Most bookstores in Utah have sold out of the new book on the Mountain Meadows massacre with a print run of 10,000 copies. Amazingly this happened in less than a week.
The buzz is that the book answers all the questions. This new openness, scholarly approach and availability for the most controversial subject in Mormon history is quite amazing.
We recently went to a few Native American sites near Prescott, Arizona with our kids. My husband’s “Mo-Dar” was in rare form. I must have been sleep-walking to miss a few of these obvious fellow Mormons also out visiting these sites with their kids. Continue reading…
I was talking with a French colleague at dinner about the differences between European politics and American politics, and he made a statement that left an impression. European politics are colored by their colonialist histories and how to balance a preservation of their culture while dealing with the other cultures they have essentially subordinated over time. For example, he mentioned the Muslims in France who demanded equal consideration of their separate cultural preferences in the very strict and isolationist French culture. The French people are very concerned with preserving their culture, values, and language (even governing the number of foreign words allowed to be added per year). I believe there is a Mormon parallel to be understood. Continue reading…
The raid in Texas is interesting (and differs from AZ and UT prosecutorial efforts) in that polygamy is being attacked directly. So, will this shift in approach result in the end of polygamy (again)? Continue reading…
Outside of my own library and the virtual community I’m connected to through the internet, Mormondom has very little impact on my immediate environment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The LDS Institute has a prominent place next to the university, but the LDS chapel is across the river in a part of town we rarely visit. The Community of Christ chapel is in the Old West Side historic district across the street from the home of our closest friends and there’s a Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite) branch out past Target. Once every six months or so we have a missionary sighting. And that’s it. Continue reading…
In my last post, I noted that something peculiar is going on when it comes to Utah’s depression numbers. Utah has the highest percentage of population reporting depression, and oddly, Utah’s depression numbers can’t seem to be explained by several correlations that tend to explain depression numbers in other states. That suggests to me that Utah’s higher depression numbers are caused by something peculiar to Utah. In this post, I take a look at three peculiar theories about what’s behind Utah’s depression numbers, which I like to call the “Shrunken Gene Pool Theory,” the “Lack of Alcoholic Self-Medication Theory,” and “Too Many Toddlers Syndrome.”
