Mormons are neither Catholic nor Protestant, so what happens to a convert in Northern Ireland, when their class, their identity, their traditions and their politics are tied to one of these two religions? It s not easy for them as you can imagine.
I went to church at the branch in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Asking around I found out most of the converts were protestants who lived in Waterside, the protestant side of the river. They told me there were a few Catholics in the branch and most of them were on the dole and having too many babies.
(Yikes!) So even after conversion, the LDS here identify themselves with one side or the other. They are all converts and have to face great pressure from their families, neighbors, and friends.
When they get baptized they are denying centuries of their heritage. The religious distinction is more about loyalties to the crown or a native Ireland. It s been that way since the 17th century when the British in power tried to convert the natives and started bringing over protestant English settlers to fill their plantations.
One history book I ve been reading said, To be a protestant or catholic in 18th century Ireland indicated more than mere religious allegiance:it represented opposing political cultures, and conflicting views of history. (Foster, The Oxford History of Ireland) That distinction continues today.
One woman told me that in the 80s she went to the branch in Omagh where the members were evenly divided among Catholics and protestants.
She said they sat on opposite sides of the church and didn t talk to each other. But now they mingle and don t divide themselves that way. She told me she doesn t know how they did it, how they overcame the prejudice.
But I think after 20 years of going to church with people it d be natural to get over it, I hope so anyway.
Maybe mormonism is the solution to the Troubles of northern Ireland. It would take another century at least, but imagine if there were no longer Catholics nor protestants in the country.
First, I suppose the wards have to learn to integrate themselves too. I didn t notice any separation, and I couldn t pick out the few Catholics there. But in conversation with the members I could see that they can t so easily slough off their political and cultural identities with baptism.
What an odd piece of advice to hear over the pulpit, but hear it we did earlier this month, as explained (for late arrivers or early snoozers who missed the announcement) in . And the Trib article gives the rest of the story : the blunt advice appears to be a response to notes (apparently accurate) made of an apostle s Stake Conference remarks, subsequently circulated via email to various members, including (according to the article) CES employees.
They can hardly put out a letter criticizing an apostle for what he said, so they put out a letter criticizing those who repeat what he said.
Okay So what are the new ground rules for how to relate to a visiting GA s Stake Conference remarks? Don t make recordings.
Don t take notes. It s probably best to simply forget what is said immediately at the conclusion of the talk, but if you do happen to remember what is said, do not repeat it to anyone. To really be on the safe side, consider just skipping out on Stake Conference entirely.
A visit to your local cinema or sporting event would put you safely out of harm s way, as well as providing the whole family with alternate weekend conversation material.
If there s really anything important said, it would appear that an official written transcript of the remarks will be released. At least that seems to be the import of the announcement, according to what I recall.
The memo was careful to distinguish reliable official sources from everything else. You would think they would at least post the memo in the at LDS.org, but no.
Ironically, if you missed the announcement over the pulpit you have to get the news either via word of mouth, from the media, or right here.
[UPDATE: Here s , also from the SL Trib link from over at T S.]
--108828154912434767-->Surfing for something to kick around the blog, I noticed Christianity Today s of Michael Moore s latest film/documentary/satire/comedy (real name: , whatever that is supposed to mean). CT calls it heavily sarcastic, rather entertaining, and somewhat incoherent. The title he borrows from , and the borrows a picture of George Bush (putting just Moore on the poster would be .
. . unappealing?
).
I liked some of Moore s early stuff (such as Roger and Me) but he s kind of flying out of orbit lately. Why should we care?
Because seeing is believing for most people. Americans increasingly get their news from what might be charitably termed the alternative media, sources like talk radio, Drudge, and hyped books like the recent slew of I hate Bush books all being examples. These are all outlets on the fringes of journalism that hype controversy and are largely insulated from editorial review.
Moore s success on the big screen seems to open a new niche for this alternative media. Ironically, the has released a bunch of good, accurate information lately (such as ), not by any means slanted in favor of the President, but with good facts, historical context, and reasoned analysis. I m afraid people will watch Moore s movie and skip the Commission reports.
It s not the politics that s the issue, it s the genre. My concern is that Moore s approach can make any person or cause look foolish, stupid, or evil. What s his next target: The Boy Scouts?
Religion? Mormons? Baseball?
Apple pie? Lawyers? And will satirical documentaries displace Hollywood action flicks the way reality TV has displaced sitcoms and dramas?
My husband and I had dinner with our home teacher and his family this past Sunday. We enjoyed a lovely meal and after Sis.
X and I had thoroughly exhausted the topic of the vagaries of a life spent wearing undergarments designed by a male who clearly had no design experience, we got into the good stuff.
