As I mentioned to Bruce Charlton in the comments section of a previous post, once you get His Majesty monologuing, you can’t get him to shut up.

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Let’s talk about signaling and countersignaling.

Signaling is behavior that shows your attachment to some group or cause or other, or that shows how much status you have.   The best signals are fairly visible and maybe have some cost associated with them (like Mormons not drinking, for instance).  Practically everything human includes at least a little bit of signaling.

Some people in some situations don’t have to signal, because their commitment and their reputation is secure enough already.  Imagine a serious war going on, and some guy walks up to you on the street. “Will you join the army?” he says, and he hands you a clipboard with a sheet of notebook paper on it. He’s scrawled LIST OF RECRUITS across the top. “Sign here,” he says.   If you sign, you sign to humor the guy. A real recruiter would have the signals of uniform, an army haircut and military bearing, a chiseled physique, and official pamphlets and forms. In fact, in the old days he would have come into town marching with other soldiers behind him, with a military drum and maybe a military band. All signals.   On the other hand—lets be fanciful here—if a trusted friend told you that George Washington had risen from his sleep to rescue his country in his hour of need and was recruiting a new army from the bed of a pickup in the Wal-Mart parking lot, you might at least go check it out. And if the man there had the aura, the voice, the face, the command presence, you might be willing to sign a clipboard with a sheet of notebook paper on it, on which was scrawled LIST OF RECRUITS.   Some people don’t need to signal. (more…)

Sometimes I think His Majesty has become a bitter old Sith.

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As a youth there were two things that turned my mind toward attending Brigham Young University. The first was a personal story my 9th-grade seminary teacher recounted that involved him as a BYU student teaching missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. The part that stuck with me, the incidental setting for his story, was that BYU is a place that serves the missionaries. That is a holy thing that wouldn’t be found at other colleges.

The second thing was learning that there were weekly devotionals where General Authorities spoke to the entire student body. If there was one school that included teaching from the mouths of prophets and apostles, in addition to the physics and literature classes that all schools have, then I wanted in. (more…)

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…)

You never know what will get His Majesty monologuing over breakfast.

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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…)

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…)

You have a new boss (not the one portrayed above). Against all precedent, he doesn’t change all the old boss’s policies. He keeeps all the ones that working. You’re pretty impressed with your new boss. He is one of a kind. (more…)

I’ve been writing a lot about the nameless virtue, which is the virtue of unironically recognizing and praising standards that you yourself fall short of. The nameless virtue is easy to recognize when we’re talking about conventional sins and shortcomings. The inmate telling kids to stay away from the gangster life, the alcoholic who wishes he’d never taken that first drink, those are all standard fare. Along the same lines, what first brought the nameless virtue to my attention were Mormons who missed out on the basic steps of Mormon life extolling those steps. Those kinds of exceptions that prove the rule make the nameless virtue pretty apparent. (more…)

Those words would be as good an answer as I could give to the question originally addressed to Conan the Barbarian: “What is best in life?”

But they’re actually taken from this passage: (more…)

“God the Father and the Holy Ghost are not to be portrayed in meetings, dramas, or musicals.

“If the Savior is portrayed, it must be done with the utmost reverence and dignity. Only brethren of wholesome personal character should be considered for the part. The person who portrays the Savior should not sing or dance. When speaking, he should use only direct quotations of scriptures spoken by the Savior.”

Dance?

Am I the only one morbidly curious about what sort of Mormon Roadshow From Hell precipitated that rule?