A couple of weeks ago we were helping my parents move a lot of their stuff into storage. In the last decade, they have moved at least ten times, and, as I’m sure you know if you have moved frequently, there are some boxes that just get shuffled from one home to the next without ever getting unpacked or sorted. As we were sorting stuff and stacking boxes, I ran across a box of apparently random stuff. In it there was a small metallic container. I picked it out and opened it up to see what it held. Inside there were two old plastic bags, one containing some kind of white stuff and the other a yellow substance, and tucked in with them was an old coin.
My father said that he believed that the white and yellow stuffs were frankincense and myrrh that some friends had brought them back from the Middle East. The coin I vaguely remembered from a family vacation we had taken many years before. It was a road trip from Utah to New York and Washington D. C. and back, stopping along the way to visit sites from U. S. and LDS Church history.
The other morning I was cooking some breakfast when I saw something amazing. Here are a couple of photos I took with my phone followed by a rough transcription of my reaction:
“Whoa, that’s a full egg yolk all the way! Double egg yolk! It’s a double egg yolk, all the way! Whoa that’s so intense. It’s starting even to look like a triple egg yolk! Woah it’s a full on double egg-yolk all the way! What does this mean? It’s so yellow. It’s so yellow and vivid! It’s so beautiful! It’s a double complete egg-yolk right in my frying pan! What does it mean? Tell me! It’s too much! I don’t know what it means. It’s so intense.”
Which reminds me of a quote from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: Read more »
I recently read an essay by Tresa Edmunds entitled “The Next Generation of Mormon Feminism” which was published on Patheos.com as part of a collection of essays on the topic of the future of Mormonism. Sister Edmunds feels that we are at the “brink of a Mormon feminist renaissance,” facilitated by Internet technology which allows like-minded LDS women, and not just academics, to support and protect each other, and to coordinate and evangelize in ways previously unavailable.
She describes young women who are choosing to leave the church rather than “shrink themselves down and become less” to fit into the role prescribed by the Church for women because the “vision we give them of their future is not a future they want.” To confront this issue, she and others have created “Women Advocating for Voice and Equality” (WAVE). Their objective is to change the church.
I empathize a lot with these women. I have watched over the last 6 years, mostly from the sidelines, as these Internet communities of Mormon feminists have grown. They often have heartbreaking stories of abuse and pain, often caused by men who wickedly point to church doctrines in order to justify their unrighteousness.
But this new wave of Mormon Feminism will fail.
Read more »
This past weekend I received a phone call to my Google Voice phone number. Since we were involved with a family wedding at the time, I let it go to voice mail. The Google Voice service attempts to use voice recognition technology to automatically transcribe voice mail messages and then email the text to you, often with humorous consequences. Here is the transcribed voice mail message I received:
Hi. This is Regina work. Sort of. I’m calling to set the record straight about my friend Mike Lee. The truth is the bikes the key part of all the clear waste out of Utah we work together. I’ve got her husband’s Council. He stopped it from being transferred across our highways ad for big story, it does West desert. You may not know but my ex father. Rex week passed away from cancer related to be there with her. So, if you might expect. Mike, please record his commitment to keeping you talk to say from high level nuclear waste a second not anybody who tells you otherwise. If it’s a resort. It’s a last minute mislead attack ads for the role personal game. That’s the truth. Again, I’m not sure of the calling to set the record straight, and I encourage you to join me support likely the upcoming primary election. Thank you. Goodbye just calling to pay for. I found it and I agree.
That’s right, the primary elections are here in Utah once again! Tuesday June 22 is election day so make sure you take the time to vote. If you are registered to vote, you can find out the location where you should vote at the Utah State website. The site will also tell you what party you are currently registered with and let you see samples of both the Ballot for your party and the non-partisan elections for your area. Also check out Abigail Adams Project – UTAH for information about the candidates.
If the erroneously transcribed voice mail above was complete nonsense to you, then don’t worry, a lot of the information that has been published during this campaign has been just as messed up even when properly transcribed.
I don’t typically read LDS Fiction. A lot of it just doesn’t appeal much to me. Those few books that do draw my attention are often either, in my estimation, much too preachy, superficial, and emotionally manipulative on the one hand or on the other veer off into apostasy in order to be edgy, artistic, intellectual, and morally nuanced. Blech.
However, contrary to my usual interests, last month I picked up a newly released book by David J. West entitled Heroes of the Fallen. I had run across West’s blog a few months earlier, and I had been following his posts. I knew that he was an aspiring LDS author, but I hadn’t followed his blog closely enough to realize that he had a book about to be published. When he announced it’s release, I was intrigued by what I had already gathered from his blog. So I headed over to the local bookstore where he was doing a book signing and purchased an author-signed copy. I finished Heroes of the Fallen in about a week.
The book is set in the ancient America of the Book of Mormon, around 320 or so years A.D. This setting is both a benefit and a challenge for the author. West benefits from a pre-existing setting, complete with unusual names and places, a history, language, political system, and religious beliefs. My favorite fantasy writers, like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Lloyd Alexander, drew upon the histories, myths, and legends of the ancient civilizations with which they were familiar, borrowing names, plots, archetypes, and themes in order to lend weight and coherence to their works. In some ways, Heroes of the Fallen benefits similarly from the Book of Mormon. By adapting and extrapolating from the Book of Mormon, West is able to concentrate on filling in the details and bringing to life a fully-realized, exotic, ancient civilization without having to invent it whole-cloth.
