Zelophehad's Daughters

We've moved!

2006-06-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

Check out our new home at http://zelophehadsdaughters.com.

God's Ways Are Not Man's Ways

2006-06-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

This is funny.

My fiance shared his favorite response with me (he got it from a friend) to being told that favorite of all favorite patronizing statements: "God's ways are not man's ways."

The Response: "Man's ways are not God's ways."

Brilliant, isn't it?

Questioning the Spirituality of Others

2006-06-19T00:53:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting to me how often we Mormons respond to religious questions by impugning the questioner’s spiritual commitment, testimony, or faith instead of, or in addition to, addressing the question itself. Unfortunately, we tend to assume that people who don’t have questions, issues, or doubts are somehow more spiritually committed than those who do. There are at least two reasons I think this assumption is problematic.

First, life has a way of breaking down the dichotomies between believers and questioners, between the faithful and the doubters. As surely as every human being suffers physical and emotional pain, every Mormon, every Christian, every believer faces religious adversity. It’s highly unlikely that anyone could long endure as a member of this church without encountering some personal challenge, whether in Mormon history, in the tensions between religion and science, in doctrine, in church policy, in the unkindness or unscrupulous behavior of other members, in the pain of unfulfilled priesthood blessings, or in the loneliness that accompanies various borderline statuses: singleness, homosexuality, infertility, divorce, physical or mental illness, race or class marginality.

Maybe another way to put this is that one of the purposes of life is to learn face our trials, including our religious and our intellectual trials, with courage, integrity, and faith. When we impugn questioners’ motives, we make that vital work we all have to do harder. We drive people into circumspection about whatever their religious adversity is, and we contribute to the resulting fissure that then separates adversity from the very personal and community religious strength that questioners and sufferers—which is to say, all of us—most need.

The more fundamental problem with maligning others’ spirituality, though, is the very basic fact that we never know their hearts. We do not know, we cannot know, it is not for us to know, what hours they have spent on their knees, what years-long wrestles they have had with God, what of their lives they have given up to seeking. But we cannot assume that they haven’t. I’m persuaded from my reading of the New Testament that how we treat each other is far more important to God than the positions we come to on even the issues that matter a great deal to me personally, such as feminism. After nearly half a life of church membership (thirty-four years and counting), I’m a little weary of the lack of charity we grant each other, on both sides of all manner of political and doctrinal divides. I’m tired of the rush to impute evil motives. Everything about our doctrine and scriptures and everything about our own mortal experience teaches us, over and over, that we live in a world of ambiguity, that our knowledge even of the most profound religious truths is partial, that even our most cherished spiritual gifts will one day pass away in the knowledge to come. If there is anything this life seems at pains to teach us, it is how little we know. All of us see through a glass darkly, and perhaps our glasses are never so dark as when we gaze at the spiritual lives of our brothers and sisters. Given this, how can we assume that others who have not had exactly the spiritual experiences we have, or who have not come to the conclusions we have based on their own spiritual experiences, are therefore spiritually deficient?

Eve and the Pain of Childbirth

2006-06-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

Artemis's pain post has got me wondering. Eve's curse is famously (at least, depending on how one parses it) twofold: "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Genesis 3:16). Eve is punished both with painful parturition and with marital subordination.

Granted, we've softened the language of that second mandate somewhat. But, I wonder, by what hermeneutical criterion have we rejected the first section entirely while adopting the second, even in modified form? Why do Church leaders not issue statements reminding women that God has always intended for childbirth to be painful, and therefore to avoid epidurals (or anything else that might unnecessarily ease the process)? If, on the other hand, we contend that the first statement to Eve is nothing more than a description, on what basis can we maintain that the second is meant prescriptively?

The Church and Pedagogical Uniquities

2006-06-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve had quite a few lessons at church lately that have made me frustrated. Not because I didn’t like the topics or because the class got out of hand—but because I was frustrated with the pedagogical choices made by the instructor. While I am aware that I need to engage in a process of repentance and growth, so that I can learn how to listen and participate in lessons without getting frustrated, I wanted to talk about some thoughts I’ve had about church pedagogy that have emerged based on pondering my frustrations in church classes.

I’ve been pondering the following questions. What are the church’s pedagogical goals when it comes to church classes? (Clarification: in this post I’m concerned primarily with adult church classes rather than seminary, Primary, missionary work, etc.) How do the church’s pedagogical goals differ from those in other educational settings? (I’ll primarily be considering the setting of academia, since it’s the educational setting I’m most familiar with.) And, what can we learn from these differences? My reasons for asking these questions are because I think that some of the problems we run into when it comes to problems with (or apprehensions about) teaching at church comes from thinking we need to make church teaching experiences too similar to our academic ones.

Probably the clearest explanation of the church’s guidelines when it comes to pedagogy and teaching are contained in the first chapter of Teaching, No Greater Call: A Resource Guide for Gospel Teaching. The manual outlines five important guidelines for teaching the gospel:

1. We are commanded—it is something on which we have no choice; there are no alternative courses open to us—we are commanded to teach the principles of the gospel.

2. We are to teach the principles of the gospel as they are found in the standard works of the Church.

3. We are to teach by the power of the Holy Ghost.

4. We are to apply the gospel principles taught to the needs and circumstances of our hearers.

5. We must testify that what we teach is true.

I’m not really going to discuss topic #1 because it’s basically just a statement that we need to teach the gospel (i.e. teaching is important). Turning to the other guidelines, I think we can find pedagogical goals in other settings comparable with guidelines #2 and #4. Guideline #2 is what we are supposed to teach, and all disciplines have certain requirements and expectations about teaching materials. Guideline #4 relates to issues of audience and appropriateness—whatever pedagogical setting you’re in, you’re going to want to adjust what you’re teaching based on who is in your class. I think some of the main differences when it comes to church teaching emerge as we consider guidelines #3 and #5. Academic disciplines generally do not require us to either teach by the spirit or to bear testimony about our classroom material.

So, what does it mean to teach with the spirit? How does a spirit-filled classroom differ from a more traditional academic classroom? What kinds of things do we see in a classroom where the instructor is trying to bring the spirit that we wouldn’t see in a more traditional educational setting? While I think there are a variety of ways to teach with the spirit and invite the spirit into classes at church, we generally talk about the spirit in terms of "feeling." And I think that oftentimes we (myself included) don’t recognize the "feeling" that we need to have in church classes. Sometimes we stray to far towards the rational/academic because that is what we are used to (I am reminded here of the innumerable Sunday School lessons where there was an abstract debate about matters such as which prophets in the Old Testament had which priesthood keys). Sometimes I think in order to avoid this rational extreme, we are tempted to associate strong emotion with spiritual "feeling" (I am reminded here of the innumerable Young Women’s and Relief Society lessons where all we heard were stories about incredible miracles or horrible suffering). (Incidentally, my next post is going to be on the association of spiritual "feeling" with emotionality and how that connects to spirituality and gender in church settings.) I think that understanding the nature of spiritual "feeling" and how that differs from "feelings" in other kinds of classroom environments will enable us to think more fully about and improve upon our church teaching and learning experiences.

Since the church teaches that bearing testimony is one of the best ways to bring the spirit into a meeting, linked with this is the issue of bearing testimony. I’m reluctant to make a lot of comments about the role of testimony in church classes because of my own peculiar tendencies (I’m an academic who is a lot more interesting in asking questions such as "what do we mean when we use the word 'truth'?"). So, instead I’ll just ask a few questions. How does bearing testimony cause church classrooms to function differently than other kinds of classrooms, and what can we learn from this?

One additional place I notice differences when it comes to church teaching revolves around the issue of authority. Generally, when you are in other educational settings, the teacher is the authority on a particular subject and the students come to class to learn from the teacher’s authoritative knowledge. In church, teachers are called from the congregation, and they do not have to go through a course of study qualifying them to teach. I think the disjunct between church teaching and academic teaching causes a lot of apprehension when it comes to teaching callings. I know many people who don’t want to teach lessons because of their lack of knowledge on a subject—they are convinced that someone with more knowledge would be the better qualified teacher. I think this apprehension makes a lot of sense—this that is the educational model that we are used to. However, if we consider how this is not necessarily the model we should be using in church settings, we can both relieve some anxiety as well as create a better model for church classroom settings. So, what does that better model look like? While I think there are a number of ways for the teacher to function as the authority figure in the class without being the “authoritative knowledge” on the subject at hand, my current favorite model is to think about the teacher as a facilitator. The teacher is there to help things run smoothly, get people talking, integrate ideas, etc. Are there any other models that others like as well or better? Any additional thoughts about pedagogy and the church?

Being Single and Adult

2006-06-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

I've been a legal adult for more than a decade now. However, as a single woman without children, in a church context I often feel relegated to a kind of pre-adult status. Don't get me wrong: I'm perfectly willing to concede that there are quite likely unique life lessons and experiences involved in marriage and parenting that can't be gained elsewhere, and I'm not out to downplay the value of those things. Nonetheless, I'd like to find a way to talk about adulthood which didn't assume that it necessarily included those elements.

The thing is, I don't see myself as being in some preparatory, not-yet-real phase of life where I'm simply passing the time while awaiting the possible arrival of a husband and children. Yes, I'd like for those things to happen. But I'm living a real life right now. I have challenges and problems and things I'm learning and opportunities and stresses. And it stings to hear comments about those who don't yet know what life is about because they aren't married or don't have children. Likewise, I have no desire to be an object of pity. The truth is that my life is actually pretty good. I study something I love. I have some amazing friends (as well as a bunch of lively if not always completely sane siblings). Sure, there are things that are awfully hard at times, but that seems to be a fairly universal aspect of the human condition.

I'm currently watching several of my single friends struggle to stay active, ones who have far fewer doctrinal difficulties with the church than I do. I wonder what would make it easier. I've long been a bit jealous of the Catholic view that adults can follow a variety of legitimate spiritual paths, marriage being only one of them. As I said, I'm open to the possibility that some things can only be learned through marriage and raising a family. But I also think I've learned important things from my own life circumstances, perhaps things I wouldn't have learned if my life had gone in another direction.

Talks to singles tend to go along these lines: "Marriage and children are the greatest of all blessings, and we have great compassion for your difficult state. Try not to feel too bad, though, because God will fix it all in the next life." And while I know it's well-meant, I'm rather tired of hearing about singleness as some kind of tragic affliction to be endured and single adults (women in particular) as victims in need of sympathy. (In many ways I think single men have it even worse, as they are more likely to be blamed than to be pitied.) It's difficult to remain in an organization that sometimes seems to see your very existence as a kind of problem in need of explanation. I would far rather hear something like, "You have a unique and valuable perspective on life, and we hope you'll bring it to the table." As much as anything, I simply want to feel that I too have something to contribute.

I honestly don't mind that the church places a lot of emphasis on families and parenting; I think they're tremendously important. But ultimately I think our focus should be on becoming better Christians, in whatever life situations we might find ourselves. And in that endeavor, I don't think that any particular group of people can claim a privileged position or inherently greater insight; surely we all have much to learn from each other.

A Physics Parable

2006-06-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

In physics, one speaks of two kinds of balance, or equilibrium. Unstable equilibrium describes a system that is in balance, but that will become unbalanced at the slightest outside influence. Think of trying to balance a pencil on its point: it’s possible to do in theory, but in practice it will fall over every time you try. Stable equilibrium describes a system that is in balance and that will seek the same equilibrium, even if outside influences temporarily unbalance it. Think of a marble resting in the bottom of a bowl: you can nudge it, flick it or bump it to make it leave that position, but it will eventually roll back to the bottom of the bowl.

In my experience, Mormons (and perhaps especially Mormon women) have a habit of reducing the Gospel to an infinitely long to-do list. Pray, read your scriptures, fast, go to church, do your visiting/home teaching, magnify your calling, go to the temple, do your genealogy, pay your tithing, pay your fast offering, bear your testimony, hold Family Home Evening, etc., etc. No one could possibly do all of these things, so success at one is always mitigated by imperfection in others. (Worse, success in any one area may be trumped by the unrealized possibility of a higher degree of success. Sure, you packed home lunches for your kids, but did you bake the bread? Hmm?)

So I was sitting one day in Relief Society, apparently thinking about physics instead of paying attention to the lesson, when I had a thought: “Be a marble.” In other words, don’t let all the little things I’m “supposed” to be doing pull me off balance; rather, see each of them as tending towards the same center of peace and stability, and seek that center by any path.

I had seen each of the little rules of the Gospel pulling me in a separate direction, throwing me off balance unless I happened to do them all perfectly at once. I realized, instead, that they were all pointing towards the greatest commandments of loving God and loving my neighbor. If I did my visiting teaching, but didn’t go on the last temple trip, I didn’t need to beat myself up for it because I had still found a way to offer service. If I went to church on Sunday but I didn’t read my scriptures all week, I had still tried to become closer to God. Each facet of the Gospel wasn’t in competition with every other one. Instead, all the commandments were working together to bring about the same end, and trying faithfully to keep any one of them would help me to follow all of them.

The Universal Salvific Will of God

2006-06-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

In 1 Timothy 2:4, God is described as one "who will have men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth." The assertion that God has a universal salvific will, that he desires the salvation of every person, poses problems for any theological claim that only a certain group of people (e.g. Christians) are eligible for salvation. Augustine, who saw the majority of humanity as a "lump of sin" headed for perdition, resolved the dilemma by re-interpreting the scripture to mean that God wants salvation not for all people, but for all whom he has predestined. In the 20th century, by contrast, many have taken this verse quite seriously and re-thought the exclusive claims of Christianity in its light.

Christian theologians commonly speak of three ways of approaching religious diversity:

1. Exclusivism. Christianity is the one and only way, and without explicit knowledge of and acceptance of Christ, no one can be saved. This of course leaves open the question of what will happen to all those who never had a chance to accept Christ. One proposal (put forth by George Lindbeck) is that everyone will encounter Christ at the time of death and thus have the chance to make a decision. Many in the exclusivist camp simply remain agnostic on the matter, trusting that God's justice will sort things out.

2. Inclusivism. It is only through the grace of Christ that one is saved, but one can be saved by this grace without labeling it as such. Karl Rahner's theory of the "anonymous Christian" is the most well-known articulation of this approach. According to Rahner, God's grace is universally offered and all people have the real opportunity to respond to it in their lives, regardless of their relationship to explicit Christianity. However, whether or not it is recognized as "Christian," this grace is the grace of Christ.

3. Pluralism. Christ is one of many legitimate ways to salvation. Paul Knitter, one of the major advocates of this approach, views the exclusivist-sounding claims in the New Testament as "love-language." When lovers say, "you are the only one for me," they are not making metaphysical assertions but are expressing love and commitment in the context of a relationship, and the comments of the early Christians about Christ should be read in a similar way. It is a mistake, says Knitter, to assume that truly necessarily implies only; an unequivocal statement that Christ is truly saving does not rule out the possibility of others who are also truly saving.

Mormons, I would say, have some hard-core exclusivist elements, asserting that not only explicit faith in Christ is required, but also the ordinances of a particular religious institution. The LDS answer to reconciling this with the universal salvific will of God is, of course, to extend the opportunity for accepting the gospel to the next life and to perform vicarious ordinance work. Nonetheless, I think there are insights from both the inclusivist and pluralist camps which are not incompatible with LDS thought.

An aspect of Rahner's theology which I find tremendously appealing is his vision of a world in which grace is everywhere. He notes that far too often, the radical gratuity of grace, the sheer wonder and un-earnedness of it, have been interpreted to mean that grace must be scarce, rare, in short supply. But God's love, he points out, is no less an awe-inspiring free gift for being universally offered. The world therefore isn't split into God's favorites who get offered grace, "the elect," and everyone else. Grace in Rahner's view is actually constitutive of what it is to be human; in other words, we can only understand who we are in light of God's love.

In a similar vein, the book of Alma tells us that "God is mindful of all every people, whatsoever land they may be in" (Alma 26:37) and that "the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own tongue, to teach his word." (Alma 28:8) According to Moroni, "the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil." (Moroni 7:16) Clearly God's communication and activity in the world are by no means limited to the church. I also see some possible continuity between the notion of "anonymous Christianity" and 3 Nephi 9:20, which explains that "the Lamanites, because of their faith in me at the time of their conversion, were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost, and they knew it not."

Rahner's approach has been critiqued for undermining the importance of missionary work— what's the use of proclaiming the gospel if people can accept it anonymously? Interestingly, although I've rarely heard it mentioned, I think this same concern could well be raised in the context of LDS theology. Why worry about baptizing people in this life when we can always do it after they're dead? I think the LDS answer would be similar to Rahner's: if you understand the purpose of Christianity solely in terms of a "get out of hell free" card, you've missed the point. You can be saved without it, but explicit knowledge of the gospel in this life nonetheless has real value.

I also think the pluralists are right to remind us that we have much to learn from those of other faiths, that it's a mistake to go into a conversation assuming that we have all the answers. Although the LDS view of other faiths has gotten more positive over the years (you hear less about "leave your apostate faith and join ours" and more about "let us add to the truth you already possess"), my impression is that the Mormon viewpoint still tends to be that we have the whole truth, and therefore nothing to learn from anyone else. Other religions are at worst misguided, and at best less-developed or incomplete versions of us. Yet given the premise that God is communicating to all people, I wonder if even from the standpoint of LDS theology, any and all dialogue between Mormons and those of other faiths necessarily has to be one-sided. Joseph Smith himself stated that Mormonism "is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may." (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 313.)

I personally don't know where I'd place myself on the exclusivist-inclusivist-pluralist continuum. I've wrestled for years with issues related to pluralism without having come to much of a conclusion. I know so many devoted, spiritual people in other religious traditions who are so clearly following God and enriching the world in the context of their faith that I have a hard time believing that everyone is meant to be Mormon. On the other hand, I'm uneasy with glib assertions that all roads lead to God, or all religions are essentially the same--claims which I don't think hold up under critical scrutiny. For the moment, although I'm murky about the details of how it all gets worked out, I hold to belief in a God who, as Nephi tells us, invites "all to come unto him and partake of his goodness" (2 Nephi 26:33) and who also speaks to humans "according to their language, unto their understanding." (2 Nephi 31:3)

Dona Nobis Pacem (some late Memorial Day thoughts)

2006-06-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

Beat! beat! drums! -- blow! bugles! blow! / Through the windows -- through doors -- burst like a ruthless force... (Walt Whitman, "Beat! Beat! Drums!"; Dona Nobis Pacem, second movement)

In 1937, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Dona Nobis Pacem. The piece emerged from his feelings on the rising tide of Fascism and Naziism in Europe in the late 1930's as well as his experiences as an ambulance driver and artillery officer in the First World War. The title of the piece means "grant us peace," and it is a compelling musical journey that borrows texts from the Bible, Walt Whitman ("Beat! Beat! Drums!", "Reconciliation," and "A Dirge for Two Veterans") and John Bright's famous "Angel of Death" speech, and which runs the gamut of musical colors and emotions--from the frenetic representation of war in the second movement to the weary calm of the third movement to the somber death march of the fourth movement to the despair and emptiness of the fifth movement and to the eventual joy and hope of the final, sixth movement.

