Seasons Change

Contrary to what some people think, the bloggernacle isn’t a long-running magazine like Sunstone or Dialogue, with a steady cast of characters and articles. It’s more like a student ward; blink and you’ll miss it. Enjoy the interactions now, because tomorrow half of the participants will be gone, and today’s particular mix of participants will never again be recreated. The moving finger writes awfully fast on the internet.

Technical Note

I’m going to be doing a few things on the back end. I’ll try not to crash the site. At least, not for too long of a time. (And no, RJ, we’re not upgrading to slashcode. Sorry. I know, you’re going to give this post a -1).

The Greatest Mormon Halloween Costume Ever

Via frequent T&S commenter, former guest-blogger, and all-around well-connected guy Jonathan Green, comes this, a priceless document of what happens when Mormonism collides with modern American Halloween festivities. The man in the costume is Brother Bill Atkinson, and the costume itself…well, see for yourself. And enjoy.

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.

We’re Number One!

Some google searches that bring people to Times and Seasons, along with the google rank of the site. “Times and Seasons”: #1 on the list of google results. (i.e., if you go to google and type in “Times and Seasons” we’re the first result that comes back.) LDS blog: #1 (But only #3 for “Mormon blog“!)

My Big Fat Mormon Aesthetics Post

For months now, I’ve been contemplating a series of posts on the possibility of a Mormon aesthetic. I’ve been rereading Kant and Rousseau and Augustine, arguing with Michael Hicks in my head, and contemplating my illustrious career as the great one who definitively articulated the theoretical framework of a Mormon (musical) aesthetic. Last night, sitting in the dark at Stake Conference, I abandoned the notion of writing that piece. Completely. And joyfully.

My Conversion Story

The reason that I don’t like to tell my conversion story is that it is boring. If I were to appropriate the famous Joseph Smith line, I would have to modify it thusly: “No man knows my history. . . . I don’t blame any one for not staying awake through my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have stayed awake through it myself.” So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Crisis and Compost

You will be happy to hear that the Oman marriage has weathered a massive marital crisis. It was tough for a while, but we are doing well now. As you might expect, the dispute centered on compost.

Blogging and Lying

Imagine that you and a couple of friends started a group blog — called it Heaven’s Banner — in which you all pretended to be fictional people having really bizarre conversations (OK, so perhaps this wouldn’t take too much pretending). You and your friends work to create a semblance of warped verisimilitude, and then watch the show. Here is an interesting question: Are you liars?

Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press

I see that Slate now puts the odds of Harriet Miers confirmation at 70%. Silly Slate, don’t they know that niche is taken? As I’ve mentioned before, the best bet, literally, is to follow the gamblers. And as of press time, they are betting that Miers has a 3 in 10 chance of making it to the Big Bench. Want a second opinion? It’s pretty much the same as the first.

Influence in all the wrong places…

From time to time Mormons face various forms of legal and political harassment. Sometimes this happens in the United States, but as events in Venezuela dramatically illustrate the legal challenges that the Church faces abroad are generally much more extreme than those that it faces in the U.S. One result is that there is a real mismatch between the Church’s challenges and its resources.

Meanwhile, Back on the Farm…

…it’s been a great year, one of the best my father can remember. The Fox family farm brought in over 90,000 bushels of wheat, including about 30,000 bushels of our high-protein dark northern spring (averaging about 80 bushels an acre for the latter, a particularly good crop). Some wild oat grass got into part of the farm, cutting down on the yield from about 400 out of our total 1800 acres, but otherwise there is little to complain about. The Amoths–a Mennonite family that have managed and farmed land for our family for three generations, and soon four–have every reason to be proud.