Category Archives: LDS Society

More lessons from Judaism: Orthodox Jews confront Torah inerrancy

Judaism, LDS Doctrine, LDS History, LDS Society, Main, Scriptures

Again from the Tablet comes this article about how some Orthodox Jews are trying to deal with historical and compositional questions about the Torah (the five books of Moses):

“Virtually all of the stories in the Torah are ahistorical,” declares a manifesto posted in July on TheTorah.com. “Given the data to which modern historians have access,” the essay explains, “it is impossible to regard the accounts of mass Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness experience or the coordinated, swift, and complete conquest of the entire land of Canaan under Joshua as historical.” Not only did the events in the Garden of Eden and the Flood of Noah never transpire, readers are informed, but “Abraham and Sarah are folkloristic characters; factually speaking, they are not my ancestors or anyone else’s.”

Such sweeping sentiments might be expected from an academic scholar, or perhaps a critic of fundamentalist religion. But the author of this manifesto is an Orthodox rabbi named Zev Farber. The essay, and much of the work of TheTorah.com, is an attempt by dissident Orthodox rabbis and professors to reconcile the findings of modern biblical scholarship with traditional Jewish belief.

This project is not new, but it has bedeviled American Jewry in different ways. Within liberal denominations, while some intellectuals and theologians have grappled with the questions posed by the field of biblical criticism—which sees the Torah as a man-made, composite work produced over time, rather than simply revealed to Moses by God at Sinai—the results have rarely filtered down to synagogue congregants and day-school pupils. Within Orthodoxy, meanwhile, the findings of academia have often met with outright rejection.

One of the greatest gifts that Joseph Smith gave the nascent Church was to reject the inerrancy of the Bible, not just in the Articles of Faith but in other comments he made through his lifetime. In some ways, the Church slipped back from that during the 20th century, due largely to the prolific, unofficial, and often unauthorized writings of Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie (not to mention W. Cleon Skousen), which promoted a very strict, literal (young earth/creationist) reading of the Old Testament (vs. Elders B. H. Roberts [see prior link] and James E. Talmage) and had a tremendous impact on the general Church membership, particularly through official teaching materials for Sunday School, Seminary, and Institute.

Now, unlike the Orthodox Jewish rabbi cited above, I actually believe a lot of the Old Testament, including the books of Moses, is historical, or at least is rooted in historical events that have gone through millennia of transmission. But I think that in our efforts to hold onto that which is valid and important, we end up accepting a lot that is not valid or that misrepresents the time frame and circumstances of the events.

The quality and openness of the work coming out of the Joseph Smith Papers project, as well as the New Testament Commentary project at BYU (and the many excellent New Testament publications of scholarship that preceded it), show the Church’s commitment to faithful and defensible scholarship. One hopes that at a future date, a similar effort will be made in Old Testament scholarship as well, with the results reflected in Church manuals.

 

 

 

“Judaism as a native language” — lessons for Mormons?

Belief systems, Judaism, LDS Society, Main

Thanks to a link from a Jewish friend (whose wife published an article there), I have become a devotee of the on-line version of Tablet Magazine (subtitle: “A New Read on Jewish Life”). The level of writing (and journalism) is excellent, and there are at least a few articles every week or so that I end up reading.

I was struck by one today, “Learning Judaism as a Native Language Requires More Than Synagogue Once a Year” by Mark Oppenheimer. He starts:

It’s the High Holiday season, the time of year when synagogues double or triple or quadruple in attendance, as barely affiliated Jews stream back through the sanctuary doors, looking for their yearly connection. Some are scared, others disdainful, many bored. And confused—lots of confusion. As someone who writes about religion for a living, I have conversations throughout the year with these “High Holiday Jews,” but also with other Jews, some of them regular worshippers, others infrequent, who are trying to figure out why Judaism is so hard for them. I’m not a rabbi and I don’t have any good answers, but I do have some reflections, which I hope will put some people’s minds at ease, maybe even help them.

His answer: practice:

Religious practice, like musical or athletic practice, is easier for some than for others. For some people, it is so difficult that they probably should not even bother. I have no ear for music, and if I wanted to learn guitar even reasonably well it would take so many hours, at the cost of so much frustration, that I should probably just skip it. For some people, religion is like that: They don’t get it, they don’t see why it is meaningful, their not-getting-it makes them angry or resentful or sad or bored, and they would always rather be doing something else. Such people should, I think, stop trying. Don’t worry that your bubbe is looking down from heaven ashamed of you; after all, you don’t believe in heaven anyway. On Yom Kippur this year, do something that brings you joy, that takes you out of yourself, that helps you reflect, but don’t come to synagogue.

