[For previous discussions of the Benedict Option, see here]
In reducing his signature idea to book form, Rod Dreher set a clear, if daunting, task for himself: 1) Describe the challenges that serious Christians face in the modern world due to increasing secularism, and 2) Propose solutions to meet those challenges. (more…)
Sunday evening two days ago I had a follow-up conversation with a young mathematician, a son of members of my ward. A couple years ago I asked him about his area of work, but there wasn’t much for me to connect with—something vague about mapping manifolds. The Sunday before last I saw him again at a reception for a departing missionary couple and learned that he will begin a post-doctoral position in Finland, so I asked him, “Why Finland?” “Well, Finland is a small place, so the math research there is focused on a particular area that happens to be my area. I’ll be working with my PhD advisor’s advisor.” “And what is that area?” I asked, fearing that the answer would be as vague as before. Instead he simply said, “Complex analysis.”
There couldn’t have been an answer of more interest to me. (more…)
On Sunday, I taught some 9- and 10-year-olds about the creation of the Doctrine and Covenants. We talked about how almost all of the revelations in it came through Joseph Smith, although there are also sections by John Taylor, Brigham Young, and Joseph F. Smith. I also took the liberty (sorry/not sorry, Curriculum Department), of directing their attention to the Official Declarations at the end, regarding the cessation of polygamy and the extension of the priesthood to blacks.
“Wait, so we used to be racist?”
Well, of course they didn’t know. (more…)
Two nights ago, my little daughter had a fever. She asked me if I could say “a boy prayer.”
“What’s a boy prayer?” I asked.
“It’s where you put your hands on my head and you say a prayer for me. Only boys can do them.”
I’m grateful for the restored power and authority to give boy prayers for my family.
The caption of the above photo by Gabrielle Shiowzawa in the Moapa Valley Progress reads, “Sierra Bunker works to start a fire with flint and steel while Micaela Leavitt looks on at LDS Logandale Stake Girl’s Camp last week.” That made me smile for reasons that may need a little explaining. (more…)
The Moapa Valley Progress reports on a stake young men’s activity:
“The group, organized by the LDS Logandale Stake, traveled via mountain bike cross-country from Caliente, Nevada, over and through the Mormon Mountain range, and ended near the Carp/Elgin exit at I-15.
“The bicyclists, and support staff in following trucks, traveled along an old mining road covering about 88 miles, and traversed an impressive total of about 6,969 climbing feet. Medical support and mechanical support were also provided the entire distance as the group accomplished the trip over three intense days.” (more…)
This part of Peter Beinart’s attempt to bring liberals to sanity on immigration stood out to me:
Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”
The increasing aggression and stridency of the Left is not monocausal, but surely the sense that the Left didn’t need white voters anymore (specifically, white Christians) helps explain why even supposedly moderate lefties did almost nothing to rein in or dissociate themselves from the extremists on campus, in Black Lives Matter, etc.
I’ve mentioned before how the very possibility of divorce makes marriage itself worse. Marriage requires total dedication, a lot of compromise, and self-denial. And fidelity in marriage requires us not to even acknowledge that there are options besides sticking around. Once you commit to be with someone, you think of every reason why you should be with them. You cultivate the love that you have; you see your spouse through Marriage Goggles.
But once you start thinking about divorce, you take the Marriage Goggles off. You may even put Divorce Goggles on. This is how marriages end.
The Left and Right in this country used to at least try to live with one another. But then the Left’s eye began to wander to those younger, more exotic and exciting immigrants. They work so hard for such low wages! They appreciate the Left’s ideas in a way the Right never could! They make such delicious sandwiches!
But what happens when bringing someone new into the home doesn’t result in the eviction of the old spouse?
Out early this morning, I was fortunate to see a beautiful thin old moon. I first saw it before 4:30, three quarters of an hour after it rose, and an hour and a quarter before sunrise. The moon should be an aid to navigation, but I found it quite a distraction working my way through the roads leaving Dulles airport. Its shadowed side was centered at 2:30 relative to the horizon, and Venus was at the moon’s 1 o’clock. They were also striking in a different way at 5:20, after the sky had begun dawning.
