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Author: Kristine Haglund
Kristine blogged at Times and Seasons from 2003 to 2006. Further biographical information can be found here.
A Hymn for Palm Sunday
My song is love unknown, My Saviour’s love to me, Love to the loveless shown, That they might lovely be. O who am I, That for my sake, My Lord should take Frail flesh and die.
A Funny Thing Happened at the Forum on Mormon Feminism
Yes, really. Actual fun–even laughing. With feminists!
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Professor to speak on Mormon Feminism
For Boston-based Naclers: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will be speaking this Sunday in a panel discussion addressing the question “Where Have All the Mormon Feminists Gone?” Other panelists are Maxine Hanks, Kate Holbrook, and me. The event will be at Quincy House at Harvard University at 7:30 p.m. (The answer? Gone for bloggers, every one. When will they ever learn…?)
What about the children?
One of the most distressing things about being a parent is the realization that you cannot control your children’s world forever. Inevitably, the institutions in which you allow or encourage them to participate will introduce ideas with which you do not agree, and which, in some instances, are contrary to the gospel of Christ. This is especially unnerving when the institution in question is the Church.
December into May: Two Christmas Poems
The weather in Boston is positively balmy–sunny and 45 degrees. This, of course, reminds me of a poem:
Weeping, Singing, Remembering–A November Homily
This is the text of a talk I gave in Sacrament Meeting around this time last year. Warning: it’s LONG, and it quite predictably incorporates the John Donne quote I force upon everyone every Thanksgiving.
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.
Sukkot
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur get all the press around here, but one of my favorite Jewish holidays usually sneaks in just before or just after the high holidays. This year in particular, with news of floods and earthquakes filling my heart and head, the festival of Sukkot seems especially worthy of
A Bloggernacle Beach Party
Boston area Bloggernackers, save the date: you and your families are invited to a beach party/barbecue at my house Saturday, July 30 from mid-afternoon (2-3ish) until whenever. Dinner around 6. We have room for weekend guests, too, if anybody wants to drive up from NYC or down from Montreal, or as one intrepid bloggernaclite is doing, drive out from Idaho in a U-Haul! E-mail me (Kristine at timesandseasons dot org) for directions.
Swimming Lessons
My children have been taking swimming lessons. Naturally, this provides me with both motive and opportunity for asking self-indulgently angsty existential questions.
The Patience of Hope and the Labor of Love
As a child, I loathed Mother’s Day. This was because I spent most of the other days of the year resenting my mother, and tormenting her in the peculiarly horrid ways that bright children can torment their parents.
Home Teaching, Hopkins, Haunting
NOTE: I wrote most of this yesterday, but thought perhaps it was too sentimental. This morning it seems horribly appropriate, as I’m praying (and crying) for Geoff’s little boy. Kaimi’s post puts me in mind of a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (“golly,” you say, “it doesn’t take much to get her going, does it?”): The Lantern out of Doors Sometimes a lantern moves along the night. That interests our eyes. And who goes there? I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where, With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Peter
Today is my son Peter’s birthday. He is named for Peter in the New Testament, because, while Jesus may have loved John the most, I love Peter best of all. I love him because he is so willing to get wet.
Primary in the Age of the X-Box
Sheri Lynn’s plaintive comment has me thinking about the difficulties of teaching Primary with today’s stimulus-saturated kids.
The Divinity of the Church, Expressed as a Percentage
NOTE: I started this a few days ago, then decided it was dumb and put it aside. It may still be dumb, but it does seem relevant to how I think about the issues raised by Frank’s posting of Elder Eyring’s talk, and, I think it’s tangentially related to Nate’s Blogscar-nominated “On Authority” (for which you should all go vote at Intellecxhibitionist [sic]). And, alas, it should now be revised to begin, “My second-most-recent scuffle…” My latest scuffle with the longsuffering John Fowles has me thinking again about how to explain myself to people who think about the Church differently than I do, even if we feel similarly about it.
Snow Day
I just found out that my children will be home from school again tomorrow. Turns out that there’s no place to put the 3 feet of snow that fell on Saturday and Sunday.
Ahem
We interrupt this week’s sparring match on gender roles to alert you to something truly momentous in the bloggernacle–get on over to The Impossible-to-Spell Blog to cast your votes in the 2004 Blogscar Awards!
Divorce
Despite our neverending discussions of various sorts of marriage, I don’t think we’ve had an extended conversation about divorce.
Shameless Huckstering: Ephraim’s Harp
On an earlier thread, someone opined that I am precisely the sort of snob for whom it is impossible to select a musical gift that will be appreciated. I want to report that two brilliant, generous and very thoughtful friends have actually done it, even without reference to an Amazon wish list. The CD is Saints Bound for Heaven, recorded by a Mormonish group called Ephraim’s Harp in NYC, and it’s great stuff.
Christmas Music for Choir Nerds, Part III
My first two posts were mostly devoted to large-scale pieces; this one is for miniatures, carol collections, and other minor or miscellaneous loveliness.
The End of the World as We Know It
Check your 72-hour kits, everyone. Over the weekend I bought and started reading a book because Adam linked to a positive review of it in the National Review.
Christmas Music Geekery, Part II–Hodie and Messiah
Yesterday I mentioned Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘Hodie’, but did not rhapsodize about it. Allow me to rhapsodize:
Kristine’s Much-Less-Endearing-than-Rosalynde’s Christmas Music Confessions (which may nonetheless redeem themselves by being useful for aspiring classical music geeks)
So, umm, I sort of dimly know what Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby sound like, but the voice that means Christmas for me is John Shirley-Quirks’s.
Reading to Peter
In our house, we have a box full of picture books that comes out on the first Sunday in Advent, and I’m always on the lookout for new Christmas books.
Christmas Letters
Aaargh–’tis the season for those yuletide roundups of the activities of everyone’s perfect families and overachieving children. A couple of years ago, I decided to fight back with this parody, which I mailed on April Fools’ Day:
Thanksgiving Reading
When I was younger, I used to entertain fantasies of forcing my children to listen to all of Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity before letting them open their presents. I’ve never done it, but I do make them listen to a paragraph of a John Donne sermon before Thanksgiving dinner:
Shameless Self-Promotion
(As if there weren’t already enough navel-gazing around here today…) Boston area Bloggernaclites should come see the New England Latter-day Saint Choir (from the Cambridge YSA Wards) concert of Wilbergiana on Sunday night, featuring ME playing 2nd fiddle (not being modest, I really am playing Violin II). The concert is at First Church in Cambridge, 11 Garden St. , at 7:30. (Free, about an hour long, all Wilberg hymn arrangements around the theme of heritage)
On Spiritual Education
About 10 minutes after my first positive pregnancy test, I was at the bookstore, perusing the shelves of parenting titles, a pastime I’ve continued with some regularity for nearly a decade now. One of my favorite of these books is called 10 Principles of Spiritual Parenting.
O Quanta Qualia–More Musings on the Sabbath
Nate’s post on the Sabbath returns me to some thoughts on the Sabbath I’ve been kicking around for a while. Earlier this fall, as I was looking for music for my ward choir to do, I considered Healey Willan’s setting of “O Quanta Qualia.” The text is as follows: Oh, what their joys and their glories must be, Those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see, Crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest, God shall be all and in all ever blest.