For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead... (Walt Whitman, "Reconciliation"; Dona Nobis Pacem, third movement)

This past Memorial Day weekend, my choir went to New York and performed Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem in Carnegie Hall. It was one of the most moving musical experiences (for that matter, one of the most moving experiences, musical or otherwise) in my life. Many of us had grown to love the piece when we sang it last year during our regular concert season, and we grew to love it all over again. The timing, both this year and last, has seemed so pertinent, and though I must remind myself that the events of last few years are not unique in the history of the world, the piece has really resonated with where I've been both politically and spiritually. Before we went onto the stage at Carnegie, our conductor related how earlier in the day he had gone to ground zero at the World Trade Center site, and afterwards had stopped by the chapel only a few blocks away where many of the families went after the disaster on September 11th. While there, he had run into two members of our choir, one of whom had reflected, "this is why we are performing this piece." This statement struck a chord with the entire choir, and after spending time conversing with many of the people who performed this past weekend, I know that most of us were not standing on that stage thinking about our cut-offs and our consonants. Instead, on our mind was the thought, "I must communicate to this audience the beautiful message of peace contained within this musical work."

...Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the voice of the daughters of my people recovered? (Jeremiah 8:22; Dona Nobis Pacem, fifth movement)

I grow so tired of of what we, as human beings, do to one another in the name of justice, God, patriotism, etc. Though I am not a pacifist and I honor the courage of those in the armed forces, the neverending tide of fighting and the neverending justifications for fighting saddens me immensely. I often visit the empty despair of the fifth movement, taken from the 8th chapter of Jeremiah, and wonder when all the horrible death and war that is part of mortality will end. But sometimes, I remember the wonderful promises of the Savior's atonement, which are reflected in the final movement of Dona Nobis Pacem: that eventually war will end, and "nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore" (Micah 4:3; Dona Nobis Pacem, sixth movement). When I was singing this past weekend, I felt a small portion of that joy and hope as we sang the final movement. My heart rejoiced in the belief that one day all the current war and death and destruction will come to an end, and that we will truly recognize the divinity of our both our sisters and our enemies.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2:14; Dona nobis pacem, sixth movement)

Dona nobis pacem. Grant us peace.

New ZD Member

2006-06-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

We're thrilled to announce that Katya is joining us as a blogger at Zelophehad's Daughters. She has this to say about herself:

"I'm working on a Master's degree in Library Science, my alias comes from taking Russian classes as an undergrad, a Midwestern winter has convinced me to take up knitting, and Melyngoch and I have been friends since about halfway through her first semester at BYU, when she figured out that I was more than "nice" and I figured out that she was more than an angry little freshman."

Welcome!

Ordaining Women

2006-05-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

In his book of this title, sociologist Mark Chaves brings both quantitative and qualitative evidence to bear on his examination of women's ordination as a general social phenomenon impacting the entire spectrum of Christian denominations. Mormonism receives no mention, perhaps because the issue takes on a different cast when applied to a lay ministry, but several of the issues he raises provide what strikes me as a useful framework for understanding our own church's policy.

Although the situation is often conveniently dichotomized between denominations that ordain women and those that do not, the complexity of ways in which women and religious authority can be paired is worth keeping in mind. Ordination does not represent any one single set of practices. Congregations which bar women from the ministry sometimes create loopholes whereby women are nevertheless allowed to participate in activities supposedly restricted to the ordained, whereas churches which do ordain women sometimes exhibit tendencies to truncate their actual authority. So in spite of the ideological divide, the situation for women "on the ground," Chaves suggests, may not be so different for women in churches that ordain them as for their sisters in churches that do not.

Chaves's interest in the topic was sparked by his observation that major denominations such as Presbyterians and Methodists began ordaining women in the 1950s at a time when virtually no women were agitating for ordination. As he argues quite plausibly, the coupling of the liberal concept of equality with female ordination was one of the triumphs of first-wave feminism; earlier calls for women's ordination were typically made without reference to equal rights, arguing instead that certain exceptional women should be allowed ordination since inspiration could subsidize their alleged natural incompetence in leadership roles, but without directly challenging women's status in society. That is, they advocated women's ordination in spite of a belief in women's inferiority.

But as female ordination became representative of a commitment to gender equality, several denominations which accepted equality on ideological grounds felt they could not continue to deny women the priesthood, for symbolic rather than strictly pragmatic reasons (hence the situation for Presbyterians and Methodists alluded to above). The converse, Chaves argues at length, is that resistance to female ordination after such a policy has come to be construed as a commitment to gender equality betokens something far more significant than resistance to women serving in priestly functions. It is emblematic of resistance to modernity.

Rules about women's ordination . . . often have less to do with women clergy than with symbolizing cooperation with or resistance to a much broader social project. . . . Women's ordination symbolizes liberal modernity, and that is why it is so deeply resisted by religious organizations defined most centrally by their antiliberal spirit (128).

Chaves amply illustrates how opposition to women's ordination in no way follows logically from these churches' doctrine, which is why he considers a sociological explanation necessary. As participants in a variegated religious landscape, our own church inevitably takes cues from other Christian faiths; it seems not implausible that the church similarly signals its allegiance to broader cultural forces through a resistance to female ordination (among other issues).

But structural reasons undoubtedly play a role as well. Chaves finds a negative correlation between the following two factors and likelihood to ordain women: centralization, and lack of an autonomous women's organization (both of which the church currently exhibits). In addition, it seems to me the church's self-concept as a transcendent entity likewise hinders examination of policy (and fosters a spirit of authoritarianism preserving the status quo).

Eventually, however, as insistence on gender equality took root in the surrounding culture, even denominations opposing female ordination began to proclaim a belief in equality, as declarations of women's inferiority became increasingly unacceptable to the broader public. Like other institutions stradding this divide, the church has adopted the ideology of equality in its rhetoric while failing to realize its implications for either policy or theology, a disconnect resulting in unmistakeable anxiety. Sister Beck's talk in the last General Conference I find indicative of our underlying awareness of this disconnect and our anxiety surrounding it. (Why emphasize the equality of priesthood specifically, and not the equal access everyone has to prayer, for example, unless there's something about the situation that bespeaks inequality?) Not surprisingly, an emphasis on motherhood in the church has sprung up only in the last few decades, seemingly in an effort to bridge this gap between our stated commitment to equality and our policies.

This unease, however, leads us to explain the situation to ourselves almost exclusively through the lens of equality and deters us from examining the underlying theological implications. By its very nature, no explanation in terms of equality can ever adequately address the issue, because it can never amount to more than a justification. It seeks to answer the question--Why is there an apparent imbalance?--and leaves unanswered the more central question--Why aren't women ordained?

Opponents to women's ordination frequently point out that priesthood power is not a right individuals are entitled to, but a gift granted by God as he pleases. I agree wholeheartedly. But I wonder what specifically it indicates that it pleases God to grant priesthood power only to men.

Within Catholic doctrine, the claim is sometimes advanced that a woman is unsuitable to serve as a priest for the reason a priest must physically resemble Christ. It strikes me that a parallel justification is begging to be articulated in Mormonism: the priesthood is the power to act in God's name; one of God's most salient attributes is maleness; therefore only males are fit to exercise that power. Given our doctrine that God himself is physically embodied, as well as abundant indications that gender is the only distinction recognized and codified by God, it would not be so farfetched to suggest that the efficacy of our ordinances rests in part on the resemblance to God of the person performing the ordinance, among other things in terms of biological sex. Such a doctrinal claim could easily be reinforced by gender policies surrounding proxy ordinances--only a woman can stand in for a woman, and only a man for a man. Similarly, can only a male stand in for a male God?

Conversely, one would expect that women by their very nature would be granted access to Heavenly Mother's divine power. Unfortunately, Heavenly Mother has no known divine power. Heavenly Mother's absence from positions of authority is replicated quite strikingly by the situation prescribed for women on earth.

It is difficult to avoid observing constellations of associations in which doctrine and policy mutually reinforce one another: power, public visibility, and maleness on the one hand, and subordination, limitations on public visibility, passivity, and femaleness on the other.

In spite of the implications of both doctrine and policy, I remain skeptically hopeful that the eternal situation is not as bleak as our vision of it. I do not presume to know the will of God. But too often I believe we accept God's silence as a definitive answer to questions that were never asked. To take a trivial example, I suspect the reason organs are standard in our church rests not on any fundamental eternal principle, but rather the simple fact that organs were the norm in Christian congregations at the time our church was founded. No cultural forces have impelled us to suggest an eternal significance to organs, or to use organs' symbolic value as a way of aligning ourselves with larger ideological forces demarcating church and world. Restricting full priesthood rights to men was equally the norm in Christian churches at the time the church was founded; for whatever complex of reasons, this practice has since been enshrined in our rhetoric as an everlastingly legitimate arrangement.

As Chaves points out, "denominational policies about women's ordination carry a symbolic meaning well beyond their pragmatic consequences for religious organizations" (83). Quite frequently when the issue is raised, the focus centers on those pragmatic consequences to the exclusion of their theological implications. But more is at stake for women than their ability to administer a blessing or serve in a bishopric: the issue, for me, is less about personal rights and opportunities as it is about identity in the eternal sense.

What Would Jesus Do?

2006-05-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

As Christians, we talk a lot about the imitation of Christ; Jesus, we are told, provided us not only with teachings, but also with the example of his life to follow. However, I find that putting this into practice is often more difficult than questions along the lines of "what would Jesus do?" might make it appear. Since few people would argue that we are all required to be itinerant miracle-workers and die excruciating deaths, it's clear that at least to some extent, we have to make judgment calls about just which aspects of Christ's life we are expected to imitate.

One issue which often comes up in this context is that of suffering. Some Christians have historically interpreted the imitation of Christ as including the practice of physical mortification. On a milder note, I know people who are reluctant to take pain medication because they see it as more virtuous to suffer; Jesus didn't shrink from drinking the cup, and they're not going to, either. Given that Jesus suffered, and we believe that this suffering was redemptive, what attitude should we take toward the suffering in our lives and in the world? How can we talk about suffering as potentially having positive effects without thereby undermining efforts to alleviate it?

There's another "what would Jesus do" question I've been wondering about lately. Quite frankly, Jesus at times comes off in the gospels as pretty obnoxious. He calls people names and pulls no punches in denouncing unrighteousness. On numerous occasions I've seen scathing condemnations of others made by people who when confronted about it point out that they're only doing what Jesus did. To be fair, I think they have a point: Jesus tells the Pharisees just what he thinks of them, without any of this politically correct stuff about sensitivity and tolerance.

But my question is: to what extent are we as Christians expected to imitate Jesus' methods? I see a number of reasons to be wary of any idea that we should precisely mimic them. There are the fairly obvious points that none of us are called to the same life mission that he was, and that none of us can claim the perfect love that motivated him. It's also worth considering that he acted in a cultural context quite different from our own, and adopting his rhetorical style and tactics wholesale might be as nonsensical as adopting his dress and eating habits.

In translating foreign languages, a common problem is that if you simply render the text word for word into the second language, you often thereby mangle the meaning of the original. I think a similar problem arises if we see the requirement to follow Christ as meaning to simply copy his behavior. I'm continually trying to figure out what it really means to "translate" the imitation of Christ into the specific situation of my own life, to live in a way which reflects his commitments to love and justice. And I don't think the question, "what would Jesus do?" is always all that helpful in this endeavor. A more useful question, perhaps, is "what would Jesus want me to do?"

Thoughts from Julian

2006-05-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

In the year 1373, at the age of 30, Julian of Norwich had a series of visions, published as the Revelations of Divine Love. I've read the work a couple of times, and I find it good medicine for the overly neurotic soul. While I might not accept all the details of Julian's theology, I love her picture of a God who is approachable, who is infinitely kind, who isn't nearly as troubled by our constant failings and mistakes as we are.

Reports Julian:

God reminded me that I would sin; and because of my pleasure in contemplating him, I was slow to pay attention to that showing. And our very Lord kindly waited and gave me the grace to pay attention . . . And at this I began to feel a quiet fear, and to this our Lord answered, "I am keeping you very safe." This promise was made with more love and assurance and spiritual sustenance than I can possibly say, for just as it was shown that I would sin, the help was also shown.

It's a reassuring idea: yes, we're inevitably going to sin, as uncomfortable as it might be to look at that. But God isn't planning to give up on us or leave us alone when that occurs; he is rather "keeping you very safe." Julian explains, "Our Lord takes tender care of us when we feel that we are almost forsaken and cast away because of our sin and because we have deserved it." One of the most pernicious effects of sin, she warns, is that it prevents us from seeing God correctly. In our guilt, we think that God is angry or hates us, and we turn away from him; we are blinded to the reality of his love.

And when we fall through frailty or blindness, then our kind Lord touches us, moves us and calls us, and then he wants us to see our wretchedness and sinfulness and acknowledge it humbly. But he does not want us to stop at this point, nor does he want us to be very anxious to accuse ourselves, nor does he want us to be inwardly miserable; but he wants us quickly to turn our thoughts to him; for he stands all alone and waits for us, sorrowing and lamenting until we come, and is impatient to have us with him; for we are his joy and his delight, and he is our balm and our life.

Not only is God our delight, but we are also his. We long for God, and God longs for us. Julian elsewhere comments, "For as truly there is a property of compassion and pity in God, so there is as truly a property of thirst and longing in God." I'm reminded of the story of Enos, in which God is no Unmoved Mover but one who weeps over his children.

There's a homey quality to Julian's God; you can imagine yourself having a cup of hot chocolate with him on a cold day, and talking over your troubles. He speaks in a friendly, down-to-earth way, and expresses interest in what's going on with us. Thomas Aquinas, writing the century before, explains in brilliant detail how grace effects a change in us, but it's hard to imagine his God inquiring as to our feelings about the atonement, which is what the Lord asks Julian. And when we finally turn to God, she reports, his affectionate response is, "My darling, I am glad you have come to me. I have always been with you in all your misery and now you can see how much I love you and we are united in bliss."

Sometimes I find myself avoiding prayer because of a vague unease that God is mad at me and perhaps doesn't want anything to do with me anymore. I appreciate Julian's vision, because it tells me of a God who is more patient and loving than I usually think he is. And I also like that it's very much a vision of hope. The Lord tells Julian (in a line famously appropriated by T.S. Eliot), "I may make all things well, I can make all things well and I will make all things well and I shall make all things well; and you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well."

Joseph Smith Sphinx

2006-05-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

When I was in Utah this past month, I visited the Gilgal Garden, which supposedly is on a lot of tourist information for Salt Lake City, but that very few local residents are even aware of. It's this odd statue garden where a man named Thomas Battersby Child, Jr. handcrafted huge stones into sculptures that represented his beliefs. The garden contains a variety of sculptures, including "The Monument to the Trade" and "The Monument to the Priesthood," though my two favorites are the "Captain of the Lord's Host," which is a carved figure with a big boulder for a head (how can you not like a statue that just has a big boulder for a head?) and the Joseph Smith Sphinx.

I don't really have any profound thoughts on any of this--I just wanted to introduce everyone to the Joseph Smith Sphinx because I thought it was cool and slightly odd, while totally making sense to me as a Mormon piece of folk art.

Anyone else want to share strange or interesting experiences with Mormon folklore, folk art, etc.?

(The image I posted is a picture by Robert Hirschi, which can be found on the Gilgal Gardens website.)

Reflections of a Utah Mormon

2006-05-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

Okay, I was actually born in California, but my family moved to Utah the summer I was five years old, and I don't remember much before that time. (I do recall wondering how we would attend church after the move, as I'd gleaned from Primary that we were the "one true church," which I took to refer to the physical building we attended. Little did I know that there would be "true churches" on every block.) I lived in Utah County for the next eighteen years, from the time I started kindergarten to the time I completed my undergraduate education at BYU.

I grew up in a world where you could buy CTR stickers along with bread and milk at the local grocery store, and where you'd usually see at least five members of your ward while you were there shopping. The neighborhood was shaped by invisible ward boundaries; we lived at the edge of the ward, and as a result I was well acquainted with the people living to the north of us, but those in the houses to the south were near strangers, people you might see twice a year at stake conference. (They re-drew the boundaries after I left for BYU, and I've never quite adjusted to the fact that those people are in my parents' ward.)

I had non-member acquaintances, but in all those years I never had a close non-LDS friend. Many of my friends in high school questioned their faith, wondered about feminist issues, perhaps dabbled in exotic things like Buddhism, but our religious conversations inevitably took place in the framework of Mormonism. My seminary teachers claimed that evolution was a theory of the devil, but the AP Biology teachers who taught me about it, and who had no trouble accepting the theory themselves, were also LDS. I never had the experience of "standing up for my beliefs" as a lone Mormon, but I do remember what it was like to wear a Clinton/Gore sticker to school in 1992, and be surrounded by a sea of Bush/Quayle supporters, many of whom took the view that it wasn't possible to be a faithful Mormon and a Democrat.

When I went to BYU, I was fascinated by the stories told by people who'd grown up in other places, some where Mormons were tiny minorities. It was true that I couldn't relate to many of their experiences, but I was nonetheless unsettled by the glib way in which "Utah Mormons" were often dismissed. I heard that people such as myself were sheltered, that we had no idea what it was like to have our testimony challenged, that we needed to get out in the "real world" and find out what life was like. After all, what obstacles could a Utah Mormon, living in the shadow of the everlasting hills, possibly have encountered?

Yet if there were ways in which I was less knowledgeable about the "outside world," I found that I was often more aware of problems within the Church than were my classmates. I remember, for example, a student being shocked to learn that some German Mormons in the 1930s had joined the Nazi party. I was all too aware that being LDS wasn't necessarily a guarantee of anything; I'd grown up hearing scandalous stories about Mormons. Bishops who turned out to be committing adultery. People using their Church connections as a way to further financial scams. The excommunication of George P. Lee. The Paul H. Dunn stories that turned out to be fabrications. Questions about the involvement of the Church in Utah politics. Tensions between LDS authorities and intellectuals. One didn't have to go looking for this stuff; it was on the news, in the air.

