I had a conversation recently with a wonderful young woman, who, ready to embark on university study declared to me that there was nothing that she could see in Mormon theology that excluded and undermined women. I was heartened that she was so faithful but I’m not convinced that her literalness will last much into her thirties. I was thinking (with fingers crossed ) that one day she will remember what I told her about being an important vanguard in... Read more
I love my city. My family’s bones are here, laid across the plains, generation upon generation. Street names in North Canterbury bear record of my family’s presence. My mother’s ancestors, like those of many others’, were settler pioneers who found their way here from England, Ireland, Wales, and Germany, never to return. They left traces of themselves across the countryside and across the city that only a trained and familial eye could recognise. It’s a beautiful city with a wonderful... Read more
Last week I took a group of teacher education students to one of our local marae. Marae are uniquely Māori places which usually consist of a meeting house featuring ornate curve linear carvings that tell stories of ancestors and their alliances. Many marae have painted kowhaiwhai and weaved tukutuku (Google it) and are aesthetically unique and beautiful. They are sacred venues involving a complex ritual of welcome and belonging. This makes it an ideal site to unsettle the ground of... Read more
Nathan is an Aries. This makes him infuriatingly certain. His position on matters political, economic, religious, domestic, sporting and so forth are brazenly assured. Last week I sent him a text quoting a Mormon Matters podcast panelist Dr Phillip Barlow who said: ‘The opposite of faith is not doubt, its certainty.” His response was as follows: “Bollocks. I’d take Jim Faust over some academic from u of u on this 1. Find a thesaurus. Look up certainty. You’ll find in... Read more
John Dehlin (of Mormon Stories Podcast fame) has recently published the first batch of results from his survey on Mormon Disaffection. It makes for some telling reading. Dehlin received survey responses from over 3000 Mormons who no longer believe the church to be true. Despite the fact that many of us have been led to think that people leave the church because they are aching for a Pinot, they’ve been offended by the Ward Clerk, or they have a wee... Read more
Prayer for Mormons is an important ritual and symbol of our faith, and alongside our daily habits of prayer are some very grand expectations of revelation. Joseph Smith started all of this. When he prayed, the heavens opened and revelation poured in. And he expected the people to be similarly inspired and revelatory. Any argument that he was territorial in the revelatory department is patently defensible. He loved it when people got revelations (but he loved it better when... Read more
A couple of years ago I went to my Bishop and spilled my guts about my peevishness over the way the church manages the donations and contributions of its members. At the time there was a lot of hoopla in the US about the City Creek Mall redevelopment and the estimated $3.5 billion spent by the church on a high end retail outfit with executive condominiums didn’t seem like a very godly enterprise to me. He just shrugged his... Read more
Our kids came to us in dribs and drabs. Our eldest (18 years old) is our only biological child. It irked me for some years that we couldn’t spontaneously produce the kind of sizable brood that holds up Fast and Testimony meeting each month. But when our boy was 10 we kind of got into a rhythm and figured we should just exploit our unique advantage. We were living in Taiwan at the time and were about to head off... Read more
My musing over the last week week have lead me to write this post about sex and Mormons. I’m a product of an illicit sexual liaison between a less active Mormon boy and my teen mother who joined the church after getting pregnant with me. I grew up being called both a bastard and illegitimate. My identity was effectively constituted within a discourse about sex, not just in the church but outside as well. I remember however being somewhat... Read more
I love Mormon hymns. They are the songs of my childhood and my youth. I can’t play much else on the piano but I’ve taught myself to play every hymn in the hymnbook. I’ve played ‘guess that hymn’ at firesides, I’ve done solos in stake conference, sang ‘God of our Fathers’ truly badly with my ward choir on National Radio and played a natty wee game when bored in sacrament meeting (suggested by a friend with the then initials NW... Read more
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