in this case, even though I'm exiting the building into the courtyard, the doors open the opposite of what I would have expected, and I often find myself trying to push when I exit or pull when I enter and looking like a moron.

All of this is to say that your subconscious mind knows a lot more than you think it does. I don't have anything more profound to say than that, but I think it's cool and worth being reminded of.

Old Time (Mormon) Religion

2010-08-11T16:53:00.007-04:00

Give me that old time religion

Oh give me that old time religion

It's good enough for me!

You may have heard the gospel standard "Old-Time Religion." It's an ode to the spiritual devotion of previous generations of Christians ("It was good enough for my mother/my father/Paul and Silas/the Hebrew children" etc). Setting aside possible qualms about its inherently fundamentalist nature, it's a wonderful song and I love it.

Pete Seeger wasn't big on organized religion, but he didn't let that stop him from performing (his own version of) a classic. He just pretended to be nostalgic for equally ancient religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. He sang it with verses like "Let us pray with Aphrodite / Let us pray with Aphrodite / She wears that see-through nightie / And it's good enough for me!" and "We will pray with Zarathustra / We'll pray just like we used ta / I'm a Zarathustra booster / And it's good enough for me!" and "We will pray with those old druids / They drink fermented fluids / Waltzing naked through the woo-ids / And it's good enough for me!" Egyptian, pagan, and new-age religions are also included. It's a wonderful parody. Here's some guy on youtube performing one version:

So what would a Seegeresque Mormon version--one that gently pokes fun at our tendencies to lionize early leaders and only tell our best history--sound like? I've come up with two verses so far:

We will pray with Joseph Smith / Say monogamy's a myth / We'll get married--who knows with / And it's good enough for me!

We will pray with Brother Brigham / We'll embrace the curse of Ham / And believe that God is Adam / And it's good enough for me!

I'd love to hear any verses you all could come up with!

Note: This isn't meant to be disrespectful or antagonistic towards any person or the institutional church--in fact, I'll bear testimony of the LDS Church, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and its current prophet-president, Thomas Monson, to anyone who will listen. It is rather meant to be taken both as a celebration that we are a living church and as a reminder that church leaders and members haven't always done things that are easy for us to understand and wholly accept. That doesn't make the church untrue, it makes it colorful!

1000 Awesome Things #47.3

2010-07-28T08:04:00.004-04:00

If you haven't heard of the blog 1000 Awesome Things, well, you should have.

As a tribute to that fun idea, I offer my own awesome thing: Walking over a stream using a fallen tree.

Sure, you could walk through the water--it's not deep, and the nice cool water might even feel refreshing--but soggy shoes are not fun to walk back in. Using nature's bridge lets you feel like a tightrope walker, perched perilously above a raging river (or restful rivulet, as the case may be). You are getting to the other side safe and dry, and best of all you're doing it in a way that is

AWESOME!

Minesweeper, or My Personal Brand of Nerdiness

2010-07-25T22:15:00.004-04:00

Since early June, I've now played 1000 games of Minesweeper on my new laptop on the expert difficulty level. That's an average of about 20 games per day. And that doesn't count the games I've played while on conference calls at work, during each of which I can probably get through 20 games easy. So yes, I am addicted.

But I love it. I love Minesweeper because it's a wonderfully maddening mix of logic and luck, NP-completeness and silliness, pointlessness and the opportunity to win a million dollars.

And it's an addiction of choice: I blogged once before about giving up Minesweeper for a year. It wasn't too hard, though I did pick up a decent Freecell habit (laced with occasional Solitaire) to compensate. And once New Year's Eve was here, I was right back in it. The point is: I really can quit any time I want.

While I like to see how fast I can beat a board, my main goal is to win. As often as possible. So if I get in a complicated situation, I'll take time to stop and think about it. I love the never-ending new situations that come up. To the right is a recent finish

that I liked a lot. There are two right answers for which mine to click, and two wrong answers; the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

Apparently, I'm in a minority in caring about winning percentage. In the (minuscule) world of Minesweeper enthusiasts, it seems like the decision to keep track of win percentage is ridiculed in favor of obscure stats that tell you how fast you can go. I certainly couldn't find anyone via Google who kept track of best win percentages. But I am quite proud of my 33% (339 wins in 1000 games) on expert. (I was this close to getting to a 34% winning percentage, I'll have you know, but it just wasn't meant to be.) But fortunately the two goals--speed and winning percentage--aren't completely mutually exclusive. My best time is 80 seconds, which ain't too shabby.

It would be interesting to try to figure out what the maximum winning percentage is in the limit. There are a lot of games that come down to guessing, but I've been able to keep steady at about 33% for a good while, so I feel pretty comfortable proposing that as a lower bound. And while I certainly don't make optimum moves all the time, and human error creeps in for sure, I don't think a winning percentage too much higher than that is feasible in the long term. Maybe low 40's. That will be my first question when I get to heaven.

And thus concludes my random celebration of a beyond-meaningless milestone. Please share any Minesweeper anecdotes or thoughts on obscure addictions.

Poll results

2010-07-23T15:15:00.004-04:00

Well my recent little poll of readers on whether women will someday get the priesthood resulted in a 76% majority (16 votes) for Yes, with 24% (5) saying No. I was a little surprised that my blog readership slanted quite that far to the liberal side, but not too much. I only wish either side would have left a comment or two explaining their thinking.

Imagine No Religion

2010-07-20T09:45:00.005-04:00

I know a lot of religious people who don't like the song 'Imagine' by John Lennon because of its message. It's just an exhortation to imagine a universe without heaven, hell, personal property, nations, or religion... I can't imagine where the problem is!

My response is based on a Joseph Smith quote that I can't verify* and can only paraphrase. It goes something like "Whenever I am criticized, I sit down and look inside myself and see if there is any kernel of fault in me that may have prompted the complaint. And more often than not, I do find a fault in myself and can go to the offended and apologize." Lennon's dream in the song is to bring about a world where people are "living for today." I believe his criticism of institutions we hold dear is conditional on the idea that they are harmful; he's not criticizing them just to be a jerk, he honestly believes they make people do bad things, whether pointless wars or just not living life joyfully.

So we have to ask ourselves: does Lennon have a point? I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. Clearly these institutions have been causes of terrible things. The existence of nations has led to horrendous acts in the name of nationalism. Fear over going to hell has wrought psychological trauma, been a factor in suicides, and promoted superficial righteousness. Belief in heaven has made people ignore injustice in this world or been used as a red herring by oppressors to distract their victims. Capitalism ensures the strongest survive, but incidentally also ensures that the weakest suffer. And religion, no one can argue, has been the root of some awful atrocities, from the Inquisition to Mountain Meadows to September 11th. If we do as Joseph Smith (perhaps only in my mind) said, we can find plenty of validity in Lennon's accusations, and indeed we owe him and all others harmed by these institutions an apology.

Does this mean we should scrap all of these institutions? I concede that John Lennon was probably in favor of the idea. But I believe we can answer his critiques better by proving them wrong, by leveraging these institutions for good. While the institutions Lennon assails undoubtedly have been used for evil, I don't believe that they must be. They are not inherently bad, but they're not inherently good either. They are inherently powerful, and anything powerful can be wielded for good or ill. (Obviously, they are not necessary conditions for evil: terrible acts have been committed by atheistic and socialist and anarchist organizations in abundance too; bad people seem to use whatever ideology and tools at their disposal to be dastards.) The answer lies in the line from the hymn 'Have I Done Any Good?' that sounds like it could have been penned by Lennon: "Wake up and do something more / Than dream of your mansion above." Realize the strengths and weaknesses of every institution, then work hard to minimize the weaknesses and maximize the strengths!

Let's make sure our religion really is helping us "live for today." Let's not forget that Jesus himself was a harsh critic of dead religious practices. If our ordinances and meetings and doctrines aren't making us happier, we need to take a look at them and at ourselves. Let's let our belief in the afterlife be an impetus to make the presentlife more like that future paradise. Let's not believe that America can do no wrong, but also remember it's astounding potential. Too often Lennon is right about me and my life. But as I strive to live a Christlike life, I have experienced periods of the abundant life he promised. I find an answer to Lennon in the restored gospel of Christ, but it's an answer I have to continually struggle to give as I tend to lapse into the kind of life Lennon assails. That's why I'm grateful to Lennon for his eternally relevant admonition to look critically at all our institutions. I believe he would agree with Spencer W. Kimball that "People are more important than programs."

So the point is, 'Imagine' should be included in the next version of the hymnal.

* This comes from a Truman Madsen lecture on Joseph Smith that I listened to on CD on my mission. This would have been 5 years ago now, so I'm sure my memory has greatly mangled the quote. Any alert readers recognize it and can help correct it? I think I still have mp3's of it all, but I haven't had the time/inclination to listen through all 8 CD's looking for the exact wording. And even if he didn't say this, I believe it's true (and a post on the problem of appeals to authority may be coming up soon).

But what of Yellow?

2010-07-19T19:08:00.003-04:00

I just started reading The Gift of Asher Lev, and at one point Potok happens to use the word "urinated." An earlier reader kindly marked the word with an asterisk and made a note at the bottom of the page reading

DEAR READER, PROBABLY THIS IS THE FIRST AND LAST TIME THAT YOU HAVE RED THIS IN A BOOK

Oh how that made me laugh. God is good.

Introspection

2010-07-18T15:22:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking recently about introspection and what a powerful thing it is. This has been brought on by recently re-reading The Stranger by Camus, creating a profile on the new Mormon.org, and a few other random experiences.

The Stranger is about a guy who lives life without any introspection or thought about what he is doing. He does what feels good and avoids what is painful or annoying, solely acting on instincts. He is not much different from an animal, really. After killing an Arab for no reason (for which he feels no remorse, of course) he begins to actually think critically* about life. He has a soul-shaping epiphany at the very end of the book as he realizes that not only does he not believe in God, he doesn't even care about the question; however, he succeeds in finding meaning in a moment of existential baptism after his anger with a priest who tried to get him to gain faith while on death row:

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--so like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

I love love love this ending! I could easily write an entire paper on it. No, I don't agree with his militant agnosticism, but it strikes me as important that he only becomes human, an agent unto himself, when he has actually looked into himself. His life has no meaning until he has searched his soul for meaning and forged it with his own will. He sees the world as alien and hostile, but he has a narrative, a purpose, a desire to act and not be acted upon. While I don't reach anywhere near the same conclusions as he does, the book got me thinking about how important it is to be looking critically at our own lives, thoughts, and goals.

I had similar thoughts as I filled out my profile on the revamped Mormon.org. The new design is genius, as far as I'm concerned. [One of my favorite featured profiles was of Josh, a NYC skateboarder. I wish I could embed the video, but go here and click on the guy on the right with the beanie and Buddy Holly glasses.] The wonderful variety of voices come across as simply real. I have high hopes that it will be a wonderfully effective missionary tool.

But back to the theme of the blog post: I created my own profile (and I encourage you to do the same), and found it forced me to inspect my faith in a somewhat new way. I think about my faith and Mormonism in general multiple times every single day. But it was different to try to answer simple questions about that faith for an audience that knows next to nothing about it. What's the best way to explain "Why am I a Mormon?" or "What is a 'testimony'?" Putting my answers succinctly (or semi-succinctly...) into words made me stretch some spiritual muscles and think a bit deeper--or at least from a fresh angle--about what I really believe. It was a great experience.

