One of the changes I have noticed in the last decade or two, is how prevalent, accepted and taken for granted, is Nihilism.
Then I realized,
Hedonism is sugar-coated Nihilism.
Kindle edition is $1.99 for a limited time at Amazon. (Hat tip to Book Bub.) It’s about how to give a talk to an audience.
It’s worth at least $1.99 just for the story of the talk that Mother Teresa gave to the Washington DC Prayer Breakfast, the subject of which was abortion and contraception. Ooh, ooh!
At a gas station/convenience store. After making a purchase. The cashier was friendly. No one else was in line.
“Are you Mormon?”
“No.”
“Would you like a free copy of the Book of Mormon and a free Bible?”
“Okay.”
So I gave the cashier a Book of Mormon (English edition) and an LDS KJV Bible. They had pass-along cards and the list of local chapels in them.
… out of the 27 deadliest mass shootings in the United States, 26 of the perpetrators were not raised by their biological fathers.
— Thus Jim Geraughty
It is heartening to me, that the most pivotal moment in The Lord of the Rings (I used the term loosely, including The Hobbit) is not the Battle of Pelennor Fields, Helm’s Deep, or the Battle of Five Armies. It is not saving the Lonely Mountain, Rohan or Gondor. It is not the heroic deeds of Gandalf, Aragon, Eowyn or others. It is not even the final defeat of Sauron or Smaug.
The most pivotal moment is a little, private internal struggle, a spiritual struggle of a man (well, hobbit technically) who has been wronged and threatened, but who has pity and mercy for his enemy, and who had no expectation anyone would ever know what he did. But he knew, and that was enough.
This is a talk I gave at Church. I had a blast.
The Book of Mormon is for our times. We all know about the Great and Spacious Building that Lehi saw. It was towering up in the air and full of people with fancy clothes pointing and laughing and it had no foundation. It made lots of people lose their way because they were ashamed or wanted to get to it.
The Book of Mormon is for our times. It means that in our times we have to worry about bullying and mocking from prominent people, about trying to be high status, and fashions. So let’s talk about that. (more…)
Just an observation that has been weighing on my mind.
There are three books of the Bible that we can tie to Solomon.
Proverbs – Happy, vibrant, bubbly, and often profound
Song of Solomon – Sexy, at least for 950 BC Hebrew love poetry
Ecclesiastes – Despair tinged with nihilism
I am not saying that Solomon was not inspired for the first and last books, but clearly, in spite of his immense intelligence, there was a lot of loss of vibrancy, power and heavenly vision. He didn’t have the Spirit of God in the same way he had.
I will leave it to the interested student to draw a conclusion why.
hint: 300 + 700
[This started as a comment on Vader’s post below, but I decided to make it a post instead.]
Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but the number of LDS participants in scouting is going to crater. The ones who didn’t really like scouts will be gone, obviously, but even those who enjoyed it will find it hard to squeeze in around whatever program the Church rolls out to replace scouting. School activities were already encroaching on youth night; how many boys are going to do Scouts and Mutual together? A few of the multi-generation Eagle Scout families will soldier on, of course.
Now, theoretically, the Church *could* do everything scouts did, just on its own. But as much as I’d love to see “The Nauvoo Legionnaires” come to fruition, I don’t expect that.
An optimist would say that the Church is free to take what it likes from Scouting and focus on that while leaving the rest behind. In reality, it rarely works so neatly. The BSA is (or was) a living, coherent thing. It is not obvious which aspects of it could be done away with without killing it. I’m reminded of Joseph Bottum’s essay in First Things, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America”: (more…)
It’s official. The Church will no longer charter Scouting after December 2019.
I can almost hear the collective sigh of relief going up. Mingled, to be sure, with some regret.