Seeing the moon two days before its new phase of course brought the thought, “Only two more orbits until the eclipse.” So, any plans to catch some shade under the path of totality? For myself, I will spend the weekend camped on the shore of Lake Greenwood in South Carolina, five miles south of the central line. Lake Greenwood is also twenty-five miles from I-26 which crosses the state on a bearing remarkably close to that of the eclipse’s path, so depending on cloud forecasts, we may set out Monday morning for the coast near Charleston or the other way toward Tennessee. Totality reaches South Carolina in the afternoon 2:36:10 and departs her coast at 2:49:01.
For any thinking about what they want to do on Monday, August 21, here is a link to NASA’s helpful webpage: link and alternate link.
This may appeal to others besides myself. I wish I could see it. From the Washington Post:
“Okay, you walk — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — and kneel on eight,” Stiefel tells Sarah Steele, a willowy, dark-eyed 22-year-old. She was recently hired as an apprentice, and Stiefel plucked her from that bottom rank to star in his ballet. Her courage at the outset of rehearsals attracted him. She possesses, he says, “the essence of a strong, brave artist.”
“You have a full eight counts to zip,” he continues. “Then you’ll get lifted. Turn on four, arms on five. Four counts for the gloves. . . . Lift on five; six, you get into the backpack.”
Miss Steele, ballet astronautrix
“This is going to work,” Stiefel assures his dancers. “This will be absolutely no problem. We have two weeks to work on it.”
I have nostalgia for lives I’ve never lived.
I was just driving through a tiny foothills Spanish colonial landgrant. There are a few small adobes, willows and cottonwoods by the streams, a twisted apple tree, a few cattle, stacks of firewood, everyone related. And I felt a strong sense of the distinctness and value of their life. And an attraction, like nostalgia.
That’s what the best tourism usually is. Nostalgia for unlived lives. Imaginative communion with them. (more…)
“Christensen is a Mormon.” It’s got a Danish great-grandfather pulling a hand cart, courting a girl from a family of fourteen, and praying nightly about the truth of the Book of Mormon until “One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.”
More good stuff such as dealing with death as a believing Mormon. New Yorker readers will be more edified than usual. Also a bunch of disruptive innovation.
Like many Mormon missionaries, I was the catalyst for a fair number of overdue weddings.
Been together for years, have several kids together*, can’t imagine living their lives separately, just never got around to an actual wedding. Indeed, it was usually impossible to tell which domestic arrangements were official until you asked them at the end of the fourth discussion. Happily, the goal of preparing for baptism was all that some of them needed to take the plunge (no pun intended).
Then there were the others, with the common refrain: “Why does it matter if we get married? We’re already together. It’s just a piece of paper.” (more…)
12 years ago my first daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on her birthday that year, with slight updates since. Today would be Betsey’s 16th birthday. Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.
Every year, this day seems to come by sooner.
This is a story of two friends in an airport.
“I don’t get it,” the one friend said. “Your life is so constrained. So narrow. You are standing in here in this little line. You won’t leave it. And then you’ll stand in another line and you’ll shuffle onto an airplane with an assigned seat you’ll have to sit in. It’s so suffocating. Me, I love my freedom too much to ever do that. By rejecting all these rules, I get to wander around wherever I want. I can go down to the luggage return or even out to the parking garage. I get to experience the airport to its fullest. There no limits. Whereas you, you just stand in line. Why do you do it?”
“I am flying to Paris,” the other friend said.
Saturday night I had occasion to try to remember my 38th birthday, and found that I could. On that birthday almost thirteen years ago, I went directly to the temple after work and realized as I drove that it marked 19 years since I received the temple endowment on my 19th birthday, a precise bisection of my life.
As for why I was calling up memory of that day, well, (more…)