These thoughts on introspection stem also from my budding appreciation for literary criticism. I've always thought that reviews of literature and articles on literary theory were pointless--just write good literature, don't write about good literature! But reading Eugene England's review (warning: long!) of Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch started changing my mind. For one, it is epic--the review doesn't even start discussing the book it's nominally about until halfway through (paragraph 28, beginning "Well, my main point today..."). England dissects Card's career not just from a literary, but also from a theological angle. He critiques, celebrates, and puzzles over Card's works, and then situates Pastwatch within that context. Another thing I loved about the review was that it was a work of literature in itself. No, it didn't use beautiful similes, introduce me to new characters, or other things I have always thought of as important to literature; it is admittedly a much more functional literature. But it was fundamentally creative. It interpreted a large body of work in an original way, it gave a framework for understanding a writer's books in a new way, it exhorted me to apply the atonement in my life. It went beyond a simple I-liked-this-but-didn't-like-this-and-I-gave-it-4-out-of-5-stars kind of review. It was a true response to literature. And this has gotten me taking works of literary criticism--which is nothing if not literary introspection--more seriously.

So finally, I'll tie this all up by mentioning how this blog has been an important vehicle for me to examine myself. I view it as a somewhat more public version of my journal where I actually re-read what I wrote at least once to edit it for a minimal level of clarity. As I type out what at times may seem drivel, I am thinking about what I think. Just as my Mormon.org profile doesn't come close to capturing the totality of my spirituality, just as literary criticism is probably as often fruitless as it provides useful insights, so all introspection is most valuable not in what it produces, but rather in the fact that the process is occurring. Essays about literature can't answer my questions about what makes good literature, but they can give some great do's and don'ts. My personal journal is more a reflection of a confused life than a well-ordered history from which I can easily pick out valuable life lessons, but it is therapeutic and empowering to create. Camus' stranger may have only found his humanity on death row, but how much better off will he be in the afterlife he doesn't believe in for it!

Moral of the post: introspect. Today, write in your journal trying to understand yourself, and don't worry when you don't. Today, take time to look in a mirror, not to judge but just to see. Tonight, read The Stranger and argue with the conclusion. But before any of that, don't forget to go do some fun missionary work on Mormon.org!

* I hate that the English word "critical" can mean both "fault-finding" and "analytical"; I am using it throughout solely in the latter use. When we analyze something--our lives, the scriptures, relationships--critically we may find some faults, yes, but it is not with that purpose in mind that we undertook the analysis. Rather, it is to better understand the subject in its entirety, warts and all.

All are Alike unto God

2010-07-15T15:35:00.007-04:00

Bruce R. McConkie commented on 2 Nephi 26:33, a scripture which says that the Lord "doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile."Elder McConkie said

These words have now taken on a new meaning. We have caught a new vision of their true significance. This also applies to a great number of other passages in the revelations. Since the Lord gave this revelation on the priesthood, our understanding of many passages has expanded. Many of us never imagined or supposed that they had the extensive and broad meaning that they do have.¹

He was speaking, of course, two months after the LDS church extended the priesthood to include all male members in good standing, regardless of race. He was saying that the Lord had broadened our understanding of what it means for God to treat all his children equally with regard to the priesthood.

My question is based on the fact that the scripture not only says that "black and white" are equal in God's sight, but also that "male and female" are alike unto God. So, does that mean that at some point God will broaden our understanding of that same scripture even further to mean that women will have the priesthood in the same sense that men of African descent have since 1978?² If not, why? Your thoughts?

I'm also including a quick poll so you can voice your opinion without having to explain it :)

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1. "All are Alike unto God" - speech by Bruce R. McConkie at BYU 18 August 1978
2. For the purposes of this blog post, I'm not interested in thoughts on whether women already hold the priesthood in some sense after going through the temple, just in whether they will some day have the same ecclesiastical priesthood roles as men do today.

No, No, No, You're Not Alone

2010-07-09T08:00:00.004-04:00

Feeling alone sucks. Which is why I think the MoHo Map (a MoHo is a Mormon Homosexual, btw) is such a cool idea.

All of the gay Mormons I know have said they felt at some point like they were the only Mormon who was attracted to members of the same sex. That kind of loneliness, as you can imagine, is oppressive. Homosexuality is a taboo topic among most Latter-day Saints except when we're strongly disagreeing with it. I think it is easy to see how a young Mormon guy who finds himself attracted to other boys can easily take that doctrinal position and feel like it is an attack on him personally (and sadly, sometimes our overzealous condemnations of homosexual activity do carry over into explicit condemnations of homosexuals). And feeling like you're the only one exacerbates the problem and too often leads to emotional scarring and/or suicide.

So the idea of the MoHo Map is simple: there are lots of gay Mormons out there. See for yourself! I know a handful of these guys, and each one is a great person. If you're gay or just curious about how many gay Mormons are in your area, check it out. I assume if you're gay it would be reassuring to see, and if you're straight it might be a little weird at first, but trust me, you've known gay Mormons all your life, you just haven't realized it. So let's all be more kind, tolerant, and overall, just a bit more Christlike!

They're working on adding functionality to put friends/allies on the map, and I'll be there to sign up once that happens.

Thanks to Abelard Enigma for the cool pic, and also check out the Moho Directory that he's put together: a listing of gay Mormon blogs that span the spectrum from fully active to fully former Mormon--I'm proud to be listed as a friend of the family.

Austin's Useless Dating Law

2010-07-04T21:52:00.003-04:00

One of the best ways to find out if someone is worth dating is to break up with them. To see how they handle such a touchy situation as telling you they think your relationship should end--or, contrariwise, how they handle being told that--says a lot about that person's true character. Sadly, you can only find out about it after breaking up (hence the 'useless' in the law's name) but on the bright side I think it can help bring closure to a relationship. If they handle the breakup badly you can at least know that they weren't the type of person you really want to be in a relationship with anyways. And if they handle it well, you can be happy that you had the chance to date a good person and learn a lot with them.

I've been fortunate to have only dated people who have handled breakups quite well, and thus made me glad to look back on our relationships; I'm not sure I can say the same about myself.

[Hopefully none of my exes read my blog, that would be kind of awkward]

Is Grooveshark Different?

2010-06-30T13:16:00.000-04:00

I've been enjoying Grooveshark for a while now. If you haven't heard of it, search for most any song and stream it. Good quality and great selection. Just today, I've gotten (re)acquainted with Sam Cooke, Leonard Cohen*, Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Prince Billy, and others. It's an easy way to listen to whatever music you're hankering for.

I gave up illegal music downloading a long ago for ethical reasons, but I have to wonder: is Grooveshark really different? I'm going to argue that it is because of the permanence of downloading mp3's versus the transience of streaming music. When I downloaded a song from Napster, it was mine forever. I probably still have a handful of songs on my iPod today from a free service that ended in 2001. When I listen to a song on Grooveshark, though, I can't take it with me. If I want to be able to listen to a song in my car I go to Amazon.com and get a DRM-free mp3 and put it on my iPod. I would actually go so far as to say that being able to stream music makes me more likely to buy it, particularly in a way that downloading it can't--if I already have an illegal version on my computer, it's just a hassle to delete it and download a carbon copy that I have to pay for.

I could also liken Grooveshark to a high-tech radio station, one that lets me pick the playlist. And radio has been around for a century, and I don't hear too many artists complaining about that medium cutting into their profits. However, this is where it starts to get dicey, because while radio stations give artists a cut (even if it is admittedly miniscule) of advertising revenue, my understanding is that none of the money Grooveshark makes from the advertisements on the right side of its site goes to artists from any of the major labels. So since I don't plan on buying any Kris Kristofferson songs in the near future, have I ripped him off in some way? At least I gave him some free publicity here, right? (Since my blog readership is so vast, that is indeed a Big Deal)

And what about in the future, when we'll conceivably have wireless connections to the internet virtually everywhere, including in our cars? Will I still want to download artists' music when downloading itself will become an inconvenience? I think when that day comes, I'll re-think my position on it, but for now Grooveshark is a great way to hear a few tunes that I haven't heard in a long time but don't necessarily need to hear again for a long time either, or ones that have been vaguely recommended to me but I want to listen to before committing. And when I hear music that I have to queue up more than once, I start to seriously consider buying it--Bonnie Prince Billy's album I See a Darkness is definitely in that category at the moment--so I feel like it supports the music industry overall.

So I'll keep grooving with a clear conscience. I think.

* In my first area on my mission, I heard a song in a store that arrested me. About the only lyrics I could remember, though, were the chorus being something about 'So Long Mary Anne,' which I wrote down to track down after my mission was over. Lo and behold, it was a Leonard Cohen song (and actually the woman referred to's name is Marianne). I've always thought of that experience as a testament to a great song-writer: being able to stop a missionary in his tracks (albeit one who never was able to--nor, truth be told--wanted to, kick the secular music habit completely) means you've got skillz.

Societal Stamp of Approval

2010-06-19T14:55:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking recently about what it means for society to "approve" of something. It came up in the context of the arguments about legalizing marijuana. One argument for keeping it illegal, which I am somewhat partial to, is that legalizing it would essentially give our societal "stamp of approval" for recreational marijuana use, whereas now we are officially "against" it. This argument is often used when it's pointed out how ineffective (from a monetary standpoint) it is to wage a war on pot; even if that's true, "stampers" would argue, it's still something we should pursue on principle.

Like I said, I see some merit in that argument. (Perhaps it appeals to my idealistic side--pragmatism be damned, let's strive to live by higher principles!) But then I considered turning that argument around and using it in other situations. Is it moral to earn billions of dollars and not give any away to charities? I think most people would answer no, to hoard every penny you gain when you're richer than God and spend it all on luxury items for yourself and keep the rest locked up is simply immoral. But have we given our societal "stamp of approval" to that? We don't have any laws against it, it's 100% legal. What about saying unkind and hurtful things? Also legal. And if I had to choose between banning tobacco cigarettes or joints, I'd choose the Marlboros in a heartbeat.

You might argue that these examples don't hurt anyone, at least not actively (meaning yes, withholding millions you could donate to children's hospitals does harm, but only indirectly). Well, if that is the case, why is there then so much uproar over proposals to ban trans fats? The research on marijuana, as far as my extremely limited understanding goes, is pretty inconclusive about actual physical harm it causes. Even in the worst case, I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that they're more harmful than really bad junk food that any 9 year old can buy at McDonald's or 7-11. Well maybe you could argue that junk food, while harmful, at least does something positive by feeding you, something necessary to live and function. It's getting pretty arbitrary by this point, though.

So my question is, what does it mean for society to approve of something? How should that approval be enacted into law? In what cases is it rational to withhold our mystical "stamp of approval" from certain activities while giving it to others that are arguable worse? And is it possible to not give societal approval to something but still allow it to be legal? Pornography might fit into this niche; while it's filthy and there should be social pressure to abstain from it, I don't think making it unlawful is productive or right. Could marijuana use fall into that category too? In the end, I'm just not very convinced by this stamp of approval idea. It seems like an arbitrary way to restrict freedoms in cases where we traditionally don't like an idea without having to provide solid arguments.

