Adventures in Mormonism

My sweet wife Sandra has figured out how to post videos on YouTube.

Here’s her first effort. She works part-time at Curves (a women-only fitness center), and her employer was closing down one Curves center and moving all the equipment to another. My wife got several of the local missionaries to help move the equipment. Afterwards, Sandra’s boss made the missionaries do a full circuit on the workout equipment. They found it was a lot harder than they thought:

This was done using her cell phone, hence the jerky quality. ..bruce..

From a posted news item:

Today, many people generally view Evangelical Christians as a people with strong family values and clean living, according to the bishop of the McLean 3rd Ward (Latter-day Saint). Some also believe they are just one of many Christian denominations.

But that view is the result of a multibillion dollar campaign over the last couple of decades by Evangelical Christians who have attempted to present themselves in such a way, according to Bishop Todd Phillips of the McLean 3rd Ward.

Many Americans, including Christians, see Evangelical Christians as “just another branch of Christianity who talk about Jesus all the time and likely do a better job at adhering to family values than most Christian do in churches in America,” Phillips told hundreds attending service on Sunday.

That perspective, however, is in stark contrast to just 50 years ago, when Evangelicals were seen as “conservative, backward religious zealots who didn’t dance or drink, and lived in the South, intermarrying, handling snakes and doing tent revivals,” Phillips said.

“They were also marked by many as extreme right-wingers out to destroy even the concept of political, religious and social tolerance.”

They were perceived by Catholics and most Protestants as a fringe Christian denomination at best and a cult at worst, he noted.

As part of a seven-week series of talks during Sacrament meeting, Phillips was attempting to answer the question of whether Evangelical Christianty and biblical Christianity are the same.

Oh, wait! That’s not what the news item said at all! ..bruce..

A common discussion among Latter-day Saints (and among many other Christians as well as believers in other faiths) is the all-too-easy tendency for prayer to devolve into mechanical recitation as opposed to, well, talking with God. That’s why this website (hat tip to Futurismic) caught my attention:

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

The website is well done, if a bit home-grown looking, and fairly complete. It let me go through the entire process of buying a one-time prayer and paying via Paypal (and, yes, I got the payment confirmation e-mail from Paypal), so it’s not (entirely) a joke. And for all I know, they may well have one or more computers set up with voice synthesizers.

Many of you will of course be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, though the stated intent here is merely petitionary prayers, not bringing about the end of creation. They have sections for specific religions: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Unaffiliated, with corresponding prayers and “special package deals” (no, really).

They don’t have “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saints” on the list of religions, and when I clicked on the “Other Religions” button, a page came up with this wonderful headline: “We apologize but other religions are not yet supported.” What is both funny and a bit sad is that I suspect most of us could come up with a standard template for LDS morning and evening prayers, as well as blessings on the food.

So here’s the questions/challenge for all of us: what distinguishes our prayers (personal and family) from those that could be set up and recited by a computer?  ..bruce..

SPOILERS BELOW! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

[NOTE: welcome to all the traffic from Twitter and from Roger Ebert's review of "Knowing"! I've expanded a few things below for clarification.]

I’m going to discuss religious themes, particularly as related to LDS beliefs and themes, as found in the movies “Watchmen” and “Knowing”, as well as in the finale of the TV series “Battlestar Galactica”. In doing so, I’ll freely discuss spoilers, at least in “Knowing” and BSG. You’ve been warned.

If you don’t want to read the spoilers, let me tell you that I strongly recommend the BSG finale (the whole series, really) and the movie “Knowing”. I haven’t seen “Watchmen” (though I’ve read the graphic novel several times over the years), but based on what I’ve read about the film, I don’t plan on seeing it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Enos is the third author in the Book of Mormon (after Nephi₁ and Jacob). He is best known for his lengthy prayer while hunting in the wilderness, wherein he first asks for personal forgiveness, then for God’s blessings upon the Nephites, then His blessings upon the Lamanites, then that a record of the Nephites will be preserved and brought into the Lamantes “at some future day” should the Nephites be destroyed.  So far, so good.

