Any valid form of asceticism is aesthetic. Aesthetic because it fits into a larger pattern of creation. Asceticism for its own sake is asceticism which uglifies. It is gnostic, creation hating. Gnostic is evil.
There’s a new LDS podcast called Spiritual Arson.
Here’s some ideas I got from them
Whom would Jesus sit with? The sinners. Yeah, but who are the sinners? Who are the people we actually loathe? The answer is going to be real uncomfortable. We don’t mind sitting down with fornicators because we officially view that as sin but our society doesn’t, so its pretty stress free. If you want the real shocking impact of what Christ was doing, if you really want to have to grapple with it, imagine him sitting down to eat with racists who use the N-word. Or substitute whatever else would be horrifying and unthinkable. We think of the Pharisees as the Jewish equivalent of the crazy Church people. In reality they were the Jewish equivalent of the opinion makers and the intellectual fashion setters.
The Spirit gives you peace in tension, not peace from surrendering to make the tension go away.
The Father doesn’t want small children. He doesn’t want small gods.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could take other churches under our wing? If they could trust us to vet their pastors against prog?
Elder Holland wants to know what is the matter with BYU.
Three years later, 2017, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, not then but soon to be in the First Presidency where he would sit, only one chair — one heartbeat — away from the same position President Nelson now has, quoted our colleague Elder Neal A. Maxwell who had said:
“In a way[,] [Latter-day Saint] scholars at BYU and elsewhere are a little bit like the builders of the temple in Nauvoo, who worked with a trowel in one hand and a musket in the other. Today scholars building the temple of learning must also pause on occasion to defend the kingdom. I personally think,” Elder Maxwell went on to say, “this is one of the reasons the Lord established and maintains this university. The dual role of builder and defender is unique and ongoing. I am grateful we have scholars today who can handle, as it were, both trowels and muskets.”[10]
Then Elder Oaks said challengingly, “I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning.”[11] He said this in a way that could have applied to a host of topics in various departments, but the one he specifically mentioned was the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Little did he know that while many would hear his appeal, especially the School of Family Life who moved quickly and visibly to assist, some others fired their muskets all right, but unfortunately didn’t always aim at those hostile to the Church. A couple of stray rounds even went north of the point of the mountain!
My beloved brothers and sisters, “a house divided against itself . . . cannot stand,”
Elder Holland went on to mention that one should not use their commencement address to come out. Yet the way he spoke was kindly and encouraging. He could have been much much sterner if he wished. (more…)
The easiest idyll you can write is childhood in or school. Maybe young love too. Some stage of life the reader had already grown being.
It allows you to write in worries or conflict for a bit of plot — will Santa make it though the creeks are swollen with rain? Who will win the house cup? — but the reader is too adult to fear them, all is well, all will be well, the hiccups in the character’s life if anything only add to the sense of deep peace.
And here, for those who will hear it, is my theodicy.
My dear, precious Wormwood,
Of course, I, I myself, as a tender and loving Uncle, am happy to help you get your Temptation & Sin Numbers up. We need those souls damned! And I certainly don’t need any more phone calls about your absolute glorious incompetence. (more…)
The more individual and distinct we become, the more we become like each other.
(Dusting off the Archives)
Authenticity is integrity with the element of time irrationally and wickedly stripped off. It is trying to be true to yourself right now, without regard to being true to who you were and especially to who you will be. The honest seed sprouts and flowers. The authentic seed falls on stony ground and stays a seed, then a withered caricature of a seed, then a husk. Authenticity is death.
In Mormon terms, where damnation means the cessation of progress, authenticity is damnation.
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
These can be challenging verses. Enough so that the official Church header to this chapter has the extremely mealy-mouthed description “Husbands and wives should love each other.” Right.
It has been suggested that one way of making sense of these verses is to see that Paul is giving people permission to do what they might want to do anyway but that their culture might tell them not to. For instance, in Roman culture and other cultures of the empire, a man loving his wife could be seen as unmanly.
Another possibility is that Paul is giving people a way to elevate the role that their culture expects of them. Instead of just being something you have to do, it becomes something that moves you more towards God. For instance, in a culture like that prevailing in ancient Rome where women were very much expected to do as their husbands told them, Paul is giving them a gospel pattern for this cultural expectation. In a bourgeois culture where men are expected to be affectionate and dote and cater to their wives, Paul is giving them a nobler way of doing it.
These are possibilities. I don’t know if any of them are true or not.
When Dr. Bruce Charleton receives the Nobel for Haircuttery, we will be proud to say we knew him when.
For haute barbery, sport the big hair flap,
but not the flap in back, you sap.
Over your ears
lest you bore us to tears.
Side flaps are fashion forward, chap.
In D&C 92, the Lord tells Williams to be a lively member of the United Order.
Scriptures about being active, having energy, being quickened–we think those are about accomplishing more. It’s good to accomplish more. But we may be looking beyond the mark. Being lively is itself beautiful. It reveals what is glorious about being alive. It and stillness and contemplation seems to be the two states that God loves best. Those are also the two states where the glory of being human are most manifest. A child playing energetically, a child at rest.
God loves deeds, great or small. To praise deeds is to participate in the divine nature.
Mostly we praise people to cheer them up or make them like us. The right reason is delight. Paradoxically when you praise from delight they are then much more likely to cheer up or like you.
The best smell in church is old cigarette smoke on someone’s clothes.
The best sound is a crying child.
The best touch is straightening a son’s tie.
The best taste is water.
The best sight is the one blurred by tears.
The sensations you sense outward and in.
I read a book recently called a Month in the Country. It’s billed as an idyll. It isn’t, but it has parts that are. Moments of peace, as the sun rises, seen from the belfry of a country church.
I think that writing an idyll is one of the most difficult tasks a writer can have.
The high-school book A Separate Peace is not an idyll, but it has its moments. Those are what give the book its power.
The Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are idylls in homespun.
Put your recommendations below.