Wrest Hymns

2010-06-17T21:09:00.001-04:00

I love "How Great Thou Art," but in my head I can't help but subvert one of the lyrics. When it says that Christ will come "with shout of acclamation," I always like to think that we're singing "with shout of acclimation." People will start out "Oh no, not Jesus!" and then slowly move into "Hey, this isn't so bad" followed eventually by "This is pretty dang good!" and finally getting into the spirit of it as they get used to the idea, shouting "This is awesome!" We figure it out eventually, but we have to acclimate to the idea.

A Bob Dylan Introduction

2010-05-25T18:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Bob Dylan's 69th birthday, so I'm in the mood to try to put down in words why I love his music so much. I've often struggled with how to introduce people to his music, because in some ways he's very much an acquired taste, so this will be my attempt to convince you of his glory.

First, which Dylan to introduce? One of the reasons he is so great and so legendary and so enduring is that he is always shapeshifting. He started out covering folk songs and writing protest songs, then quickly was branded a sell-out as he moved into poppier and lighter stuff and then on to out and out rock & roll--and that's only his first four years! He's done psychedelic, Christian, jazzy, bluesy, country, boogie-woogie, modern, and even crappy music in the years since. I love how many styles he explores and makes his own. I've concentrated mostly on his 60's music here, since that is his best, in my opinion, and like I said can already give you a good sampling of his stuff.

Rather than go on talking about him or his lengthy career, I'll introduce him by sharing a few of his songs that I've been loving recently. If you'd like to listen along, here's the Grooveshark widget that will let you!

Chimes of Freedom - One of Dylan's less overt protest songs. A memory of watching a downpour from shelter is turned into a vision of the "countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse" where lightning--the chimes of freedom--drowns out the chimes of wedding bells. This song is for everyone who has ever felt compassion for "the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute" or wished there were bells "Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake / Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked / Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake." Bob Dylan (and God!) remembers them, and both want us to do the same.

Most of the Time - The perfect evocation of a relationship that ended a long time ago but that still brings a smile to your face (and a twinge to your heart) every now and then, that you've gotten over except when that one thing reminds you of her, that was so good and so close. It's powerful and pathetic. My favorite verse:

Most of the time
My head is on straight
Most of the time
I’m strong enough not to hate
I don’t build up illusion ’til it makes me sick
I ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick
I can smile in the face of mankind
Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time

For more songs along these lines, check out most of his album "Blood on the Tracks." For an amazing nostalgic look back at strong but equally lost platonic relationships, listen to "Bob Dylan's Dream."

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall - An apocalyptic masterpiece with imagery that blows my mind every time. Traveling through a ruined world and describing it in a way that's a cross between Isaiah, Eliot, and Ginsberg. Prophecy of and memorial to the tragedies of the 20th century and humanity in every time. The format of speaking to his "blue-eyed son" reminds me of God's statement that the earth will be smitten with a curse if the hearts of the fathers aren't turned to the children and vice versa. The last verse, laying out his plan to fight back against the despair in some way, to be a witness and a voice to the injustices despite the fact that he knows he'll just sink into the sea, is real to me.

The Gates of Eden - This song just brings so many thoughts to my head every time I listen to it, and they're never the same twice. This time, my thoughts are that it is an indictment of everything, of every plan to recreate the paradise we've allegedly lost, of demagogues who promise prosperity, of greed, of phony philosophies, of our high opinions of ourselves. Listen on to the next song on this album, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," for an equally incriminating sequel.

Every Grain of Sand - Bob Dylan described this song as a revelation, and I have to agree. This song represents the atonement--and faith in an all-powerful Savior--so well for me. Sin is real and choking, storms rage, innocent faces are ground down, temptation's angry and personalized flame never goes out, but through it all there's an undertone of salvation. At the worst moments something divine springs up within, a spark of love and redemption, an invincible testimony of an eternal perspective. God sees and knows and brings us back.

Desolation Row - No one can begin to explain this song adequately. Epic is a good word to start with (it is over 11 minutes long, after all). It sprawls across literary and cultural icons of the last few thousand years (into which Dylan--oh so humbly!--inserts himself in the last verse), tying them all together into an enigmatic narrative set in and near desolation row. The words stay with me; just recently I heard a virtuoso violinist performing a modern composition in the Kennedy Center playing an electric violin, and I couldn't help but think of Einstein thanks to this unforgettable song. You can think of this song as describing hell (or maybe something more akin to the Elysian Fields) or an elaborate critique of modern culture (the "agents and superhuman crew" have been interpreted as J. Edgar Hoover's overzealous and paranoid FBI agency) or another apocalyptic addition to the Dylan canon. I think of it as one of the best poems I've ever heard sung. And oh man, the harmonica! How can you not love it?

Some honorable mentions: Visions of Johanna, Ring them Bells, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower, My Back Pages, Tombstone Blues, and dozens of others. But this has gone on long enough already, hasn't it?

The point is, Bob Dylan belongs among the most fun and engaging musicians and artists of all time. And now you know him! Happy birthday, Bob!

[picture courtesy of the awesome blog The Impossible Cool--check out their Malcolm X from a few days ago too!]

How much do we know about Heavenly Mother?

2010-05-12T19:43:00.000-04:00

I've often heard it said that one of the reasons we don't talk much about Heavenly Mother is because very little has been revealed about Her. My thesis is that, while that may be true, we know almost as much about Her as we know about Heavenly Father.

Mormons believe that Jesus Christ is Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. In fact, virtually every single instance of God or the LORD speaking in scripture is believed to be Christ. Even times when context seems to imply that it is the Father (Moses 1, for example), it is generally accepted that Jesus is speaking on behalf of the Father via 'divine investiture of authority.' So pretty much the only times we have God the Father speaking--Christ's baptism, the first vision, etc.--is to briefly bear record of or introduce the Son. We know very little about God the Father from His own words.

What we do know about Heavenly Father is that He had a plan for all of us to come down here and live and grow and be saved by Christ and one day return to live with Him. His attributes include perfect love, omniscience, omnipotence, justice, mercy, power, and wisdom, among many other things. He is the father of our spirits. He has a body of flesh and bone. Joseph Smith taught that He is an exalted man, and that we can become like Him. Beyond that, what do we know about Him? I don't think there's much. (Not that I'm complaining--I'm sure if we needed to know much more about Him, He would make sure we found out.)

So what do we know about Heavenly Mother? She is the Mother of our spirits and Heavenly Father's wife. She has a body of flesh and bone. Prophets have also taught that she has a perfect love for us and is also merciful, just, and concerned with our well-being. We can return to live with Her, because she lives with the Father. We can become like Her. And if Heavenly Father is an exalted man, it seems that Heavenly Mother would have to be an exalted woman. Sounds pretty similar to what we know about Heavenly Father to me.

Further, the Proclamation on the family teaches the ideal that husband and wife should work together as equal partners, and our most famous reference to Heavenly Mother--Eliza R. Snow's 'O My Father'--speaks of completing what They have sent us to do and returning to heaven with Their 'mutual approbation.' These teachings seem to make clear that Heavenly Mother was involved to some degree in teaching and guiding us and possibly formulating the plan of salvation, and that She will accept us home just as joyfully and intimately as Heavenly Father will.

So it seems to me that we know basically just as much about Heavenly Mother as we do about Heavenly Father. I grant that it's not much, but it is powerful and edifying and reassuring knowledge nonetheless. [Let me know if I'm totally overlooking some area that we know a ton about Heavenly Father in, but next to nothing about Heavenly Mother.]

So if that's all true, why don't we talk about Heavenly Mother more often? My guess is that it's a mixture of culture (we've always talked about Heavenly Father more and the status quo is hard to change) and a desire to be respectful of Her. While I want nothing more than the utmost respect to be shown towards my Mother in Heaven, I also don't think that ignoring Her is respectful. A good analogy I've heard is that of the temple. We hold the covenants and rituals performed in the temple very sacred and holy, so we don't discuss them in detail outside the temple. But we talk about the temple a lot in generalities and as a goal for children to work towards and we bear our testimonies of the temple's power. Could we do the same with Heavenly Mother? We don't have to speculate about Her or parade Her around or pray to Her, but can't we be better at acknowledging Her huge importance in our pre-mortal, mortal, and post-mortal lives? Can we bear testimony more often of the love we feel from our Heavenly Parents? Can we speak in our lessons of both Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father sending us to earth?

Survey Results

2010-05-11T14:21:00.001-04:00

For those who took or at least read the survey question from my last post, here are the results. I got 20 responses: 13 respondents (65%) understood the passage to be saying option #2, that the story was trying to make a categorical judgment about people who choose not to marry in the temple; 7 respondents (35%) chose #1, that it was a judgment limited to that specific case and not meant to be taken as a general rule.

This story is apparently ambiguous enough that people take very different things away from it (which actually reminds me of a post I did on the subjectivity of art). Be mindful of that if you use the anecdote in lessons, and maybe you'd do better to just pick a story that has a clearer message and is less likely to be understood in such divergent ways.

Quick Poll

2010-04-23T14:39:00.001-04:00

Read the following excerpt, and then I have a question for you about it. The question doesn't have to do with whether or not you agree with the story, but rather what the story's point is. Think of it like an SAT Critical Reading question, I guess.

“A few years ago a young couple who lived in northern Utah came to Salt Lake City for their marriage. They did not want to bother with a temple marriage, or perhaps they did not feel worthy. At any rate, they had a civil marriage. After the marriage they got into their automobile and drove north to their home for a wedding reception. On their way home they had an accident, and when the wreckage was cleared, there was a dead man and a dead young woman. They had been married only an hour or two. Their marriage was ended. They thought they loved each other. They wanted to live together forever, but they did not live the commandments that would make that possible. So death came in and closed that career. They may have been good young people; I don’t know. But they will be angels in heaven if they are. They will not be gods and goddesses and priests and priestesses because they did not fulfill the commandments and do the things that were required at their hands.

“Sometimes we have people who say, ‘Oh, someday I will go to the temple. But I am not quite ready yet. And if I die, somebody can do the work for me in the temple.’ And that should be made very clear to all of us. The temples are for the living and for the dead only when the work could not have been done. Do you think that the Lord will be mocked and give to this young couple who ignored him, give them the blessings? The Lord said, ‘For all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead.’ (D&C 132:7)”

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Again, I'm not asking if you believe either of those options represents reality, but which do you think the author is trying to say? In the interest of full disclosure, this is taken from a talk given by President Kimball* in 1975 in an Area Conference in Japan, but I'm not asking whether you agree or disagree with the prophet on this issue, just what you think he meant here. And for further full disclosure, I understood option #2 was meant, but I have a good friend who has always understood the story to mean #1. Hence this blog post.

* So if anyone on earth could have the authority to let us know the final outcome of these two people's exaltation via revelation, it would be him (that is, this fact makes #1 at least plausible in my mind)

Honor the Code

2010-04-10T15:13:00.000-04:00

My former roommates at BYU put together a rap about the BYU Honor Code. I understand that at least half of the humor comes from knowing these guys, that the chorus is kind of hard to listen to, and that the video is a bit weird, but I think the words are clever and funny enough for me to share it with a wider audience. So give it a listen, and the lyrics are included below.