But at the very end of the book of Enos, we find the following:

Enos 1:25: And it came to pass that I began to be old, and an hundred and seventy and nine years had passed away from the time that our father Lehi left Jerusalem.

Enos is apparently identified in Jacob 7:27 as the son of Jacob:

And I, Jacob, saw that I must soon go down to my grave; wherefore, I said unto my son Enos: Take these plates. And I told him the things which my brother Nephi had commanded me, and he promised obedience unto the commands. And I make an end of my writing upon these plates, which writing has been small; and to the reader I bid farewell, hoping that many of my brethren may read my words. Brethren, adieu.

Now, Jacob was Lehi’s “first born in the wilderness” (2 Nephi 2:2), and Jacob was already born when Lehi & company set sail from Bountiful to the New World (cf. 1 Nephi 18:7), and furthermore was born before Joseph, who was also born before embarking. This means that Jacob was born, at the latest, about seven years after Lehi left Jerusalem, and probably a few years before that. Let’s split the difference and say that Jacob was born 4 years after Lehi left Jerusalem.

This means that the lives of Jacob and Enos spanned 175 years. This is not impossible, but it is highly unusual. So let’s look at some possible explanations.

Read the rest of this entry »

[NOTE: I've made a few updates and edits below.]

I wrote yesterday about how the Deseret News has managed to actually increase its paid circulation by focusing more on a specific target audience — Mormons — while the Salt Lake Tribune declined in paid circulation at the same time.

This editorial choice at the Tribune certainly isn’t going to help matters much (the column is by Connie Coyne, the ‘Reader Advocate’ at the Trib; emphasis is mine):

I talked to many faithful LDS Church members this week after a story about “Big Love,” HBO’s polygamy drama, appeared in The Tribune alongside a photo of one of the characters wearing temple clothing known only to devout members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Trust me, Pandora’s box is ajar and the bad feelings are in the ether. . . .

By Friday afternoon, 1,111 readers had commented on the online version of the story at www.sltrib.com.

Although a tightly cropped version of the photo appeared in the print edition, the larger shot was pulled from the Web site and the photo archives as soon as Tribune Editor Nancy Conway saw it. She believes the photo added nothing to the story by Vince Horiuchi about the controversy surrounding the episode that airs Sunday evening. That episode reportedly will depict a rite that members consider sacred and private. . . .

But I can assure Mormons that The Tribune did not intend to offend members of the LDS Church. We should have more carefully considered what using the photos would mean to Latter-day Saints.

Yep, you read that right. The Tribune ran in its print edition and on its web site a photo (from “Big Love”) of an actress in LDS temple robes to accompany an article by Vince Horiuchi about the “Big Love” flap. (NOTE: it’s unclear exactly which article Coyne is talking about; I found three by Horiuchi on the “Big Love” flap [here, here and here], but none has the 1,000+ reader comments that Coyne references.  Of course, that raises the issue of whether the Tribune pulled down the corresponding reader comments after pulling the photo from the web site.)

I’m trying to figure out how Coyne can say with any credibility that the Trib‘s editorial staff “did not intend to offend members of the LDS Church” by running that photo.  It’s hard to see it as anything but a deliberate poke in the eye to Utah Mormons. It would be like running one of the (in)famous Mohammed editorial cartoons in a heavily Muslim city and then saying, “We didn’t intend to offend Muslims!” You may have editorial reasons for running the cartoon, but you can’t claim after the fact that you didn’t understand how it would upset people. (Note, however, that there have not been, to my knowledge, any death threats, fire bombings, or massive street demonstrations in the wake of the Tribune‘s actions.)

Note, by the way, that I think that the Tribune had every right (under the 1st Amendment, etc.) to run that photograph; in that, I happen to agree with Vince Horiuchi (though not with his snarky tone). But as we like to remind ourselves in the Church, you are free to choose your actions; you are not always free to choose the consequences.  And given the Tribune‘s circulation struggles, this may not have been the wisest course of action.  ..bruce..