For everyone else, however, those of you who feel that maybe religion holds something for you, some mystery you just haven’t unlocked yet, or connection to a tradition you value, think about those things you have mastered, maybe in arts or sports, that came in time, with some regular practice. Think how rewarding those things are now. Maybe religion is like that. And maybe the next time you go to synagogue, you should take a bucket of balls, and not worry if you double-fault.

I think this touches on the reason why so many Latter-day Saints, having stopped attending church for a period of time, find it hard to start up again even when they want to.

My own brush with inactivity happened, of all places, at BYU, during my senior year of college. My (former) wife and I were head residents at Heritage Halls (back when it was all-girls); I had the responsibility of going around every Saturday night starting at 1:30 am to (a) kick all guys out of the dorms and (b) make sure all the outside doors were locked. Since we’re talking about 48 apartments in two halls (Snow and Smith), it meant that I usually didn’t get to bed until 2:30 am or later, while the student ward we attended (I was executive secretary) met relatively early on Sunday morning. We had a year-old toddler, and it was easy to decide to sleep in instead of getting up and getting ourselves ready.

Then one Saturday night, we realized it had been several weeks since we had been to church. And here’s the interesting part: my first reaction was, “We need to get up in the morning and go to church”, while my second reaction was a fear of embarrassment — that when we walked in, everyone was going to ask us where we had been or make other related comments. The impulse not to go at all startled me, since I had always been and still considered myself a staunch, faithful member. We did get up, we did go, and I’ve never gone through a period of inactivity again, but since then, I have always had sympathy for those who would like to start going to church again, but find it hard to do so.

I think Oppenheimer summed up that challenge with this passage:

But the religion is not native to you anymore, so if you do want a greater ease with it, it will take some time. Just as with guitar, or basketball. Or French or Swahili. If they aren’t native, they take a little work.

Food for thought; go read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

Mormon “mega-projects”?

Church administration, LDS Society, Main

Matthew Crandall has a provocative column over at Real Clear Religion on what he terms “Mormon mega-projects”: the Church Conference Center, City Creek Mall, the “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign, and the like. I haven’t quite decided yet if it’s a serious column or tongue-in-cheek.

The analysis and exposition through the first part of the column appears straightforward, at which point he sets forth his three suggestions for future mega-projects:

  • BYU-England: a metropolitan-style university aimed at providing a BYU-type experience for LDS students from Europe.
  • A “Waters of Mormon” chain of water parks.
  • A “Grand Nephite” flagship hotel in Salt Lake City.

The first idea was intriguing, though given the free or near-free college education available throughout much of Europe, I’m not sure how it would work. Beyond that, if the Church were to invest in a project like that anywhere, it would be in Latin America — and there the Church is going in the opposite direction, having just closed down its venerable high school in Mexico to convert it into a missionary training center.

The “Waters of Mormon” theme park is just too silly for words, whereas the “Grand Nephite” suggestion ignores the fact that the Church for nearly a century had a semi-luxury flagship hotel in downtown Salt Lake City — the Hotel Utah — which it closed and converted into the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. As someone who travels to Salt Lake City several times a year, I don’t think that the city needs or could support another large semi-luxury hotel. It also ignores the fact that the Church has had a decades-long trend of divesting itself for-profit businesses.

Beyond that — and aside from the City Creek investment, which was done to halt the urban decay setting in around LDS Church Headquarters and Temple Square, not for revenue purposes — the LDS Church’s financial focus is primarily outside the United States. That is where the Church’s growth is taking place and where its infrastructure needs are.

I have a good friend who works full time for LDS Church property management on a regional basis here in the United States. He says that the Church has made it clear that infrastructure spending in the US and Canada — including upgrades to existing chapels and buildings, as well as construction of new buildings — will be held to a minimum in order to use that money elsewhere in the world.

In other words, if we see any future “mega-projects”, they are far more likely to be outside the US, and they will likely be tied closely to the Church’s mission statement: proclaim the gospel, perfect the saints, redeem the dead, care for the poor and needy. No universities, no hotels, and certainly no water parks.

