[Note: I did a Google Image Search for “Mickey Mouse Evil,” and it came up with this image, which is more apropos for this post than I could have hoped for.]

This is not a Robert Ludlum novel. These are some thoughts, hopefully not too disjointed, about Mormons and The Benedict Option.

I.     “Eeek! A Mouse!”

A few months back, we went to Disneyland with my side of the family. It’s a cliché among BYU fans to note how much BYU gear one sees at Disneyland. Now I know why; even if you aren’t looking for them, Mormons are EVERYWHERE in the Magic Kingdom. You might think that I only noticed the because I’m Mormon. But my undergraduate school is one that, based on size and distance from L.A., you would expect to be on rough parity with BYU at Disneyland. Instead my college was outnumbered probably 10-to-1.

So yeah, Mormons love Disney. Back in the days of Walt himself, this would hardly warrant mentioning. Christians like good, clean family fun, and Disney = good, clean family fun.

But not all Christians like Disney. (more…)

11 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 15th birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetheart, it’s been a long time and always getting longer.
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My oldest will be old enough for Kindergarten in the fall. The small talk question of the moment from our fellow parents is, “Where are you enrolling him?” In our school district, that’s more than a geography question. It’s a big district with more or less open enrollment, and they’ve done an admirable job of making sure there is an abundance of options. Gifted programs, foreign language immersion schools, charter schools with a patriotic focus, etc.

He won’t be going to any of those, however. As we’ve anticipated since before he was born, he’s going to be homeschooled.

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you homeschooling? Is it for academic or moral reasons or what?”

No one asks these questions of parents who send their kids to the Japanese immersion school. (more…)

“As the rain clouds dispersed over Madison High before a recent Saturday afternoon game, a throng of pro scouts in a rainbow of Major League Baseball caps crowded along the backstop, eyes focused on two seniors who may not even be playing baseball in two years.”

In the Washington Post, with quotes from former missionary Jeremy Guthrie and not-former missionary Bryce Harper. (link)

Amending the Constitution would be more than worth it to make it happen. I’m pretty sure Simon Schama had to be carried out of this debate on a stretcher:

From Music and the Making of Modern Science by Peter Pesic, page 28:

In his earlier Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum celi (Treatise on the Commensurability or Incommensurability of the Celestial Motions, written sometime during 1340-1377), Oresme staged this problem in the form of a debate between personified figures of Arithmetic and Geometry, enacted at the command of Apollo himself. The whole dramatic scene is unique among his works, which he generally phrased in the traditional Euclidean style of geometrical propositions.

Appearing as a character in his own drama, Orseme expresses his perplexity whether incommensurability is actually present in astronomy or only a purely theoretical possibility. Then Apollo, accompanied by the Muses, Arts, and Sciences, appears to Oresme “as if in a dream.” Apollo rebukes him for being “ignorant of the ratios relating the things of this world” and hence subject to “affliction of the spirit and an unending labor.” Apollo phrases the problem trenchantly; “an impreceptible excess—even a part smaller than a thousandth—could destroy an equality and alter a ratio from rational to irrational.”

Our esteemed JG co-blogger John Mansfield has a theory that Mormons are retreating socially into their extended families, and worries that the Church is turning into something like a confederation of clans (have I got it right, JM?). He goes so far as to posit that the custom of cousin marriage might make inroads in a more insular Church.

I don’t really see the trend of extended families becoming more important than other Church associations, possibly because I live in a far-off land where most Mormons are transplants without extended family around. But I do observe a trend that might be related. (more…)

Overheard from a missionary:

Our families are worth the world to us.
We are worth the world to God.

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You know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.  It ends this way:

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.

“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”

“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.

Now you will know the rest of the story: (more…)

On Thursday Ken Mattingly, the youngest man among those who ever ventured beyond low Earth orbit, turned 80. A couple others were younger than Admiral Mattingly at the time of their respective launches, but Mattingly’s mission, the next-to-last Apollo mission to the moon, was later than theirs, and he was born last. As Apollo 16’s Command Module Pilot 44 years ago, he is one of seven men to have ever been isolated by a couple thousand miles from any other person, three days orbiting the moon alone.

To repeat, the couple dozen men who have ever seen Earth from a thousand miles away are all 80 years old or older or dead, and they all did so on their way to the moon. Another decade or so left till such feats become legend.

His Majesty didn’t come to breakfast the other day.

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From the Washington Post:

Leona Barnes doesn’t remember when, back around the close of World War I, she met Gladys Butler, Ruth Hammett and Bernice Underwood. Growing up in Southwest Washington, they were part of the landscape, in the same way that her house and her street and her church were.

As little girls, the four played jacks and jumped rope; later they shared gossip and danced the two-step and the Charleston. Two of them lived in the same house at one point, and three of them had babies the same year — 1933. But they could not have predicted that someday they would be poised to celebrate their 100th birthdays together.

“We all are grateful, and we thank the Lord for all of us to see 99,” Barnes said as she sat this week in Zion Baptist Church in Northwest Washington with the other three, who are members there. Slapping her thigh for emphasis, she said, “If we don’t make 100, it’s up to Him — but we made the 99.”

Knowledge is a form of love.  Knowledge without love is like sex without love. (more…)

Political science professor Benjamin Knoll has put together an analysis of suicides among those 15-19 years old as correlated with the Mormon percentage of states’ populations. (link) There are elements of his analysis that are odd and unhelpful for understanding anything, but the one big fact at the heart of his data is interesting to me. The suicide rate for this age group in Utah is double what it was five years ago. (more…)

Now, repentance could not come unto men except there were a punishment, which also was eternal.

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