Just graduated from high school
Now its time to to college
Gonna up my mad IQ
Continue thirstin' after knowledge

So I'm going to the Y
Wanna get an education
Yeah Its kind of like the U
But without the fornication

They got this righteous code
To preserve the students honor,
To block the path of sin
Like the snow did to the Donners

So I studied it up close,
And of course you know I signed it
Now a stain of sin on me?
You ain't never gonna find it

Yo my record's stayin clean
Yeah I ain't no lying weasel
And I always get mad props
Every time I talk to Cecil

Says he knows the code’s important
His generation paved the way
Im lookin at his face
And yo I don’t think that he shaved today

I don’t hesitate to act
Ain't nothing gonna phase me
I've got my spare gillete
And its time for you to shave G

Chorus

My roommates they don’t get it
Yeah and trash they always talkin'
They wont talk it up so loud
When the Bishop come a knockin'

They say the bish he doesnt scare em
And it ain't all that important
Well I’ve only got two words
Ecclesiastical Endorsement!!

And I always find em sneakin'
Lookin at their nudie pictures
And the only thing I'm reading?
Yo the Ensign and the scriptures

They put on their dirty movies
With the swearin' and the violence
But like Simon n Garfunkle
I prefer the sound of silence

Yeah they go to church on Sunday
Only trying to save some face
But I always go to two blocks
Yo six hours just in case!

The code they always breakin'
Thinkin that they’ll still excel
Well eat drink and be merry
For tomorrow you’re expelled

Chorus

Now cruising up on campus
Gonna make a good impression
All the honeys stop and stare
At the standards of my dressin'

Yeah I'm always lookin sharp,
To the standards I adhere
I shaved 3 times this morning
My hair's cut above the ear

They know I keep it real
Walk the walk and talk the talk
And that it's always virtue
That be garnishing my thoughts

So all the ladies they be lookin
Trying to find a way to me
But you don’t even have a chance
If that skirt's cut above the knee

So if you think that can handle this
We can take a walk
Or come over to my crib
If its before 12 o'clock

So if you got what I need,
Ima tell ya little story
Its involving me and you
and some celestial glory

Chorus

When my journey here is through
and it's time to graduate,
I'll be ready for a job
and ready for the pearly gates

So if you think you’ll reach the top,
well you know I'll make it higher
when Elijah comes to get me
in his chariot of fire

If you want to be exalted
Don’t forget what you been told
Be putting oil in those lamps
You got to HONOR THE CODE

Depression within Mormonism

2010-04-03T00:15:00.000-04:00

Depression sucks. Let's just get that out there.

While I'm not currently depressed, and haven't been for a good while now (for which I thank God), I know something about it. Which is why I very much appreciated a thoughtful series of posts from the Mormon blog By Common Consent titled "Living With Depression." In the series, a number of Mormons talk frankly and openly about how they've dealt with (or wished they could deal with) depression. It felt to me a little like my gay Mormon friends tell me it feels to just be around other Mormons struggling to come to grips with their sexual orientation. While I can never understand what it's like to be gay (or any number of other characteristics I don't have), just hearing other people discuss the issue of depression felt like a breath of fresh air for me.

One thing that really resonated with me and strikes me as something that those who haven't ever been truly depressed (meaning more than just sad or down for a day or two) is just how inescapable it feels, at least for me. Not only that, at its worst I don't even want to escape. Apathy is absolute. I once tried to explain depression to one of my roommates, and while he was as supportive and caring as possible, his advice was basically that depression is a tool of the devil's and I needed to pray and read my scriptures etc etc in order to ward it off. Trust me, I've done that. And so far, it hasn't ever helped, at least not in any way I could discern. When I'm really depressed, I eventually just stop praying and reading scriptures for a while until I come out of the hole. Not that I don't think they could help--I've had many powerful experiences with both--but that it just doesn't make sense when I'm in that depression to do those things. It just does not compute in my brain to perform those simple acts. It seems like it's a storm cloud that comes from time to time (triggered no doubt by my situation and own choices at times, but sometimes seemingly at random as well) and goes when it goes. I feel very powerless when I'm depressed.

I think one of the writers captured a similar feeling when she said:

It seems to me that we have become more comfortable in Mormon culture about talking about depression, precisely because it has been medicalized, and we can explain it in comfortingly technical terms like “serotonin re-uptake” and “dopamine receptors.” What we still can’t do is talk about the spiritual aspects of it–it’s ok to stand up in testimony meeting and say “the Lord has helped me recover from postpartum depression through priesthood blessings and medical care,” but it simply isn’t ok to say “I feel abandoned by God. When you talk about your close relationship with Him, I wonder why I can’t feel what you do, and it makes me feel terrible.”

We countenance talking about grief, depression, and anger only when they’re safely in the past tense, or when we can explain them away as a physical, brain-based phenomenon. It’s understandable, of course, because it is painful and unsettling to see someone suffering and have prayer or priesthood blessings seem not to work–”mourning with those that mourn” can be (perhaps must be) a genuine challenge to the faith and testimony of the comforter, as well as the comforted. What does it mean to bear one another’s burdens, when one of our brother’s or sister’s burdens is despair, or the absence of hope and faith?

Well the point of this post was two-fold: first, to break down a little bit of the stigma around depression by sharing a little bit about it in my life; and second, to encourage whoever reads this and might be interested in learning more about depression and how it relates to Mormonism to read that series. Here are the links to each post. They are long, but I think very useful and instructive.

Living With Depression
Series Overview
Part I: Recognizing Clinical Depression
Part II: Impact on Daily Life and Family Relationships
Part III: Depression and Spirituality
Part IV: Everything Else, For Now

If you or someone you know struggles with depression, I think patience and support are the best things. While I've never gotten to the point of needing medication, I understand that it can also be extremely helpful for many people. And since I'm an avid PostSecret reader, I've seen the suicide prevention number (1-800-SUICIDE) there and figure it's a great thing to let everyone know about. Ultimately, I know God's love for us is as infinite and eternal as it is sometimes unfathomable.

Touching Bottom

2010-04-01T00:05:00.000-04:00

I often feel that life is like floating and swimming in a vast beautiful lake. There's a lot of freedom: you can go with the flow or move purposefully in your chosen direction. But lakes are big and deep and can be overwhelming sometimes. The free-floating feeling can get to be too much, and you just wish you had something solid to stand on, that your feet would touch down on a sandy lake bottom so you could stand for a bit before continuing your swim.

Spiritually (and in most ways, really) I tend to see a lot of gray area. I generally am ok with this and like the freedom and diversity and agency and responsibility that it gives and requires. But sometimes, I need to touch bottom, and just feel a solid reassurance of real, true faith. I got one of those experiences today, and it was sweet. I'm very grateful for loving Heavenly Parents who give me the grace to believe in Them. I feel reassured, having touched down on a wonderful, cozy, sandy, lake bottom. Now I'll swim on.

Of Namesakes and Mandrakes: T9 Dictionary Collisions

2010-02-28T19:43:00.000-05:00

I've always been fascinated/bemused by the mixups that happen when you use T9 predictive typing on your cell phone. While it is quite good overall, it can lull you into a false sense of security and if you don't actually make sure to read every word, you might text a friend asking if they'd like to go watch 'some mother' instead of 'some movies.' Because, of course, 668437 is the T9 code for both 'mother' and 'movies.' Bus ride can become cup ride, Jordan can become Korea, and (fittingly) kiss can become lips.

I decided to put my Computer Science degree to use and look for other fun "collisions"--cases where the same T9 code produces multiple words, preferably humorously. While I couldn't code in the humor criterion, I did create a simple Java program that prints out all the T9 collisions in a dictionary text file*.

Perusing through this file of 4717 collisions, I found a few I probably would have never stumbled across on my own. Namesake & mandrake are equivalent according to your phone, as are enemy & endow and imam & hobo (please don't hate me, Muslim fundamentalists--I love Islam and am only reporting what I found. Wage jihad against Tegic Communications, the heathen company that developed this godless technology).

Of course, there are a lot of boring collisions, like producer & produces, but there are some fun ones to find as well. I uploaded the output of the program to a public Google doc--check it out and see if you notice any particularly funny or unusual ones (I have only glanced over random sections of it).

After doing all this, I found this page that analyzes T9 collisions for numeric codes with the most words associated with them, which is also interesting, but he never would have found out that pennant & remnant go together, so I like my approach too.

So have you ever had any good mixups using T9 predictive typing? Did you find any gems from my list that I missed?

* I wish I had access to the actual T9 dictionary they use in phones, but I couldn't find it online, so I just used the default linux (American English) dictionary. I also didn't count one-letter words, because they are stupid, and I ignored any words that include anything other than the letters A-Z.

Talent Midrash

2010-02-20T17:08:00.000-05:00

I remember thinking up this midrash on my mission, though I didn't know it was a midrash at the time.

Matthew 25:18 But he that had received one [talent] went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.

This servant was rebuked for not trading with his talents and getting an increase, as the other two servants had, but in his heart he was resentful for the rebuke because he had, after all, worked harder. The first two had invested the money and let interest do all the work while they sat at home doing nothing. The last servant had traveled to the desert and found a hiding place away from the beaten track. He had dug a deep hole all by himself, buried the money, and replaced all the earth perfectly so no one would be able to discover the cache. He then had to go retrieve it when his master returned. It was all a laborious process, much more intensive than the passive "work" performed by the two servants who the master praised so well.

This scripture shows us that working hard is not the goal. Effectiveness is the goal. Magnifying your calling does not need to mean you stay up to all hours of the night putting together flyers for every class or planning who will read which quote or organizing every detail. We need to prepare, but it is not something to stress about or overdo. Spending time with friends and family, taking a walk through the woods, or reading a poem can be the best preparation for a lesson. Look for ways to let your efforts go farther--to gain the interest of the Spirit on your investment of time--rather than doing everything yourself.

Thoughts on Ash Wednesday

2010-02-17T18:32:00.000-05:00

I went on a tour of George Washington Law School today, but as I often do I got there way too early (OCD tendency of mine: fear of being late). I noticed, though, a church across the street from the admissions building. I walked in and sat in the back and read from Romans 9, where I had read the night before, though the NRSV translation they used in this church was a bit plainer in places. The pastor came back and asked if I would like to receive ashes. After asking what exactly that meant and his explanation, I said I would love to.

The pastor read excerpts from the sermon on the mount (again, I love modern translations sometimes) and a few other passages about forsaking sin and our need for a Savior. He talked about how we need to prepare for Easter; if we just walk in Easter Sunday to the joyful church building celebrating Christ's resurrection without having meditated on his death and sacrifice beforehand, we will have missed something. He described Lent as a journey towards Easter in beautiful words. He also talked about how the Resurrection is a challenging concept that we should grapple with. It does not make sense for all of us who were born and die. It transcends logic and intuition.

As he put an cross of ash on my forehead he repeated the words of Genesis: "Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return" and enjoined me to remember my baptism "and be glad." It was a lovely ritual.

As I took the tour of GW and walked back to the metro, I saw a handful of other people with ash smudges on their forehead. As Mormons, we generally wear our religion privately, but it felt interesting to be openly and easily identified as a Christian at first glance, reminding me in a way of Jews wearing a yarmulke or Muslim women a covering of some kind. It felt strange at first to be so open (this coming from a guy who spent 2 years trying to convince pretty much everyone he met to be Mormon!) about religion, I don't really know why. But I liked it.