I imagine that every place has its own unique challenges. I have to admit that I've found it easier to be a Mormon outside of Utah, and I think it would be hard to go back. And yet I still cringe when I hear people condescendingly referred to as "Utah Mormons." I've been away from the state for a number of years, but I still consider myself in some sense a Utah Mormon; my Mormonness, for good and for bad, has been shaped by my experiences growing up there. I have plenty of my own complaints about Utah, but I find that it's somewhat like having your family criticized. If you're not a fellow Utahn and you start mocking the state and its people, I just might have to wash your mouth out with Jello.

Eve at FMH

2006-05-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

Eve's currently guest-posting at Feminist Mormon Housewives; check out her thoughts:

Memories of a Trailer-Trash Girlhood: Mormons and Social Class

Introverted in an Extraverted Church

"Swept Aside By Feminism"

2006-05-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

In the latest of Alexander McCall Smith's absolutely delightful "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" books, Blue Shoes and Happiness, there's a passage about feminism that I thought was hilarious. The character Phuti Radiphuti, a rather shy, earnest man, who is engaged to Mma. Makutsi, is contemplating:

For far too long men had assumed that women would do their bidding, and if women were now questioning that, then he was quite happy to agree with them. Not that he was sympathetic to those people who called themselves feminists: he had heard one of those ladies on the radio and had been shocked by her aggressiveness towards the man who was interviewing her. This woman had more or less accused the reporter of arrogance when he had questioned her statement that men had, in general, fewer abilities than women. She had said that his time was "over" and that men like him would be swept aside by feminism. But if men were to be swept aside, wondered Phuti Pradiphuti, then where would men be put? Would there be special homes for them, where they could be given small tasks to perform while women got on with the important business of running things? Would men be allowed out of these homes on selected outings (accompanied, of course)? For some days after he had listened to the interview, Phuti Radiphuti had worried about being swept aside, and had experienced a vivid and uncomfortable dream— a nightmare, really— in which he was indeed swept aside by a large feminist with a broom. It was an unpleasant experience, tumbling head over heels, covered with a cloud of dust, in the face of the frightening woman's brush-strokes. (p. 53-4)

Phuti musters up the courage to ask Mma. Makutsi if she is a feminist, and she replies "Of course I am. These days most ladies are feminists." This causes some concern for poor Phuti Radiphuti, and as a result for Mma. Makutsi, who is warned that it is unwise to talk to men about feminism as it makes them run away. Fortunately, all is resolved happily in the end.

When feminism is discussed, one of the anxieties which frequently seems to emerge is something along the lines of, if feminists get their way, will men be "swept aside?" I've heard it argued, for example, that if women had the priesthood they would take over the church, and men would no longer feel they had anything to contribute. But I'm not convinced that it's necessary to frame this as a kind of zero-sum game. If women had more formal authority or a greater voice, would this cause men to "lose" something— or is it possible that both men and women could benefit from such contributions?

Are All Women "Mothers"?

2006-05-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

I've heard it said that all women, regardless of whether they have children, are mothers. (Sheri Dew's oft-quoted talk on the subject a few years ago is a well-known instance of this point of view.) While I appreciate the inclusive intent behind it, I have some serious reservations about such a claim.

First of all, I think the term "motherhood" gets so broadened in this approach as to lose any substantive meaning. I have enormous respect for what mothers do. But I'm simply not going to pretend that the term applies to me, too. To claim that I, in my single childless grad student life, am as much a "mother" as a woman who is raising her children, is to devalue the specific character and importance of what she's doing. If the aim is to point out that women can act caring and nurturing and serve others regardless of whether they have children of their own, why don't we simply speak about that in terms of the call to follow Christ (which, incidentally, applies equally to women and men)? Why appropriate and re-define the term "motherhood?"

In addition, I don't like the way in which "motherhood" and "womanhood" get collapsed into each other in this way of thinking. Motherhood is one role which a woman can take on; I do not however believe that it is constitutive of what it is to be a woman. Women also function in a variety of other roles: sister, wife, daughter, teacher, priestess, etc. But surely what it is to be a woman (or a man) goes far beyond any particular role that she or he might fill.

My sense is that this kind of argument arises from the inflated discourse about motherhood, the tendency in LDS thought to place it on a pedestal. Once that's happened, it becomes awkward to deal with the fact that there are numerous women who don't have the chance (or perhaps even the desire) to be mothers. But where did this rhetorical elevation of motherhood to the highest of all callings come from in the first place? I would guess that it's largely the result of an attempt to make sense of the restriction of the priesthood to males. This is why fatherhood doesn't get talked about in the same kind of idealized way, and why no one feels the need to say that all men are in some sense fathers; as priesthood-holders, their value is already clear.

I don't think that the priesthood/motherhood parallel works, for a number of reasons. And I wonder whether if it were dropped, it would be easier to back away from overblown claims about motherhood. I see it as far more meaningful to talk about motherhood not as some abstract, almost mystical quality possessed by women everywhere, but as a concrete and vital service which many (but not all) women perform. If we want to honor mothers (whom I certainly think are worthy of recognition), let's honor mothers; if we want to honor women, let's honor women. But let's not talk as if the two were identical.

Reclaiming the Body

2006-05-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

The dualism of Descartes still heavily influences contemporary understandings of the mind-body problem. It also heavily influences the church’s own form of dualism: spirit-body.

According to Cartesian dualism, each individual is made up of a mind and a body. The two are linked, but the mind has precedence over the body (who can forget Descartes famous “I think, therefore, I am”?). The source of initiative, rationality, and all other good things, is the mind, while the body is dangerous, transgressive, emotional, etc. (An interesting side-note: many feminist scholars have published on how the mind-body division was imposed onto the man-woman division, where men become assocated with the elevated, rational mind and women with the transgressive, emotional body.) In today’s society, we still have not escaped this dualism. People still trust rationality (a quality of the mind) over emotionality (a quality of the body). Bodies and bodily desires, especially those of women, are still generally considered dangerous and transgressive.

In the church, we have a similar dichotomy, though here the elevated category is that of “spirit” rather than “mind.” In church classes, we are encouraged to submit our natural desires to the dictates of the spirit. In his October 1985 conference address on “Self-Mastery,” Russell M. Nelson argues, “Before you can master yourself, my precious one, you need to know who you are. You consist of two parts—your physical body, and your spirit which lives within your body. You may have heard the expression ‘mind over matter.’ That’s what I would like to talk about—but phrase it a little differently: ‘spirit over body.’ That is self-mastery.” He continues, “Your spirit acquired a body at birth and became a soul to live in mortality through periods of trial and testing. Part of each test is to determine if your body can become mastered by the spirit that dwells within it.”

Nelson’s talk is a clear, representative example of the church’s discourse on the body and spirit division. While we do believe that “[t]he spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15), our discourse often indicates that the spirit is of a higher element than the body, and we need to subsume our bodies to our spirits.

Yet underneath this elevation of spirit over body, the church has a truly amazing (and I would argue, unique) emphasis on the body. Many religions consider us strange for thinking that God is embodied and looks like us. The notion that God has a body of flesh and bone is a significant doctrine, as is our belief that one of the central (if not the central) purposes of mortality is for us to get a body. We learn that Satan and his followers are passionately jealous of our bodies, and that in the spirit world, we’ll be limited in the progress we can make because we will not be in possession of our bodies at that time.

In contemporary philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, there has been a re-examination and reclaiming of the body (see Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies or George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philsophy in the Flesh), and I would like to see us do the same in the church. And not solely in the way we currently see the body celebrated—as a holy temple that we should protect and keep sacred through practices of modesty and chastity (for example, see Susan Tanner’s conference address from last October on “The Sanctity of the Body”). While chastity and modesty are important precepts and teachings, I want more celebration of the joyous nature of our bodies. While our bodies are the object of much of life’s pains and trials, they are also the seat of joy and pleasure and our interface with the many wonders around us.

I also want a more substantial consideration of what it means that our body is an equally important part of “the soul of man.” Why is God embodied? Why do we have bodies? How are they an important part of our eternal nature? Perhaps some of the answers to these questions are beyond our mortal comprehension, but I would propose one preliminary answer: God’s plan is a plan of happiness, and we can only receive a fullness of joy through our body.

Let’s rethink the spirit-body dichotomy and discuss the multifold purposes of our bodies. While controlling our desires is an important lesson of mortality, our bodies are so much more than something to be mastered by our spirits. They are part of our eternal nature, and they play an integral role in our divinity and our capacity for empathy, love, and joy.

The Ethics of Missionary Work

2006-05-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

First of all, before I find myself pelted with tomatoes (or perhaps Books of Mormon) by an army of RMs, let me clarify that I don't think that sharing something which you've found life-changing, something which you think could have tremendous potential benefits for others, is a bad thing to do; in fact, quite the contrary. Nonetheless, I am troubled by much of our discourse about missionary work. I keep coming back to the question of whether it's morally acceptable to enter into a relationship with another human being with a view towards using that relationship to accomplish some other end (even a laudable one), rather than seeing the relationship as an end in and of itself.

I'm actually less bothered by the work performed by full-time, clearly identifiable missionaries. There's a certain straightforwardness to it; they're not hiding the fact that they're out to convert you. But when it comes to that more nebulous realm of "member missionary work," things get murky and at least potentially duplicitous. When I act friendly or loving to people, when I engage in service, it is because I'm hoping to thereby implicitly advertise my faith? And if so, can I truly be said to be practicing charity?

Likewise, viewing people as "potential converts" raises a host of problems. If that's the lens through which I'm relating to someone, am I going to be open to the possibility that I could genuinely learn something from her experience and beliefs, or am I going to be preoccupied with the ways in which I think my answers can fix his problems? Am I going to share the variety of my life experiences, including the struggles and the dark times, or am I going to censor out bits which I fear might not be sufficiently faith-promoting?

I find that when I discuss LDS teachings with non-members (which happens fairly often, given that many of my friends and acquaintances are fellow theology students and quite interested in religion), I sometimes feel like I have to bend over backward to ensure that they know that I'm not only talking about the subject as part of an agenda to convert them, that I'm genuinely interested in their beliefs as well. Because of our reputation for proselytizing, it at times seems that the very fact that I'm a Mormon means that my motives are already suspect in any religious conversation. It's an awkward position to be in.

I wonder whether there's a certain paradoxical element to missionary work, in that you can't directly pursue the goal without damaging the integrity of the process. In other words, it doesn't work to befriend someone in hopes of converting them, because such a friendship is already of dubious authenticity. In a nutshell, I'd prefer to see missionary work as something which enriches relationships, rather than view relationships as a useful tool for furthering missionary work.

Mothers in the Book of Mormon

2006-05-10T18:25:00.001-07:00

It’s Mother's Day on Sunday and I would like to bet that at least one person in every ward is going to read the one mother-related scripture in the Book of Mormon. “Yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it.” (Alma 56:47-48) Have you ever wondered who those faithful women are?

Approximately twenty-six years before Helaman took his army to fight the Lamanites, the sons of Mosiah and some of their friends set off to preach the word of God to the Lamanites. Among the stories told about this journey, there are those that tell of three women who played a role in the conversion of many Lamanites and may have been the mothers or grandmothers of the sons of Helaman. (See Alma 17-19, 22)

The first woman we run into is only known by her husband, King Lamoni. After Ammon protects the King’s flocks, he preaches to the King, who prays to the Lord and falls down as if dead. The King’s servants carry Lamoni off to his wife, who mourns the apparent death of her husband for two days. She decides against burying Lamoni, has a talk with her husband’s servants and calls for Ammon. When he arrives, she explains that she thinks her husband is not dead as he “does not stink” Ammon takes a look at the King and tells her that he “sleepeth in God” and will awake in the morning. Ammon then asks a very important question. He asks, “Believest thou this?” and she answers, “I have had no witness save thy word, and the word of our servants; nevertheless I believe that it shall be according as thou hast said.” Ammon then counters with the compliment, “Blessed art thou because of thy exceeding faith; I say unto thee, woman, there has not been such great faith among all the people of the Nephites.” The Queen believed the words of an unknown man based simply on the testimony of others.

The story continues. King Lamoni wakes up in the morning, as Ammon had prophesied. Lamoni’s joy in his experiences during those days of unconsciousness is so great that he testifies to his wife and then falls to the floor. His wife, whose heart has been changed through the words of her husband, also falls to the floor, overcome by the Spirit. Ammon and the servants are also overcome and fall to the ground as well. This is where the second woman comes in. Abish, a servant of the Queen who had “been converted to the Lord many years, on account of a remarkable vision of her father,” runs to tell the people the good news, hoping that they will also come to believe in the power of God. Unfortunately, the people aren’t as excited as Abish is. They are suspicious of this unknown Nephite. They fall to arguing among themselves about whether or not they should kill him. This bothers Abish, who had been so excited just a few moments ago. She starts to cry, and runs to the Queen and lifts her up by the hand. The Queen speaks in tongues, proclaims the greatness of God and revives her husband. Ammon and the others soon follow. These two women, one whose testimony had survived on its own for many years and one who had just discovered God, both have great spiritual strength and understanding, and either or both of them must have passed that strength on to their own children.

There is one other woman connected with these events. After having a little confrontation with his son, King Lamoni’s father decides to give the gospel a chance. Ammon’s brother, Aaron, goes to visit him. A similar event happens. King Lamoni’s father, upon hearing the gospel, prays to Lord and falls down as if he were dead. His wife, though, is not as accepting as her daughter-in-law. Instead of believing Aaron, she commands her servants to take him. They refuse out of fear. The queen then commands that the people come and slay Aaron. To avoid any further contention, Aaron stretches forth his hand and raises the King up. The King then proceeds to convert entire household, including his wife. Though this woman does not initially believe and welcome Aaron, she eventually has her own change of heart and joins the church with her husband. As her husband has married children, it is less likely that this woman is the mother of a stripling warrior. But her testimony doubtlessly affected her children and their children and her grandsons could have been among those who remembered the words of their mother.

Though these three women are never again mentioned individually, they are doubtless part of the group of people who moved from the lands of the Lamanites to the land of Jershon, under Nephite protection. These people took on a new name, the Anti-Nephi-Lehites. Therefore, it is no stretch of the imagination to guess that these three women could have been among the ranks of mothers who taught their sons to trust in the Lord. These women could have been among those referred by when the sons of Helaman said, "We do not doubt our mothers knew it."

I Don't Like Church History

2006-05-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

There. I said it.

The flaw is in me, not in the discipline of history, which I just don’t have much of a mind for. Kiskilili and Elbereth--who study very different aspects of it in very different ways--both have a much better intuitive sense of history than I do, and Lynnette earned a couple of degrees in it before finding her calling in theology. Me, I’d rather wander around in the abstractions of philosophy than have to deal with the tedium of what actually happened.

My family moved to Utah right before I started fourth grade. I believe I was forever scarred by those grainy photographs of pioneers bravely conquering the desert, eternally grim and stalwart in their long black outfits. Also, the pioneers are the sacred bogeyman of every Mormon child. If you ever complain about being hot in the back seat of the car on some long trip, someone inevitably points out that the pioneers didn’t have air conditioning when they crossed the plains.

But I can’t blame it all on hagiography. Strike two is polygamy. It’s hard to deal with a version of marriage that essentially continues, in terms of our temple sealing practices, and that has such uncomfortable orignary authority. I’m descended from lots of polygamists, so I owe my existence to the practice, but I can't say I enjoy examining the grim and dirty details.

In the end, all hagiography and polygamy aside, I’m just bored by it. I think it’s great other people love it. I think it’s great there are—evidently!—so many fascinating conversations going on in the LDS world about our history. I have nothing but the profoundest respect for Dave of DMI, the range of whose knowledge and whose civilized tone are my ideal of what the Bloggernacle should be. I think it’s great there are books like _Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview_ and _Mormon Enigma_ and _In Sacred Loneliness_ and _Rough Stone Rolling_. I just can’t make myself pick them up. I just can’t. I’m sorry. I end up reading Harry Potter instead.

I wouldn't deny history funding if I had lots of money. I would just want other people to do it, not me.

Further confessions of my general unfitness to be a Mormon intellectual, coming soon!

Tales of Sacrament Meeting

2006-05-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

The T&S thread on chapel seating got me thinking about my memories of sacrament meeting over the years. I don't recall that my family sat consistently in one place when I was a kid, though I do remember a lot of sitting in the hard folding chairs in the cultural hall. As I recall, younger sisters could be very useful for helping the time go by. When I was an early teen, I would take one of my younger sisters for a walk during the middle of the meeting, ostensibly because she needed to stretch her legs. Another sister spent sacrament meeting drawing mazes; she reminds me of the time when she left to use the restroom and was quite unhappy when she came back to find that I'd "livened up" her maze with various comments and threats.

I spent a lot of time reading the hymn book, or counting things in it, since there wasn't much else to read. I wasn't the only one turning there for entertainment; my brother put his creative energies to work and re-wrote hymn lyrics. I don't think I'll ever be able to sing "Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel" without thinking of his Communist version, including the refrain, "Put your shoulder to the wheel, push along / And sing only this approved Party song."

When I was living in the Midwest several years ago and attending a branch, one Sunday we had a high council speaker who in the middle of a very random talk mentioned that he wanted to tell us about a gift we all had. I was anticipating something like faith, or the Holy Ghost, so I was a bit surprised when he went on to talk about how we could develop a photographic memory. If we would order the product MegaMemory, he explained, it would increase our memory by five hundred percent; he was going to recommend to the branch president that he purchase it for the branch. I don't think I've ever struggled so hard not to burst into hysterical laughter during a sacrament meeting--which would have been very obvious, given that we met in a fairly small room. I also remember a talk in that branch on the subject of Star Wars, for which the speaker brought a lifesize Yoda as a visual aid (though unfortunately he was asked to leave it in the hall.)

My friends of other faiths often ask me about LDS worship services. I tell them that often they can be quite humdrum. But because we have little formal liturgy and different people talking every week, you really never know what might happen in them.

