Christianity and Women’s Rights
Recently I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Ann Braude, a scholar of the religious history of American women, on the topic of the role Christianity played in the fight for women’s rights in the United States. I’ve heard Professor Braude speak in the past (once to Mormon women at an Exponent II series in my area) and have very much enjoyed listening to her ideas. Caveat: I’m relying here on hastily scribbled notes and can’t vouch that they accurately encapsulate Braude’s views.  Gender, argued Braude, continues to present Christianity with an unresolved theological crisis; although Christians consistently assert that men and w

Missing Mother Education
In one of many recent conversations we’ve had about raising children, my mother recalled attending mother education classes once a month as part of the old weekday Relief Society curriculum (which existed before the block schedule was implemented in 1980). She said there were always two choices: a mother education class and an alternative, for those who weren’t currently raising children–and, I suppose, for anyone who simply didn’t want to be educated in motherhood that week, for whatever reason. Of course a mother education curriculum can be beyond awkward in many contexts. One of my first church callings was as the mother education instructor in my singles’

More Church President Probabilities
As a follow-up to my last post discussing who in the Quorum of the Fifteen would likely be Church President at some point, I made some figures that show Quorum members’ changing probabilities over time for the last 60 years. (A description of where these probabilities come from is in the previous post.) A few notes about the figures: Each Quorum member’s line is labeled with as short a label as possible, which for most of them is just a last na

Halloween and Ritual Boundary Crossing
Mormons tell more jokes about alcohol than anyone I know. There’s a simple reason for this, I think, and it’s not (in my reading of it) that many faithful Mormons are on the verge of losing their grips on the teetotalers’ wagon. Quite the contrary: the humor of such jokes derives specifically from the transgression of important cultural boundaries. It’s only funny to joke about heading over to the local pub for a Jack Daniels after the General Relief Society broadcast because such an outing is forbidden, highly improbable, and entirely incongruous with the tenor of the evening. If such an event were an ordinary occurrence, the joke would have no resonance.* One could argue that,

Nursery Etiquette, or, What I Wish Others Knew About My Calling
As Mormons we are theologically committed to experiential, bodily knowledge. And we all know there are some things you never really understand until you’re actually in the trenches, dealing with a situation as it unfolds on the ground. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned in the several times I’ve served as a nursery worker. (1) Nursery is not day care. Please don’t drop off your precocious sixteen-month-old (or worse, your misbehaving five-year-old!) because you’re–very understandably–tired of chasing her around the halls and you just know she’ll be fine, she won’t cry when you leave, and she’ll love th