There is a term known as 'holy envy,' coined by Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl (and according to that wikipedia page it came about when he was defending the LDS Church's right to build a temple in Stockholm!), which I think is a great idea. To me it means that, while remaining committed to your own faith and religion, you can look at and enjoy and, on some non-sinful level, be envious of the traditions and rituals and doctrines of other churches or philosophies. That is how I feel about Ash Wednesday. I don't think there are any reasons why we as Mormons don't commemorate it other than simple cultural ones, and it was fascinating and edifying to participate in another church's remembrance of it. I felt a little bit more connected to the larger Christian world knowing that thousands and thousands of other people were doing the same thing today. I'm glad I was early and stumbled onto the chance to finally take part in this wonderful tradition.

It's a beautiful day today to confess your sins to God and remember the sacrifice of Jesus for each of us.

Ask me no Questions

2010-02-04T17:07:00.000-05:00

I really really hope Obama succeeds in ending the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. It's dumb, discriminatory, and based on baseless fears. And thank goodness for parody to fully illuminate just how ridiculous it is:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

A Few Gay Men & Women

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Troop morale? You've got bigger stuff to worry about when you're getting shot at and blown up by roadside bombs than whether the guy next to you thinks guys are hot. Sorry, it will be a minimal problem, if at all, and even then certainly very temporary.

Minarets in Switzerland

2010-01-27T14:39:00.000-05:00

I found it hard to believe, but one of our writers for the BYU Political Review was strongly in favor of the recent popular initiative in Switzerland to ban construction of minarets on top of mosques in that country, like the one in Zurich on the left here. So we each wrote an article, pro and con. You can read hers in favor of the ban here, and my argument against it here.

I had to edit my article down some for size constraints, so I'm afraid that the transition to the final paragraph could have been much improved, but I really wanted to include it because I feel like this recent brouhaha in Switzerland is a great chance for us as Americans generally and Mormons specifically to think about what we might do (and are doing) in analogous situations. I think most Mormons are against the ban, and hopefully the realization that the Swiss courts are the best chance to get rid of it will remind those Mormons who have espoused a "courts are enemies of democracy!" mentality (especially recently as some American judges have disagreed with the official Mormon stance on marriage) that the judicial system does have a place in protecting minority rights, whether or not one agrees with all of their decisions.

Anyhow, let me know what you think of both articles either here or on the comments on the BYU PR website. It will probably be the last article I'll ever have in the Political Review, but I think it's a good one, and it was a lot of fun to be a part of that publication.

"But If Not" - A Sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr.

2010-01-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered this sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia in November, 1967. For the life of me I can't find the exact date, almost any more info about it, or any transcription of it. So, since I'm currently unemployed and in honor of MLK Day yesterday, I figured I'd make myself useful and transcribe it. Enjoy!

Transcription notes:
A few uhs were taken out, as well as a stammer here or there. For the most part I've formalized spoken informalisms like 'ya' to 'you' and 'oughta' to 'ought to,' though I did leave in a few instances of 'gonna' just because I think it sounds better.
I've bolded and italicized a few words that I think deserve special emphasis and which he emphasizes in his speech, but there are many times he raises his voice and "bolds" words that I have transcribed in regular type; I can't try to convey all his powerful intonations and speaking style via thicker font, you really just have to listen to it.
Also, if you want to both listen to the embedded speech below (thanks to the wonderful Internet Archive) and read at the same time, please let me know if you spot any typos or mistakes in my transcription.

But If Not

There was a day when many of the Israelites found themselves in bondage in Babylon. There was a king of Babylon by the name of Nebuchadnezzar, you read about him a good deal in the book of Daniel, and it stands as an epic that will remain stenciled on the mental sheets of unfolding generations. Nebuchadnezzar was a mighty king, and when he ruled, he ruled and when he issued an order he meant business. And Nebuchadnezzar issued an order. He made a golden image and his order was that everybody under the reign of his kingship had to bow before that golden image and worship it. Now those of you who read the Bible remember that story. One day Nebuchadnezzar called in the judges and the governors and the sheriffs, and they had a dedicatory service for this golden image, and then he said to them "I'm instructing you to see that everybody bows before this golden image." But there were three young men around there. One's name was Shadrach, the other one's name was Meshach, and the other name was Abednego. And they answered--and I read it from the scripture--and said to the king

"O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this manner [sic].
"If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
"But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up." [1]

Now I want you to notice first, here, that these young men practiced civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the refusal to abide by an order of the government or of the state or even of the court that your conscience tells you is unjust. Civil disobedience is based on a commitment to conscience. In other words, one who practice[s] civil disobedience is obedient to what he considers a higher law. And there comes a time when a moral man can't* obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. And I tell you this morning, my friends, that history has moved on, and great moments have often come forth because there were those individuals, in every age in [and?] every generation, who were willing to say "I will be obedient to a higher law." These men were saying "I must be disobedient to a king in order to be obedient to the King." And those people who so often criticize those of us who come to those moments when we must practice civil disobedience never remember that even right here in America, in order to get free from the oppression and the colonialism of the British Empire, our nation practiced civil disobedience. For what represented civil disobedience more than the Boston Tea Party. And never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal! It was legal to do everything that Hitler did to the Jews. It was a law in Germany that Hitler issued himself that it was wrong and illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I tell you if I had lived in Hitler's Germany with my attitude, I would have openly broken that law. I would have practiced civil disobedience. And so it is important to see that there are times when a man-made law is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe, there are times when human law is out of harmony with eternal and divine laws. And when that happens, you have an obligation to break it, and I'm happy that in breaking it, I have some good company. I have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I have Jesus and Socrates. And I have all of the early Christians who refused to bow.

Now the second interesting point is that these men never doubted God and his power. As they did what they did, they made it very clear that they knew that God had the power to spare them; they said that to the king: "Now we know that the God that we worship is able to deliver us." And that grew out of their experience. They had known God, they had experienced God in nature and they knew God as the creator. And then they had seen God in history. And then they had seen God, I'm sure, in their personal lives. They never doubted God's power to deliver them.

[break in recording?]

But let me move now to the basic point of the message. Know this morning, if we forget everything I've said, I hope you won't forget this. It came to the point after saying "Our God is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, but! if he doesn't deliver us, we still are not gonna bow." "But if not" -- do you get that? That these men were saying that "Our faith is so deep and that we've found something so dear and so precious that nothing can turn us away from it. Our God is able to deliver us, but if not..." This simply means, my friends, that the ultimate test of one's faith is his ability to say "But if not." You see there is what you may call an 'if' faith, and there is a 'though' faith. And the permanent faith, the lasting, the powerful faith is the 'though' faith. Now the 'if' faith says, "If all goes well; if life is hopeful, prosperous and happy; if I don't have to go to jail; if I don't have to face the agonies and burdens of life; if I'm not ever called bad names because of taking a stand that I feel that I must take; if none of these things happen, then I'll have faith in God, then I'll be alright." That's the 'if' faith. You know, a lot of people have the 'if' faith. Jacob found himself in that dilemma once, and his faith was contingent on an if. And he said "Now if God will be with me and if he will keep me in this way that I go; and if God will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the LORD be my God." [2] That's the 'if' faith; Jacob hadn't quite gotten to the essence of religion.

There is a 'though' faith, though. And the 'though' faith says "Though things go wrong; though evil is temporarily triumphant; though sickness comes and the cross looms, neverthless! I'm gonna believe anyway and I'm gonna have faith anyway; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof, the LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." [3] And old Job got to that point, he had a 'though' faith. He looked out and everything that he had had been taken away from him, and even his wife said to him "Now, what you ought to do, Brother Job, is to curse God and die. God has been unkind to you, and you should have let God know a long time ago that you would only follow him if he allowed you to stay rich, if he allowed your cattle to stay in place. You ought to curse him and die, Job, because he hasn't treated you right." But Job said "Honey, I'm sorry but my faith is deeper than that. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. My faith is a 'though' faith." And this is the essence of life and religion. The question is whether you have an 'if' faith, or whether you have a 'though' faith.

You know what this says in substance, that ultimately religion is not a bargaining matter. A lot of people bargain with God. "If you just let me avoid pain, God; if you allow me to be happy in all of its dimensions; if you don't allow any suffering any suffering to come; if you don't allow frustrating moments to come, then I'll be alright, I'll give you a tenth of my income [2], and I'll go to church and I'll have faith in you." But religion is not a bargaining experience, it's not a commercial relationship. And you know, no great experience in the bargaining atmosphere. Think of friendship, think of love, and think of marriage. These things are not based on 'if,' they're based on 'though.' These great experiences are not based on a bargaining relationship, not an 'if' faith, but a 'though' faith.

And I'm coming to my conclusion now. And I want to say to you this morning, my friends, that somewhere along the way you should discover something that's so dear, so precious to you, that is so eternally worthful, that you will never give it up. You ought to discover some principle, you ought to have some great faith that grips you so much that you will never give it up. Somehow you go on and say "I know that the God that I worship is able to deliver me, but if not, I'm going on anyhow, I'm going to stand up for it anyway. What does this mean? It means, in the final analysis, you do right not to avoid hell. If you're doing right merely to keep from going to something that traditional theology has called hell then you aren't* doing right. If you do right merely to go to a condition that theologians have called heaven, you aren't doing right. If you are doing right to avoid pain and to achieve happiness and pleasure then you aren't doing right. Ultimately you must do right because it's right to do right. And you got to say "But if not." You must love ultimately because it's lovely to love. You must be just because it's right to be just. You must be honest because it's right to be honest. This is what this text is saying more than anything else. And finally, you must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause--and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you're afraid that you will lose your job, or you're afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice. These boys stand before us today, and I thank God for them, for they had found something. The fiery furnace couldn't stop them from believing. They said "Throw us into the fiery furnace." But you know the interesting thing is, the Bible talks about a miracle. Because they had faith enough to say "But if not," God was with them as an eternal companion.

And this is what I want to say finally, that there is a reward if you do right for righteousness' sake. It says that somehow that burning fiery furnace was transformed into an air-conditioned living room. [light laughter] Somebody looked in there and said "We put three in here, but now we see four." Don't ever think you're by yourself. Go on to jail if necessary but you'll never go alone. Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you and criticize you, but you never go alone, for somewhere I read that "One with God is a majority," and God has a way of transforming a minority into a majority. Walk with him this morning and believe in him and do what is right and he'll be with you even until the consummation of the ages. Yes, I've seen the lightning flash, I've heard the thunder roll, I've felt sin [?] breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul but I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on, he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone; no, never alone, no, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. Where you going this morning, my friends, tell the world that you're going with truth. You're going with justice, you're going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow. But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil.

*context suggests in these places that King is just not enunciating the ending clearly, because it sounds like there is no contraction in these places.

Scripture references (at least, the ones I noticed):

[1] Daniel 3:16-18
King misspeaks in quoting the King James Version in verse 16, saying 'manner' instead of 'matter.' Also, here is the NIV translation, which better explains what it means to not be "careful" to answer:
"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up."

[2] Genesis 28:20-21

[3] Psalm 46:3, 7

I had two questions that I've been thinking about. First, King says he would have "openly" broken Hitler's law against aiding Jews? Interesting to wonder whether he literally believes that it would have been important to openly break that law and have approximately 0% chance of not being summarily killed, or whether he might be open to breaking that law in such an extreme case in secret so as to be able to help more Jews and do more good. He was a really big fan of non-violently breaking laws and publicly suffering the consequences in order to wake up people's consciences to injustice. What do you think he meant there?