Deseret News — Once upon a time the Deseret News, the Church-owned newspaper in Salt Lake City, carried on a highly entertaining feud with the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune. In these calmer days, the Tribune and the News share the same adverstising office, cooperate on the Sunday edition, and never exchange so much as a snide word. Oddly enough, however, Mormons still get some small rebellious satisfaction out of subscribing to the Tribune, and non-Mormons regard the Church paper with suspicion.

– Orson Scott Card, Saintspeak: A Mormon Dictionary (Orion Books, 1981)

There was an interesting article by Paul Beebe in yesterday’s Salt Lake Tribune about the travails of the Tribune and the Deseret News in today’s tough market for newspapers. However, Beebe buried the real lede, and quite possibly deliberately.

You see, Joe Cannon at the Deseret News has adopted a concious approach to increase LDS coverage and utility to LDS readers, both in the print edition and online, since “research going back a decade shows little interest in the newspaper among non-Mormons” (as per Card’s quip above). Beebe focuses a lot on the internal controvery at the News over the decision, including staff protests and even some demotions:

Last month, 10 News reporters removed their names from stories they had written for the Feb. 23 paper to protest Editor Joe Cannon’s strategy to make the LDS Church-owned paper more pleasing to Mormons — and more profitable. Cannon sees the strategy as a way to allow two daily papers to remain viable in a market of Salt Lake City’s size.

The reporters were also protesting the demotion of two editors who objected to the paper’s drift.

What Beebe later acknowledges — though you have to get halfway through the article to find it out — is that:

Cannon’s strategy appears to be working. Paid circulation increased 2.1 percent in the six months ending Sept. 30. The News was one of a few big-city papers to add readers during the period, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations figures.

If you have been following newspaper journalism at all for the past few years, you’d know how remarkable that is. I’d be interested to find out what other “big-city papers” have increased in circulation during the last six months; most of the focus these days are on the ones that have already closed up shop (like my town’s own Rocky Mountain News) or are likely to do so soon. So the fact that the News increased its circulation, in a city as relatively small as Salt Lake and with another competing daily newspaper, is major journalistic news indeed.

Oh, and the Tribute, like most other newspapers around the country, lost circulation during the same period:

The larger Salt Lake Tribune is coping with circulation and advertising declines of its own. Paid readership dropped 5 percent in the six-month period, according to ABC. So far this year, revenue for both papers is down 20 percent.

Although the circulation losses are blamed on a cost-saving move to pull Tribunes from numerous hotels in Utah, editors see them as additional confirmation that the newspaper must branch into new areas if it is to keep its leading role.

So the question is: will Salt Lake City be a one-paper town (as Denver now is) in a few more years?  ..bruce..

Comes this news from California:

FOLSOM, CA – A Folsom investment firm that allegedly ran a $40 million Ponzi scheme drew largely from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, according to federal investigators.

Equity Investment Management and Trading, Inc. was headed up by Anthony Vassallo, 29. A professional networking Web site indicates Vassallo attended Brigham Young University between 1998 and 2003.

The alleged Ponzi scheme came to light Wednesday when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil complaint in Sacramento federal court seeking to seize assets held by EIMT and levy fines against Vassallo and company vice president Kenneth Kenitzer, 66, of Pleasanton.

The complaint claims as many as 150 victims, drawn largely from Vassallo’s religious community, invested $40 million between May 2004 and November 2008.

One on those alleged victims is Kevin Stillion, 38, of Rancho Murieta, who said he gave Vassallo his life savings of $120,000 to invest in April of 2008.

“We know that we do have an account that does have some money in it, but it’s less than two percent or one percent,” Stillion said.

Here’s the corresponding press release from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Much has been written about Utah being the fraud capital of the US, though I suspect the various post-collapse frauds that are coming out (starting with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but certainly not ending there) make anything done in Utah look penny-ante. But there is a confluence between two pervasive concepts in Mormon society that feeds into such fraud:

• I can trust fellow Mormons professionally
• God will bless me financially if I pay my tithing, etc.