Radical life extension and the LDS Church

Belief systems, Health, LDS Doctrine, LDS Society, Main, Science

Interesting article in the Atlantic on the prospects of extending human life and the religious implications thereof, based on a Pew Research Center poll. The Pew Center asked sought comments from several major religions; for the LDS Church, they ended up talking with Steven Peck at BYU:

“The church believes that the human body is sacred, which is why it even discourages body piercing and tattoos,” says Steven Peck, a bioethicist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “So, as long as the body remained the same, as long as you were only giving people more of what they already have without big alterations, I think it would be fine.” On the other hand, “if there was a sense that [life-extension therapy] was desecrating the body, that would be a problem,” Peck says.

Peck, obviously, is not a General Authority or (to my knowledge) an official Church spokesperson. Also, his answer as given — and he may well have had more to say — doesn’t really address advancing technology in artificial prosthetics and organ transplants. I doubt Church leaders or most Church members have problems with organ transplants, artificial limbs, artificial hearts, and so on. But what happens when we can transplant, say, the human head of a quadriplegic  on top of a mobile prothetic torso (with heart/lung machine, etc?). Does that count as ‘desecration’ or merely another logical step in transplant/prosthetic technology? Suppose the side effect of such an action is a significantly greater human lifespan and/or greater functionality for the person involved — would elderly people who were not quadriplegics then be justified in such a procedure, assuming they could afford it?

Interesting questions. Lincoln Cannon, where are you? 🙂  ..bruce..

 

Utah Mormons (a revised repost)

Family, LDS Society, Main, Personal

 

A few years back, Peggy Fletcher Stack — religion editor at the Salt Lake Tribune — asked me for some of my thoughts about the various stereotypes of Utah Mormons (vs. Mormons outside of Utah). I wrote them up and sent them to her; she never used them, so some months later I turned them into a post at Mormon Mentality.

Now Sandra and I find ourselves seriously looking at moving back to Utah, something we had never really considered (for various reasons) since leaving 25 years ago. But the house we’ve rented for the past eight years here in Colorado is getting put on the market, and Sandra and I — both now 60 years old — feel it’s time to get a bit closer to kids, grandkids, and other family members. Being in Utah puts us close to several children and grandchildren, as well as most of Sandra’s surviving family members; it also puts us a day closer to kids, grandkids, and family member (on my side) in Nevada and California. So, I thought this was a good time to repost my original thoughts, with a few minor edits.

[start of revised repost]

First, my own background. I joined the Church in 1967 at age 14 in San Diego, only member of my family to join. After graduating from high school, I attended and graduated from  BYU (1971-78, less two years for a mission [Central America]). Upon graduation in 1978, I lived in San Diego (CA) and Houston (TX). I moved back to Utah in 1985, and left again in early 1988. Otherwise, I have lived in California (both San Diego and the Bay Area), Texas (Houston and Dallas), the Washington DC area (Virginia, Maryland, and in the District itself), and Colorado (outside of Denver). Not counting the BYU wards and Central American branches I attended, I have been a member of 16 wards/branches. I’ve been active since joining and have held a variety of callings, including two stints as a counselor in a bishopric. On the other hand, I’ve had a beard most of my adult life (including during both bishopric stints); make of that what you will.

Still, though we haven’t lived in Utah for 25 years, we go back there constantly, particularly since moving to Colorado eight years ago — we’re now just an 8-hour drive away. Sandra has been going there at least 4 times a year, mostly to see her mom (until her mom passed away last fall); I go along about half the time. And, as noted, we have kids and grandkids living there, so we interact with them regularly on the phone and via the ‘net.

As I see it, there are at least three key factors that make the experience of being LDS in Utah different than that of being LDS outside of Utah.

The first is inheritance. I daresay that a plurality — and likely a majority — of Mormons in Utah are Nth-generation Mormons, N >= 2. They were either born into the Church or, less commonly, descend from individuals who left the Church but have on their own joined the Church themselves. They tend to have large family networks. My wife is related to measurable portions of Utah and Idaho; her mom (Sorenson) and dad (Anderson) each came from a family of 12 kids, from rural Utah (Koosharem) and Idaho (Samaria), respectively. Utah Mormons also tend to have large and highly-connected social networks (the old fashioned kind), some of which date back decades or even more than a century.