Home teacher X is a good man, actually a great man, and I have no problem with him - in fact, I like him very much - except that he happens to be in the stake high council. Unfortunately for him, this quirk of his means that sooner or later, as in any conversation I have with anyone with administrative authority in the church (ward clerk, anyone?
), I started to pepper him with interrogatories and accusations, attempting to elicit any enlightened response on church policy.
This is my issue: why does the church so forthrightly and singlemindedly waste its greatest resource- the women?!
!! In particular, let s talk about administrative leadership.
I happened to go to law school in NYC along with others of you. Even during law school, a number of my male compatriots in the law school were tapped, rightly so, I m sure, to share the burden of the administrative functioning of the stake. They were/are stake clerks, members of bishoprics, members of the high council, etc.
This trend has only increased in the years since graduation. In fact, I would say we have a definite bias towards lawyers in the stake, perhaps because our great stake president is himself, one of the chosen. I, on the other hand, being of the female, if not feminine, persuasion, hold callings like primary teacher and compassionate service committee member.
So, that is all well and good. I certainly don t aspire to be a bishop; I can rarely stay awake through sacrament meeting, and it would be mighty embarrassing to have to do my snoring on the stand.
I also recognize that we do have leadership roles for women: a woman can be a leader in the auxiliaries, as Primary or RS Pres.
However, these roles tend to be reserved by age and experience in the church, unlike the leadership roles chosen for men around these parts. Furthermore, they are certainly off-limits for women who choose or are unable to work outside the home in a professional capacity. Finally, those roles deal exclusively with women and children.
If a woman has a position of leadership in that or another capacity and needs to deal with men, her authority is always subject to the authority of a man.
So, what s up with the sexist treatment? Let s take as a given that the priesthood for men is a divinely inspired dictate and necessary for the preservation of order in the church and that hierarchy itself is a good (not that I don t, ahem, question that).
What does priesthood service have to do with administrative function? If the men who come to NYC to go to law school and business school (sorry, MDs, I know you ve got Yamada, but there just aren t as many of you) possess certain leadership/organizational skills, and the church chooses to call upon them to use that skill set, why not use women with those same skills that way?
The way I see it, priesthood function is organized to keep men interested in church.
Excuse the generalizations, but the majority of men respond to hierarchy, responsibility, concrete accomplishment and power. So, the organization of the church does an effective job appealing to a certain kind of man, if not all men.
This isn t just a personal vendetta for me, because I happen to enjoy my callings, but rather a pattern of abuse we can track throughout the church.
The bigger problem, aside from hurt feelings, is wasted resources. More educated women are not just excluded from serving most effectively in the church, they are squashed when attempts are made. Women, even those with certain carved-out leadership administration, still have to answer to (typically) socially-conditioned sexist males for approval of projects.
Ultimately, I think many women just opt out. Why try to set up service projects at church when we can go outside the church and serve more effectively? I could be an attorney at Human Rights Watch and effect change, but if I wanted to set up a program to help at-risk youth in the church, I would have to clear it with fifteen people at the top of the stake, assuming I could even get them to answer my phone calls.
HOFRS is one of the greatest acronyms the Church has ever come up with: Helping Others Feel and Recognize the Spirit, a great way to systematize something that is utterly unsystematic.
In any event, for purposes of my post I m tweaking HOFRS, because I m curious about Helping Ourselves Feel and Recognize the Spirit.
As to helping ourselves feel the Spirit: Christ says in John, The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. How can we force the wind to blow our way? Admittedly, Sunday School Answers spring to mind, but I m not sure that reading the Scriptures, or any other activity, is going to always do the trick for us as some sort of totemic invocation.
What works for me is seizing random opportunities I have the idea that by praying, or reading scriptures, etc. whenever I get the chance, I have as much likelihood of feeling the Spirit as I would at any other time. Unfortunately, this leads me to believe that on some level, getting a piece of the Spirit seems a matter of happenstance.
Can this be right?
As to helping ourselves recognize the Spirit: this one is a mess. I don t think we do a fantastic job in this Church of helping people realize when they ve felt the Spirit, or helping them distinguish between the Spirit and good feelings, or for that matter helping people understand exactly what the Spirit is.
For example, take the doctrinal notions of Light of Christ, Gift of the Holy Ghost , and feeling inspired. No one can explain what these mean, at least not in any definitive sense and to be sure, all of our doctrinal explanations will overlap and at times conflict. Don t get me going about the H.
G. during Christ s earthly ministry!
In my mind however, a doctrinal definition of roles for the Holy Ghost/Spirit isn t as immediately important as trying to discern when you are feeling the Spirit, compared to when you ve just watched Beaches or Saving Private Ryan and feel a catharsis brought on by good drama or melodrama.
Can we feel the Spirit when it is artificially invoked through drama or film (that certainly seems the premise of LDS films)? How can we tell exactly what s going on? It would seem to be an important distinction since everyday emotions don t have the power to lead us to salvation the way the Spirit is supposed to.
