I don’t know if this is a temporary error or a permanent shift in policy, but the audio mp3 and video mp4 files of the Priesthood Sessions of General Conference are now available on the conference archive pages of the official church website:
Last fall I broke the news that the church was considering allowing members to watch the Priesthood Session live this year by using the planned LDS Account login functionality. The LDS Account system was finalized and released earlier this year and rolled out to a number of church websites.
Making the audio and video available after the Conference Report Ensign magazine has been publish may represent a new policy for Priesthood session media.
We’ll see if the church makes an official statement.
(Hat tip to reader David S for the tip)
Background: Member Driven Missionary Work
In the April 2009 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elder L. Tom Perry, who is one of the Twelve Apostles of the church, spoke about the responsibility of every member of the church to facilitate the missionary effort to teach the Restored Gospel. He urged us to step up “to do a job that is rightfully ours and for which we are better suited” than the missionaries. He urged us to open our mouths
to our friends and family. (Read the whole address: “Bring Souls Unto Me“, April 2009)
A few months prior to his conference address, Elder Perry presided over our stake conference. I had the opportunity to attend the priesthood leadership training meeting where he introduced us in more detail to the church’s vision for member driven missionary work and reactivation. Without creating any new manuals, establishing any new organizations , or requiring any additional meetings, he told us that the church intended to radically alter the work of building up the church through missionary work.
He then introduced us to a ward mission process by which wards and stakes will prayerfully identify teaching opportunities for the full-time missionaries. Lessons to both less active members and non members will be treated as equally important. Increasingly, members will be expected to drive the work forward by sharing the Gospel.
The church has known for many years that the most effective missionary system is driven by member referrals, but officially shifting the responsibility for finding new people to teach onto the stakes and wards, and holding them accountable for it, is an important, fundamental change.
My Revolutionary Proposal
Elder Perry’s words reminded me of an idea I had at the end of my own mission that dovetails perfectly with this new effort. Since his presentation I haven’t been able to get it off my mind. The more I think about it, the more I think that it needs to happen. Here it is:
Sacrament Meeting Invitations
Yes, I think that Sacrament Meeting Invitations could revolutionize the member missionary effort. Here’s how:
In this post I intend to draw a controversial analogy between the subprime mortgage and credit crisis and the resulting economic upheaval and the potential societal upheaval that could result from the redefinition of marriage.
To set things up, let me share my personal experience with the economic crisis.
This weekend, April 4th and 5th, 2009, is the annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where the modern Apostles and Prophets of Jesus Christ will speak. Every Conference I post links to MP3 audio and other Internet resources as they become available.
For many months now I have been working on a project involving the Book of Mormon with Daniel Bartholomew, which we will be unveiling in the near future. As part of that project, I have compiled an outline of the textual structure of the Book of Mormon. I looked for an existing outline, but couldn’t find anything extensive enough for my needs. I am making it available here for anyone interested (as a PDF document):
I compiled the outline as a way to help me understand the Book of Mormon better by identifying some of the organizational boundaries, voices, and structure of the text.
We don’t do traditional T.V. in our home. We have a television, but it isn’t hooked up to cable. It isn’t even connected with traditional broadcast television channels. It doesn’t have any channels; not a single one. And it has been that way for the entire ten years we’ve been married.
Instead, we have a DVD player and a VCR. We own some DVDs and VHS tapes, but not a lot. In the past, we have actively chosen what we will watch by renting it from the local library or blockbuster. If friends recommended a certain television show, we would wait for it to come out on DVD and then rent it.
Increasingly, however, our video entrainment is coming through the internet through sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com.
Last year I discovered that Hulu included the excellent LDS Film Saints and Soldiers among the feature films available to watch for free on their website. A few months ago I noticed that it was listed among the most popular films for the day, and have been watching its popularity ever since.
Saints and Soldiers is currently the 2nd most popular feature film of all time on Hulu (behind the Jim Carey movie Liar Liar). It is also the 4th most popular film this month, the 7th most popular film this week, and the 12th most popular film today.
In an interesting article published in the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer argues that within the next 10 years there will be a major collapse of Evangelical Christianity. Spencer, who describes himself as a “postevangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality” says:
“Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.”
…
“I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches.”
…
“We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.”
“We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.”
I’m afraid that whomever wins the day in the California Proposition 8 legal battle, we all lose in the long run. I’ve been trying to follow the arguments presented by both sides to the California Supreme Court and while I support Proposition 8, I think the arguments being made by both sides are pretty dangerous. A lot of the argument goes back to the fundamental arguments made during the formation of the U. S. Constitution and then solidified during the Civil War.
On the one had we have democracy which is the rule of the majority. The government derives its just powers from the people. So a government has to be fundamentally democratic to wield any power justly. A government that foists the desires of a minority over the majority would be an unjust oligarchy, and tyranny of the minority.
However, the founders were also very suspicious of pure democracy because more often than not it devolved into a tyranny of the majority, where the majority unjustly tramples the rights of the minority.
So while keeping the government fundamentally democratic, they structured the government with a series of checks and balances based on distributing democracy to competing scopes that would prevent the states with large populations from tyrannical rule over the states with small populations, while still allowing government action to be derived justly from the people. They called this a Democratic Republic.
In the case of Prop 8 the majority has ruled to uphold traditional marriage norms through democratic vote.
Those who favor same-sex marriage lost at the ballot box and view this as an act of tyranny of the majority, so they have turned to the courts to try to overthrow it.
Those who favor traditional marriage view the court case as an act of oligarchy, a usurpation of the democracy from which the government derives its powers.
Now we come to the arguments made by the lawyers before the California Supreme Court.