With that inheritance and inter-connectivity comes a lot of folk and family practices and doctrine. Some of it is a survival (often in distorted or incomplete form) of what were once mainstream (or at least popular) LDS beliefs and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries. Along the same lines, there’s a lot of social behavior that within Utah is associated with being Mormon but really does not stem from the Church and the Gospel; it’s not as pervasive as it was 40 years ago, but it’s still there.

Outside of Utah and especially outside of the United States, the majority of (adult) Mormons are 1st or 2nd generation. They bring into the Church their culture, prior beliefs, family ties, and social networks that existed prior to their conversion. They tend to see LDS doctrine without a lot of the accumulated and outdated cruft (aside from threadjacked discussions or the occasional exclamation in Gospel Doctrine and RS/PH).

The second is concentration. Various words come to mind — “hothouse”, “echo chamber” — but my favorite observation is from a close friend, Bob Trammel, who — adapting a line from “Hello, Dolly” — once said, “Mormons are like manure. Sprinkle them around, and they make things blossom. Heap them up in one place, and they stink.” A Mormon here in Colorado with offbeat ideas will find they don’t spread much — the LDS density isn’t just high enough. Someone in Utah with those same offbeat ideas can easily find kindred spirits within blocks of his (or her) home; heck if he writes them up, he can probably get quite a few high priests groups within the valley to pass them along. I will acknowledge that e-mail and the internet allow some of this to go on outside of Utah’s bounds, but the dense social network is still the best medium for these things (e.g., “Today’s youth were generals in the war in heaven.“) to get passed along . Likewise, there’s a reason why most LDS splinter groups and breakaway churches start in Utah — again, the density elsewhere often just isn’t high enough to sustain such a group.

The concentration inside of Utah also make the “outliers” on either end of the Mormon spectrum (however you care to define that) much more visible. Outside of Utah, it is much easier to be quietly and invisibly unorthodox (in any direction), because you’re surrounded by people who aren’t Mormon and your ward is spread out over many square miles. Inside of Utah, your ward fits into a space of several square blocks, and pretty much all your neighbors (Mormon or not) are aware of just where you fit in (as they suppose).

The density of Mormons within Utah also tends to make wards — which are defined geographically and tend to each cover a very small area within most urban and suburban areas in Utah — very homogeneous in terms of ethnic, financial, and professional background. That, in turn, can lead to a mindset that says, consciously or not, “how the Church is in my ward is how it is or should be everywhere else.”

The third is integration of church and society, which is a consequence of point #2. I’m not talking about political issues of church and state per se (though those are certainly brought up a lot). I’m talking about the tendency to judge someone in her/his secular role based on what we believe about their commitment to and activity in the Church, as well as the tendency to ask for favors (vote for me, invest with me, sign up for my MLM organization, take a quick look at my teeth/car/dog for free, give me a discount on X) based on shared Church membership and/or prominent (local) Church responsibilities. This certainly goes on outside of Utah (cf. the Mormon affinity fraud cases in California and here in Colorado, and the White Horse idiot up in Idaho), but it is so pervasive in Utah as to make it hard to avoid.

Many, many years ago I made it a personal rule not to use someone from my ward (or even my stake) in providing professional services to me (law, medicine, automotive, etc.) — not because I think Mormons are dishonest or sloppy (I don’t), but because if I’m unhappy with them or stop using them, I don’t want that to have awkward consequences within my ward. (Case in point: my dentist here in Colorado happens to be in the bishopric of one of the other wards — which is actually in another stake — that shares our building; I see him almost every Sunday and apologize for not being back in for my regular checkup yet.)

At the same time, status tends to accrue based on callings and associations with Church general leadership. Utah remains the only place where I have heard men (though, fortunately, only a few) talk in all seriousness about their “Church career”, as they try to figure out how to go from bishop to stake president to mission president/area seventy to general authority.  Likewise, for some LDS, it is the peak of status to have a son or daughters (or grandson or granddaughter) marry into the family of a general authority.

