Hold on to your hats and glasses, folks; this week’s query is bound to be a wild one.
Dear Mormon Girl:
I’ve noticed a lot of my gay and lesbian friends seem to love the show Big Love? Why?
Signed,
JKL
First, JKL, a true confession: I don’t watch Big Love. I know Mormons who do watch it. I know Mormons who love it. And I know Mormons who hate it, especially since the show televised to the whole stinking world portions of sacred temple ceremonies reserved only for the most dedicated members of the faith. Yup, that really bothered me.
Continue reading…
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A close friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous recently saw in the shadow of the temple his story follows
In October, I was fortunate to attend the Portland, Oregon, screening of the movie, In the Shadow of the Temple. http://www.intheshadowofthetemple.com The screening was hosted by the producers, Karen Di Millia and Dennis Lavery. Prior to the screening Dennis and Karen spoke for 10 minutes and explained how they started this project. After the screening they took questions and answers for roughly 30 minutes.
Lavery and DeMillia, who are not–and never have been–LDS, originally planned to make a movie about people who had left the religion of their youth. They attended a meeting of the Portland Humanist Society, explained their project, and asked if anyone had such stories they would be willing to share. In the course of discussing the project with members of the society, they were told that who they really needed to talk to was Sue Emmett, who had left the LDS church. After talking with Sue and others with whom she put them in touch, they decided to re-focus their project on the experience of those who have left the LDS church. Continue reading…
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Recently I drove up Little Cottonwood Canyon with my brother and nephew. This is the canyon in which many of your ancestors pulled out the granite for the construction of the salt lake temple. As soon as we passed the granite facings on the side of the canyon my nephew played a song on his iPod by Corb Lund Brother Brigham Brother Young and it brought mental flashes into my mind of men working on the side of the mountain blasting granite out of it. It made me think of the struggles that men and women had even back then with the faith in many ways very similar to our day. From what I have read Mr Lund isn’t LDS but has relatives that are. Im assuming one of his relatives is a historian buff? Its probably safe to presume this song will never be played in a chapel 
but I can’t help liking it! You can listen to his song Here Continue reading…
If one searches around the bloggernacle, you’ll find a snarky comment about how the church traded polygamy for statehood, or that the church just wimped-out on polygamy. Such comments don’t seem to take into account how much pressure the US government was putting on the church–it was literally trying to snuff it out if the church didn’t back down from polygamy.
I’d like to get into some of these details leading up to the Manifesto. (This is a shorter version–more details are found here.) I talked about the Manifesto previously in the context of whether the prophet would ever lead the church astray. It should be noted that the church had been fighting federal anti-polygamy legislation for nearly 30 years, so I think it should be noted that the Manifesto banning polygamy in 1890 was not a spur-of-the-moment quick capitulation. I’ll be taking my quotes from 2 books: Forgotten Kingdom by David Bigler, and Great Basin Kingdom, by Leonard Arrington.
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Being from England, we do not really have a Polygamous Pioneer heritage like some from the US. However, we do have something a little more contemporary. A few months ago I was speaking to a single woman, who had a few children and had been divorced for some time, about the Church’s history regarding polygamy. It was fairly routine until she began explaining some of her past experiences with people who had approached her regarding whether she wanted to practice Polygamy, but in a slightly different way. Continue reading…
A few weeks ago, here at Mormon Matters, I posted on My Perspective on Polygamy (with a longer version found on my blog.) I hinted that I wanted to talk about it some more, and this time I thought I would try a more “faithful” perspective. A commenter on my blog took exception to some “hearsay” I had been discussing. So, I wanted to see what Bushman had to say on these issues, as well as address some assertions by others regarding Joseph’s possibly nefarious motives for polygamy. Specifically, I want to address 3 controversial issues:
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I have long avoided talking about polygamy on my blog. It is a source of tremendous discomfort for me, but it keeps coming up, so I want to give my impressions about this early practice in Mormonism, as well as my beliefs and reconciliations.
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OK Paul technically isn’t exactly an international DJ, not unless you consider that you can listen to his interviews on line.
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The tragedy of 9/11 had a big impact on my views about the relationship between faith and reason. As I watched the video footage of the jumbo jets flying into the World Trade Center towers over and over again, it dawned on me that I was witnessing the destructive power of faith unchecked by reason. Consider for a moment the faith proposition that motivated the 9/11 hijackers: “If you slit a few throats to hijack a plane and then fly that plane into a skyscraper, killing yourself and all your comrades along with thousands of civilian men, women, and children, then God will reward you in Heaven with 72 virgins who will provide you more sensual delights than you could ever have hoped to enjoy during mortality.” Viewing the fruits of the hijackers’ faith — the twisted steel and endless ash, the homemade “Missing” flyers plastered everywhere, the sobbing relatives of the victims — I couldn’t help wishing the hijackers would have run that faith proposition through the wringer of reason before deciding to act upon it.
Faith needs reason because faith unchecked by reason can be just as deadly as reason unchecked by faith proved to be in the gulags of Soviet Russia, the Cultural Revolutions of Maoist China, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. (Would Stalin, Mao, and Pot have ordered the killings of millions if they had had faith in an afterlife and final judgment?)
We Mormons are certainly not immune to the potential dangers of unquestioning faith. Continue reading…
I think it’s fascinating to watch people justify their angst over prophets by pointing out all the “weird” stuff about which prophets used to speculate, then turn around and criticize the current church leaders for being “boring” because they won’t speculate any more. I also think it’s fascinating that most of the people who long for “the good old days” rarely mention that those “good old days” included INTENSE persecution, death and incredible hardship – or the that “bad new days” include explosive growth and much more of a “rolling stone” appearance than the “good old days”. Continue reading…
I’ve always been rather fascinated with the “fruits” of Joseph Smith’s polygamy.
Orson Pratt, who was an early defender of plural marriage, often explained that its purpose was to participate in the blessings of Abraham and to more effectively populate worlds:
“Therefore, a Father… could increase his kingdoms with his own children, in a hundred fold ratio above that of another who had only secured to himself one wife. As yet, we have only spoken of the hundred fold ratio as applied to his own children; but now let us endeavor to form some faint idea of the multiplied increase of worlds peopled by his grandchildren, over which he, of course, would hold authority and dominion as the Grand Patriarch of the endless generations of his posterity. …the one-hundredth generation would people more worlds than could be expressed by raising one million to the ninety-ninth power.” (The Seer, March 1853, p. 39) Continue reading…
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Did anyone watch Law & Order last night on NBC? If you didn’t, you missed an interesting parody based on the events that transpired in Texas with the FLDS Church. Instead of the FLDS Church it was The Church of the Path. Today’s guest post is by The Captain. Continue reading…
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