Contrary to what we may think, this is not unique to LDS society. Part of what has come out in the wake of the Madoff scandal is how many of his victims were Jews and Jewish organizations that felt they could trust Madoff because he was Jewish. As one of the earliest AP reports noted:

Investors big and small were swindled, from Florida retirees to celebrities such as Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon and Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax. Many of Madoff’s victims were Jews and Jewish charities, which trusted him because he is Jewish. Those cheated included Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

But back to the Vassallo scheme. Here’s what should have sent big warning bells off for anyone, LDS or not, who was considering investing (emphasis mine):

Investigators said investors were lured with the promise of monthly returns as great as 3.5 percent.

This is exactly the same thing that Madoff used to get his investors, though his standard pitch was a mere 1 percent/month (the FBI does say he did make some claims of annual returns approaching 45 percent, but the 1%/month figure shows up most often). That claim alone should have been enough to warn people away, particularly in an era where you’re lucky if your money market account offers a 3.5% annual return on saving.

But here’s the real kicker (again, emphasis mine):

Stillian [one of the victims] said he is not a member of the LDS church, but has Mormon friends who introduced him to Vassallo. “It was all about friends and family and trust,” he said, adding, “I sat there in his office and he showed me the returns,” Stillian said.

Dating all the way back to my undergrad years at BYU, I have made it a matter of standing policy that whenver anyone tries to get money from me (selling me something, investing, etc.) and brings the Church or related issues into it, my response is an automatic and irrevocable “No.” Any appeal to Church membership, Church authorities, personal claimed worthiness (“When I was in the temple the other day…”), etc., is a big red flag that the pitch being made cannot stand on its own merits.

The sad thing is that most Mormons are honest in their dealings with others, including their fellow Mormons. Tthat’s what makes the occasional fraud like this both effective and devestating. Those who take advantage of that trust are truly wolves in sheep’s clothing. Like the moneychangers in at the temple in Jerusalem, they turn the house of God into a den of thieves — but, unlike the moneychangers, they do so having sworn a solemn oath to take Christ’s name upon themselves.  I for one would not want to be in their shoes when they face the Savior’s wrath.  ..bruce..

The last two posts have dealt with the future (in America) of Evangelism in particular and Christianity in general. Ardis Parshall’s comments on the former post raise the question of the extent to which these same factors impact the LDS Church. I’d like to poke at that a bit, mostly to explore ways in which the future of the LDS Church might be different from what faithful members typically envision.

Let me start by addressing the standard bifurcation between those who believe the LDS Church is what it claims to be  — the Church of Jesus Christ, restored by God Himself, the “only true and living church” — and those who do not. Those in the latter camp can and do envision all sorts of futures for the LDS Church, and they do so quite reasonably, since their premise is that it is simply a man-made organization (or, in some Evangelical circles, the Church of Satan) and so can suffer all the varied fates of any such organization.

For believing or faithful Latter-day Saints, however, the LDS Church is God’s kingdom restored to the earth, never to be taken from the earth again between now and the Second Coming of Christ. It is, in the words of Daniel’s vision as echoed in the D&C, “the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth” (though that passage actually refers to the Gospel, not the Church, as that stone). As such, our vision of the Church’s future tends to be largely more of the same — more wards, more stakes, more missionaries, more missions, more members, and maybe even a few more scriptures — with a brief period of last-days catastrophes, during which we live off our food storage (you do have your food storage, don’t you?), have a much shorter meeting block, and generally encourage and help each other while the rest of the world goes to pieces. Somehow in all this, our homes and our chapels (especially our stake centers) will be places of refuge for ourselves and our nice non-LDS neighbors.

But what if that standard picture is wrong or misleading? What if the course of the Church between now and the coming of the Savior turns out be quite different from what we usually presume? We often cite the books of Helaman through 4th Nephi in the Book of Mormon as providing a type and shadow of events surrounding the Second Coming and the Millennium, but in so doing, we ignore the fact that the Church of God goes from being dominant in both Nephite and Lamanite regions to almost (but not quite) vanishing completely just prior to the great destruction that accompanies the Savior’s death. In fact, one of the first things the Savior does when He appears to the Lehites at Bountiful is to re-establish the Church, reordain its leaders, and re-institute baptism, including for those existing leaders.

Orson Scott Card played with some of these themes in his Folk of the Fringe stories (all written in the 1980s), in which a limited nuclear exchange disrupts American (and American LDS) civilization. The stories are worth reading to see what Card does with this setting, particularly with what is in effect a rejection by God of the LDS Church in America.