On Questioning

2006-05-03T22:45:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of Luther lately. He makes the point over and over that human reason is insufferably arrogant in its attempts to understand God; God's actions may sometimes appear absurd to us, but it is not our place to judge. Faith, he says, includes believing in the goodness of God even if he decides to damn everyone; it is presumptuous of reason to question God's mercy based on the fact that some end up in hell, even if they had no possibility of doing otherwise. Luther, like Augustine, in asserting the priority of grace over freedom (we do not have the power to opt for faith; God must work that in us), has no solution to the question of why God elects some and not others. For him, that decision is part of the hidden will of God, and it is not our place to pry into such matters.

I hear similar sentiments sometimes expressed by members of the Church. "It's that way because that's how God has chosen to do it, and who are we to second-guess God?" I have a difficult time with such an approach. On the one hand, I do think it's tremendously important to acknowledge that God's perspective is much, much broader than ours, that of course things aren't always going to make sense to us. But I also think it's crucial to continually place our understanding of God's will in dialogue with our conscience, our own sense of right and wrong. The latter is admittedly culturally-bound and fallible, but I think it's worth remembering that the former is as well.

I also think that there is sometimes a bit of a double standard with this. For example, I've occasionally heard comments in church about the troubling implications of the practice of infant baptism, that it suggests a God who is unjust and therefore not to be trusted. In other words, a practice is critiqued on the basis that it makes God appear unfair to our understanding— despite the fact that our understanding is inherently limited. Likewise, people in other religious traditions who worry about what is going to happen to their loved ones who died without having heard of Christ, and who dislike the idea that such people could end up in hell, are likely to be told by Mormons that such concerns are valid and important and worth addressing. Yet when Church members struggle with aspects of our own tradition that seem unjust to them, that perhaps hurt them as deeply as the mother who is told she must believe that her deceased unbaptized child is forever locked out of heaven, they are often told that they simply need to accept that this is how God does things, and it is not our place to object.

Perhaps one reason why we're given multiple ways of accessing truth— scripture, personal revelation, church authority, conscience, reason— is that they serve as checks and balances on each other. It doesn't make sense to me that God would give us the more internal ways of discerning truth and then expect us to automatically discount them if they conflict with more external communications (or the reverse). I don't have an easy answer about what to do when some of these come into sharp conflict with each other. But I don't think the solution is to say "that's just how things are," and dismiss further discussion of such matters as illegitimate and irrelevant.

Gifted

2006-05-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

I was that proverbial and justly despised snot-nose, a gifted child. I remember being separated out from my kindergarten class with a few others into a special group for those of us already reading. I remember taking what I’m now sure was an I.Q. test at the end of first grade, sitting on a large chair in a strange office as a strange woman read me strings of numbers from a book and told me to recite them to her backwards. (So much of childhood consists of navigating adults’ inscrutable directives.) I remember the advanced reading and math classes that provided “enriched” activities. (Who was being subjected to the “impoverished” activities, I wonder now?) I remember the gifted class I attended every morning for an hour in third grade. The work was engaging enough, but there was a tense watchfulness about the teachers. I rarely felt that I pleased them, nor did I ever feel quite at ease in that room.

Like athletic prowess or musical ability, giftedness can quickly swallow an identity whole. Paradoxically, it interferes with learning because it inhibits the confession of ignorance. Once you are gifted, can you have a bad day, put your foot in your mouth, admit that you don’t know something, be dumb, be bad, goof off, daydream, waste time? Even at five, I felt uneasy about the extravagant praise I sometimes garnered. My teachers were praising someone else, and dimly I knew I was not the polite, self-restrained, eager-to-please child I seemed. At school I was pathetically overcontrolled, petrified of failure. But at home I was wild, oversensitive, melodramatic. I fought with my brother and sisters, talked back, burst into tears, threw my toys on the floor, refused to eat my vegetables. The praise of school was based on a myth of myself that, having set in motion, I could not stop because I was terrified of authority and terrified to behave in any other way than with absolute and rigid self-control. Sometimes I wanted to quit being so good just to escape the burden of having to be. Yet I craved the praise of my teachers even as I knew it was not me they were praising.

No life can long sustain such constraints or such contradictions. I didn't last. By eighth grade I was so depressed that for weeks I couldn’t so much as write my own name at the top of my papers, and my glory days were over. It was both a loss and a relief.

The end of my giftedness is the inevitable end of every such story. At some point—high school, college, graduate school—you hit your level, where everyone is just as gifted as you are, and many are more. It is the end of a life that finds its meaning in excelling others, but equally the beginning of other ways of living. Now that I’m old enough to be a garrulous nontraditional student, I find myself asking every question I once swallowed in fear, without pausing to consider how dumb I might sound. The freedom not to know, to be wrong, to be at peace with one's own utter ordinariness: we so misprize such wild and precious liberties.

Our faith promises the gifts of the spirit. Before God we are neither loved nor reviled for them, but given them that we might learn love in their holy uses. A spiritual gift is a language, an invitation to know and love God and one another. And we are judged by our desires for good or evil that find expression in them, not by our gifts themselves. I Corinthians 13 teaches the severe and tender lesson that the only gift that will endure is love. All our gifts fail, or perhaps alternately, in terms of our doctrine of eternal progression, the day will come when like our cast-off mortal social ranks, our gifts will cease to distinguish us out from one another because we will stand in absolute equality before God.

Early in my mission, I memorized a passage of scripture in Italian with my companion, Doctrine and Covenants Section 4, that section missionaries the world over probably still recite together every week at district meeting. I’ve always liked memorization and recitation. I like holding the architecture of a poem in my mind’s eye, entering a room of words in a willed rhythm, like striking the strings of an instrument exactly on the downbeat, and savoring, phrasing the precise musicality of each phrase. To learn by heart is to surrender a piece of yourself to a pattern of language which then has claim upon you. My companion’s favorite verse was, “And if ye have desires to serve, ye are called to the work,” or in Italian, as we said it together, and as it still passes through my mind on sleepless nights, “Se voi avete il desiderio di servire Iddio, voi siete chiamati al lavoro.” My companion was kind, warm-hearted, and outgoing as I’ve never been, and she was merciful to me in my restless weirdness without being condescending. I remember her telling me that no one believed she’d go on a mission. Everyone thought she’d get married instead, which in a swift and bizarre cultural reversal, had the become in some eyes the path of lesser women. She told me how she had quoted that verse to her detractors, confident that her desire alone was enough.

Life strips us beyond nakedness. So much of what we love falsely, and truly, is tenuous. Material things wax old or are lost, we fall into poverty, relationships fail, people we love die. Our minds as well as our bodies can lose their powers to age. Perhaps all that we can hope for in this life is to cultivate our desires for the good. As long as I can desire the good, I can train my heart to hear the sometimes distant but constant call to the work of God, and to respond with whatever means now lie by grace between my hands, knowing that the power of my desire alone is mine.

Faith and the Imagination

2006-05-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've recently been doing work on the imagination and self-narrative, and it's made me think a lot about the role of imagination in faith. This isn't at all to say that I see faith as equivalent to belief in something imaginary, but simply that I think our faith is always shaped by our imagination. Our understanding of the divine is inevitably mediated by what we imagine it to be—we carry some kind of picture or image of God in our minds based not only on our life experience but also on the ways in which we've made sense of that experience, the connections we've drawn between events, the meanings we've constructed. And such processes are fundamentally imaginative in nature.

One fascinating suggestion I've encountered is that the Fall is actually a Fall of imagination. We've lost our ability to rightly imagine both God and ourselves. Salvation thus involves a kind of repair of the imagination. Our encounter with revelation, with God's self-disclosure, opens up new possibilities in what we are able to imagine. If revelation is to make any real difference in our lives, we have to go beyond mere intellectual comprehension of its truths; we must imaginatively enter into the world which it discloses to us. Both faith and imagination involve openness to realities beyond what we can currently see.

Of course, the imagination can also be problematic. In looking over scriptures on the subject, I was struck by how negative many of them are. Paul warns of those "who became vain in their imaginations" (Romans 1:21). Mormon notes that "if ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing, then ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who is not a God of miracles." (Mormon 9:10) The Doctrine & Covenants observes, "They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god" (1:16). One of the real dangers with imagining seems to be that of idolatry. We run the risk of conjuring up an image of God and mistaking it for the final word on the subject, forgetting that God is always beyond our imaginative capacity. We can get stuck in the way which we imagine reality to be, and close ourselves off to new possibilities.

However, I believe that the imagination can be healing, even salvific. Sin is linked to bondage, to lack of freedom, to an ever narrowing field of vision. The imagination can potentially be a way of moving beyond the destructive narratives which we might find ourselves living. Alma 32, which encourages us to experiment on the word and see where it takes us, might be understood as an appeal to the imagination. Our ability to imagine means that we can keep re-interpreting our experience, re-telling our stories— and in that process, we can unexpectedly encounter God even in places where we previously only saw darkness and emptiness.

Coming Back to Life

2006-05-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

I considered writing something cheesy about the beginning of May and it being spring and the sun shining, but I think I'll just say that we're back.

Bored by Sex

2006-02-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

Not THAT kind of sex. Literature-classroom sex, the wordy two-dimensional substitute for the real thing.

Although I’m firmly committed to the law of chastity, I don’t think I’m a prude. I think it’s possible and at times necessary to discuss sex publicly and that it can and should be done with both maturity and candor. For example, I don’t think youth or adults are well served by chastity lessons that consist mostly of the vague injunction “Don’t do it.” And of course, sex really _is_ part of literature. I once taught a literature class at BYU and noticed halfway through the semester that in one way or another it had come up in every single text (Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marx, Ibsen…) we had studied. I finally threw up my hands and facetiously told the class that the chance to read about sex is the whole reason to major in literature instead of math.

But just how much sex do we need to find? In some academic contexts it comes to seem relentless, and also adolescent. And Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse (tee-hee—sex in the Bible!) Between-the-lines lesbian encounters in Jane Austen (ha, ha—sex in the most virginal classics!). Phallic symbols in John Donne’s religious poetry (what an erotically charged blasphemous juxtaposition!). At some point just by neglecting a text’s esthetic, historical, sociological, religious, and linguistic features, we’re pornographizing it, and at its worst, the method starts to reduce all texts to pop-up fig leaves. Pull and titter.

If I became this obsessed with eating (an arguably more central human activity than sex), majored in literature and gastronomy studies, could not stop finding hidden digestive processes in literature to the exclusion of every other feature, and talked incessantly about liberating the suppressed polymorphous desires of my own esophagus, I would rightly be referred for psychological help. The name for this kind of obsessive attachment is a fetish. Collectively, as a culture, we have a sex fetish. Seeing sex to the exclusion of all else relentlessly strips it of the complex human context that makes it meaningful in the first place. It reduces sex to porn. The problem isn’t just sexual excess; it’s sex as mere titillation. Bereft of any meaningful connections to the rest of life, sex becomes a series of mechanical postures, a porn manual.

It’s always been a minority of critics who read sex this intensively (and they certainly have given the newspapers exciting things to report about the MLA convention!) I’m also happy to say that from what I can see, excessively sexualized interpretation has already passed its heyday. Maybe all interpretive approaches become more interesting once the initial flurry surrounding them has died down, and we can see what’s worth salvaging.

In the meantime, I’m bored. Oh, Mr. Literature Professor, can we talk about something else, please?

Choosing the Left

2006-02-04T23:33:00.000-08:00

I'm left-handed. It's something I've always thought was kind of fun, despite the inconveniences of rooms with only tiny right-handed desks (think the JSB at BYU), getting ink smudges on my hand when I write, and the concern about risking my life should I ever attempt to use power tools.

Growing up, I heard that left-handed people were more likely to be geniuses, insane, and criminal— all of which sounded like deliciously exotic possibilities. My brother introduced me to baseball card collecting when I was around eight years old, and I smiled to see the advantage of being a left-handed batter (you're a step closer to first base). Is anyone surprised that I turned out to be somewhat left-leaning in my political views?

I once read an interesting study in which right-handed children were much less likely to know the handedness of their parents than were lefties. It made sense to me— I suspect that most people are much more aware of any characteristic they possess which places them in a small minority. It's something I often find myself observing; I love watching Theoden fight left-handed in Return of the King, and always find it a bit disconcerting that in the scene in which he rides down the line of his men, hitting their swords with his own, he does it right-handed.

I don't know if this is at all related to my left-handedness, but I also have real problems with left-right confusion. If you give me a minute to think about it, I can discern left from right— but off the top of my head, chances are I'll get it wrong. Many years ago when I was a suffering driver's ed student, my instructor had to repeatedly say "No! Your other right!" as I failed to follow his turning instructions. Some part of my brain has simply connected what is commonly labeled "left" with "right," and try as I might, I've never been able to undo it. Left simply feels like right to me.

Church, I find, is a place where I'm likely to be aware of my left-handedness simply because there is so much handshaking going on. I always carry my scriptures in my right hand, in order to leave the left one free for opening doors and so forth. This puts me in an awkward position, however, when someone wants to shake my hand; I have to either quickly shift the scriptures, or simply do a left-handed shake.

I won't even touch the profound theological question of whether it's acceptable to take the sacrament with one's left hand, or to sustain someone. But I do wonder about all those scriptures which state that the wicked will find themselves on the "left" hand of God. I just have to ask— are lefties more likely to be left behind? ;) Because the way I see it, choosing the wrong is clearly a problem, choosing the right is somewhat better, and choosing the left is best of all.

The Best of Sci-Fi

2006-02-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

So I thought I'd start things off by listing my favorite sci-fi shows as of late. They're not really in any particular hierarchy, except that I do have the greatest emotional attachment to Firefly. (Don't expect too much brilliant articulation--I'm mostly just rambling here.)

1. Stargate SG-1: (And to a lesser extent, I would include Stargate Atlantis.) Ultimately, I think Stargate's greatest strength is it's mythos--and what is has is fabulous. I cite the episode Reckoning specifically in regards to this because the brilliant way it brought everything together, and then conceived of a beautiful conclusion to the conflict with the Goa'uld. We got Daniel and his ascension-arc (with roots that trace all the way back to the movie), more Ancient technology, the continuing back-and-forth struggle in the Jaffa Rebellion, RepliCarter, the Asgard, Ba'al working for Anubis with the Kull warriors (Anubis now having to change people every once in a while on account of Lost City), the Tok'Ra...Part One of Reckoning is officially the only episode of the series to have Bra'tac, Thor, and Jacob Carter. I think, more than any other show I've ever watched, SG1 has done the absolute best job of building up history and development and interlocking threads of plots and continuation of those threads and plots...when I watched the episode Reckoning a year ago, I knew that it was one of the absolute best of the series. Because, it would be a terrible episode to introduce non-fans of the show with, but it was the ultimate payoff for the most hardcore and loyal of followers. And Reckoning was the episode that made me realize just how much I love that aspect of the series, and that I really think it's the series greatest strength.

I also absolutely love the continuing mentality with development within the series (if that sentence even makes any sense). For example, when they find new technology, not only is that then incorporated, but it's then used in future technology as everything develops; we meet the Asgard, who give us hyperdrive and beaming technology to be incorporated into the F-302s, the Prometheus, and even the Daedalus on Atlantis. And the all-important discovery of the zat weapons in second season...which is essential because they needed an equivalent of stunning effect from phasers on Star Trek.

And while I initially dreaded the drastic changes to be made to the series this season (what with the defeat of the Goa'uld and the departure of RDA) I've actually been pleasantly surprised. While the interaction between Jack and Daniel remains one of the core strengths and relationships of the series ("Why don't you just hold your breath--you haven't done that in a while.") I've found Mitchell to be a pleasant surprise. And of course, I love Vala, and any interaction she has with Daniel ("Let's make babies!") and am thrilled she's going to be main in 10th season. And even the Ori have proved to be an intriguing new villain--it certainly plays on what the fans seem to want most: to know more about the Ancients. (Too bad we've never gotten to see anything of the Furlings...)

I say Atlantis, to a lesser extent, though more as a sub-favorite, alongside SG1. Part of that is because I think second season so far has been pretty weak, and I've had to watch the character assassination of Rodney McKay (my favorite character) degrading to little more than comic relief. (Oh that Martin Gero will write more McKay episodes--but no more like Duet.) The series does have it's moments, and despite constant cliche, still has potential to be as good as its predecessor. Though I'm hoping that the writers will wise up and realize that Sheppard-McKay interaction is just about the part of the entire series, and will showcase it more. ("This is why parents get someone else to teach their kids how to drive.") I hope Peter DeLuise pulls himself away from SG1 more in the future, because I think The Defiant One may be just about the best episode of the entire series, thusfar.

2. Battlestar Galactica: I've been trying to put my finger on just why I think this series is so great, and the closest I can come to proper identification is in the very tight plotting and pacing. It does have it's down moments, and it's down episodes, but when this series gets caught up in moving fast, it's fabulous. And I think it's second only to Firefly in the central role character plays to the vitality of the series. Things become complicated, and fascinating, and move at such a brisk pace because the relationships are so endlessly complicated. So much so that I enjoy reading all the various, detailed speculations and analyses of each character ("I think Starbuck and Tigh hate each other because they both lean on Adama for emotional dependence and see the other as competition." "Starbuck and Apollo will get together eventually, but they're both too screwed up to deal with each other right now--best that Apollo has a fling with Dualla, and Starbuck continue her obsession with Anders." etc.)

One of the things I love most about the series is that it is literally the only one (in recent memory, anyhow) that could literally draw out such emotional reactions from me--especially in the vein of shock and intensity. I would cite specifically Cally shooting the Galactica Boomer at the end of Resistance. The build up to that was very well structured, as we watched Cally become more and more frustrated on behalf of Tyrol, and come to the conclusion that Boomer needed to be eliminated. Plus, I was semi-spoiled and knew she (Boomer) was going to die, but certainly not like that. And when I watched Ressurection Ship a few weeks ago...I love that you can totally read that Cain knew Starbuck had been tasked by Adama to assassinate her, even though it was never said out loud; and the entire juxtaposition of watching the destruction of the Ressurection Ship from the p.o.v. of Apollo floating in space, with Baltar essentially dismissing the Number Six hallucination from his mind, with Starbuck waiting to kill Cain and Fisk waiting to kill Adama...was genius.

Also, how refreshing is it to see a Sci-Fi series where not only do the main female characters outnumber the male (I'm talking just the opening-credits people) but the creators have made a conscious effort to make this a very egalitarian society. Granted, the series also has an abudance of supporting characters that appear in nearly every episode, but where we have Tigh and Helo, we also have Cally and Dualla.