Equally difficult is the notion that the Spirit speaks through our own thoughts and emotions, thereby completely obscuring its nature as an external influence.
So, to sum up:
1. I don t know how, exactly, to get myself feeling the Spirit; and
2.
I wouldn t really know it, exactly, if I were feeling the Spirit.
This can t be as hopeless a scenario as it sounds thousands feel the Spirit, and bear testimony to that effect. But I d like to hear it from some of you.
The latest issue of Sunstone magazine contains the most interesting article to grace its pages in some time. Entitled its author, John-Charles Duffy, argues that the orthodox intellectuals of Mormonism, while defending the faith and sparring with its critics, are simultaneously expanding the scope of Mormon orthodoxy in beneficial ways.
Duffy contrasts orthodox intellectuals such as Stephen Robinson and the FARMS authors with hard-liners (orthodox non-intellectuals?) like Joseph Fielding McConkie. Orthodox intellectuals sometimes accommodate the wisdom of the world into their religious views and strive to square LDS understandings with secular knowledge, all the while maintaining certain boundaries so as not to become liberal Mormons or revisionists.
Hard-liners reject such a project, believing it to be misguided, and perhaps even harmful. Duffy concludes:
I do not anticipate that orthodox intellectuals will persuade mainstream academics to take LDS faith claims seriously, nor do I anticiate that they will convince mainline Christians to stop challenging LDS claims to the Christian label. However, orthodox intellecuals have been remarkably successful at promoting their progressive orthodoxy within the Church.
How have they done this? Think of the debates about hemispheric vs. limited Book of Mormon geography, greater acceptance of evolutionary biology, modified LDS understandings of Biblical mistranscription ( it s really just about the canon ), etc.
If this reminds anyone of Kaimi Wenger s thread at T S, it should. Although the theses are different, many of the same themes and specific examples are present in both.
I really liked this article.
It squared with many of my own observations about Mormon apologetics. Not that I wouldn t quibble with a few things: I don t share Duffy s a priori rejection of Book of Mormon historicity (not that this matters to his thesis). Also, I feel like overt psychoanalysis of academic motives belongs on Oprah Winfrey, rather than in a magazine article.
Nevertheless, the broad claims of the article resonated with me. (Footnote 201 is one of my dead horses!)
This could serve as a springboard for a lot of issues, but here s the one for today: Duffy talks about the anti-intellectual tradition within Mormonism (which he rejects) and the anti-contention tradition (with which he sympathisizes).
He thinks that on balance, the effect of orthodox intellectualism on Mormonism is positive, but in its vitriolic FARMS manifestation, it has had to develop an apologia for apologetics itself. That is, the FARMS authors have needed to justify the scathing, sarcastic, polemical (insert lots of other adjectives here) quality of their rhetoric, in light of various scriptural, prophetic and apostolic admonitions ostensibly opposed to their project (but not universally so), and this hasn t been an easy row for them to how. Duffy thinks the scriptural grounds for jettisoning the anti-contention tradition in Mormonism are somewhat problematic, though perhaps not insurmountable.
I must confess that I personally am not as sympathetic to the anti-contention tradition as Duffy. I like rhetorical fireworks more than most people. I really enjoy reading the FARMS Review for this reason alone.
I like to pick verbal fights. I don t necessarily wear that as a badge of honor; it is merely an empirical observation about myself (which other Bloggernaclites occasionally get to see on display). But at the same time, I think Duffy has a point; there is no denying the scriptural and prophetic injunction against contention.
So what should we make of this? Is contention a bad thing that becomes a necessary evil only in certain contexts (be that a context of defending the faith, or any other)? Or is contention sometimes bad, but sometimes an unqualified good?
Or is the problem that contention lacks a precise definition, whose parameters haven t been thoroughly explored, and typical rhetoric about avoiding contention is therefore tired and simplistic?
You tell me.
--108756632803891867-->Some of you may remember last week s . After some long and arduous deliberations, we re pleased to announce our winners!
Winner, best blog post idea:
, with his Super Size Me idea:
First, the two inspirations for the idea.
You may have heard of the movie Supersize Me. For those that haven t, it s a documentary in which a man eats every meal, three times a day, at McDonalds, for an entire month. It documents his health and the changes his body makes throughout the month, as a sort of longitudinal experiment on what McDonald s food does in high doses, to the human body.
Second inspiration: Gary Cooper s post at Doctrinal:net on studying the scriptures intensely. Specifically, Gary writes that on his mission he was able (I do not know how) to read the scriptures for four to six hours a day, which resulted in an extremely heightened spirituality, including the receipt of many revelations.
So here s the idea: I m going to mix the two.