I sent the following letter to the delegates from my precinct to the Utah State Republican Nominating Convention which will be held on May 8th, 2010. If any of the candidates get’s 60% of the delegate votes at the convention, the candidate will become the Republican Party nominee without a primary election. I am posting it here as an open letter to all delegates to the state convention.
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Dear delegates,
Thanks for reaching out to ask for my opinion and for all your work to represent us at the state convention.
You might remember me from our neighborhood caucus meeting. I also ran to be a state delegate with the intention of replacing Mr.Bennett. I realize that in our precinct, most of you expressed support for Mr.Bennett, and that professor Frederickson, in particular, is a personal friend for his (though she did emphasize, to her credit, that just because she is a friend does not mean that she agrees with him). I hope you realize that I do not think he is a bad person. He has done what he thinks is right, and that is admirable. I do think, however, that what Mr. Bennett thinks is right and what I think is right are no longer aligned.
Read more »
Looking for something new and different to do for a date or a family outing? Come to the Puppet Variety Show I’ll be MC-ing this Saturday at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem.
The Great Puppet Follies – Puppet Variety Show
Saturday, April 10, 2010
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
$5 adults, $3 Children (ages 3 – 11)
SCERA Center for the Arts
745 South State Street, Orem, UT 84058
Tickets can be purchased at the SCERA ticket office or online at http://www.scera.org
This Easter weekend, April 3th and 4th, 2010, we’ve been enjoying the annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every Conference I try to post links to MP3 audio of the sermons of the modern Apostles and Prophets of Jesus Christ as well as other Internet resources as they become available.
Also, try out the Beta of the church’s new General Conference page:
Since the passage of the health care law on Sunday, a lot of us have challenged its constitutionality. Even before it was passed we suggested that it would violate the constitution. But since it’s passage I have seen a lot of friends and family who support the law say they don’t understand why we think it is unconstitutional. They often cite the “general welfare clause” of the constitution and laws that require automobile insurance to justify the law under the constitution.
Up front let me say, as I have before, that the current health care system is the pits, unsustainable, and that insurance companies are corrupt. That insurance coverage is intertwined with your specific employer, that it is so much more expensive for individuals, that people are denied coverage because of preexisting conditions, and that we pay for routine care through insurance claims (which is like paying for gas for your car through auto insurance claims), are all terrible, illogical aspects of what we currently have. It needs to be overhauled.
I love reading classic literature in the original spelling. A few years ago one of my best friends gave me a facsimile edition of the 1611 edition of the King James translation of the Bible. Knowing that a great deal of Tyndale’s translation ended up in the King James version, for my birthday last year I got myself a copy of the 1526 edition of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament in the original spelling. I love them both. For me, reading through these books is a fun way to learn about how our language works as well as gain insight into the history of the Gospel.
The other day I was reading through this copy of Tyndale’s New Testament and I found the following fascinating construction in St. Mark chapter 10:
And he sayde unto them: Whosoever putteth awaye his wyfe, and maryeth another, breaketh wedlocke to herwarde.
In modern English we would generally use the phrase “toward her” or depending on our dialect, “towards her.” But here Tyndale places the -ward suffix, indicating direction, on the pronoun!
A petard is a small bomb used to blow up gates or walls of an enemy’s fortifications. William Shakespeare coined the phrase “Hoist with his own petard,” in his play Hamlet:
I’ve realized that the volume of content here on Sixteen Small Stones has been in stead decline for some time. As I’ve thought about the reasons, I’ve decided that my posts have become much too narrowly focused, and so I have been writing only when I have something to say regarding religion or politics and when I have the energy to distill my thoughts into an essay.
Originally, Sixteen Small Stones was meant to be a place for me to write about any of my many interests and starting now I am going to return to that objective. I will still be writing about politics and religion when I have something to say, but it will not be the only focus as it has been lately.
Back in October of 2009, Daniel Bartholomew and I announced our ScriptureLog project, an open source plugin that turns WordPress into a collaborative scripture study platform. At that time only we only had The Book of Mormon available.
Then in November, we released an update to add the Old Testament.
When we released the Book of Mormon, I had taken the time to develop a Book of Mormon outline, and I wanted to outline the Old Testament as well.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. If you’ve followed this blog for a significant time you know that I have doubts about the compatibility of Darwinism and the belief in God as the Creator.
I remember as a high-school biology student, in addition to various other evolutionary facts, our teacher showed us the famous Heackel drawings of the developmental stages of embryos. He made us all memorize the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And he insisted that it was a scientific “fact” that proved that Darwin’s theory was undeniably true. It was all very convincing and I believed him. As a faithful member of the LDS church I reasoned that “evolution” was simply the device which God employed to bring to pass the creation. This was in 1989 and little did I know that the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis had, even then, been long discredited.
The Obama Administration has updated the White House website to include visitors logs. This is a wonderful development and even though I don’t generally agree with many of the things that the administration is doing, this kind of transparency should be applauded. We need more transparency.
However, I thought it was super funny that the service that they have chosen to use to publish the visitor log data on the web, Socrata, has a button right at the top of the display that says “Socialize This.” Almost every other service in the world uses the word “Share” on their links and buttons for posting information to social networks like twitter or facebook.
It’s a Freudian slip from the collective administration subconscious.