Secondly, I find it iInteresting that he feels OK calling Jacob's faith into question, saying he "hadn't quite gotten to the essence of religion." We don't usually critique prophets in any way nowadays. What are the upsides and downsides to doing so?

John Yoo Interview on the Daily Show

2010-01-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

I watched the Daily Show last night, as I am wont to do, and they had an interview with the notorious John Yoo, author of some of the memos that authorized ~~torture~~ enhanced interrogation techniques. It was good, but edited down for time. Fortunately, they posted the whole thing online. I've embedded the first video at the bottom of this post (and links to the other 2 extended portions, because they're kind of hard to find), but before that, my thoughts (since you care so much about those).

First, the good. The fact that this interview happened is very good. I don't watch mainstream news shows (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc) because I hate all the fluff and I can read the NY Times and BBC and whatever other news and blogs I want online, saving time and avoiding thousands of stories about Tiger Woods (or whoever the most recent pointless celebrity scandal/death/flop/fad is), but my point is that as far as I know, the mainstream news networks aren't getting these kinds of interviews. And when they do, they're not putting any journalistic pressure on the interviewees, just accepting their answers at face value. Stewart said things like "Well that's not true" and posed difficult questions and followed up. I especially liked how he challenged Yoo on the 9-11 attacks being unprecedented; he brought up the good point that while they were unprecedented in scope, in their nature they were terrorism, something we've faced (off and on) for at least a century, more depending on your definition. And in the extended interview, Stewart got to ask him about the problematic aspects of having an ill-defined (and unlikely to ever end) "War on Terror" when that is the reason for expanded presidential powers, something I was dying for him to ask during the edited interview but got left out.

On the negative side, Stewart wasn't as prepared as he should have been, and he admitted and apologized for as much. He really should have brought up the times that the US has tried both our enemies and our own soldiers for waterboarding (see this great Washington Post op-ed, Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime) when Yoo claimed that there was no precedent at all for exactly what torture is--either a bald-faced lie or the sign of major ignorance in someone who should have known better. Sleep-deprivation, stress positions, and threats of imminent death have also been widely condemned by the US press and even our State Department as torture when we weren't the ones doing them. There has also been case law internationally that has explored what is and isn't torture; while that isn't necessarily binding as precedent on US courts, other nation's laws are often cited by our federal courts as background on cases in which we are breaking new domestic ground. Yoo completely ignored all of this, and Stewart should have brought up these specifics. Along these lines, Stewart didn't seem to grasp for a long time one of Yoo's first (and relatively valid) points that there are some things that the CIA has authority to do that go beyond regular domestic law enforcement tactics but stop short of torture. Stewart also sometimes asked long, complicated questions, and then barely gave Yoo any time to respond, interrupting him again. I know he's more of an entertainer than newscaster, but especially when you know you're doing an extended interview (it lasted about 25 minutes altogether) you should know you have the time to
allow more dialogue and explanation, especially when you're the only real interview that Yoo is going through.

For Yoo's part, I felt like he was very evasive in his answers. He wouldn't give a straight answer about how and why people didn't like him, about what he was asked by the Bush administration to do, or why enhanced interrogation techniques were really ok. (This might be one of the reasons Stewart felt the need to interrupt him at times.) However, as Stewart said to Yoo at one point during the extended interview, "You're the most charming torture author I've ever met!" Yoo was articulate about many of his views on expansive executive power, among other things; he's clearly a very bright man and affable, he makes a good impression on people. Too bad he was behind such terrible legal opinions.

Overall I think it was a very good and important interview, though Stewart's interviewing skills could have been better and Yoo could have been more forthright. But as Stewart very well said at the end of the extended interview, it's too easy to caricature the opposition as evil and not sit down and actually talk about things with them. I'm glad he did a good job of having some real, honest discussion with a very controversial figure. It also made me excited to go to law school in the fall so that I'll be more equipped myself to understand, critique, and support the arguments used in these debates.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Daily Show: Exclusive - John Yoo Extended Interview Pt. 1

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Part 2 (extended)

Part 3 (extended)

Idiosyncracies and/or OCD tendencies

2010-01-11T20:10:00.000-05:00

A friend's recent tweet reminded me of one of my strange tics: I generally highlight text as I read a webpage by double-clicking on it. It's not necessarily what I'm reading at the moment (I usually concentrate my clicking around the middle of the page), and I generally highlight and unhighlight repeatedly which I'm sure annoys people who know me in real life. Sorry.

I also count steps when I'm going up or down stairs, though I understand that one is a little more common. Plus, I have somewhat complicated rules about how I step on and over cracks and lines on the ground, but I won't bore and confuse you with those here on my blog.

I don't mean to talk (solely) about in which ways I'm weird: I like to ask other people what their idiosyncratic or OCD tendencies are. So what about you? I've had friends who must close any open cabinet doors in a kitchen, who crack their fingers in a specific way at specific times, or who always try to set their alarm clock to times that are palindromes. OK fine, that last one was mine again. But what are yours? What are the weird little things you do for no good reason?

A Mormon Midrash for the New Year

2010-01-07T01:40:00.001-05:00

This is an attempt at the form presented at the blog Mormon Midrashim. Here is one I particularly found interesting there. And if you don't know what a midrash, is, well, get thee to Wikipedia

1^st Nephi 1:1 "I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father..."

This midrash has nothing to do with the verse itself, but rather with the act of reading it. If you're Mormon, you have this verse memorized, but not because of the doctrinal significance of it. Reading it means that you're starting the Book of Mormon again. That act is important because we've all done it so many times, it is a shared experience with millions, it shows our commitment to study this great book of scripture at one definite point in time. Would to God that we all had the last verse memorized just as clearly as the first, that we always finished what we started.

On The Subjectivity of Art

2010-01-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

I'm going to take as a given that art is subjective from person to person. What one person sees as a sublime expression of grace, beauty, and the highest human yearnings, another impartial observer will see as a cliched, inane, derivative piece of trash. That's ok, and I'm not going to talk about such subjectivity.

I'm interested in how even one person can see the same or very similar putative works of art very differently. Let me give an example. I hated the movie Iron Man. I found Robert Downey Jr.'s character loathsome (and yes, I know he was supposed to be a jerk, but I just hated him even when he was trying to change and do good etc.), I thought the plot was puerile, and I kind of hate movies where the main attraction is lots of things blowing up. I don't remember all the other reasons I had for hating the movie, I think I've successfully repressed most of the memories.

Fast forward a year and a half. I see James Cameron's legendary-upon-release film Avatar. For some reason, I enjoy watching the movie. It's escapist, campy, heavy-handed, predictable, and the metal ore they were mining is called UNOBTAINIUM for goodness' sake! ...but yet I like it. I got a good laugh with my brother imagining Bill Pullman delivering a Na'vi Independence Day speech ("Na'vi... that word should have new meaning for all of us today"), the alien world (also not-so-subtly-named Pandora) was detailed and intricate, and overall it was just fun. To be clear, I don't particularly want to ever watch it again, and I certainly wouldn't call it a very good movie by any standard criteria, but it did what it set out to do in my case: entertain.

Now as I look back, I don't see too much difference in actual quality between these two blockbusters. Dialogue, acting, cinematography--all average at best in either one. Why did I like Avatar and despise Iron Man? I have no idea. My best guess is just that in one case I was in a much better mood for a mindless action flick, but I struggle to understand how that could really account for the vast difference in reaction.

I can only conclude that even within one person, art is highly subjective. Who you are with, what happened the week before, and how much you had to pay may each influence your reaction and interpretation of any movie, painting, or album in impossible to predict ways. I don't know if that's obvious to everyone else, but I was surprised to see just how much of a difference it can make. I have no hope of even being consistent within myself about what kind of art I like. But it's so fun to keep experiencing it nonetheless.

So have you ever had this kind of experience? When and how? And as a final confession, two other favorite stupid action movies of mine (which, as I said, I normally avoid at all costs): Live Free or Die Hard and Shoot 'Em Up, but that might be because I classify both as comedy; they are hilarious.

p.s. And everyone who thought the Na'vi women were hot: you weird me out. You are completely wrong.

The Flight and the Nest

2009-12-30T00:19:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at the BYU Parity blog

I just finished a great book about 'the Woman question' in Mormonism from a historical perspective--which is a convoluted way of saying it was basically a book about the struggle for Mormon women went through for more gender equality through the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is titled "The Flight and the Nest" by Carol Lynn Pearson from 1975 and I highly recommend it.

The book's chapters consist of Pearson's summaries and contextualizations framing meaty quotes from the Woman's Exponent, The Relief Society Magazine, and The Young Woman's Journal. Topics include

The general societal undervaluation of women at the time. One of the first telegraph messages in America was of the birth of "only a girl."
Mormonism's unique doctrines that taught women that they were eternally to be considered man's equal. I learned that Eliza R. Snow's hymn that we now know as "O My Father" was originally titled "Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother."
The propriety of women entering the workforce. Brigham Young once encouraged women to "stand behind the counter, study law or physics, or become good bookkeepers and be able to do the business in any counting house."
Women's roles in politics. There's a great 1895 picture of Susan B. Anthony and Reverend Anna Howard Shaw with several prominent Mormon women who were involved in the Women's suffrage movement, plus the classic story of Mattie Hughes Cannon, a Democrat, defeating her husband Angus Cannon, a Republican and president of the Salt Lake Stake, in an 1896 election for State Senator.

The book is remarkable in showing just how progressive Mormon women (and some men) of the 19th and early 20th centuries were. They were adamant and proud to declare the eternal truth that man and woman "will always have need of the other; they will walk together, side by side, and find completeness in each other." This is precisely the message Parity strives to send, for women and men at BYU, in our nation, and around the world.

One of my personal favorite chapters was titled The True Helpmeet about the nature of the marriage relationship. A 1923 Relief Society Magazine article, quoting Frank Crane, spoke of the three ways man can look at woman:

"You can look up and call her (with more or less mental reservation) an angel, divine and ethereal... It is usually temporary and easily slumps into contempt, jealousy, and all kinds of morbidities, for it is in itself untrue and morbid.

"Secondly, you can look downward on her. You can play the autocrat. You can emphasize your lordship and mastery. And no one but a petty soul could possibly enjoy doing this.

"Thirdly, you can look her level in the eye, as your equal, your pal, your friend and companion."

I think the first attitude is quite widely held today among men in the church, to some degree or another, and is therefore one of the more immediate problems we face when working towards more gender equality. Women are not born saints on a pedestal, they are just as susceptible to temptations, pettiness, unkindness, and most all other vices as men are. We are all working towards becoming more Christlike together, and no good can come of pretending like half of us have a tremendous head-start.

I also very much appreciated the "Mormonness" of the feminism expressed in the book. Family always came first in everyone's priorities. While women pushed for the freedom to work in the same fields as and receive equal pay as men, there is a consistent recognition that raising a righteous family is the most important job of any mother. But of course it cuts both ways, and fathers are not given a free pass on family involvement either--both need to work together--and they quoted scriptures to prove it. There was also a wonderful discussion of an enlarged view of the very word "motherhood"--John Taylor spoke of how, although Eliza R. Snow never bore any children, she should surely be considered a "mother in Zion," drawing parallels with George Washington who is called the father of our nation despite his lack of offspring. Leah Widstoe adds that "all intelligent worth-while work for social betterment in private life or in organized activity is but an enlarged Motherhood acting for the uplift of mankind."