I m going to go on a diet of pure Book of Mormon, allowing no other optional inputs in my life. Meaning: outside of work and encounters with actual people, I will not have anything put into my brain besides the Book of Mormon. For a month I won t watch TV, won t read anything else, won t do movies, music (except background sacred), or internet (besides blogs).
Every spare moment when I don t need to be doing something else will be spent reading from the Book of Mormon. It will be a month of pure Book of Mormon.
During and after the diet, I will report on the experience.
And Winner, best blog tech update idea:
, who submitted many great ideas, the best of which was:
Consider giving each poster their own short link list, i.e. Steve s Links or John s Links where each can put their own favorite sites about absolutely anything.Please join me in congratulating our winners and their fantastic ideas! I will contact them each today regarding their hard-won Gmail accounts, and implementing their ideas.Encourages diversity, creates links, gives posters something to blog about.
For those of you experienced with budget travelling, the hostel culture should be familiar. Most dorm rooms have 4 + beds and the polite and friendly thing to do is introduce yourself to nearby bunk-mates.
Introductions include obligatory answers to the following: where are you from, where have you been, where are you going, how long have you been here and when things are really friendly bunkmates will often share tales of the things they ve seen in town or good tours they went on.
My first night staying in an hostel last week, (I m travelling) three boisterous dyed blond college girls checked themselves into my room. Usually I find these girls annoying.
They tend to talk to much and be too loud in their vacuous blatherings. These girls did fit that stereotype and had a long discusssion on Britney Spears new boyfriend. BUT, they were sweet.
When they told me they were all from Nevada, Reno or Las Vegas and then I looked at them with their sweet smiling blond selves, I thought, they could be mormon. So I asked, You guys aren t mormon are you? They laughed and said no , but told me they know lots of mormons.
Then, and this was my fault for asking the question in a negative way, one of the girls said Hey, we could ve really freaked her out by telling her yes! Ha ha ha. That s when I knew it was time to share, so I said, Oh, I am mormon, that s why I know there are so many in Nevada.
They got quiet for 2 seconds then were over it. I felt the urge to say, don t worry, I m not like the rest. But I restrained myself, I m glad I did.
But why did I feel like saying that? I wondered what it is about us that makes girls like this think we are freaky, and that made me apologetic and almost shameful of my own kind? The whole episode disturbed me.
I m ashamed that I had that reaction. What is it about us that makes us so freaky? How sad.
Here we were, on the other side of the Atlantic, and we both brought this negative view of mormons with us. Discuss.
(P.
S. I m having a fabulous time, it wasn t disturbing enough to tarnish my trip.)
Jennifer J
--108739803897046107-->A thread at Times and Seasons titled LDS Need Not Apply has sparked discussion of the Marriott Corporation s decision to make p0rnography available to their guests. Mormon s tend to see Marriott as a Mormon corporation and are quick to pass judgment on business practices that are perceived to be contradictory to church teachings. Of course Marriott is not the only corporation that is held to this unusual standard, but it is probably the most well known so it is the one I will use as an example.
Two camps generally emerge when discussion turns to whether Mormon owned or Mormon run corporations should be held to a different standard than the rest of their industry. The first camp puts out a hypocrisy argument, expressing outrage or shock at the businessman s behavior. The second, what I think of as the duty already owed argument, says that a duty is owed to a constituency that requires a course of action that may be contrary to the church s teachings or the person s personal beliefs.
Several times I have heard fellow church members condemn Marriott for trafficking in p0rn. Occasionally I hear in response that Marriott is a public corporation and the corporation owes a duty to shareholders to maximize profits.
Not maximizing shareholder return itself, however, does not violate any duties-at least in the state where it counts (and every other state that I am aware of).
The Delaware courts have held that directors must maximize shareholder value only when the breakup of the corporation is certain or there is a change of control. Corporate directors are required to act in the best interests of their shareholders, but this does not require them to maximize profits without taking other constituencies into consideration. The legal doctrine known as the business judgment rule protects directors and officers from personal liability as long as they are acting in good faith-which amounts to having an articulable reason for pursuing a course of action.
While there is no real legal reason compelling a Mormon director or CEO to act against the teachings of the church, there may be competing moral reasons. I am sympathetic to the Mormon CEO who feels a certain way about an issue but believes that the shareholders to whom he owes a duty expect him to act differently. I m not sure a CEO ought to feel comfortable imposing his moral values on a company if he doesn t believe it is in the best interests of the company-this is precisely the imperial CEO behavior that the business publications have spilt buckets of ink over for the last three years.
On the other hand, it seems to me that a Mormon corporate leader is no different than any other corporate director or CEO in that he shouldn t check his ethical and moral convictions at the door.
What I m interested in, then, is a corporate Mormon ethic that considers competing duties and interests that a Mormon corporate leader faces and thinks about how to approach them systematically.
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