Further, I find the incorporation of religion fascinating. The humans believe in multiple gods (Artemis, Aprohdite, etc.) while the Cylons believe in only one god--along with somewhat of a deterministic, repeating cycle in the universe (if I understood things correctly from the Leoben interrogation by Kara in Flesh and Bones). And I've stumbled across more than one online article comparing the mythos of the show to Mormonism--the 12 tribes that are wandering, and the fact that you only have to switch two letters in "Kobol" to get "Kolob" and so forth.

3. Firefly: I've been involved with the series less than 6 months, and I can already easily say that it's my favorite sci-fi series ever (which, in my history, is a title not easily given). Also even more significant when taken into account the fact that it's 14 episodes and one movie long. Granted, I was a Joss Whedon fan before I got into Firefly, but I easily think that it's the best of his three series. And while I do usually get somewhat involved with the technobabble of other sci-fi series, I get a kick out of the fact that he is so determined to steer clear of that with this series. (One of my favorite quotes from Whedon is from a Q&A where someone asks about how far apart the different moons and planets are in the solar system, to which he replied along the lines of,"They're really close together, like a little planet village. If you ask me science questions, I'm going to cry.")

Granted, anyone who's a fan knows that Serenity if Firefly-class, and I'm sure there are even some people out there that could recite the class code and all that fun stuff rambled off by River at the beginning of Train Job. But if you think back to episodes, with every single one it's more along the lines of,"It's the one where the characters did this" rather than "It's the one where this part of the engine broke down so they had to travel through time to discover another wormhole to a whole nother reality of existence." And how cool was it that just in 14 episodes, we got to see repeat of supporting characters. (This is going by watching the episodes in actual order, as opposed to how Fox originally aired them.) We got to see Badger again in Shindig after Serenity, we got to see Niska again in War Stories after Train Job, and we got to see Yo-Saf-Bridge again in Trash after Our Mrs. Reynolds.

And while I do love all the characters (a rarity for any show), I do hold such a special place in my heart for Mal (as evidenced by the framed picture of Mal I have above my desk--courtesty of Melyngoch). But it's not even just lust. I get such a kick out of the fact that he likes to appear the bastard, and becomes frustrated by his conscience, and the fact that he ultimately can't help being a good person. And I love that each other member of the crew demonstrates different aspects of his personality (if you like to read it that way, which I do): Zoe is the soldier, Jayne is the ruthless mercenary, Wash is the sense of humor, Kaylee is optimism, Book is spirituality, Inara is compassion, Simon is intelligence, and River is the physical manifestation of the evils of the Alliance.

When discussing Firefly, one also can't ignore the sense of humor. I've enjoyed Whedon humor in the past with Buffy and Angel, but it really hit its peak with this show. I love, love the way they like to take the obvious cliche and slap it in the face. ("Mercy is the mark of a great man. *stab* Guess I'm just a good man. *stab* Well, I'm all right." "Jayne, this is something the Captain has to do for himself." "No, no it's not!" "Oh!") Plus Our Mrs. Reynolds and Jaynestown, between them, have too many great moments to cite many specifics; I've read that Whedon considers OMR to be his best script--and while I don't know whether or not it's true, I could definitely understand why he might that think that; it is fabulous. I absolutely adore the scene in the cargo bay when Zoe calls the entire crew down to meet Mal's new "wife" ("We always hoped you two kids would get together. Who is she?") And everything about the concept of Jayne being seen as a Robin Hood-character, with his own song included, is absolutely brilliant.

4. Star Trek Deep Space Nine: I have to admit, this one is somewhat of an afterthought, but mostly because it's been off the air for five years. This is easily the most emotionally attached I've gotten to in a series with my sisters--and it was a very serious obsession for each of us.

I lost interest in Voyager round about the time we had Seven of Nine in a half-naked skin-tight outfit dueling with the Rock...and while one could justifiably argue that Next Generation is just as good as or better than, DS9 is ultimately the one I remember having the most long-term relationship with. (Uncoincidentally, Ron Moore, who was an executive producer for this show, is one of the show creators/runners for BSG.) I loved that this was the first Star Trek to seriously dabble its feet in religion (which I'm sure just had Gene Roddenberry rolling in his grave.) Are the creatures inside the wormhole powerful aliens? Yes. Well, are they a religious icon to the Bajoran people? Well, that would also be a yes. And the conflict of Sisko being leader of the Federation contigent and simultaneously Emissary to the Prophets was such a pivotal aspect of the series.

The series also managed to move somewhat away from the mentality in regards to women established and maintained during the first two Star Treks. (Women in knee-length cheerleading outfits; Troy in her wolf suit and acting the over-emotional ditz.) Sadly, Star Trek never moved past the idea of women making up any more than 30% of the galaxy, but Dax and Kira were vastly superior to Uhura, Troy and Crusher. I also really liked the idea of the Bajorans being more like the Celts--the women fighting alongside the men in battle.

While the Dominion were ultimately great villains, and served their purpose, one could also argue that the series also succeeded equally (if not better) in various social commentary (though I'm sure one of my sisters could elaborate on that better). I think another thing that made TNG and DS9 better than the others was knowing just when to have fun with an episode. Julian Bashir as a pseudo-James Bond while the rest of the crew has been inadvertantly transported into the holodeck in the ever-classic "Our Man Bashir"...or I remember specifically having a lot of fun going through the sheer enthusiasm and humor from "In the Cards" (which, at the time, also served as a nice counter to all the war/dominion heavy episodes that were around it). And also unlike Voyager and TOS, DS9 did know when to take itself seriously...like in Duet and Hard Time.

I mean, I think it had its flaws, but ultimately I still think of DS9 and TNG as the pinnacle of the Star Trek franchise and look back on both with a considerable amount of nostalgia.

How to Read

2006-02-02T21:07:00.000-08:00

Language is unstable; texts are ambiguous. Reading, therefore, is not always a straightforward affair.

This gives us leeway in how we approach our sacred texts, from the scriptures to ritual to official proclamations. Accepting the premise that a) God is good and loving in a way that makes sense to us here and now, and b) all sacred texts both embody absolute truth and are inspired by that same God, we're often left with the seemingly simple task of selecting the interpretative possibility of any given text that best accords with our own conception of God.

However, although any text permits a range of interpretations, not all interpretive maneuvers are equally valid. When presented with a spectrum of interpretive possibilites yielding conclusions ranging from absolutely appalling to satisfactory or comforting, it's tempting to simply select the latter as the most valid. In this way, we never have to question either assumption a) or b). Armed with preconceptions of God's character, we can approach texts knowing in advance what they *must* mean, and then simply undergo interpretive acrobatics in order to graft our foregone conclusions onto the text.

While the conclusions may be perfectly valid, however, I submit that this practice is fundamentally dishonest. When we reach conclusions based on readings which do not follow naturally (and I recognize this issue is complexified considerably by the fact that what seems a natural reading of one text to me may not seem natural to you), it seems essential that we openly locate the authority of our conclusions *outside the text itself*.

I once consulted a priesthood leader on the matter of a sacred text which has enough institutional authority behind it and troubles me sufficiently profoundly that it has severely disrupted my relationship with God. His response: "Everyone knows that it *really* means . . ." My contention is that not everyone knows that. Many people accept the language at face value. If that's what we mean, that's what we have to say.

As a specific example of a difficult passage, I've chosen 2 Nephi 5:21: "And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord GOD did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

I cannot read this passage without flinching, and I suspect there are members of our own community for whom it causes excruciating pain I don't claim to understand. There's an almost overwhelming temptation, in encountering such a passage, to resort to convoluted conceptual and textual acrobatics in an effort to explain away the plain sense of the verse, and thereby find a way to maintain our commitment to a God who loves all his children without regard to physiological characteristics (and certainly several other scriptural passages would suggest this), and at the same time to maintain our commitment to the inspired nature of the text.

But it seems to me that in an effort to minimize others' pain (and in particular our own discomfort), we trivialize that pain.

There are several ways of approaching this text; the focus of this post, however, is not how best to address racism in our tradition (this is an important issue which deserves a post of its own). The focus is how we treat texts whose most natural implications leave us profoundly uncomfortable. The text says something I don't like, and I find offensive and disquieting, and I think it's worth acknowledging that fact rather than searching for a way to ham-handedly fit the text into my own worldview.

I'm convinced that our sacred texts are often problematic and raise issues that are deeply troubling. But the only way to address these issues is to allow ourselves to see them.

My suggestion is that, whatever else we do, we encounter the text as honestly as we know how. This is not intended to imply that everyone will read a text the same way; our own perceptions and experiences necessarily inform our reading of every text. Nor do I intend to imply that all of us encountering texts as honestly as we can will reach identical conclusions. This is only to say that, given a broad range of possible interpretations to choose from, we select the interpretation not that is the most appealing to our own sensibilities, but that fits the textual evidence as we see it the best.

Mood Disorders and the Spirit

2006-02-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

I was inspired to write and make this post because of the series over at By Common Consent on Mormons and Mental Illness.

I'm a graduate student in my late 20s who's suffered from bipolar disorder since my early 20s. I have no formal training in psychology, but one of my academic interests is psychology and emotion in 20th century American culture (one of my specializations is cultural studies). Typically I look at mood disorders and emotions as cultural and social phenomena (as was perhaps evidenced by my last post on this blog), but I thought I'd temporarily suspend that avenue of thought and explore some thoughts on mood disorders and spirituality that stem from my own experiences.

Those who suffer from mood disorders (or who have watched loved ones suffer) know how difficult it can be to access God, feel the spirit, etc, when one’s disorder is not under control. Depression is a disease that causes immense despair and/or numbness, and often leaves the sufferer feeling cut off from God. Mania leaves its sufferers with racing thoughts and feelings, and often suffuses their lives with exhilarating delusions of grandeur rather than the comforting, affirming touch of the spirit.

One aspect of this phenomenon that really interests me is what we learn about emotion and the spirit from people who have these kinds of experiences. The spirit can touch our lives in many ways. We learn in D&C 8:2 that the spirit can speak to both our mind and our heart. While there is often a lot of discussion in church circles on what makes feeling the spirit different from other emotions and intellectual revelations (for instance, how do the emotions you feel when listening to a moving musical performance differ from a spiritual experience?), and I do think we need to examine the potential differences, in this post, I'm more interested in the commonalities. While spiritual experiences can differ from other emotional experiences in ways that can be difficult to express, I believe that God works through our thoughts and emotions to touch us with the spirit and his love.

Now enter into the equation mood disorders such as depression. "Mood disorder" is a term that doesn't really encompass the totality of the experiences of its sufferers. These disorders are illnesses that affect both one's cognition and emotional state (as well as other bodily processes such as appetite, sleep, etc). On the emotional side they can cause intense emotional pain, guilt, or even an absence of emotion (or, in the case of mania, intense feelings of euphoria or agitation). On the cognitive side, depression can cause a lack of creativity, difficulties in concentration, slowness in processing information, obsessive thoughts, etc. Because of these limitations, it becomes difficult to access the spirit; because one's emotions and cognitions are so out-of-whack, it becomes difficult for God to inspire us in our minds or in our hearts.

I find myself constantly struggling with figuring out what feelings to trust: the church teaches us to trust our feelings, because the spirit is often equated with "feeling" (we "feel" a burning in our bosom, we "feel" twinges in our conscience when we sin, etc). However, mood disorders teach you that you shouldn't trust your feelings: people with bipolar disorder who feel that they are God's chosen servants aren't necessarily so, people with depression who feel like they're the most worthless people on the planet aren't necessarily so, etc.

I do think it’s important to ask how one learns to trust the feelings that come from God while denying the feelings associated with the disorder. At the same time, I think the issue is more complicated than mere differentiation between feelings. Drawing lines between the Spirit and the disorder doesn’t look at the ways that we can experience both at once (or one through the other). For example, feeling the Spirit can affect my base mood level, and distorted cognitions and emotions change the lens I use when thinking about God’s answers to my prayers.

It’s important to not only consider how to distinguish between feelings, but to think about the general messiness and interconnectedness of different feelings. What do mood disorders and their effect on spirituality tell us about how God works through our cognitions and emotions? (What does it mean that when we’re emotionally and cognitively screwed up, it becomes much more difficult to access God and His love?) What can mood disorders teach us about spirituality more generally? How are other spiritual states that are linked to emotion (faith, hope, charity) affected by mood disorders, and how do these spiritual states affect mood disorders and our other emotions more generally?

Do Honest Questions Aid and Comfort Anti-Mormons?

2006-02-02T00:22:00.000-08:00

I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then I began to wonder

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

--Adrienne Rich, “North American Time,” from _Your Native Land, Your Life_

Rich’s poem calls me to consider the ethics of speaking into any fierce public divide and the ways the polemics of appropriation can deform what I hope to say. The “political correctness” she describes in the first section shrivels her voice as she notes what she shrinks from reporting “for fear of our enemies’ usage.” I’m very reluctant to use the term “enemy,” especially categorically. I certainly don’t consider someone my enemy simply because he has left or disagrees with the LDS Church. But as I see some of the uses to which those who actively oppose the Church might put our words here, I’m tempted to recoil from those hard and merciful interrogations to which the thoughtful life calls me and to censor myself until I only dimly echo the aphorisms of unthinking consent. On the Internet, how easily our words can fall into the hands of those would concatenate them into inexorable chains whose conclusions we would abhor. It’s not difficult to think of examples, historical and contemporary, of words written and repeated in willful innocence of the ways they have been brandished in bloody triumph over others’ broken bodies and souls, some of which Rich goes on to name in her poem. So, to paraphrase a question once put to Christ, who is my enemy, and what, besides the love enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount, do I owe her? What do I owe the enemy of my enemy who might find himself assailed by my words in my enemy’s mouth? In addition to the obligations to integrity and to mercy that attend all communication, I wonder how to take ethical account of the sometimes bitter public divide between Mormons and anti-Mormons into which our words here now inevitably fall.

My faith and covenants make possible all my inquiry, which I hope to conduct in a spirit of devotion. Although I cannot control the uses to which my words may be put by others, and although I remain committed to welcoming every honest expression of faith or doubt and every sincere question, I hope to foster a dialogue that honors its constitutive faith, even, and perhaps especially, in its most acute, most heartfelt interrogations.

Where have all the mothers gone?

2006-01-30T22:49:00.000-08:00

The other night, I went to see the musical “Aida” (the Elton John version, not the Opera) and I have just one question. Where did all the mothers go? For those of you not versed in the Aida story, it has a love triangle between an Egyptian princess (Amneria), the head of the Egyptian army (Ramades) and a slave from the kingdom of Nubia (Aida), who turns out to be the Nubian princess. All three main characters have a father who appears in the play. Aida’s father gets captured by the Egyptian army, Ramades’ father is plotting to kill the Pharoah and the Pharoah shows up just because he’s the Pharoah and you can’t have a story about Egypt without a Pharoah. But where are their mothers?

This is something that has bothered me about both T.V. and movies for quite some time. It seems that though major characters have regularly appearing fathers, mothers are quite a bit more scarce. This trend seems much more common among the sci fi/fantasy genres (where most of my attention lies) than say sitcoms.

When you think about science fiction and fantasy on television, what comes to mind: cool special effects, strange plots, interesting ideas, and even some character development. But when it comes to family relationships, specifically those relationships between main characters and their parents, there seem to be a lot more fathers.

The WB recently began airing a show called Supernatural (Buffy: The Vampire Slayer meets the X-Files). Two brothers find and destroy “monsters” based on common American myths (the girl who comes out of the a mirror if you say her name three times, the scarecrow, the man with a hook, etc.). Yes, these brothers had a mother, but she died tragically at the hands of some demon. Their father used to lead the family in their hunting, but now he is off on his own. The show is centered around finding their father and killing whatever killed their mother.

How about Star Trek, one of the most well known of the sci fi genre. Commander Will Riker of the Enterprise gets to have an entire episode where he not only deals with the emotional issues he has with his father, they end up in a fighting match. Captain Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine hooks up with his father every time he makes it back to earth. Lt. Tom Paris struggles with the bad relationship he has with his father despite the seventy light years between them. There are exceptions in Star Trek. B’Elanna Torres of Voyager and Geordi LaForge of the Enterprise spend time worrying about their mothers. (It turns out they are both dead.)

This trend continues: Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Angel, Firefly, Charmed, and even Smallville. (Though the protagonist of Smallville has two loving parents, until recently, the antognist is constantly struggling with his father.) There are one or two exceptions. Buffy has a mother for five seasons, and don’t even get me started on Alias. (One of the most complication sets of relationships I have ever seen, though at the beginning of the show the title character had lost her mother when she was six and doesn't talk to her father.)

As for other genres of television, Cop/drama/medical shows mostly ignore character development in favor of plot. Those who do have parental figures also tend to have fathers (Crossing Jordan, Numbers), though ER has had a few mothers guest star. The other major genres of television, the Real Life show and the Sitcom, seem to have equal shares of parental figures. (Gilmore Girls, The Simpsons) Interestingly enough, it is in these genres that more main characters are portrayed as mothers as well as career women. (Close to Home, Medium, and CSI all have female main characters with children.)

As for movies, look at some of the biggest blockbusters. Pirates of the Caribbean has two characters with fathers. Elizabeth’s father is not only the governor of Port Royal, but he leaves his post to follow the Pirates who “kidnap” Elizabeth. As for Will, his father may not actual appear, but he drives the entire plot. (Bootstrap Bill) What happened to his mother is anyone's guess. Indiana Jones spends an entire movie arguing with his father. His mother is only mentioned in the past tense. The Lord of the Rings has a plethora of fathers. Arwen has a father. Frodo has a father figure. Sam is always talking about his father (my old Gaffer). Eowyn and Eomer have a father figure in Theoden. And let’s not forget the complicated relationship between Boromir, Faramir and their father Denethor.

Of course a discussion of blockbusters wouldn’t be complete without Star Wars. The original three movies are about a boy, a girl, and their father. Their mother, Amidala, does show up as a real person in the first three movies but it is sad that her role as a parent is non-existent. She lives long enough to bear the children but then passes away so that the true parental angst of the movies lies between Luke, Leia and their father. Star Wars does have one exception. Anakin has no father, though he does have a mother. Of course it is her death that begins him on a path to the dark side of the force.