There is a lot more I would love to say about this book--the poems, the history, Pearson's final chapter addressed to her daughters, the suffragist hymn to the tune of Hope of Israel, so much!--but this post is already long, so I'll just say this: read this book. We have a rich heritage of gender equality in our religion, and it is inspiring and flat-out awesome. It gives me so much hope to see how much the condition of women has improved in just a century, and I'm excited to see how much farther we can get!

Christmas Music

2009-12-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

I feel especially Scroogian, as far as my blog is concerned, because my sister has been cranking out awesome Christmas posts daily this month on her blog, and I haven't had anything remotely Christmas related here yet. Plus, her most recent post about Christmas music kind of stole my one idea of what I wanted to do. So I'll just offer up my belated and derivative thoughts on one of the main reasons this season is so awesome: the music.

I was struck again by the power of music in bearing testimony of Christ during my BYU ward's Christmas program two Sundays ago. In particular, two girls I know sang a beautiful duet of "What Child is This?" I don't think I'd ever heard (or maybe just never paid attention) to more than the first verse, which is pretty normal stuff about Christ being born in a manger. The second verse, however, jumped out at me:

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

I hadn't ever realized how scriptural the imagery was in this song. I love the words describing the Word being made flesh, and then that flesh being pierced for us all. Just beautiful. And, as Eugene England said in his great essay Easter Weekend, a spiritual song is most beautiful when performed by those who have a testimony of the Savior about whom they sing, and these girls definitely did.

While I'm at it, I'll just throw out there another phrase that I've always found interesting in the carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem," namely "The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight." The hope and faith of millions of people--both past and future--came head to head with their fears in that night, and it was the beginning of the triumph of the former.

So enjoy the many many wonderful Christmas carols to be heard at this time of year (but let's retire those past their prime). There is truly a lot to be thankful and hopeful for during this season. What are the most meaningful Christmas songs for you?

p.s. I think we hear a lot about carols that people find annoying or overdone, but I'd like to nominate "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella" as the most underappreciated Christmas song. Any others you'd like to see sung more often?

Disagreeing on Politics

2009-11-13T22:03:00.000-05:00

I was very happy to hear about the LDS church's recent hearty approval of Salt Lake City ordinances that guarantee non-discrimination in housing and employment for LGBT people of that city. I'm now especially hopeful that last year's saddeningly rapid demise of the Common Ground Initiative will be reversed this coming year, especially with Elder Holland giving a measure of support to the idea that common-sense anti-discrimination laws would be a good thing to adopt statewide.

The liberal side of the political world was glad to hear about the Church's public stance, though many decided to see it more as damage control/PR/too little too late (one sterling exception was Andrew Sullivan--a man who has been a gay-marriage advocate for two decades).

But the most intriguing aspect of the recent news, to me, was the reaction from conservative groups like the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based organization with primarily Mormons as members. The Sutherland Institute was one of the main opponents of the Common Ground Initiative last year (watch a great debate between them and Equality Utah at the latter's website). They released a statement after the LDS Church came out in support of the gay-rights ordinances, saying

As a public relations opportunity, the LDS Church’s statement before the Salt Lake City Council may assuage the minds and soften the hearts of advocates of “gay rights” in Utah. As a policy statement, it is problematic.

The statement goes on to argue that including terms like "sexual orientation" and "sexual identity" in laws leads onto a slippery slope that makes it easier for judges and lawmakers to legalize gay marriage. In addition, Gayle Ruzicka, leader of the conservative Utah Eagle Forum and member of the LDS Church, said "We expected the church not to have a problem because they've been carved out of it. The rest of us have not been carved out of it," and that the ordinances "discriminate against people who have personal religious beliefs."

I find these disagreements intriguing because I know many Mormons who disagree with Prop 8 in California and have their commitment to Mormonism questioned for not agreeing with the Church. Harry Reid (who is against gay marriage) recently ruffled many a Mormon feather by saying that the Church should not have gotten into the Prop 8 fight. Now I wonder what the reaction, if any, will be towards those who disagree with the Church's stance on gay rights because it is too "liberal."

I won't try to use the "You're on the wrong side of the Church's stance!" card as a bludgeon to tell these people to change their views, even if it would work to my advantage in an argument, because that tactic is repugnant to me. Coercing people to believe anything is wrong, no matter the goal. Especially in the political realm, we need to understand that everyone will see things a little differently, the Church included. Birth control, abortion, and illegal immigration are other issues where I know there are good members of the Church on both sides of these issues (i.e. more liberal or more conservative than the Church's position) who disagree with the Church's stance. Don't just make appeals to authority to win an argument--if your ideas can't stand on their own, they must not be very good.

If someone doesn't agree with the Church (assuming an honest, non-confrontational disagreement) about something, especially on a political matter, why should that threaten you or me? Let's talk about it, let us reason together. Let's try out that persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, love unfeigned thing. Let's be civil and respectful; Christian.

See also: A great article by Margaret S. Lifferth from the the May 2009 Ensign [how ya like that appeal to authority? ha HA!]

Of Dylan, Tevye, and Heavenly Mother

2009-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

I was listening to one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs today, Shelter from the Storm, and thinking about how it reminds me of Heavenly Mother.

Aside #1: yes, I know, Dylan most likely wasn't actually thinking of Heavenly Mother per se when writing this song, but one of the beauties of Dylan is that his songs can mean a lot to a lot of different people. Aside #2: I realize that the third verse especially seems to be speaking specifically of a lover, but the other verses make it clear that Dylan is also thinking of a much more broad feminine subject. Bear with me...

There are two clear references to Christ in the song, one being a "crown of thorns" that the unnamed woman takes from the singer gracefully. And then, probably my favorite verse,

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose.
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I see this as an expression of our Heavenly Mother's love and concern for, in this verse Christ, but throughout the song for all of Her children. Whether we've been hunted, whether we question, whether we're hopeless and forlorn, whether we feel there's a wall between us and Her, she (alongside our Heavenly Father) is still waiting, loving, soothing--offering us shelter from the storm.

So where does Tevye come in? I watched Fiddler on the Roof today as a cultural experience for my Biblical Hebrew class (which I recommend to everyone--aside #3?) and it came to mind too as I thought about Shelter from the Storm. At the end of that film, Tevye is acting like his youngest daughter is dead, ignoring her completely, because she married a gentile. Now, to be clear, I don't think that our Heavenly Father does that to us when we act against His wishes, but I do think that with our cultural baggage we tend to see father figures as more harsh, cold, and stoic. In the film, it is the momma who is willing to call out to the wayward daughter (and the oldest sister too, let's don't forget) rather than the father. I think it is sometimes easier for us to believe that a Heavenly Mother would forgive us and love us than a Heavenly Father--again, not because that reflects reality, but because our culture conditions us that way in many respects. The idea of a Heavenly Mother helps us remember that God is great, He and She encompass all good traits, whether here in mortality we tend to associate one with 'masculinity' and another with 'femininity.'

That is the feeling that comes through to me when listening to this Dylan song.

PATRIOT Act Reauthorization Article

2009-10-13T22:45:00.000-04:00

I'm an editor for the BYU Political Review this semester (it's a blast, by the way) and also an occasional writer. The latter is the reason for this post. By popular demand (of one older sister), I'm posting a link to my rough draft: read it here. It has some notes and random crap at the end that you can ignore, or not. And just so this post has a little bit of meat to, I'll quote a bit of it here as well:

The government's intentions are noble, and who are these armchair quarterbacks, these backseat civil liberties drivers, to criticize good-faith efforts to protect us? Sadly, the government itself has admitted that mistakes--sometimes small, sometimes serious--have been made in using these powers. One example is the use of the PATRIOT Act outside its intended sphere of use: So-called "sneak and peek" warrants that allow the government to search a home or business without telling the owners for up to 30 days afterwards have only been used 3 times in counter-terrorist investigations; the hundreds of other uses were in drug investigations. Also, the FBI's own Office of the Inspector General testified before congress that the FBI severely underreported violations and irregularities in their requesting of private records. Violations ranged from mundane mistakes to acquiring records beyond what even the PATRIOT Act allows, requesting information without authorization, and requesting records for people not connected to any investigations. ...

America faces real threats to its safety, and the PATRIOT Act gives the government many tools it needs to protect us. As the law currently stands, civil liberties are not sufficiently protected, but there does not need to be a choice between safety and constitutional rights. Senator Feingold (D.-Wis.) proposed the JUSTICE Act which would still give the government the powers it needs to fight terrorists while still respecting Americans' privacy. Sadly it was defeated, and the PATRIOT Act was renewed with minimal added protections for civil liberties. We have missed an opportunity to stand with the founders of our nation, who fought for the right of citizens to be free from broad government searches. Our next major chance for reform will be in 2013, when these same provisions will be up for review again.

So, any thoughts? How can I improve it? Does it explain my concerns effectively? Be vicious; this is a first draft, after all.

Ear Candy

2009-09-21T03:52:00.000-04:00

If you want to hear good music, and I mean really quality music, please listen to Chanticleer. They are one of the most widely acclaimed male vocal groups around. If you own some of their stuff already, I plead with you to get out some good headphones and listen some more because--c'mon--it will be worth it. If, on the other hand, you don't have any of their stuff or haven't even heard them (shame!), then go find something post-haste. I'm listening to their gospel album Where the Sun Will Never Go Down and it is just stupendous. Oh my word it is good.

To paraphrase the words that Richard G. Scott has unfortunately never actually said, "If you have not listened to Chanticleer, I plead with you. Listen to them now. Do not delay. If you have thought, 'That’s not for me,' I plead with you to reconsider. Of all bands I treasure, this one was the first."

So there you have it. They were endorsed by a fictional General Authority quote. The thinking has been done. So go listen!

To bear one another's burdens, that they may be light

2009-09-14T21:00:00.001-04:00

I just read an inspiring account of what is right with the Church and its interactions with its gay members. No matter one's political, theological, personal beliefs, I think we can all agree that this is a beautiful thing, and one that I hope is tried elsewhere as well.

The Five Love Languages

2009-07-20T17:49:00.000-04:00

I think I'm just a johnny-come-lately, but I only yesterday found out about the Five Love Languages (pay no mind to the cheesy website design, they're actually pretty cool--read on!) by Gary Chapman. Basically, he posits that there are five basic "love languages"--ways to express and receive love. The five languages are (in no particular order):

Quality Time - You find it really important to spend time with people and be together.
Acts of Service - Small acts of service really communicate love.
Words of Affirmation - It's important to have love and compliments expressed verbally.
Gift Giving - Giving gifts is a major way of communicating love.
Physical Touch - A hand on the arm, a back-scratch, an arm around the shoulder, a kiss--these are the best ways to communicate love.

It's important to remember that everyone experiences love in all of these ways, but Chapman contends that everyone has one that is more important than all the others, and that they can be (more or less) ranked for each person--think "good, better, best." Also, although for most people they are the same, it is possible to prefer to give love in one language, and receive it in another.