As the internet continues to transform the way we consume and even create entertainment, it is interesting to see how members of the LDS church are using the medium to create Mormon-specific entertainment distributed on the web.
As is usual with the web, not all of the content is worth promoting, or even consistently worth promoting.
In addition to blogging, we’ve seen the beginnings of a couple of LDS-oriented comic strips.
The 9th Ward is posted most Fridays by father-son team Rick and Ryan Goldsberry, who live in California, and features humorous vignettes related to Mormon culture.
Zarahemla Times is also posted Fridays by Kevin Beckstrom. It’s about a family living in the suburbs of Zarahemla in the time frame of about the end of Alma or Helaman in the Book of Mormon. Interesting in that it employs modern LDS terminology, such as the Relief Society, anarchronistically to an ancient setting.
So with blogging, podcasts, and now comics, we arrive at the next step in web-based LDS Entertainment: The Book of Jer3miah.
The names we use are powerful. In the scriptures, as well as many ancient cultures, new names are often given to individuals and groups in order to separate them from others, join them together in a common covenant, or indicate a significant change.
In the Book of Mormon, King Benjamin gives his people a new name . Later, those Lamanites who listen to the teaching of Ammon and his brothers choose to rename themselves Anti-Nephi-Lehies to distinguish themselves from the others while still retaining their unique identity.
If you have read my blog for a while, you will know that I I have a great deal of compassion for those members of the church who struggle with same-sex attraction, and I admire the faithfulness of those who despite their weaknesses, choose to bridle their passions and remain true to the teachings of the prophets. (see my previous posts here and here).
The names “gay” and “homosexual” are problematic because they describe such a range of behaviors and feelings. It is impossible for someone who hears another describe himself as “gay” to distinguish whether they mean that they are are a practicing homosexual or simply struggle with same-sex attraction but purposefully abstains from homosexual practices in favor of traditional morality.
David Benkof, who was formerly a practicing homosexual before returning to the religious practice of Judaism and becoming celibate, recently published an article in the Jerusalem Post in which he proposes a new name for people with same-sex attraction but who choose to live according to tradition by remaining celibate or entering into traditional, hetero-sexual marriages.
DELTA stands for “Deliberately Living Traditionally” and is the name he proposes for those who choose to live traditionally to distinguish themselves from “gays.”
Over this last weekend, the hosting provider for Sixteen Small Stones experienced a major hardware outage. While they were able to get most of the websites they host back up within a couple of hours, one segment of their system remained offline for over 40 hours. Unfortunately my websites are hosted on that segment. If you tried to visit during that time you would have seen a 403 / forbidden error.
In the future, if my blog goes down, you can check my twitter account for updates about what is happening.
While every hosting provider has occasional outages, this is the first time I have been down for such a long time. At least it happened over a weekend when traffic is usually lower anyway. Hopefully things will remain stable now.
A depressing new study by Benjamin Edelman entitled Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment? in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reveals that states with larger conservative populations have greater numbers of people who subscribe to web-based pornographic services. The state with the most subscriptions per 1000 people, most subscriptions per 1000 home internet users, and the most subscriptions per 1000 broadband internet users (1.69/2.49/5.47) is Utah. This article from New Scientist provides a summary.
People are likely to ascribe this fact to hypocricy and sexual repression among conservatives and religious people, especially Latter-day Saints. But may I suggest that we look a little closer at the issue before jumping to that conclusion. Are there other factors that could be contributing to this trend?
BISHOP, BISHOPRIC
(This entry contains some original observations about the word Bishopric that I have not encountered elsewhere, so please read beyond the first few paragraphs even if you are familiar with LDS Bishops and Bishoprics)
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Bishop refers to the individual priesthood authority who directs the affairs of a single congregation. In contrast, in the Catholic church a bishop oversees multiple congregations in a group called a diocese, similar to what latter-day saints call a Stake President.
A Bishop in the LDS Church is not paid for his service, but manages the affairs of his congregation in his spare time in addition to holding a normal full-time job to support himself and his own family. Bishops are called from among the members of the congregation who hold the Melchizedek Priesthood to serve for a number of years, after which they are “released” to return to the congregation and replaced by another. So in any congregation there is only one bishop, but there may be several former bishops among the congregation.
As many of you know, one of my many projects is the Maxed Out Puppet Comedy Troupe. We perform fairly frequently throughout Utah Country, and will be performing for the annual Puppetry Festival at the Salt lake County Library on Saturday, March 7 at 2:30 p.m.
We are also members of the Puppetry Arts Guild of Utah which hosts an annual puppetry workshop in April where you can learn all about puppets, puppet making, puppet performance, and see performances by puppeteers from all over Utah.
The Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe, based at the University of Missouri, will be performing at the Pardoe Theatre at Brigham Young University in Provo, on January 16th and 17th.
Bunraku is an amazing form of traditional Japanese Puppetry, more properly called ningyō jōruri.
Martin Holman, is the coordinator of the Japanese studies program at University of Missouri and the director of the troupe. He studied Japanese at BYU, and is the first non-Japanese to ever be trained in and perform ningyō jōruri in Japan.
Holman contacted us through our Utah Puppetry website. ” We are, to my knowledge, the only troupe outside Japan that performs traditional Japanese puppetry,” he said. He wanted to clarify that he was slightly misquoted in the BYU press release.
Sixteen Small Stones is now integrated with Facebook using Facebook Connect. Now anyone with a Facebook account can leave comments on my articles here without having to create a new account and remember yet another password.
Just click the Facebook button in the comments section of any post and approve Sixteen Small Stones for use with your facebook account, and you will be able to leave a comment on any article whenever you are logged into Facebook.
First time comments will still be subject to moderation, but once your first comment has been approved, you should be able to comment at will.
Let me know what you think and if you have any trouble with it.