Finally there are the Superhero movies. I have always been fascinated by the way so many superheroes go from ordinary guy with an extraordinary ability to a superhero. There always seems to some triggering event. For many superheroes, such as Daredevil, Spiderman, and Batman, the triggering event is the death of their father (or uncle in the case of Spiderman) in an alley at the hands of some lowlife. Even Elektra, one of the few female superheroes out there, makes her decision to fight when her father is killed by one of Daredevil’s nemeses. Superheroes, then do not interact with their fathers, but use the death of their fathers to spur them into action.

But Batman is just a little more interesting because he had a mother, and her death really didn't effect him. Bruce Wayne (a.k.a Batman) lost his mother to the same man who killed his father. In the latest incarnation of Batman, Batman Begins, it is his father’s death that takes center stage. His mother has little or nothing to say. (I honestly can't remember if she has even one line.) When Bruce Wayne has flashbacks of his early childhood with his parents, it his father, and his father’s words, that dominate and drive his decisions.

So where are the mothers? For fantasy and science fiction, mothers seem to be sweet, loving, perfect, conveniently dead non-entites who are only mentioned in passing with maybe a moment of grief attached. Aragorn mourns at the grave of his mother as Elrond reminds him of her sacrifices. (I think this happens in the Extended Edition.) Leia remembers her mother as sad, but she died when she was very young. Indiana Jones’ remarks only about his mother that she “didn’t understand” his father's obsession with the Holy Grail. Mothers are non-characters who may have once been in their children’s lives but are no longer important to the storyline.

So what is so special about fathers that they are so much more likely to show up in pop culture than mothers? Society is so concerned with single motherhood and teenage pregnancy. Women are more likely to raise their children and play a prominent role in their lives? Why don’t we depict more characters with live mothers? Perhaps it is because, despite our protestations over single mothers, we still believe that fathers play the biggest role in their childrens lives. Perhaps pop culture truly represents the ideal where fathers are more active in their children's lives. Perhaps it is because fathers are so often absent, emotionally or physically that adult children may have more complicated relationships with them.

What is so sad about all this is that society is constantly reminding us that mothers make so much of a difference in children’s lives. In the church, there is still a lot of pressure for women to stay home and raise their children. (The ideals of Republican Motherhood still exist.) But pop culture is telling us that mothers really don't matter that much. Yes, they need to be there to raise the children but as for interacting with them as adults, that's the father's job.

I would love to see more mothers, especially in the kinds of TV and movies I watch. I would love to see a superhero movie where the mother’s death spurs the action or where a mother and daughters fight the evils of the world. I want mothers to be more than the stereotype, more than dead, more than a past memory. I want there to be more live mothers on TV and in the movies.

How to Cry in Church

2006-01-29T20:52:00.000-08:00

By most measures, I am not very feminine. My husband has to drag me to Michael’s to look at decorations for the house, I cannot be prevailed upon to take pictures, let alone scrapbook them, and I will never be accused of being a slave to fashion, as the Car Talk guys so tactfully put it. But I have at least one tentative claim to femininity. I cry. Not delicately, like the doe-eyed women in movies who dribble out a few dainty, alluring tears. I sob convulsively. I cry like a…wounded buffalo?? It’s not the kind of crying that makes people want to offer me their great-grandmothers’ handmade lace handkerchiefs. It’s the kind of crying that makes people want to put something in my mouth so that I don’t swallow my tongue.

I have a long history of losing it at church. The first time I remember being pushed over the edge by sacrament meeting was when I was six or seven. My family was harried and late that morning, I was cross and uncomfortable in my Sunday dress, and I suspect some discouraging words may have been uttered all around before we barged in. At the opening strains of “There Is Sunshine in My Soul Today,” I burst into angry tears because my soul was illuminated by not a shred of sunshine, and even then I was sure that everyone else was serene and happy and that I was alone in my puddle of misery. I had to be hauled out by my poor mother, who I’m sure was already stretched to the breaking point from juggling four intense and sometimes wild kids.

The February 2005 Ensign had a fascinating article by Carl C. Bruderer entitled ”Losing Barbara, Finding the Lord,” describing the pain of losing his wife to breast cancer and his subsequent journey to reactivity. The article was moving on many levels, but the part that absolutely riveted me was his description of seeing all of the families with both parents and ending up sobbing in the men’s restroom. At the point I read the article, I was making fairly regular trips from sacrament meeting to the restroom myself, for my own reasons, and it was so comforting to read that someone out there had done the same thing.

Recent posts have led me to reflect on the etiquette of religious crisis. Let’s face it, there are lots of reasons to cry in church, and probably all of us will experience one or more of them at some point in our lives. So, in the spirit of self-mockery and self-instruction, I offer my personal guide to crying in church.

First, cry quietly. Convulsive sobbing only creates unfortunate social complications that will likely make you feel worse, either in the moment or later, as you reflect miserably on the spectacle you’ve made of yourself. Kind people stare, try not to stare, or dither uncomfortably. (This is not their fault. When other people cry in my presence, I dither just as uncomfortably.) Should they ask you what’s wrong? Hug you? Leave you alone? Offer you a Cheerio? If you find yourself unable to keep it down, slip out as quietly as you can. In deciding whether to leave or stay, weigh the disturbance of your sobbing against the disturbance of rushing out of the meeting, and go with the lesser. Escalating sobbing suggests it’s time to flee.

Get your sobbing thoroughly out of your system before you attempt a return. While you’re completely convulsive, restrooms are best. You can lock the stall door and keep flushing the toilet if you have to, which, while undeniably a horrible waste of water, guarantees you privacy. In any other room, you risk interruptions that lead to stammered apologies on both sides. It’s also important not to convince yourself you’ve regained your composure before you actually have—this can lead to repeated attempted and failed returns, which only draw more attention. So once you’re out, don’t rush back until your hiccupping has faded of its own accord and you really have calmed down, not just stopped crying.

In the intermediate stage, after you have ceased convulsing but before you are ready to return, playing the piano in an unoccupied classroom can be very soothing.

If you are stuck in the front pew, where you would call more attention to yourself by leaving than by staying, another set of tactics comes into play. The most important thing is to get your mind off of what is driving you to tears by any means available. Open your scriptures. Contemplate polytheism in the Old Testament. Read the more anguished psalms, unless they make you cry harder. Read the Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver you have brought for this express purpose (I owe this suggestion to Lynnette. It really works!). Recite whatever scriptures, poems, or verbs you’re currently committing to memory to yourself. Say the multiplication tables backward. Make a frog out of the sacrament-meeting program. Hold the small child of a desperate parent near you.

Another tactic that rarely works, but might fool the unsuspecting: assume a beatific, touched-by-the-Spirit look. Attempt a radiant smile through your tears.

If you know you may have to leave sacrament meeting, Sunday school, Relief Society, or priesthood, position yourself in the back of the cultural hall or right by the door to facilitate a rapid exit. Recognize that certain days (Mother's Day, Father's Day, and stake conference are some of mine) are invariably bad, and on those days, position yourself accordingly, or just sit in the foyer. Recognize too that certain periods of life are just bad, and during those times, no matter what happens, you will probably break down. And remember that bad days and bad times, however endless they may seem, do invariably come to an end.

What do you all do when you lose it in the pews?

I am not Academic

2006-01-29T17:13:00.000-08:00

Steering things in a more secular direction...

By way of preamble, let me start off by saying this is in no way meant to be an attack towards academia, nor towards those who are academically-minded. And I bear absolutely no grudge against the world of academia (with the possible exceptions of the biology and American Heritage departments at BYU).

Anyway, so I went to my friend's mission farewell today. She's a girl I've known since I was ten, we were really good friends in high school and now she's off to serve a mission to Russia. (She actually told a cool story in her talk about how she was told by God when she was 15 that she would one day serve a mission to Russia and that's why she took all this Russian in high school and college and spent six months there teaching English.) I went over to her house after church where they had lunch and we sat around and talked and she yodeled for us (she's the only person I know who can yodel--it's pretty cool).

I was talking to her Dad, who remembered my major and asked about that and each of my siblings. I gave some such remark about how they were all off being academic, unlike me. To which he gave the reply along the lines of, oh yes, you're an academic, too. I kind of veered on past that comment by furthering the conversation in saying that they, my siblings, would rather sit around and discuss religion and politics where I would rather analyze movies, and he then said that I could incorporate that by analyzing the religion and politics in movies.

Now this is a man who I consider to be the most genuinely decent Church leader I've ever had--and I've dealt with some pretty bad ones. He was my Bishop a couple of years before he was made Stake President, and then was moved along even further up into pseudo-GA status. I took a semester of Book of Mormon from him my freshman year, and even used him as a reference when I applied to my major. And one of the coolest things about him is that he is just about the most genuinely open-minded, non-judgemental person I have ever met (which is refreshing, because one of my biggest complaints about Mormons--as a culture--is the general lack of sincerity). And I in no way think that he was trying to be offensive or push any buttons with me.

But I take the comment of someone telling me I'm an academic to be somewhat of an insult--both to me, and actual academics. Among other things, I think people will generally only tell me that because I come from a family of such, and therefore the assumption is that I fit in with the mold--despite the reality that I am really not that learning or book-oriented of a person.

Which is not, certainly, to say that I have no desire to participate in any of the politically or religiously-geared discussions on this blog. Most likely, I'll continue to lurk, and occasionally post a comment when I feel the burning desire. But my greatest aversion towards such discussions is actually one of the same reasons why I doubt I will be incorporating the subjects in my movie-learning/producing, etc. in the near future. I think I've gotten to the point where I'm a little tired of being angry. I'm tired of being angry about politics, and at certain people; I'm tired of being angry at the church, particularly in regards to women (and I'm trying desperately to prove to myself that it is possible to be a feminist and a good, faithful church member at the same time).

So when it comes down to it, I would probably pick analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of a video game over having a discussion about Khadafi and where it is he truly belongs. So I'll gladly participate in other conversations, but if anyone has any recommendations for a good RPG, I'd love to chat.

(Possibly Nonsensical) Musings on Sense

2006-01-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

The question of whether church teachings "make sense" (and to what extent it matters whether or not they do) has come up in a couple of places lately, and I've been mulling over my own views on the subject. I've always been a bit fascinated when I've heard people assert that they find the LDS church appealing because it makes so much more sense than any other religious system. I don't doubt their sincerity, but my own experience has been rather different.

Sometimes when other church members find out that I study theology, I get the impression that they are imagining that I'm learning about a bunch of bizarre and clearly apostate doctrines which simply don't hold up in comparison with the truths of the restored gospel. But if that were in fact my perspective on things, I'm not sure why I would even bother with this field. I've learned a tremendous amount from seriously engaging the theology of other traditions; my academic work has pushed me to think about issues in new ways, raised provocative questions, suggested alternate possibilities. I do have moments when I'm acutely conscious of just how Mormon is the lens through which I see the world, when having considered other options I still prefer the LDS theological angle— but I have to also admit that I sometimes find the arguments of other Christians to be more compelling than ours. It's a mixed bag. They have problems and contradictions and things that are hard to explain, and so do we. They have some really cool stuff, and so do we.

And yet I remain a Mormon (albeit a rather conflicted and confused one). I'm not sure I can entirely unpack the reasons for that, but I can say it's not because I think the LDS approach clearly makes more sense than that of anyone else. Over the years, in fact, I've become a lot more skeptical about a variety of fairly basic LDS teachings. I think that what has nonetheless kept me at least semi-active is my profound belief that I've authentically encountered God in the context of the church.

That, however, leaves me with the question: if my commitment (such as it is) is primarily based on experiential knowledge, does it really matter if things don't make sense? There are actually a large number of dilemmas about which I can say okay, this is an intellectually interesting problem, but it's not going to shake my faith if I can't figure it out. However, I find that there are some crucial issues which have more serious consequences. Joseph Smith famously said in the Lectures on Faith that we are unable to exercise faith in God without a correct understanding of his attributes. For me, the heart of the matter is the simple question: can I trust God? And when I encounter problems (such as evidence which suggests that God values women less, or that church leaders have felt divinely authorized to lie) which have the potential to erode that trust, I don't know that I can simply "have faith" and put those questions on the shelf, as such problems threaten to bring the entire shelf crashing down.

Does any of this make sense? ;)

My Journey into Apostasy

2006-01-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

It's now been almost two years since I received my endowment, and these have been, without question, the least religious two years of my life.

I was not a closet feminist before my temple experience. I was quite upfront with my bishop about the fact that I think there's no good reason for women not to hold the priesthood, and how I pray the Proclamation on the Family is uninspired. I took the temple prep class four times over the course of several years, and drove a series of teachers crazy with questions. (Why are ordinances necessary, anyway?)

But in spite of my grievances, I was committed to the church. Of course, even if divinely inspired, it's an institution run by humans, and it's fallible, and I don't expect to agree with every word that comes out of every church leader's mouth. But I was convinced through personal experience that God is loving and trustworthy and involved in the church, and I could forgive the church's mistakes for that reason only. I guess I figured, rights will eventually be wronged; God is so good, and so loving, that he's worth making some compromises for.

The temple blew me away.

At first I tried to convince myself that I just needed to bite the bullet and focus on the good and not the bad. I went back a second time, alone. I sat in the celestial room and wept and begged God to explain to me how he could be so cruel. I got no answer. And I never returned.

As angry as I was (and am), apostasy did not come easily or immediately. Far from falling out of the church, I feel I've jumped out, gradually weaning myself off religious practices that came to seem tained by this--what shall I say?--institutionalized declaration that women are not entitled to the same quality of relationship with God that men enjoy; that God does not trust women to the degree he trusts men.

It took me several months before I could bring myself to stop wearing garments, and I sobbed the night I first took them off, begging God to understand that I simply cannot endorse what they represent. For the longest time I vowed repeatedly to stay away from church services, but found myself showing up anyway. In my pre-temple life, I made an effort to fast every Sunday and read the scriptures an hour a day. Now I can't remember the last time I fasted, or took the sacrament, or got on my knees, or opened the scriptures. I've forced myself to give this all up. And there are times, not so infrequent, when I really miss the religious life.

To this day I am as convinced of the reality of God as I am of anything. But I've lost my faith in God's goodness, in his love for me, in his desire for my well-being and happiness. Call it a lack of faith (I do), but I don't trust God anymore. I can't worship God from within a framework that is profoundly personally demeaning.

I feel that for a long time I've made painful compromises because I value my relationship with God. I've been willing to forego "the right to act in God's name" on account of my two x chromosomes. I've spent my life reading androcentric scriptures. But there's a limit to the compromises I'm willing to make, and the temple is light years beyond it. My autonomy is sacred. Anything that threatens it I consider sacrilegious. I'm not going to cede my autonomy to a fallible male with a fallible ability to recognize God's will simply because God is unwilling to enter into a formal relationship with me directly. If God doesn't want me, I don't want him.

I think I've encountered just about every reaction you can imagine to this ongoing religious crisis. To those who say, "Honey, one day you'll understand why God commands what he does," my tendency is to reply, "Yeah, after I've been lobotomized." (Did I mention I have a problem with being condescended to?) Then there are those who are eager to uncover the "real" problem: am I not keeping the law of chastity? Do I have trouble with the Word of Wisdom? Other people explain to me how the church actually doesn't subordinate women, because they have wonderful mothers, or wives. (How nice for them!) One good friend suggested to me that the church is all about vicarious relationships: Christ did something for men they couldn't do for themselves, and then men do something for women. It's a gallant effort, and I appreciate the intent, but hierarchy is implied. Christ is able to lift men up because he's above them, and better than they. Why are further intermediaries needed? Why wasn't Christ's ateonment enough to fully reconcile women to God too?

One woman even accused me more or less of setting myself up to show everyone how much more sophisticated I am than they are. She was extremely intelligent, she informed me, and she had no problem with the temple: therefore, neither did I. (I don't claim superior intelligence. I don't deny that there are people smarter than I am who have no problem with the temple.) Over and over I hear that it's not a big deal. What can I say? It's a big deal to me. I'm not trying to judge those who love the temple or deny their spiritual experiences there (I have good friends in this category), or those who have made peace with it in spite of reservations. But I do wish people could accept the sincerity of my crisis.

Near the end of the movie _The Interpreter_, Silvia asks the leader of Matobo something to the effect of, "How could you give so much, and then take away even more?" I would love to put this question to God. What's so difficult about the entire issue is that I've felt God's love, and I no longer know how to make sense of it. Just the thought that there's even a possibility that the God who claims to love me expects me to accept *this is a knife to the heart.

Please observe the following guidelines in commenting on this post: 1) this isn't the place to discuss Kiskilili's spiritual failings, 2) though former church members are welcome to respectfully add their thoughts on this particular issue, this isn't the place to talk more generally about why you don't like the church or why you left it, and 3) please steer clear of specific discussion of the temple ceremony. --ZD Admin

The Role of Women in Heaven

2006-01-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Starfoxy's excellent question about the role of women in heaven (see the thread on gendered language), I thought I would take this opportunity to ramble. :)

I admit, I'm confused. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that our sliver of knowledge about Heavenly Mother (i.e., she exists), was a "revelation" to Eliza R. Snow: she logically deduced that it would be nonsensical for there to be two genders on earth but only one in heaven--if God is our parent, and parents come in pairs, shouldn't he have a partner?

So far, so good. But by similar logic, I wonder, could we not posit the existence, for example, of heavenly cat parents? Otherwise where in heaven or hell did all these cat spirits that are being born into cat bodies at a rapid rate all over the globe come from? And if we assume God, all by his lonesome, is able to somehow come up with cat spirits and zebra spirits and all the rest, why could he not have produced women in the same manner, all by his lonesome?

In the second creation account (Genesis 2:4-3:24), God comes off as a little bit, well, bumbling; he makes the decision to create a "help meet" for Adam, randomly creates animals in an effort to that end, and then seemingly finally chances almost by accident on the creation of woman. Doesn't exactly sound like Heavenly Mother's at his side, does it?--or why couldn't he have just modeled Eve on her and figured the whole thing out a little sooner? Man is undeniably central in this account; woman, far from being God's "crowning creation," is derivative of man. Of course, Eve's subordination to Adam is explained as an eternal curse, but let's not fool ourselves: Eve was never equal to Adam to begin with.

If God created animals simply because a network of creatures in symbiotic relationships was needed in this earth life (after all, men can't perpetuate the species on their own!), how do we know women weren't created for nothing more than the same purpose? Man, after all, is granted divine dominion over both the animals and woman.