Finally, the pervasiveness of the Church in Utah actually creates a problem for the youth growing up there. About a year after Sandra and I married — with nine (9!) kids between the two of us — we decided to leave Utah and move out of state, even though our respective former spouses (and most of Sandra’s family) lived there. Why? Because the natural inclination of youth is to rebel, and in Utah, the main institution to rebel against is the Church, and we began to see signs of that already. Instead, we moved them out to northern California (Santa Cruz), where they were a tiny minority and where even the stake president wore his hair a bit over his ears. 🙂

Let me finish by saying that — aside from the ‘inheritance’ issue I mentioned above — I don’t really buy into the stereotype of the “Utah Mormon”, at least not as applying to the majority of Mormons in Utah. (I am, however, willing to grant that Southern Utah may be an exception, particularly listening to annegb.) I think that the distribution of LDS behaviors and beliefs — however you want to map that — is roughly the same inside and outside of Utah. The difference in Utah, as per the concentration issue, is that there are a lot more people in Utah that outside it who do fit the classic “Utah Mormon” stereotype, and they are often some of the most visible and vocal.

[end of revised repost]

So, if we do end up moving back to Utah, it will be interesting to see if my observations still hold; one way or another, I’ll do a follow-up post at some point in the future.  ..bruce..

Changes in missionary age: a brief observation

Church administration, LDS Organization, LDS Society, Missionary work

Like most wards here in North America, we’re seeing more of our young men and women leaving on missions; I help my wife lay out the weekly sacrament bulletin, and the list of missionaries serving keeps growing longer.

Beyond that, though, I’ve noticed an increased seriousness and maturity among our priest-age young men, especially those in their senior year of high school. We’ve been in this ward for eight years now, so I’ve watched most of these young men grow up, and I can see those changes as the weight of their mission calls — impeding or actual — settles on them.

It will be very interesting to see the long term impact of this change. I think it will be significant and very positive. ..bruce..

Mormons, Vietnam, Romney and the Draft, revisited

BYU, LDS Society, Main, Media, Military, Missionary work

Five years ago, the Boston Globe ran an article suggesting collusion between the LDS Church and the US Selective Services regarding deferments for missionaries in general, and Mitt Romney in particular. The simple truth was, yes, young men could get a ministerial deferment (one of many different deferments available) for the duration of their mission, but the deferment vanished as soon as the mission ended — and the mission was fixed in duration. I should know: my own draft number was 4, and the only reason I didn’t end up enlisting in the US Navy was that the draft was suspended before I returned home from my mission.

More significant, though, is that during an era in which anti-war protests were common on many college campuses, they were almost non-existent at Brigham Young University. What’s more, BYU had large, active Army and Air Force ROTC programs all through the war, even though many other colleges and universities were criticizing, curtailing, or even shutting down their own ROTC programs.

Well, the issue has come up again, triggered in part by Ann Romney’s appearance on The View, where Whoopi Goldberg inexplicably thought that Mormons weren’t allowed to fight. (Seriously? Did someone feed her this question, or did she come up with it on her own?) But that brought up the fact that Mitt Romney didn’t serve in the military and has resurrected the same themes of collusion and draft dodging. I made the statement in my post five years ago that Latter-day Saints if anything were probably over-represented in the US military during the Vietnam War; now I have evidence of that.

Let’s look at the figures. During the period of the Vietnam War — say, 1965-1974 — the total US population was around 200 million. During that same period of time, LDS Church membership grew from roughly 2.4 million to 3.4 million. That membership is men, women, and children of all ages, both inside and outside of the United States. I have not yet been able to find the actual United States LDS membership for that period, but I will assume that it was on the order of 75% of the total LDS membership, or about 2 to 2.5 million — just a bit over 1% of the US population.

Furthermore, probably only about 50% (if that much) of that membership within the United States represented actively practicing and attending members. So the ratio of active LDS members living in the US to the US population at large during that period was probably on the order of 0.5%, perhaps less.

So, how many self-identified Mormons were killed in Vietnam? 589 out of 58,193, or just over 1% of all US military deaths. In other words, Mormons were at least proportionately represented by population among US military deaths in Vietnam and were likely over-represented. 

How many Mormons served in uniform for the US military in Vietnam? Assuming they died at the same rate as everyone else, it would be about 27,000 (1% of 2.7 million).

So, yes, Mormons did fight — and die –in Vietnam in numbers at least proportional to their percentage of the US population and likely higher.

As for Mitt Romney, my understanding was that he had a ministerial deferment for his mission and one or more student deferments (which didn’t end until 1971) while attending college. Millions of other students had legitimate student deferments, too, usually in multiples (since you had to reaffirm each year that you were still enrolled in college) — that wasn’t draft dodging, that was the norm, and it actually increased college enrollment during the period in question. ..bruce..

