People unfamiliar with LDS leadership succession practices might be disappointed to discover just how, well, boring it is. No large scale voting. No top-secret colored smoke meetings. I think this has led LDS presidents to engage humor when addressing the topic.
Maybe the two categorizations I present in this blog post’s title aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can definitely say which of the two comes closest to characterizing the God I like to envision.
I’m excited to be a dad. I’m scared to be a dad. It’s going to change my life unlike any other event I’ve experienced. There’s no going back.
Something I like about being Mormon is our emphasis on praying using our own words as opposed to fixed language. But what can we do when spontaneous prayers feel hollow or empty?
Maybe we focus on gratitude because we feel guilty—and scared. We know at a deep level that we’re ludicrously wealthy and healthy. We’re also terrified of that ease and comfort disappearing. So we read books and articles about gratitude as a cardinal virtue not because we genuinely feel grateful, but because we’re afraid of how God might smite us if we don’t.
The following is taken verbatim from Greg Prince’s biography David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. It recounts some of President McKay’s concerns with the temple endowment ceremony, particularly with how younger people might interpret it. Ever since the endowment was introduced by Joseph Smith, who adopted many symbols from masonry into it, it has been modified numerous times—usually by removing portions and shortening the ceremony—in order to better accommodate the changing sensibilities of church membership. This excerpt sheds light on the thought process behind some of these changes.
This post is adapted from a talk I recently gave to my home congregation about the enabling power of the Atonement.
Ever since Mitt Romney declared his intentions to become the Republican nominee for president in 2008, one of the chief criticisms directed at him has been that he isn’t ideologically pure enough, that he isn’t a “true” conservative, or that he’s changed positions on key issues too many times. In other words, he’s weak on Republican principles. But is that necessarily a bad thing?
My patriarchal blessing says I was born into the Church to good parents because of my valiance in the premortal life. But I remember thinking at the time, “I was given every chance in the world to succeed and blossom based on my fortunate birth circumstances. If anything, God thought that I was weak and needed extra help to ensure I didn’t fail.”
The following is a partial transcript I made of an excellent Mormon Stories podcast interview with Terryl Givens, one of the most intellectually interesting and thoughtful Mormons I know of. Here he discusses his view on how and why religious belief must be a choice and not simply something that’s obviously false or obviously true.