For me, it was kind of hard to pick my dominant language. I can definitely rule out gift-giving since gifts don't mean much at all to me, and service (while of course nice) is also not very high on my list. But the remaining three were harder. I finally decided on quality time being my number one--I really love to talk to people one-on-one and spend time with friends and loved ones. Words of affirmation are also very important to me--I sometimes can crave verbal praise and recognition, and when I hear them it just feels really, really good. Physical touch is also important for me. I love hugging, back-scratches, holding hands, etc., though PDA is gross. All that was validated by this quiz (no scientificity guaranteed), where I scored 11 on quality time, 8 on words of affirmation, and 7 on physical touch (service was 4, gift giving 0 :) ).

Like I said, I just yesterday found out about this way of looking at ways of communicating love, but I think it's a very useful tool. Just talking to my girlfriend about it helped me recognize a source of what had been some concern for me (that she's not a "words of affirmation" kind of girl) but also helped me realize that she expresses love through physical touch and quality time. It was also good to find out that we're both not very into gifts--phew! (but don't worry, I still give flowers or whatever on special occasions).

Overall I think it's very useful to recognize how family, friends, and significant others give and receive love so that you're not talking past each other. If one person constantly says "I love you" but the recipient of those words thinks talk is cheap and would prefer the other person just pitch in with the chores, you can see how problems could develop and both sides feel hurt. Apparently, you can also work on improving your fluency in love languages that don't come as naturally to you, which is a great goal, and one I'll be working on.

So, were you already familiar with the five love languages? Which one(s) is (are) your primary language(s)? Did you like all those parentheses I needed to make that last sentence exactly tolerant of whether or not you had multiple love languages? Have you ever been in a situation where two people had their relationship damaged by using two different love languages without realizing it? I'm anxious to hear your thoughts!

And it breaks my heart

2009-07-15T14:38:00.001-04:00

The next time I go to the temple, I'm putting Anonymous on the prayer roll. It will represent both that letter writer, and all the other gay members of the church who have to remain "Anonymous" out of fear.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." -- Paul

Editorial on Homosexuality Finally Published

2009-07-02T11:45:00.000-04:00

The BYU Daily Universe finally published my article, A Call for Compassion, about homosexuality at BYU. You can read it here. Only took them 5 months :)

I'm glad it got published, though I wish they would have waited till fall semester (or just printed it last winter like they said they would...), but they couldn't guarantee it would get published then so I just figured better now than never. Hopefully it will help out some of the students who think they're alone in being attracted to members of the same sex, and hopefully it will help increase the level of tolerance among those of us who aren't. Time will tell.

History in the Present Tense

2009-06-15T22:14:00.000-04:00

Absolutely amazing. Breathtaking. Awe inspiring. I need more cliches to describe this. Iran is erupting in protests over almost certainly faked-election results: the incumbent Ahmadinejad appears to have rigged the election to prevent his defeat by the reform candidate Mousavi (whose supporters wear green, explaining the sea of that color in all the videos and pictures). Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest, and it sends chills down my spine the more I read about it. These people are getting beaten by state police and plain-clothes policemen, people are being killed, but they are standing up and not taking it. It is stunning. This in a country that only a few years ago was declared part of Bush's new axis of evil (though the broad stroke lacked the nuance one might desire from our head of state, he definitely had a point: the country hasn't been doing too much right recently). A country where candidates in presidential elections have to be OK'ed by the unelected religious clerics. A country whose president has denied the Holocaust and called the US a western devil and who knows what all else. This. Is. HUGE. Included below is one of the best raw, powerful videos I've seen yet on youtube of what's going on; it was taken earlier today (Monday) in a large square in Tehran where Mousavi spoke. Huge crowds, chanting, the sounds of freedom.

This next clip shows Mousavi a bit as well:

One of the most important sources of information (though by nature also fragmented and prone to rumor and exaggeration) has been Twitter, believe it or not. Here's a link to a collection of tweets from Iranians (warning: includes two pics of bloody protesters). Yes, they're out of context, they're short--but they're first-hand accounts of the panic and elation that is coursing through the Iranian people right now.

From the videos I've seen, there has been some violence on the part of protesters, though it seems remarkably little compared to the beatings they seem to be enduring. I've seen a few fires burning and some rock throwing, but at the same time there have been amazing pictures of protesters shepherding lone riot police who have gotten caught in the midst of the hostile public to safety (pictured at top--see another similar incident, in video form, here). The Iranians are hungry for democracy, and by and large they are going about it peacefully. If the regime keeps responding with force, though, I don't know how long it will stay non-violent.

Right now I'm praying for a relatively peaceful outcome and for the will of the people to ultimately prevail. And of course keeping up with the latest every chance I get. I've seen amazing coverage from The Daily Dish (actually the same blog that had the great series on abortion I mentioned in my previous post), Andrew Sullivan there has been all over every new angle as it unfolds. FiveThirtyEight.com has also had some great coverage of the statistics of the election, with this post being a great example. BBC and NPR are also covering things pretty well. The perennially superb Big Picture blog also has a great collection of photographs which show protestors being beaten, fighting back, marching peacefully, the aftermath of raids on Tehran University, and more.

Again, this is amazing. We are either witnessing the birth of a much more direct democracy or about to see a regime strike hard against its own people. Let's hope this is more of a USSR falling thing rather than a Burma or Tiananmen Square thing. I certainly hope so.

It's So Personal

2009-06-09T00:08:00.000-04:00

There has been an amazing series of posts on Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, titled "It's So Personal." Sullivan has a strong Catholic background and is staunchly pro-life, but in the wake of George Tiller's murder he has opened a discussion on his blog featuring first-hand stories of women (and sometimes their husbands/boyfriends) about their decisions to either have or not have an abortion, with an emphasis on abortions that occur after ~20 weeks--the type of abortion that Tiller was one of only about three doctors in America to provide.

The best part about the series has been the even-handedness of it all. Accounts are published from people who had abortions who regretted it and those who think it was the right choice. There are stories of mothers who chose not to have an abortion and are happy with that decision, even if sometimes the baby only lived a few minutes, if at all. The stories contradict each other, in the sense that they don't all come to the same conclusions or even agree about some of the fundamentals. But they are all real in that you can get a sense, however small, of the heart-wrenching decisions that many women and men go through. The series brings nuance, reality, and detail to a debate that has for too long been characterized by the single word you put after "pro-" in your label. These posts remind us all that this really is not just a black and white issue, no matter how strong feelings are on both sides. [See this Newsweek article that basically says the same thing, more eloquently.]

You can read the first dozen or so posts here, listed chronologically. Since that list was published just earlier this week, there have been a few more published as well. Three that I found very touching were Not Knowing For Sure, A Target of Terror, and, perhaps the most unlikely, A Life Saved By Choice.

My point, again, is this: abortion is a terribly difficult choice. While I don't think it's possible or, ultimately, desirable to outlaw abortion, I also love life and want to see the number of elective abortions drop through promoting adoption, better counseling, and providing much more support for pre-, neo-, and post-natal care, especially for the impoverished. But the bottom line is this: don't vilify and lampoon those who disagree with you. Again, this is not a cut-and-dry issue, so let's all try to do what we can to understand other points of view and try to look with charity on all of our fellow women and men. I'm grateful to Sullivan for helping me see multiple sides of a contentious issue.

Missionary Moment

2009-06-03T14:19:00.000-04:00

This is a story from a friend of mine named Chris Gong, who's currently serving a mission somewhere in Taiwan (sorry, I can never remember missions more specific than the country). His emails are generally quite short (this one is exceptionally long by his standards) but poignant is always a good word to describe them. Here is his most recent email, in full. I love it.

Elder Christopher Gong

Early in my mission, I was moved to the rural mountain town of QiShan in southern Taiwan. The branch was small but full of faith and love. One day, after seeking referrals in church, Andy Weng bounced up to us followed by his sister Emily. He said “We know someone who needs the gospel. It’s our Uncle. He just got out of jail on probation because he needs heart surgery. It’s perfect!”A little bit apprehensive, we set up a time for later that week.
I’ll always remember the first time we saw Brother Guo. He was slouched back against his motorcycle, stone faced and chain smoking. He wouldn’t come into the house for the lesson, so we taught him standing up outside by his motorcycle. We shared about our loving Heavenly Father and that through reading the Book of Mormon and praying, we can know He is there and feel his love. Emily shared her favorite scriptures and bore testimony. After loving persuasion from Andy and Emily, Brother Guo reluctantly set another time.
The next time we met, I was startled to see there was something different about him. “You’ve been reading and praying, haven’t you?” I said. “Every single day,” he said gruffly, but his eyes smiled just a little, and Andy and Emily were beaming. My companion and I sat at the Weng family dinner table, listening to stories and trying (and failing) to avoid getting served pig foot soup. Dishes were cleared, and we started the lesson with song and prayer. My first move companion bore testimony of the atonement in his first move Chinese. As everyone listened intently, straining to better understand, an amazing thing happened. The spirit filled the room, and we could tell Brother Guo’s heart was touched.
Over the next few weeks, Brother Guo read and prayed daily. He came to church with his supportive family. He struggled with and eventually overcame his addictions. We saw his heart softened, and the light in his eyes grow brighter and brighter. But because of his traditional beliefs and opposition from other relatives, he was still unwilling to commit to baptism.
As we were leaving after one appointment, Brother Guo exchanged some quick words in Taiwanese with his older sister. She said “Andy told him that missionaries can give blessings. He’s going into surgery this week, and he’s worried. Can you give him a blessing?” He may have been worried, but we were terrified. We could barely communicate, and neither of us had ever given a blessing in Chinese before. We knelt together in prayer. And then, in their broken down storeroom, with our broken Chinese, we performed the blessing.
We saw Brother Guo at church the next Sunday. He looked tired and walked slowly. After church, he pulled us aside. One night after his surgery, he had woken up with throbbing chest pains. Desperately, he prayed for help. The pains subsided. He was grateful and humble, and asked to be baptized.

So that's why I chose Ezekiel 36:26-28. as my mission scripture.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

May we all continue to have mighty changes of heart.

Love, Elder Gong

Music's the only thing that makes sense anymore, man

2009-06-01T03:23:00.000-04:00

Utah's Gay RIghts Failure

2009-03-29T03:28:00.000-04:00

I recently wrote an article for BYU's Political Review titled Utah's Gay Rights Failure about the saddening defeat of the Common Ground Initiative, a set of bills in the Utah legislature that would have granted some basic rights like not getting fired if your employer finds out you're gay, hospital visitation rights, health care for partners, and the standing to sue in the case of wrongful death. I'm just linking to the article on the PR website if you'd like to read it so that you can also take part in some of the discussion going on there.

Also, I highly recommend Ryan Decker's piece from the same issue called Teams With No Winners about blind partisanship, and why it's bad; don't worry, he puts it a bit more eloquently :)

Ahh, the ghetto that is University Villa!

2009-03-24T22:39:00.001-04:00

I live at University Villa, and don't get me wrong: I like it. My roommates are the grapes, my ward is chill, rent is cheap, and cleaning checks are not analistic. But I do have to chuckle sometimes at the ghettoness of the place. (Disclaimer: I know, compared to 95% of the world, I live in the lap of luxury here. I am talking strictly relative to middle-class America when I call it the ghetto)

Half of the walls are (painted) cinderblock. The pool is going to be mostly a big gravel hole without water for another month and a half. And--what really motivated this post--this is a picture of how maintenance fixes leaks in the floor of our bathroom: by putting some caulking down and holding it in place with a board which in turn is held down by two rocks and some phone books. Stupendous!