To all those nominal conservatives and theists who bought the claim that gay marriage is no threat to your marriage and is not about changing the basic institution of marriage: You’ve been had.     (more…)

Everybody knows something true and noble. The only way not to would be to consciously reject everything true and noble. Only devils can do that. None of us are devils here. (more…)

At First Things and Bruce Charlton’s blog. (more…)

Men with high school diplomas have seen their hourly wages fall by 20% since 1979 (women’s have risen).
Women now make up nearly 60% of those receiving a college degree. The percentage is expected to increase.
At all levels of primary and secondary education, teachers are disproportionately female, more than ever before. Male students do worse than female students, more than ever before.
The Great Recession has hurt male employment much worse than female employment. Men are disproportionately dropping out of the workforce and going on disability.
Illegitimacy rates among blacks, hispanics, and whites are at an all time high, in large part because men are checking out of marriage in large numbers and because the number of men who are unmarriageable has increased.
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Elder Christofferson preached Sunday that the aim of the gospel is to draw down “perfect justice and infinite mercy” from heaven. The phrase stuck with me. Perfect justice and infinite mercy. (more…)

At last, an explanation for Satan’s motives.       (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

A Mormon student at Florida Atlantic University is up on academic charges, likely for complaining about a classroom exercise where he was asked to stomp on the name of Jesus. (more…)

Get married young.

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Reading complaints a few weeks back that too many Latter-day Saints marry before completing courses of higher education, I felt concerned that a natural corollary of that is that people who don’t complete a college education shouldn’t marry at all. Perhaps the unfolding 21st Century for many will be less like the 20th Century abounding in middle-class families and more like earlier ages when bunk houses, barracks, brothels, servants’ quarters, convents, and monasteries absorbed many whose economic limitations put marriage and children out of reach, and those who want a different future will have to choose paths of their own bucking prevailing trends.

The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia has put out “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” There is such discussion of the Great Crossover (mean age at first marriage passing age at first child), and a running theme is that delayed marriage plays out differently for the two-thirds of the nation that doesn’t complete a college degree.

A summary can be found at Washington Post: link. Coming at the topic from another angle, perhaps you’ll enjoy “Settle Down” by Kimbra. Or perhaps you won’t, if your tastes in song and dance don’t run that way.

I am quite taken with this article over at the Old Country. (more…)

But exceedingly fine. (more…)

I am my father’s oldest child, born when he was 40. He died at 83, so while he lived he was even in memory always older than me. I’m now 46, and I remember having a 46-year-old father. I also have a child who is forty years younger than me, and thinking of him, I am glad for my father that I was born to him.

From mysliveroflife.blogspot.com

In Spring the gardener finds out death.
He finds which limbs did not o’erwinter.
Some stems twig and bud and bloom,
Some stems splinter.

I lost a limb some seasons back,
Of my flesh, my firstborn daughter.
Time dried the break, but I still lack
The fruits–a moiety of laughter.

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At the Old Country, they are “greatly bothered” by missionaries routinely bearing testimony at pageants and visitors centers. Religion is, you see, too sacred and private a matter to be made part of religious functions.

Mormon liberalism, like secular liberalism, tries to privatize belief and disagreements about belief. Except that in the case of Mormon liberals, the “public sphere” out of which they are trying to privatize religion is the Church itself. This is the fundamental cause of the collapse of religious liberalism in other denominations. Not because religious liberalism is actively hostile to faith, except insomuch as it pertains to sex. No, whatever you believe is fine, just so long as you keep it to yourself. But keeping your faith to yourself is just another way of saying that you don’t participate in a church.

To be fair, I don’t think most Mormon liberals are conscious that they are attacking the foundations of the Church. I think they have absorbed the liberal settlement of the church-state controversy and are instinctually applying it to our religion.