And then there's the old refrain that all those of us who faithfully attended seminary have heard chanted ad nauseum whenever the topic arises: the reason we know nothing about Heavenly Mother is that she's too, well, special, too *holy even. If this is the case, I wonder, whose decision was it that Heavenly Mother be an absent parent? Did Heavenly Father make it--essentially sticking his most valuable possession in a safe where no one could get to "it" and sully "it"? And was it really his decision to make, and if so, why? Or did Heavenly Mother decide herself she was too holy to have anything to do with her earthly children? If the way we pay highest respects to the holiest of heavenly beings is by refraining from attempting to make any contact at all, don't Heavenly Father and Jesus deserve this much respect too? Why not throw the scriptures away, give up prayer, and disband the Church--all as an act of ultimate worship?

I've been reminded on several occasions by several individuals that women must be valued by God, because--men can't get to heaven without 'em! I'm afraid I take little comfort in this fact. Several objects facilitate men's passage into heaven. They have their physical temple recommends, the vehicles that convey them to temples, baptismal fonts, the bricks that go into the construction of church buildings, on and on and on. But does God love the bus that shuttles his faithful flock to his holy house *for itself*? Does he feel concern for the bus when it encounters obstacles and weep when it breaks down and is replaced by a more efficient model?

I, personally, am either going to mean more to God than an object facilitating someone else's salvation, or I'm going to refuse to have a relationship with him at all. I simply will not be an eternal housepet.

In short, I'm not at all sure what exactly the women in heaven are doing, but I've become increasingly convinced I would rather not be doing it.

The Social Functions of Happiness

2006-01-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Because of all the other bloggernacle posts on happiness and maintaining appearances (see Dave’s Mormon Inquiry, Feminist Mormon Housewives, and Exponent II), I’ve been thinking about this subject for much of the day today. However, my thoughts have taken a slight detour through my academic interests.

I do a lot of work on thinking about the ways in which emotions are not only signals of internal states or biological processes, but have social functions. In Catherine Lutz’ Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, she argues that emotional concepts cannot be thought of as independent of the culture and society from which they originate, and that the discourses and structures to which emotions belong determine their very nature. She explains that "the concepts of emotion can more profitably be viewed as serving complex communicative, moral, and cultural purposes rather than simply as labels for internal states whose nature or essence is presumed to be universal" (5).

Today I’ve been thinking about the ways in which "happiness," an "appearance of happiness," or a "culture of happiness" has specific social functions within the church. While I think a lot has been said about the impact that this "culture of happiness" has on its individual practitioners, today I’ve been thinking about the impact that the "culture of happiness" has on the ways in which people inside (and outside) of the church relate to one another.

I think fMhLisa hits on one of these in her post, when she writes "You are happy for an audience of potential converts who will see any sign of unhappiness as an excuse not to convert." How many times have we heard conversion stories with the phrase "I was attracted to your church because everyone seemed so upbeat and happy"? While I would be interested in hearing to what extent this is an attraction that the church holds for non-members (my inclination is to think it’s exaggerated), I think there is truth in the belief that an appearance of happiness will attract people who are looking for a greater sense of peace and happiness in their own lives. There’s a reason that people in advertisements who are using various kinds of products are almost always smiling and having fun. (For the sake of not getting too complex, I’m ignoring the whole "light of Christ" issue, though I think more needs to be said on both the differences between and the relationship of a "culture of happiness" and exhibiting the "light of Christ.")

I think there are also social functions of a "culture of happiness" within the membership itself. There are scientific experiments that have been done on the effects of acting happy (or even doing something as basic as smiling). Most participants in the studies reported higher levels of happiness after pretending as if they were happy. While I am certainly not a proponent of the extreme versions of this formulation—-"if you try hard enough, you can make yourself happy" or "if you act happy, you will become happy"-—I do think that in many instances having interactions with happy people (who are truly happy in genuine, affirming ways) can increase your own levels of happiness. Similarly, if you were around a bunch of stressed and depressed people who were projecting those emotions onto others, your own stress and depression levels would probably rise. So, one social function of happiness is that it can increase happiness levels in certain kinds of interactions.

I think another social function of a "culture of happiness”"is that it seems to collectively affirm the truth of the gospel. Others have noted that there is an individual phenomenon (which Russell Arben Fox, in his comments on fMhLisa’s posts on FMH, labels "works righteousness") where we believe that happiness stems directly from righteous living, and if we display happiness, it indicates to others our own level of righteousness. I think this happens on the collective level as well. Not only does displaying an attitude of happiness signal to those around us that we are living a righteous life (according to church discourse/culture), if everyone is doing that, it affirms to the community the truth of their beliefs. If we look around us and see that everyone is happy, we can say to ourselves "the church is true—the fact that everyone is so happy is proof." Even if we are struggling with our own testimony, we can look over at Sister Jones, see that she’s happy living the gospel, and ideally that can give us hope that we can achieve a similar state of happiness in our own endeavors toward righteous living. It’s a collective affirmation that the church formulas for gaining a testimony, increasing our faith, and obeying the commandments really do work.

Now, I am not arguing that any of the above are "good" or "bad" social formations. I think they’re complex, and that they have both benefits and detriments. However, I think a "culture of happiness" impedes certain kinds of social formations, and I would argue that this is a clear problem.

For instance, I think that it often prevents certain kind of social conversations and relationships that could potentially be very strengthening to church members. I am reminded of the scripture in Moroni 6:5: "And the church did meet together oft, to fast and to pray, and to speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls." Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I think about this scripture, I imagine a church membership getting together and having intense, honest conversations about their struggles with faith and how to overcome them, etc.

A "culture of happiness" often impedes authentic conversations on how to deal with struggling testimonies, problems achieving obedience to certain commandments, etc. If we encouraged other kinds of emotional social formations, not only would those of us who are struggling with this issues (which is everyone in the church at some point in their life) feel more comfortable with our own inadequacies, we would be able to have authentic and strengthening conversations about the very real struggles of life and living the gospel. It can also make it much more difficult to "mourn with those that mourn" and "comfort those that stand in need of comfort" (Mosiah 18:9)

Other thoughts? In your mind, what kinds of social formations and relationships does a culture of happiness encourage? impede? Are these beneficial, harmful, or (my personal favorite) both?

Blogging from North-West Cheeto Land

2006-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

There I was, last October, reading 2 Nephi over my morning Crunchy Corn Bran and Mountain Dew, and suddenly I thought, I think I'll go on a mission. Yes, that's a lovely idea. I'll go convert those people who think they need no more Bible. Glad that’s settled. Are we out of skim milk?

Of course I was melting down an hour later, but the interim was a nice breath of irrational certainty. As bad of an idea as this looks from the practical perspective, it has a sanguine air of inevitability to it; I’m simply convinced that I’m going to go. It’s also a solid 180 retroversion from my previous position. I'm twenty-four, and in the last three years of eligibility, I’ve been fiercely opposed to the idea. Part of the reason is that there's so much about the Church that makes me crazy, and on irritable days I get this horrible vision of me in a denim jumper and nametag half-heartedly telling people to come join our church so they can be ostracized for drinking diet Coke and watching The Simpsons and also find out that their gender role involves being the adornment of humanity. Part of the reason is that although I’m committed to the LDS Church and call myself a devout Mormon, I’ve always struggled with the “one true church” rhetoric. I can’t imagine looking a committed Christian of another faith in the eye and saying “You’re wrong. I’m right.” As Eve has pointed out to me, though, committed Christians of other faiths don’t usually let the damn-mar-mans past the doorframe, so that’s an unlikely scenario.

And part of the reason is, for good or ill, selfishness. It’s inconvenient. I’m in the first year of my MA/PhD program and taking time out now means letting the Latin and Old English I’ve been struggling to bring up to par atrophy away back toward oblivion; coming back will be like starting over. I just took out 23K in school loans, and I certainly don’t have the resources to pay that back before I leave. I’ve uprooted my life and moved across the country once in the last six months, and I’m only just beginning to settle into my new home and find friends among my new acquaintances. I don’t want to deal with the social hardship of the mission, and I don’t want to deal with the social hardship of coming back. And given this detour, I’ll probably be into my thirties before I leave Bloomington, Indiana permanently. I know that doesn’t quite read as catastrophic, but I sort of had Bloomington filed away in my brain as a rest-stop on the highway of my life, somewhere I’m going just so I can get to somewhere else, and the prospect of turning thirty here makes me think it’s probably got more to it than picnic tables and a gas station. Going on a mission now seems like it’s going to leave me stuck later. It takes time out of a life that I never feel is large enough to do everything I want to anyhow.

On the other hand, my life invariably goes better when I do what I suspect God wants me to. I’ve made too many bad decisions while ignoring that persistent vibration in the back of my mind that falls somewhere between better judgment and revelation, which I associate with God making suggestions. And I remember my favorite professor at BYU suggesting that some people might need to hear the gospel from a girl with purple hair and a nose-ring, and even though I can’t take either to the MTC, I’ll still have them on the inside, if that makes any sense. If God and Christ and the Atonement really are at the center of my life, and I’d like them to be, then it seems like I should be willing to endure the inconvenience and the nineteen-year-olds to go to Russia or Finland or North-West Cheeto Land (as Ziff has kindly predicted) or even (heaven forbid) Iowa (I’ve actually had nightmares about getting called to Iowa) and tell people about these things that are so important to me.

So look for me this time next year, illicitly blogging from the MTC. Eve and that same BYU professor have both warned me that although I'll probably do fine in the field, the MTC will be a very grim trial indeed, and I'll need my Bloggernacle fix. Ten points to the best idea for how to smuggle in a laptop.

Gender-Inclusive Language

2006-01-23T16:21:00.000-08:00

In writing papers for school, I continually find myself confronted with questions about language and gender. Like most of the academic world, I pretty much take it for granted that saying "man" and "he" simply isn't going to cut it if I'm talking about the entire human race. The lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular is awkward at times— my own preference is usually to alternate between "she" and "he"— but I'm very much a believer in the importance of not writing as if all humans were male.

The place where I admit that I've found myself a bit less certain is in discussion of God. Like most Mormons, in casual speech I nearly always refer to God as "he," and that was initially how I wrote my papers. Yet the more I've thought about the issue, especially as I've encountered feminist theology, the more uneasy I've become with that choice. I'm quite sympathetic to the argument made by feminist Christian theologians that if God transcends gender, which is how mainstream Christians (a term I'm using in contrast to "LDS Christians") view deity, then there is no reason to limit our metaphors for God to masculine ones (like "father), or to use exclusively male pronouns when referring to the divine. (I'd recommend Elizabeth Johnon's She Who Is for a good discussion of this.) I also share Mary Daly's oft-quoted concern that "if God is male, then male is God."

The problem takes on different contours, of course, when one comes at it from an LDS perspective— our belief in an embodied God means that we aren't merely being metaphorical when we use the pronoun "he." Yes, we have a vague and very underdeveloped notion that there is a Heavenly Mother out there, too. But the God who acts in scripture, the God of official church discourse, is always male. And unlike mainstream Christians, I find that I can't dismiss such references as simply the language convention which the speakers are opting to use as they struggle to describe a being who is in reality neither male nor female.

I don't know where exactly I am right now on the question of how to refer God. At the moment, at least in my academic writing, I usually go for the strategy of avoiding gendered references altogether in my discussion of the divine. I don't entirely like that, though, as I think it comes across as making God sound more distant, more abstract, more impersonal.

When I go to church, however, these questions seem far away, because we're still back on the question of whether gender-inclusive language is even needed when we're discussing human beings. I do think this is an area where things have improved greatly over the last few decades, but I still find it jarring to hear talks about "man" and "brotherly love" given to audiences of both sexes. For years, I've changed the words of the hymns when singing them. (I remember one entertaining incident when I was sitting with several of my sisters and we all substituted "sister" for "brother," causing the people in front of us to turn around and laugh.)

I realize that the God-language question raises some real theological issues. But it strikes me as a fairly straightforward matter to at least note that women as well as men are members of the Church, and to acknowledge that reality in the way we talk. I'm a bit puzzled by the fact that those who resist the practice are so often the same people who are emphatic about the reality of gender differences; it seems to me that they would in fact be highly motivated to ensure that women weren't inadvertently being referred to as "men."

What are other people's thoughts on this?

Glimmers of Grace

2006-01-20T16:08:00.000-08:00

From the beginning of my studies in theology, I've been fascinated by the doctrine of grace. As with many questions in this field, I'm particularly interested in what it actually means for lived experience. If grace is something real, I keep asking, what concrete difference does that make in how I live? What does it mean to wake up in the morning to a world of grace?

I remember as a teenager furtively reading evangelical pamphlets which encouraged me to say the Sinner's Prayer and be saved, and feeling intensely drawn to that possibility. Though I disagree with various aspects of the overall evangelical outlook, I think there is something deeply powerful in that basic idea that you can approach God even from the wreckage of your life and he won't turn you away, that you don't have to live up to some minimum standard before you can ask for his help. I love the story of Alma's conversion, how in Alma 36:18 he cries, "O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me" and then in verse 19, he reports, "I could remember my pains no more." I'm always struck by how there is no verse 18.5 in which the Lord says, "Well, I might think about forgiving you, but only if you devote the rest of your life to becoming a great missionary."

On perhaps a similar note, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich makes the case that repentance is actually the result of forgiveness, rather than the other way around. Last fall I read a book by the Orthodox author Olivier Clement, in which he comments, "the awareness of being loved and the response that it unlocks are the only criterion of repentance." I've found such observations helpful in coming to re-think repentance not so much as something which you endure in order to re-gain God's favor or appease his anger, but the desire to change which is sparked by sensing God's radical acceptance of you. Several twentieth century theologians have pointed out that grace isn't some kind of substance which can be bottled and analyzed; rather, grace is a relationship. It is God's steadfast willingness to be in relation with us, a relationship which if we will allow it can be transformative of who we are.

Yet I often struggle to believe in that possibility, go through times when life feels empty and dark and I wonder why, if grace is everywhere, I am so unable to see it. I've come to believe more and more that grace tends to be mediated through other things, that it is not an abstract force "out there" somewhere but rather a part of the fabric of my everyday life, and that if I'm going to find it, it will be in those quotidian details. I often glimpse it in literature or poetry or theology or music. Most of all, I encounter it in the people in my life who are patient and forgiving and don't give up on me even when I make serious mistakes. It is through the experience of such relationships that I've gradually come to develop more trust in a God who is not seeking to condemn, but who is "full of grace, equity, and truth, full of patience, mercy, and long-suffering." (Alma 9:26) It may be rare that I directly see the workings of grace, but when I look, I am frequently surprised by how many hints I see of something just around the corner, beckoning to me.

Words of the Heart

2006-01-19T00:38:00.000-08:00

My favorite part of the Joseph Smith story has always been this passage:

While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act, I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know…(JS-H 1:11–12).

I love this passage because it describes an experience I have had over and over with the scriptures, and also because I hope and yearn for the generous and comprehensive God James promises, a God who gives to all, who desires us to seek Him, who does not rebuke me for my ignorance. When I take the time to approach the scriptures with an open heart, sometimes a passage I’ve heard or read many times in boredom or distraction pierces me to the very core of my being, speaking to me at a level of understanding that involves and yet exceeds both the intellectual and the emotional. I could not explain what it is about such scriptures that alters me, suddenly deepening my understanding of their words in a way that is beyond words and unmistakably summoning me to a better life.

The experience Joseph describes of being so profoundly spoken to by a scripture that he returns to it again and again, of being called to a deep and self-implicative reflection that radiates from the words into his life and calls him into a deeper communion with God is at the very heart of my experience of the gospel. I think of really reading the New Testament for the first time as a college freshman, of being newly stunned by the ethical power and beauty of Jesus’ teachings and knowing, knowing on that level beneath the mind and even the emotions, that they were divine, of knowing This is how I must live my life. I think of Abinadi rebuking the priests of King Noah because he perceives that the commandments of God “are not written in [their] hearts” (Moisah 13:11). And of the Old Testament, speaking of the law: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart” (Deuteronomy 6:9). And of Isaiah, where God addresses the people “in whose heart is my law” (Isaiah 51:7). And of Jeremiah’s experience of the word of God as an irresistible fire: “his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.” (Jeremiah 20:9). And of the promise in Ezekiel: “And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19–20). And of the description in Hebrews: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12). The word of God discerns me, searches me and tries me, as the Psalmist says (Psalm 139:23), and teaches me to confess and forsake my sins (Doctrine and Covenants 58:43): “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10).

In the gospel of John, the chief priests and Pharisees ask the officers why they haven’t brought Jesus, and they answer, “Never man spake like this man.” (John 7:45). With them I say that although there are many writers I adore, never has anyone spoken to me as God has. Nothing calls to the very depths of my soul like the scriptures. Nothing.

Perhaps one way to view the labor of this life is, through the grace of God, to bring my body and soul to conform to His words as Christ, the perfect example and Savior, was the word made flesh (John 1:14), to write and write my stony heart into a heart of flesh that loves the ordinances of God—or, more accurately, to open my heart to God, that in His grace and generosity He may write and write upon it, that with Enos I might “declare...the truth which is in Christ all my days, and…rejoice…in it above that of the world” (Enos 1:26).

What scriptures speak most deeply to you?

Searching for Honesty and Wholeness in Teaching Women’s Studies

2006-01-17T13:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve been a teaching assistant for an introductory Women’s Studies class the past few semesters. Last semester I had a rewarding and thought-provoking experience (I’ve actually had many, but I’m going to talk about one in particular) with one of my sections. We were talking one week about art and activism and the ways in which women have used art to represent their lives and make feminist statements. I think the reading prompted the students to consider how to negotiate feminism in their own lives because one student expressed frustration with translating the ideas from class into her lived experience. She was trying to deal with friends dismissing her by saying things like “Oh, there she goes again with her feminist complaints about patriarchy,” and she wanted to know what to say in these situations; basically, she wanted to know how to communicate the ideas she learned in class and have people actually listen. We talked in class some about that frustration, and ended up bringing the conversation back to the art we were discussing—how the women artists used humor, creativity, and personal experiences to reach their audience (rather than just angry ranting).

Then one of my students asked me about my own experiences with feminism and Women’s Studies. In a website we looked at, the woman artist expressed how her initial enthusiasm for Women’s Studies had waned at a particular point in her life because she found herself only having conversations about feminism with other feminists, and my wanted to know if I had had a similar experience. I think my student was also asking me was whether or not I got tired and frustrated after years of being a feminist and multiple semesters of teaching Women’s Studies, and whether or not these things dragged me down and made me lose my enthusiasm for feminism and Women’s Studies.

