Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, no witch has power to charm,
So hallow’d and gracious is the time. –Hamlet

John C. Wright is in rare form.

I was driving back from a friend’s house a couple of evenings ago.  I’m feeding and watering his ducks (3 Campbell crosses, one miscellaneous), chickens (5 Plymouth rocks), and one goat (hyper-active).  The sun had just set seconds before I got into the car.  On my left, the snow-covered Manzanos took the exact color of the twilight on my right.

The moment was breathtaking.  A voice, or something like it, said in my mind, ‘Time is sin.  Time is error.”  The sense, I think, was that all pure moments bleed into each other, are, in a sense, the same moment.  It was a good thought for Christmastime.

A young man of my acquaintance contemplates what he should be in the Nativity.  “Jo-fes” or a “Jesus shepherd”?

He decided on the Jesus shepherd. Both get to wear red cowboy boots, so that was a wash. But “Jo-fes has hair on his face” while the Jesus shepherd “has a big black dog named Spaceship-ha.” (I am not making these up).

Moral of the story: uh, don’t get stressed out over Christmas tasks and decisions.

I guess this is what they call a “bleg.”

I recently was called as YM President, which of course means I’m also the Priests Quorum Advisor. We have two boys who are high school seniors and planning on missions after the school year. They seem fairly well prepared to go with regard to enthusiasm, testimony, and maturity. What they lack is much substantive knowledge about the Gospel. I’m referring specifically to knowledge of the Scriptures and Church History. From my last few weeks of priesthood lessons, just to give two examples, I know that they had no idea who wrote most of the Epistles, and had never heard of the School of the Prophets. I don’t want to unduly elevate rote memorization of facts, but as a spot check for their familiarity with the source material of our religion, it was not encouraging. What this says about our Sunday School and Seminary classes I will leave for another blog post.

So I’ve decided to get them for Christmas a single volume that gives them a basic and broad-based grounding in Gospel knowledge. (more…)

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Decades from now, when only old men and women can dimly recall when somebody told a friend of mine about a dancing human spaceman that can read my mind when we got the radio on, there may be 9-year-olds that sing together “Joel, the Lump of Coal.”

(more…)

Our Cub Scouts went caroling to an old folks home. The elderly people there were moved. It is remarkable, the power we have to affect each other. (more…)

Nine years ago, Edmonton writer Colby Cosh was considering in the National Post the potential H5N1 flu epidemic: “One daily warned us on Wednesday that a flu pandemic could ‘thrust the planet into unprecedented social and economic chaos.’ But what, I ask you, was the Spanish flu if not a precedent?” He continued with the lessons he had acquired from an acquaintance with microfilm rolls of early 20th Century Canadian prairie newspapers he had poured through for other research. (link)

This week in Maclean’s, Cosh turns similar attention to recent bouts of freelance terrorism: “It has become a pastime of mine to pick major royal or ministerial figures from 19th-century continental Europe and look up the little-known assassination attempts against them.” (link)

Meg Stout gives a plausible explanation of when dissent warrants expulsion from the Church, and when it doesn’t. It’s true that the women’s organization “Give Us The Priesthood Or We’re Telling The NY Times” (that was the name, right?) was “tone-deaf when it comes to Mormon culture but in tune with world media.” They certainly seemed to come from a much more alien value system than some of the subtler snakes in the grass, who dress and talk like Mormons, so much that they seem almost like the real thing. But I think it’s even simpler than even that. (more…)