 

Billy Graham breaks with a 30-year policy and appears to endorse Mitt Romney

Current events, LDS Society, Main, Politics, Traditional Christianity

My good friend Dan Blatt over at Gay Patriot send me an e-mail this afternoon which I just saw a little while ago, pointing to a Washington Post article that states that Mitt Romney met with Billy Graham, and Graham for all intents and purposes endorsed him:

Graham then asked Romney what he could do to help.

“Prayer is the most helpful thing you can do for me,” Romney said. “And what you’re planning, what your son has shown me is going to be very very helpful. And I appreciate that. Its going to be terrific.”

Graham, Franklin Graham and Romney then prayed and as the meeting ended, campaign aides said that Graham told Romney: “I’ll do all I can to help you. And you can quote me on that.”

Ever since Watergate, Graham has had a policy in place of not endorsing presidential candidates (cf. this 1980 article). He came close in 2000, meeting with George W. Bush just two days before the election, but even there he restated his policy:

Graham, in Jacksonville, Fla., for an evangelistic campaign in the city’s Alltel Stadium, met with Bush for a private prayer breakfast. In posing for photographs with Bush and his wife, Laura, and his son, Franklin, Graham stated: “I don’t endorse candidates, but I’ve come as close to it as any time in my life.”

The Florida Times-Union, on its Internet site, noted: “The legendary evangelical leader, the Rev. Billy Graham, practically endorsed Bush,” whose race against Vice President Al Gore concludes with Nov. 7’s general election.

Graham, who led in prayer when Bush was inaugurated as governor of Texas, was quoted by the newspaper as saying he had already voted by absentee ballot in his home state of North Carolina. “You can guess who I voted for,” said Graham, who has acknowledged being a lifelong Democrat.

The danger, of course, is that the money quote from Graham is being repeated by Romney aides; on the other hand, I suspect the Washington Post did some verifying of its own.

What is truly telling is the language: “I’ll do all I can to help you.” That’s not a tepid endorsement or a ‘lesser of two evils’ resignation; that’s about as full-throated as Graham can get at his age. I will be interested to see if it helps some of those Evangelicals who are concerned about putting a Mormon in the White House to vote for Romney anyway.  ..bruce..

 

My $0.02 on the Big Announcement

Church administration, LDS Organization, LDS Society, Main

I’ve been doing some thinking about the announcement made today regarding the lowering of ages for young men and young women to leave on full time missions. I think this change will have some significant changes beyond the obvious.

First, it ups the ante in Aaronic Priesthood and Young Women classes, particularly in the former. There’s a well-established pattern in which young men make it through high school and then spend a year or so deciding whether to go on a mission and to get themselves ready to do such. Now that young men can leave on missions immediately after turning 18 and graduating from high school, they will have serious decisions and preparation to make while they are still in high school. Likewise, having young women leave at 19 will, I think, make mission preparation a growing theme in the Young Women’s organization. And for those in both groups who are considering serving a mission, Seminary will take on an additional importance.

Second, and somewhat contradictory, the statements made by Pres. Monson at General Conference and by Elder Holland at the press conference afterwards indicate an official Church observation that there is no single age at which young men should leave on a mission — merely that 18 is the earliest age at which they can leave on a mission. For several decades, the “go-on-a-mission-at-age-19” meme has been a strong cultural milestone within the Church, at least in the US, and young men who choose not to leave on their mission at that age are often looked at with some concern or even disapproval.

But the statements by President Monson and Elder Holland made make it clear that while a young man can leave at 18, he may for various reasons choose to wait longer. The consequence may well be a general acceptance within the members and local leadership of the Church that there is no one set age at which a young man should leave on a mission, but that it is up to him to make a decision on that timing based on his own circumstances, choices, and inspiration. So, for example, while many may choose to go right after high school, others may choose to complete college, vocational training, or military service first, and then serve a mission.

As for the impact on young women in the Church, I can do no better that to repeat the comment made by Becca over at By Common Consent that said, simply, “Fewer child brides; more sister scriptorians.” A glib remark, but one with weight behind it.

[UPDATE — 10/07/12, 1009 MDT]

Reading some of other posts, tweets, and news reports about this change raises a related thought, one echoed in some of those sources: this will cause significant upheaval in long-established and heavily entrenched social patterns and mindsets among LDS youth in high school and college. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade or so.  ..bruce..