I told my students that actually the opposite was the case—that my enthusiasm for the subjects I teach my students has actually grown, that I came from a background where feminism was looked at with suspicion, and that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained more confidence in and enthusiasm for my feminist beliefs. I didn’t go into a lot of detail because my classes are student discussion and not instructor-centered, but afterwards I reflected more on the students question; I thought about how I negotiate feminist theory in my own life, especially in regards to the church (which is the place I encounter the most non-feminists).

In high school and at the beginning of college, I was a person who believed the stereotypes about feminists and had no desire to take a Women’s Studies class. I didn’t want to hear about how my desire to get married and be a mother was wrong (little did I know that I probably wouldn't have heard this). My first encounter with feminist theory was in an introduction to critical theory class, but I didn’t really spend much time thinking about it because it was mostly about feminism and film (all that stuff about the "male gaze"), and it wasn’t directly applicable to my life. When I got to my Postmodernism class the next semester, however, I encountered my first article about the history of the Women’s Movement, and its complex portrayal of the debates and tensions within feminist circles strongly affected me on both an intellectual and emotional level. I found myself simultaneously agreeing with and resisting things that seemed to directly contradict what I believed.

Obviously, my identification with feminism grew (a story I’m not going to detail now), but I still find myself negotiating tensions between my conflicting beliefs, both at church and in the classes I teach. I have to deal with a certain amount of compartmentalization, and I tend to not share my complete story with people in both arenas. At church, I don’t introduce myself as a feminist, I don’t try to convert other women to feminism, and I don’t do feminist critiques of issues such as how church culture and discourse has their own problematic version of women’s appearance being connected to their power. I do sometimes share my feelings in more personal settings, but I’m often scared to say something even then. While I want to be honest, I don’t want to deal with the aftermath, as a tension-filled Visiting Teaching experience earlier this afternoon reaffirmed. On the other hand, in my Women’s Studies classes, I don’t share with my students my turbulent and conflicted thoughts on the subject of abortion, and in our unit on women’s sexuality and our discussions of heterosexism, I don’t tell my students that I’m still a virgin and that my church teaches that homosexuality is a sin. I think that honesty about one’s own experiences can be powerful teaching moments, but it’s difficult for me to use my own experiences as teaching moments when I often can’t make sense of them myself.

Despite this compartmentalization and my inclinations towards silence, I find myself increasingly trying to find ways to share my honest thoughts and integrate these two disparate parts of my life. I was brave enough in a Relief Society lesson I was teaching on the Priesthood to explain how my focus on the Priesthood as the power of God (and my avoidance of any gender-related discussions) was because of my own emotional discomfort with the issue. I find that feminism and Women’s Studies has increasingly helped me make sense of my questions about the church’s teachings on gender—something I always possessed but didn’t have a language for. My understanding of women as divine individuals has strengthened my belief in the goals of feminism that are about women realizing their potential, desires, and goals (something that is at the heart of feminism).

What I find the most rewarding and where I find the most wholeness, however, is in teaching Women’s Studies. I see my own experience reflected in my students grappling with ideas they find liberating, challenging, and sometimes threatening. I tell my students stories about my life that I can make sense of. I find joy as these students come to class, trying to make sense of their lives, and leave with alternate and positive ways of thinking about issues that are often very painful for them (violence against women, eating disorders and body image, etc). When students tell me stories about how their friends react negatively to what they’ve learned, I’m sad, but I’m also excited that this class not only increases their knowledge, but also directly translates into their everyday lived experience. When I reflect back on my answer to my student’s question last semester, I wish I had been better able to articulate that despite the many struggles I’ve had integrating feminism into my life, I don’t get frustrated with feminism or Women’s Studies because of her and the rest of my students.

Headbanging through Church

2006-01-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

Although I relish VTing horror stories more than I should (it's really hypocritical of me to pray to forgive these people and then keep recounting and relishing their insensitivity), the aspect of Lynnette's post that interests me the most is this paragraph:

But this is one of the many areas in my relationship to the Church where I find it hard to delineate how much of the problem is me (my negative attitude? my lack of faith?) and how much is a legitimate mismatch between the program and myself. In other words, could I make it work for me if I tried harder, or would that be more akin to repeatedly banging my head against the wall and expecting it not to hurt?

When it comes to Church programs, I'm a lifelong headbanger. Young Women's, seminary, and now VTing and Enrichment generally just don't work for me. I go through headbanging cycles like this: guilt for nonparticipation, gird up my loins have more faith pep talk to self, try program out, and experience nauseating headbanging sensation and vivid flashbacks of why I quit before. Rinse and repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

What is the voice of God in all this? On the one hand, the official discourse tells me to participate, and sometimes, at least, I think I should. Quit being so hypersensitive and judgmental, I tell myself. Give it a chance. On the other, I've sometimes wondered after a particularly spectacular headbang if God isn't trying to tell me to quit beating my head against the wall.

Confessions of a Visiting Teaching Drop-out

2006-01-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

For the past two years or so, I've requested to not have anything to do with visiting teaching. I have a kind of meta-guilt about this, in that I feel like I ought to feel guilty for it. (I certainly hear plenty of exhortations on the subject calculated to prick one's conscience.) But the truth is that I don't actually feel all that bad. Not being involved in visiting teaching has been such an immense relief for me that it's hard to summon up much regret for having made such a choice.

I don't entirely understand why I have such negative feelings about the whole thing. It certainly hasn't been all bad; I've at times had visiting teachers and teachees whom I quite liked. And unlike many people I've talked to, I haven't had any truly awful visiting teaching experiences. But nonetheless, when I have participated in the program, it's usually felt like far more misery than it was worth, a horrible weight hanging over me every month. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've generally viewed upcoming visiting teaching appointments in a similar manner to how I've viewed upcoming exams, with a combination of stress and anxiety and even dread.

Maybe part of the problem is my sense that in such a context I have to censor much of who I am. When church-related topics are discussed, I often don't want to say what I really think for fear that it will lead to either a fight (which I'm guessing is probably not one of the Relief Society's goals for visiting teaching), or that the other sisters will be concerned for my eternal soul and start trying to "fix" me. And it takes a lot of energy to come up with comments which aren't dishonest but which also aren't going to stir up unnecessary controversy. What do you say, for example, when you more or less disagree with the official message, and your companion and the visiting teachee are discussing how marvelous it is? It's not that I think that all disagreement should be avoided, though I'll admit to being a person who isn't crazy about conflict. But visiting teaching doesn't usually feel like the most appropriate setting to start airing my more heretical thoughts.

Part of this is probably also tied to personality tendencies. I'm very introverted, and I find engaging in small talk with people whom I don't know well to be roughly as pleasant as having root canal work in the best of situations, let alone situations in which you're visiting someone who would probably rather be doing something else but is doing their duty by allowing you to come by.

But this is one of the many areas in my relationship to the Church where I find it hard to delineate how much of the problem is me (my negative attitude? my lack of faith?) and how much is a legitimate mismatch between the program and myself. In other words, could I make it work for me if I tried harder, or would that be more akin to repeatedly banging my head against the wall and expecting it not to hurt?

The strange thing is that at least in theory, I rather like the idea of visiting teaching, of working to ensure that everyone in a ward feels connected to at least a few other people. I really can see its potential value. But when I'm confronted with the reality of it, my immediate impulse is to go into hiding. So I'm curious—how do other people feel about visiting teaching? Do you do it? What aspects of it have you found positive, or not-so-positive?

Life as a Test

2006-01-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

I actually attended Gospel Doctrine yesterday (don't fall over in shock, anyone), and there was much discussion of this scripture:

"And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them." (Abraham 3:25)

I've heard all my life that life is a test. But I'm not entirely comfortable with that way of talking about it, and I've been thinking about why that is. Maybe it's that a "test" sounds to me like something being given by a neutral, disinterested party— as if God were a scientist running us through mazes and observing whether we or not we succeed. It strikes me as rather similar to the notion that God is responsible for all the trials in our lives, an idea which I've always found tremendously disturbing. (To clarify, I do believe that God can bring good out of even awful situations, but I don't think that's the same as saying that God is the one responsible for such situations.)

Perhaps I also dislike the metaphor because it sounds so external. I do think our choices matter, but I think they matter because they make us into the people that we are— not because God is going to assign us a grade at the end. "Sorry, you almost made the 90 percent cut-off for the Celestial Kingdom, but unfortunately you sometimes skipped your visiting teaching." (Minus the 90 percent bit, I actually once heard a statement along those lines in Relief Society.)

But I think my biggest objection is that life seems less meaningful somehow if its most fundamental purpose is about passing or failing. I believe that our experiences here have some kind of intrinsic value, that they're more than just lines to be added to a celestial resumé. It seems to me that the purpose of this life must be closely tied to experiential learning, in that we have experiences here that we couldn't have in the premortal world— such as being embodied, or having to make decisions in a situation of ambiguity. And perhaps my problem with the test idea is that I don't really associate tests with learning; I see them more as a kind of arbitrary hoop-jumping. My sisters and I have often discussed that feeling of wishing you had the time to genuinely learn the material you were studying in school, instead of frantically choking it down. Is it possible, I wonder, that focusing on life as a test which you have to get right could lead you to miss out on a lot of what is actually most rich and valuable about this experience of mortality?

An Inarticulate Hunger: LDS Women and Graduate School

2006-01-07T20:09:00.000-08:00

Last night I read again in 3 Nephi 28 about the three Nephite disciples who didn’t dare tell Christ what they most desired, leaving him to read the thoughts and the sorrows of their hearts. I won’t pretend that my desires are anything like theirs, but their fear to speak their own deepest yearnings lays bare something in me.

Growing up in Utah County, I didn’t realize it was possible for an LDS woman to go to graduate school. I don’t remember meeting any women who had, and the women I heard about who pursued advanced degrees or careers were usually spoken of with disapproval. Like my sisters here at Zelophehad's Daughters, I’ve always had a passion for books and ideas, but I've also long felt that my desires for learning were not just daring, but beyond the bounds of religious acceptability, even evil. From the time I was eight or nine and throughout Young Women’s my future was usually laid out for me in terms of marriage and children. Among the hard lessons I absorbed during those years was the message that marriage and children would obliterate the intellectual desires that, consequently, came to feel so presumptuous to me that I hardly dared articulate them. That lesson, among other influences, taught me to view marriage and children with resentment and dread, as an unavoidable but divinely ordained fate. I recoiled from what I saw as a contracted future of feminine simpering (the women I identified as “real” Mormon women simpered) and struggling with too many children (I was the sort of Mormon girl who hated to babysit my own brother and sisters, let alone anyone else’s.). To borrow a phrase from Adrienne Rich, I was split at the root, my public religious life set in contradiction to the desires it rendered illegitimate and drove underground. As an adolescent I read all of Chaim Potok’s novels of religious conflict over and over, frantic for answers to questions that I couldn’t ask in the seminary classes I rarely attended. I remember the mute desperation I felt in junior-high and high-school careers classes, in senior meetings with my guidance counselor, whom I told I wanted to be a music teacher because that seemed an acceptable answer for a Mormon girl. In college I had long conversations with God about the harsh dichotomy between the limits imposed by my gender and my internal wildness. I accused God of cruelty, wondering why, if He had made me a woman, He had also afflicted me with this relentless fervor to know, to know, to know. Wallace Stevens said, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”—but the longings of the mind can also be the longings of the heart.

When my husband began graduate school in the fall of 1998, we moved from Provo, Utah, where we had both been attending Brigham Young University, to a remote rural area of South Dakota. The transition was a difficult one for me. I felt abruptly cut off from intellectual pursuits. Once every month or two, without having planned to, I would find myself reading until 4 a.m., restless, giddy with lack of sleep and the wild contemplations of darkness, and ravenous for something I had long tried to convince myself was my religious and moral duty to sacrifice. But I often felt frustrated with that sacrifice and resentful of my husband’s intellectual adventures, partly because few besides my long-suffering husband seemed to see it as a sacrifice. In the LDS community, moving for a husband’s schooling or job is what women do, what many of the other women in my ward had also done, and it seemed routine, scarcely worth comment. However, the branch there—along with the immense and almost inhuman beauty of the Great Plains, the sea of prairie and sky I fell hopelessly in love with, as I had earlier fallen in love with the mountains and the desert—saved me. Although we left the plains seventeen months ago, I still physically ache for that dizzying view that exceeds the eye’s circumscription, for vast skies streaked with clouds or traced with the circles of enormous flocks of migrating birds or littered deep with stars. It is the geography of eternity into which I still escape time’s contingencies. And although I was raised in the church, living in that branch was the first time in my life I ever made friends in an LDS congregation. I had been so accustomed to looking for friends elsewhere that it took me a year or two even to imagine that a branch might become a home.

Last summer, my husband completed the final requirements for his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. That process, along with his acquisition of an M.B.A., took seven years. Honoring a long-standing agreement that we made partly in recognition of the fact that he is far more likely to find gainful employment in his fields than I am in mine, he finished his education first. Now we have reversed roles, and as he’s begun his first full-time job, I’ve returned to graduate school. Partly because we’ve moved twice recently, we have had different four bishops and branch presidents over the past two years. In casual conversation, two have explicitly discouraged me from pursuing a Ph.D., both by posing the question in terms of whether I don’t have enough education already. I don’t mean to condemn these bishops, nor to make them offenders for a word (Isaiah 29:21, 2 Nephi 27:32). I don’t envy them their callings, and I can only imagine the excruciating situation of living at the center of the ward fishbowl and of having to monitor every word that falls from their lips. The words that too routinely fall from my lips would not bear such scrutiny. I realize too that neither they nor any of us can entirely escape our cultural constraints. Yet their casual discouragement evokes an old sense of loneliness, of being split at the root.

I struggle to have faith that my faith, most truly understood, pervades and orients my life and is not merely a fragment of it, that even a woman’s mind can be consecrated to the purposes of God.

Comment Policy

2006-01-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

You're more than welcome to add your two cents to the conversation here; we greatly appreciate the well-thought-out and insightful responses that so many people have generously shared with us. Just a few guidelines to keep in mind:

1. Please focus on your own experience, ideas, and interpretations. This isn't the place to call others to repentance, or to attempt to remove the mote from anyone else's eye. Comments along the lines of, "in my experience, this has been helpful" or "this is the way I see things" are fabulous. Comments along the lines of "this is what's wrong with you" are a problem.

2. You're welcome to explain why you completely disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks are not acceptable. This includes such behaviors as name-calling, insults, or questioning other people's personal righteousness.

3. Please keep ranting and raving to a minimum. We'd like to keep the tone here constructive.

4. While you certainly don't have to be LDS to participate here, please respect that this is a blog aimed primarily at an LDS audience and avoid comments with a generally anti-Mormon tone. This isn't the place to debate the veracity of the LDS faith, or to attempt to argue anyone in or out of her/his beliefs.

Comments which violate these rules may be removed. If this happens and you think you've been misinterpreted, or you have other questions about this, you can contact us at zdaughters@gmail.com.

In a nutshell, don't be obnoxious and don't be self-righteous, and you should be just fine. :)

(updated 5/1/06)

About Us

2006-01-04T16:47:00.001-08:00

Six of us are sisters:

Eve is working on a PhD in comparative literature and philosophy. She's been married for nearly ten years to a clinical psychologist who is much better at home-decorating than she is. She's perfected the skill of studying Latin while watching The Lord of the Rings, but her penchant for multitasking sometimes leads to problems when she attempts to talk on the phone and cook at the same time.

Lynnette is in a PhD program in systematic theology. She's especially fond of chocolate, fantasy novels, and staying up too late, and her highest priority in life is beating her siblings at Settlers of Catan (an occurrence which doesn't happen nearly often enough.)

Kiskilili is pursuing a PhD in Akkadian and Sumerian studies. (The name "Kiskilili," by the way, is that of an Akkadian demoness.) She's a bit fanatic about In Search of the Trojan War, dreams about learning every language in the world, and is more likely to celebrate Bach's birthday than her own.

Elbereth recently completed a B.A. in history, and is currently employed as a secretary for a gaggle of family historians. Her interests include pop culture, library science, women's history, and children's books. She served a mission in Detroit, where she learned (among other things) the skill of fitting large pieces of luggage into a small car trunk.

Melyngoch is enrolled in a MA/PhD program in English with a focus on medieval studies. She has an incomprehensible attachment to the color orange, has dyed her hair often enough that no one remembers what its original color was, and is very interested in social justice. She recently came out of the closet and confessed that despite appearances (e.g. her nose ring), she's in fact planning to serve a mission.

Amalthea is about a year away from completing a B.A. in film studies. She plays a mean game of Mario Kart, is known for going to see movies she enjoys multiple times (we're talking double digits here), and is generally more of a salty spirit than a sweet one.

Unlike the real Zelophehad's Daughters, we have a brother. Ziff is a perpetual graduate student. His name comes from Mosiah 11, where we learn that evil King Noah went so far as to tax the people's ziff at a rate of 20%. He and his wife have two incredibly cute sons, who are very popular with their aunts.

Our final two members aren't related to the rest of us, but have graciously agreed to contribute nonetheless (and, we hope, prevent our blog from collapsing into complete family insanity):

S is in a PhD program in English. She's a committed feminist who loves to cook and shop for clothes. She's currently engaged. She and Lynnette survived being roommates while attending a university in the Midwest, and have been good friends ever since.

Katya is working on a Master's degree in Library Science. Her alias comes from taking Russian classes as an undergrad, and a Midwestern winter has convinced her to take up knitting. She explains, "Melyngoch have been friends since about halfway through her first semester at BYU, when she figured out that I was more than "nice" and I figured out that she was more than an angry little freshman."

(updated 6/2/06)

Welcome!

2006-01-04T15:11:00.001-08:00

Welcome to Zelophehad's Daughters!

If you're not familiar with the story to which our title refers, it comes from the book of Numbers. In a nutshell, Zelophehad died without sons, and his daughters came to Moses with the request that rather than having the property pass out of the family, they be allowed to inherit. Moses took the case to the Lord, and got this response:

"The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them." (Num 27:7)

It's a fun story because it's about women who aren't afraid to speak up for something which has been denied them in a patriarchal society, and God even takes their side. (Also, the name Zelophehad just sounds kind of cool.)

We're particularly interested in blogging about subjects related to Mormonism, feminism, and academia. But we might also from time to time tackle other very important topics such as Cheetos, pop culture, and Star Wars.

Thanks for coming by! If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email zdaughters@gmail.com.

(updated 5/1/06)