How I spend my Sunday nights, and what it means for the future of Mormon thought.
Author: Rosalynde Welch
I grew up in Southern California, the daughter of Russ and Christie Frandsen and eldest of their eleven children (including Gabrielle, Naomi, Brigham, Rachel, Jacob, Benjamin, Abraham, Christian, Eva, and Isaac, in case you're wondering if I'm related to that Frandsen you used to know). In 1992 I graduated from La Canada High School and started at BYU, where it didn't take me long to switch from a pre-med to an English major. In 1993 and again in 1994, I spent several months in England studying literature and theater with, among other able teachers, Eugene England. I developed interests in Renaissance English literature, contemporary critical theory, and creative writing, and wrote my Honors thesis on composition pedagogy. I served in the Porto, Portugal Mission from 1996-1997. I graduated from BYU in 1998 with a degree in English, and married John Welch later that week. John and I attended graduate school at the University of California at San Diego, and I was awarded a PhD in Early Modern Literature from that institution in 2004. I studied under Louis Montrose and dissertated under the title "Placing Private Conscience in Early Modern England," combining my interests in Renaissance literature, religion, and poststructuralist theory. During our years in San Diego, our daughter Elena Rachel was born in 2001, and our son John Levin Frandsen in 2003. We moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 2004, where John is an oncology fellow and I stay at home with our children, including since 2006 our daughter Mara Gwen. I currently serve as Relief Society instructor and choir pianist in our ward. I also maintain eclectic interests in backpacking, piano, food writing, travel and jogging.
LDS Sessions at the Society for Biblical Literature
Mormons make an appearance at the important SBL conference.
Crunch the Catalog
The hidden meaning of the Deseret Book Christmas Catalog.
Baby Daddy
Why are babies busting all over?
The Seer at the Microscope
From time to time I’ve heard it delicately suggested that the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church curriculum is, not to put too fine a point on it, bland pablum, and stale, to boot. These pundits have not read last week’s lesson.
What’s the Worst Halloween Candy?
I’m pretty sure I discovered it at Big Lots yesterday: Tweeterz, which consist (according to the packaging) of candy-coated triangular shaped bits of Twizzlers. Any contenders for the title?
Hello, Goodbye
Actually, goodbye first.
Times & Seasons Welcomes Jenny Webb
We’re pleased to have Jenny Webb blogging with us during the next two weeks.
BYU Studies Blogs
A couple of interesting blurbs appear in the “Study and Faith” newletter accompanying the most recent issue of BYU Studies.
Parsing Parity
Taryn Nelson-Seawright has originated a lively thread on BCC presenting some new data on the gender disparity in Mormon Studies and inviting ideas on the reasons and remedies for that disparity.
September 2
This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of my youngest brother’s birth and death. In his honor, I’m posting my mother’s narrative of his brief life in ours.
Power and Authority
On Kaimi’s Ensign thread, a conversation about the kinds and quantities of power exercised by the sexes has been simmering. Julie suggested that we open another thread for that discussion, and I’ve obliged.
Cookbook Zion
I gave a talk yesterday; the text is pasted herein. It’s long, but easy reading, I promise.
Garment (di)Strict
The current issue of BYU Studies publishes for the first time a very interesting letter from one of the first Hawaiian converts, Jonathan (Ionatana) Napela, to the Prophet Brigham Young.
Wishing Well, Penny
A dear friend of mine recently wrote to me, confiding that she’s been coming to the slow and vertiginous realization that she’s never had a strong testimony of the gospel, despite a life of exemplary activity in and service to the Church. With her permission, I’ve shared my response to her letter below.
Quote—Preside—Unquote
In the comments to Julie’s dialogue with Randy B. on the meaning of “preside” in Mormon discourse, she issued (and re-issued!) a challenge to any interested reader: find a statement from a 20th-century Church leader showing that our concept of presiding has teeth. Never one to pass up a challenge—particularly one that will allow me to both avoid unpacking my suitcases and escape the frustrations of potty-training my son, at least for a few minutes—I spent some time with my LDS Library 2006 CD-ROM this morning.
Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker
I’ve brought my children west from the alluvial soil of Missouri to the sandy chapparal of Southern California for a few weeks. The first-order pleasures of being home include conversation in our domestic dialect marked at every intersection by shared memory and emotional habit, and free babysitting. Among the second order pleasures, though, are the stacks of wedding announcements at the counter to be perused at lunch and the piles of old Church News issues beside the recliner.
And Who Is My Neighbor?
This morning the five-year-old was first, in the kitchen just before nine.
Meal Deals
I’ll admit it: I really am more likely to bring my scriptures to church if I know I’ll get a cookie for it.
The Vicar’s Garden in the Global South
This week’s New Yorker features an interesting article by Peter Boyer on the crisis facing the Episcopalian Church in the United States after a New Hampshire diocese elected the openly-gay Gene Robinson as bishop. (This post, by the way, is not principally about gay issues.)
Mara Gwen
I’m very pleased to present the second Times & Seasons baby of the month, my daughter Mara Gwen.
Bloomblogging
Mid-march is the season of the burning bush: the crocuses are done, the daffodils are almost on, but for now it’s the forsythia that owns the day.
Notice: Dr. Richard Bennett on the Missouri Experience and Mormon Militias
Dr. Richard E. Bennett, Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, will be the featured speaker at the Miller-Eccles Study Group tonight, February 24, and tomorrow night, February 25, at two locations in Southern California on the topic of 19th Century American militias and Mormon militias.
Call and Response
Last night at 6:30 PM Pacific time, most members of my family dialed in to a conference call to Provo, Utah—to the lobby of Stover Hall on BYU campus, to be specific. My brother Benjamin—seventh child, sixth freshman at BYU, fifth missionary, third son, and a few days shy of nineteen—was about to open his mission call.
At Sixes and Sevens
The high point in my Church career so far came at age two, when I stood and recited the first four Articles of Faith from memory in Sacrament Meeting . Alas, early precocity did not usher in mature perspicacity, and I confess that these days, while I can still recite most of the Articles as stand-alones with some accuracy, I’m hard pressed to string them together in any recognizable series. (I can, however, rattle off all the books of the Old Testament in order to the tune of “Praise to the Man,” thanks to the heroic efforts of my Sunday School 14 teacher.)
A Quick and Easy Way to Tell if Something You’re About to Say is Patronizing
Notice: Joseph Smith at the Library of Congress
Read-gifting
So which books molted beneath your tree and emerged Christmas morning? Let’s have them all, the good, the bad, the remaindered and the regifted.
Transfermations
So my sister Rachel, having graduated the MTC, has just had her first real transfer.
Kinds and Reasons
I recently read an article by Robert Winston, a British writer and television presenter, exploring the implications of evolution for religion and asking whether our earliest ancestors gained some competitive advantage from their shared religious feelings. Winston’s stuff was just okay, I thought; it was something else that caught my attention.