Another favorite in this vein is a little short story called “Entry” by Stephen Scott, found in the book LDSF: Science Fiction by and for Mormons (Scott and Vickie Smith, eds., Millennial Productions, 1982). The story is only 3 pages long, and if I could contact either the author or the editors and get permission, I’d post the whole thing here. In brief, the story simply looks over the shoulder of the President of the Church at some future date as he is bringing his journal up to date for the week gone by. But in so doing, we learn about all the things that have changed in the Church (and in the world), such as:

• the calling of full-time bishops
• a reference to “Apostle Kantor’s ‘mixed’ marriage” (no further explanation is given)
• the “new rulings on euthanasia”
• the radical interpretation of the Word of Wisdom as part of the drive against world hunger
• the death of the Prophet’s wives [yes, plural] in the California earthquake a few years ealier
• taping his eulogy for Apostle Yoshimoto
• site selections for new temples near Buenos Aires
• his son serving a mission in Zimbabwe
• his daughter attending BYU-Rome
• the First Presidency meeting with the “Council of Twenty”
• reference to six missions “behind the so-called Iron Curtain”
• the new Church Headquarters, apparently located in Mexico (“across from the Hotel Baja”)
• the reinstitution of the United Order in some areas
• in giving a talk broadcast Church-wide, having to use translators “for those who did not speak Spanish”
• opening of missions in Tibet, Madagascar, and Ceylon
• a new hymn book
• a four-hour private meeting with the Pope
• a reference to “Apostle Hussein”

Again, this was published in 1982, before there were missions in Russia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar (we’re still waiting on Tibet and Ceylon), before there were temples in Buenos Aires (or even in Mexico, for that matter, though there was one in Sao Paolo, Brazil), or even a new hymn book. What I like about the story is the constant yet understated (and largely unexplained) introduction of things that we might not expect in a future Church, yet things that could well happen.

For example, if the Church continues to grow significantly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Council of Twelve expand into the Council of Twenty; I suspect the Twelve are pretty much overwhelmed as it is now. Likewise, given the relative growth of the Church in Latin America vs. the US and Canada, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Church leadership and organization move south in another 30-50 years, possibly sooner in the event of some catastrophic upheaval (social, economic, political, or even physical) in the United States.

So what are your thoughts for possible futures of the Church?  ..bruce..

E. D. Kain at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has also taken note of Michael’s Spencer’s prediction of the collapse of Evangelical Christianity and added some thoughs of his own from a Catholic point of view:

Now my personal take is that the disintegration of the highly political evangelical movement which Andrew [Sullivan] identifies as Christianist would be overall a very good thing. But if Evangelicals drift over into the Catholic Church I do think there is cause for concern.  I think one thing the Church absolutely does not need is a large population of biblical literalists and fundamentalists swelling its ranks.  The problem with protestantism in general, to my mind, is its lack of mooring in history and tradition, something that really forms the foundation of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

What the Catholic Church does need is a Vatican III.  What could help save Catholicism, which I think in the long run stands a better chance of survival than evangelical or even mainline protestant churches, is a reform in its priesthood.  It’s time to allow priests to marry.  This prohibition on marriage in the priesthood is foolhardy, and one of the major stumbling blocks not only in recruiting new priests, but in winning back public trust of the Church itself.  Beyond that, the Church needs more transparency.  I think there is a case to be made against total transparency, but with all the scandals that have beset the Church in the past few decades, from child molestation to cover-ups, the only way to quell the slow uproar over these seemingly never-ending revelations of deceit is to open up.  Let us see what’s going on behind the veil of obsfucation.  The wrong thing to do would be to take the Church away from Vatican II reforms.  The right thing to do would be to move toward a relevant Vatican III.

Of course, what neither Spencer nor Kain address is what happens if some significant percentage of those Evangelicals move into the LDS Church (as opposed to the Catholic or Orthodox Churches).  ..bruce..

[UPDATE: Here's a post to discuss possible futures of the LDS Church, particularly in America.]