x-posted from Daily Kos by permission. Guest post by Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for the (Maine) No on 1 campaign. A new public poll from Democracy Corps was released yesterday, showing us with a slight lead in this race of 50% to 41%, a significant jump from kos’s numbers from the other week of 46-48. ...
By the time Elder Beaverton and I got back to our apartment, it was past 18 heures (6 p.m.), so p-day was officially over, and it was time to get back to work. The cool thing was that our work for the evening was hardly work. We finally had a referral for once — in ...
I’ve just done a guest post on the Sunstone Blog about my first Sunstone experience!! Shortly after the conference, I was happy to see that two bloggers remembered the panel I organized as being a particular favorite! Unfortunately, neither one of them seemed to remember that I was on the panel. A bit of a ...
Elder Hafen’s talk has certainly sent some ripples through blogspace! I would start with ECS’s research piece (correcting Hafen’s many citation errors). The Swearing Elders expand on one of ECS’s points, and the Third Wave Mormon gives a two-part point-by-point rebuttal of Hafen’s talk (as does Living with Mormons in one), while jmb275 gives a ...
I caught this article about a peanut farm in Texas owned by the LDS Church. I’m wondering how much of the motivation for this story is my earlier post on the cattle ranch in Florida (ego stroke!). Anyway, the reporter for the story was able to get a number from the LDS Church on their ...
Guest post by Danielle Truszkovsky. BEFORE WRITING THIS column, I sat and stared at my computer screen for what seemed like ages trying to figure out a way to make the topic of IRS regulations seem a bit more interesting. Let’s face it, most people just don’t want to read about a subject as dry ...
“In truth, I believe this book will save someone’s life,” says one of the blurbs in Jonathan Langford’s novel No Going Back. I agree, it’s quite likely. Through the experiences of Paul (a gay Mormon teen) — and of the LDS bishop who takes a special interest in his young charge — Langford paints a ...
This past May, I caught up with documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan, who didn’t shy away from answering some pointed (and personal) questions about 8: The Mormon Proposition. As the first NYU grad in my family’s six generations of Mormons, go figure that I’d be personally interested in both Mormonism and film (nevermind Mormons on film!). ...
I was back home fishing. The morning sun was filtering down the canyon as I rowed my boat out to the middle of a calm lake and started preparing my lines… Not really. But in my mind I was already gone. Anywhere but wasting the last P-day of my mission watching the rest of the ...
My mother Gudrun Bachmann was born on June 9, 1939. When World War II begun with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, she was less than three months old. When Germany surrendered on May 9, 1945, she was one month shy of her sixth birthday. Besides a treasure trove of family stories from ...
The topic that bubbled up all over Outer Blogness this week was the “natural man”! For example, Bull asks about how to tell who’s really a man from who’s really a woman — just drop trou? Or is it not that simple? And what about the implications for “eternal gender”? In a similar vein, Tom ...
If you ever needed a reason to distance yourself from the LDS Church, Bruce C. Hafen of the Seventy has just given you one. Oddly, this talk was linked to from the blog of the PR Department of the LDS Church as though it is worth reading. I’m not sure why they are proud of ...
I have a 6-year old daughter, and one issue that will start coming up soon is baptism. It’s not the actual baptism that bothers me; I basically see it as a rite of passage. I think eight years old is far too young to decide to join a religion, but if my daughter wants to ...
In line with my earlier post about the LDS ranch in Florida, I just caught wind of this: The LDS Church owns two hunting preserves in Utah. Turns out the Deseret News has profiled the preserve and the missionaries who staff it. (Yep, you read that right – missionaries staff the LDS owned hunting preserve.) ...
Illustrations by Sister Mary Lisa Do you remember the first time you ever watched Johnny Lingo? I imagine if you’re typical of most of us that were raised Mormon from childhood, the memory of that first viewing has been lost, mercifully, in the bazillions of subsequent times you were subjected to it. Or perhaps it ...
Salon.com is running a pretty fascinating article on the Cleon Skousen/Glenn Beck connection. It’s a pretty fascinating look into Mormon-laced, right-wing, ultra-nationalistic, paranoid, pro-theocracy, conspiracy theory, which also goes by the name “The Glenn Beck Program” on Fox News. ...
Todd Whitaker recently bore his testimony. The video of Todd testifying to his ward has now gone viral. As you may have seen, it was not your typical Mormon F&T meeting fare. I caught up with Todd by email and he agreed to answer a few questions. ...
The big news this week is John Remy‘s excommunication for apostasy!! And he’s not the only one who’s feeling the heat this week for disbelieving and/or criticizing the LDS church. The crap has hit the fan and set off a whirlwind of drama, accusations, and letters of condemnation from Hypatia’s mother. Daniel is also responding ...
I was riveted by the fascinating tale of excommunication from the Mormon church, over at Mind on Fire, told with great honesty and feeling, as well as by the reader community response. I have just one question, though, which I suppose should be directed to the Mormon church itself: Where’s my lousy excommunication? I did ...
By Karen Ocamb, News editor, Frontiers in LA Reposted (with permission) from Dirigo Blue and Daily Kos. “God has no grandchildren,” the evangelical ex-Marine father of my late friend Chip Howe said, explaining how he surrendered judgment and came to accept Chip’s homosexuality. Chip, a Lieutenant in the Navy during the Vietnam War, was supposed ...
Hi everyone, I’m honored to join the Main Street Plaza crew. My name is Mike, and I chose the nickname Saganist because Carl Sagan has been a big influence on my thinking. Just a bit of background on me: my religious history is long and complicated, but I joined the LDS church in 2000 at ...
A while back another blogger asked me to submit an essay about my Mormon experience. Probably, for good reasons he changed his mind and never published it. Since it is already written and might shed some light on my argument at Times and Seasons, I might as well publish it myself. It might help some ...
Cross-posted over at Virginia Beach Progressives and Our Own Online. This is somewhat a lengthy post on how my sexuality affected my faith in God. It’s also a brief account of my entering into and coming out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From July 2004 to June 2006, I served as ...
I don’t want to ghettoize this post by making it about Mormonism, but since that’s why we’re all here, it’s natural to gravitate to that. But this pertains to so much more than one group. I recently watched a video (not the best) that got me thinking about what it means to be a member ...
For all the criticizing we do of Mormonism, there are some positives that are worthy of mention. I occasionally run across them in my varied reading on the internet. I came across this story about the Mormon culture region having the lowest amount of credit card debt of any region in the U.S. Is this ...
It’s sad to see Summer vacation coming to a close, isn’t it? (For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is — I don’t know how the vacation schedule works down under…) In a highly controversial move, the president (of the US) has decided to open the school year by speaking to students about ...