In today’s marketplace—yes, in your own neighborhood, town, and cities—scheming, deceiving promoters are making available to gullible purchasers all kinds of enticing offers. We are sorry to report thousands within our ranks are being duped by the glib tongues of those who offer and solicit in whispers. “Once in a lifetime opportunities” and “Just for you” approaches are unusual no more. Such offerings and deals should be avoided like a plague.

I believe the Lord wants us to become alarmed and concerned when we see the wicked and unscrupulous taking unfair advantage of the weak and uninformed. No Latter-day Saint should exploit another man’s situation, manipulate, lie, steal, cheat, or deceive. Our responsibility is to assist each other in avoiding involvements that can be devastating to our welfare.

-Elder Marvin J. Ashton, from his talk “Give with Wisdom that They may Receive with Dignity”

I’ve seen any number of people express the regret that the brightest minds in our generation are devoted to inventing subtler financial manipulations and more addictive online ad platforms. (more…)

[In the Washington Post sports news]
As his free agency heats up, Bryce Harper begins ‘social media fast’

Don’t bother looking to Bryce Harper’s social media accounts for clues about what the free agent outfielder makes of the reaction to the 10-year, $300 million deal the Nationals reportedly offered him in September. At least not for the next week. (more…)

Last month one of our commenters, COB, opined at this site concerning our coming pattern of Sunday worship:

When something is good, and helpful, you want more of it. When it’s not helpful, you want less of it. We have God specifically telling us that church time is more harmful than helpful. [. . .] If what we need is actually LESS time together, then the membership itself is actually not only not helping each other but potentially harmful.

When I read those words, it called to mind a time not long ago, when my wife came home from the Relief Society meeting feeling underserved. (more…)

We live in a vast charnel house, a morgue, a knacker’s yard . . .  Dead people, dead animals, odd ends of decaying meat are just laying around, heaped up there, rotting here, a stray piece rolled into that corner.  Its easy to get sick.  A little cut can swell into a great putrid infection.  A little carelessness with your food, you can be puking for  a week.  Its easy to die.

If you want to thrive, you have wear masks at all times, have to be careful where you step, have to follow careful rituals, can’t afford to slack off.  You and your whole house.  You can’t do it by yourself.  Every one with painstaking care when they are outside, at all times.  Everyone following the most stringent procedures when they come back inside the House.

But not enough do it.  Too many live diseased, crippled, and high-mortality lives.  It is difficult not to.  It is very difficult.  And there are agitators who wander through the decay without mask or glove, proclaiming their freedom.  No one else can shout as loud as they can, as they wear no mask.  No one can easily refute their lies that careful living is joyless, because the joy is in the Houses, and no one can go to one, not really, until they have joined it and are washed and cleaned and passed through quarantine.

The strict rules of hygiene are hard, but now with the agitators they are harder.  We can be mocked and attacked for our masks and our gloves.

Some of us wonder why we have be so extreme.  (Those of us are getting the infections and dying off.) Some Houses wonder if they could not spread the word of hygiene better if they weren’t so rigid about it. Masks and washing and stuff appears so alien, we need a hygiene that speaks to today’s youth. After all, the message of hygiene is ultimately a message of health and hope, not despair and grimness. So these Houses wash without washing and ward off disease without warding it off, and perish.

Daily reminder that childlessness is death, libertinism is decay, and we Americans live in a strong, free, and prosperous . . . charnel house.

(more…)

From Columbus Day, through Thanksgiving, we celebrate the rich heritage of Settler-Americans, including Colonial-Americans, Pioneer-Americans, English-Americans, Scots-Irish Americans, and Conquistador-Americans, and honor their vibrant contribution to our national fabric.

From their curious folkways such as freedom under law, square dancing, and white guilt, to their various scientific achievements and inventions, such as calculus, the Chia pet, toilet paper, and marketing, truly they are part of who we are!

What began in late summer of last year as an odd feeling in Mrs. Mansfield’s upper back and progressively became more painful was identified on November 10 as metastasized renal cell carcinoma. It has been a long year, feeling more like three, which stretching out was good in many ways and nightmarish in others. After eleven months from diagnosis, and twenty-four years from wedding, it looks like a few days of life remain.

An experience of this sort brings up various observations and musings. One from last night was about “mutual admiration societies.” It’s a phrase that mocks little circles of two flattering one another. On the other hand, these past few weeks it has been an uplifting thing to sit by as a couple of admirable people feel it is a good time to express their respect for one another.

A new hobby of mine is occasionally reading trial reports on the treatments prescribed to my wife. In those studies two important measures are progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). The first is the number of months until cancer ceases to be arrested by treatment and resumes growing and spreading, and the second is the number of months until death. So it is that such reports will contain sentences such as the one that today caught my mind: (more…)

I took my family to see Palmyra recently. My wife had been there before, but none of the rest of us had. One thing I’ve learned about Mrs. C is that she doesn’t really have the fourth-dimensional sense of wonder at occupying a historically significant spot of earth. I can personally attest that she’s much more excited to enjoy a Caesar salad than she was to visit Caesar’s tomb. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t find history interesting, just that she doesn’t take any special pleasure in retracing its steps.

“It’s a gift, you know, being able to feel history in certain places. My mom has it. We’d visit Church historical sites, and she would ask me, ‘Can you feel that?’ But I never really did.” (more…)

A friend of mine … asked his son what he wanted to be, whom he would want to be like. His son named a member of the ward who lived nearby, a man he had admired for some time. Don drove his son to where the man lived.

As they sat in their automobile in front of his home, they observed the man’s possessions and his way of life. They also discussed his kindness and generosity, his good name and integrity. They discussed the price their neighbor had paid to become what he was: the years of hard work, the schooling and training required, the sacrifices made, the challenges encountered. The affluence and seeming ease with which he now lived had come about as the result of diligent toil toward his righteous goals and the blessings of the Lord.

The son selected other men whom he deemed models of successful and righteous living and learned from a wise father the stories of their lives.

-thus Rex d. Pinegar.  What an excellent model.  Young men in the church should be spending their time with older men.  The primary good of a camp out is usually the conversations over the campfire or while hiking.  It is really surprising how little the young know about the lives of their elders and how much they like to hear those stories when given a chance.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

What a nice sentiment, you are thinking. Wrong, child. It should be keeping you awake at night. Properly understood, it is cosmic horror. (more…)

We did not pray for rain in vain.

The sun did not set, so thick were the clouds,

and at the night hour, the rain fell like rock,

massed like rock, and lasting like rock,

without ebb or throb.

It reached the sky, one great mountain

of water and thunder, and we were under.

It overwhelmed the soil–and the noise and light–

it overwhelmed the mind.

One electric blast stayed so long it was no flash,

a blow of light and not a lash.

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…)

[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…)