Author: Stephen C

One of the more curious aspects of the temple ceremony was the charge to avoid “loud laughter.” [Note, I originally spoke in the present tense, but evidently it has been removed–with all the recent changes I somehow missed that]. It’s like only eating meat during the winter, one of those things that was indisputably, canonically there but virtually nobody, no matter how conservative, made a point of it.  However, I get the concept even if I’m a little fuzzy on the operationalization: avoid frivolity and light mindedness because reality with all its pain and suffering–and glory–is essentially and fundamentally serious. The other day I was reading through a Wikipedia article on the Russian Famine of 1921 (good hell those people have gone through a lot), and it had a picture of human meat displays, possibly from the human meat markets that sprung up during this time (obviously huge content warning). During this and other times in their history such as the Siege of Leningrad it was a real-life Eli Roth film; you had to be careful about letting your kids out of your apartment less roving bands kidnap and eat them. (And if you were Jewish, much of history was a real-life Purge film, where people could just kill you in.a pogrom [another big CW] if they wanted).  You can see why the Russians aren’t known for their comedy. Life gets so gritty that frivolity almost seems like an affront…

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The Ascension Lately I’ve dipped into literary depictions of the Savior’s life. Unsurprisingly given the subject matter, historically responses to literary depictions of the Savior have been quite polarizing, and sometimes controversial. For example, evidently The Man Born to Be King, an early, relatively milquetoast (by today’s standards) radio depiction of the Savior’s life, was blamed for the fall of Singapore. Gradually fictional depictions of the Savior moved from being more devotional–like Ben Hur–to the more naturalistic, like the Master and the Margarita, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Quarantine, King Jesus, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. A funner entry in this genre is Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. In principle I’m not opposed to naturalistic depictions of the Savior. However, most cases simply fail to really capture the subtle ineffability, the quiet, almost secretive dignity of the figure that even non-believers can grasp (Albert Einstein: “No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.”) In many cases I feel like the novelty of naturalistically depicting Jesus or some clever literary gimmick (e.g in the Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ has Jesus as a different person than Christ) carries a lot of the weight in justifying the schlog through the novel.  There are also the slightly modified retellings, here Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord comes to mind. Another…

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So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers.  In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male.  These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed parts of elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even if it touches on some of the same themes. So here I will take the fact that the leadership positions are male as a given, and address where we go from there in terms of sex segregation of callings (I’m going to use sex and gender interchangeably here, so sue me).  At the outset, I should note that If we want to make the practice/doctrine distinction, which I typically don’t, this is clearly in the practice, and not doctrine, category, and if the Church were to change on this it wouldn’t cause any great consternation on my part. Still, all things being equal I think the current course is the wisest for two main reasons; both of them, I am sure, contentious no matter how carefully worded.  First, if leadership positions are reserved for men for gender complementarian reasons, it…

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I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of the Great Apostasy in Latter-day Saint circles. As far as what we canonically know from D&C in the core of our concentric circles of authoritativeness, God told Joseph Smith that all the other sects were “wrong” and doctrinally incorrect. We also know, per John the Baptist, that priesthood authority was “taken…from the earth.” However, the details beyond that are fuzzy. For example, we don’t know when it was taken from the earth. Commentary has traditionally assumed that it was sunsetted with the death of the apostles but we don’t know for sure.  Clement is a first-hand account of a good, devout man trying to make things work in the immediate aftermath of the apostles. For the first time the Christian community had to figure out how to run a church without apostles ordained by Christ. (Early Church historians suggest that Clement himself knew the apostles, but these claims were all documented 100-200 years after Clement if I’m not mistaken, so I’m putting that in the maybe/maybe not category). Of course, as seen from the New Testament epistles, keeping everybody on the same page was no…

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I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.  Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but they are not entitled to the same level of equanimity and peaceful quiet as if they, you know, just went into the cultural hall (I promise the adults don’t bite).  This hasn’t happened recently, but occasionally you go into the…

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister missionaries is shown to have a subdermal birth control, which the movie states would be a reason for Church discipline if known, which implies that either 1) the movie was implying that the sister missionary was sexually active, or 2) the birth control was used for hormonal regulatory purposes, and the movie producers were wrongfully implying that the Church prohibits the medical use of birth control per se. Whatever the case, the birth control knowledge of the missionaries had an actual part to play in the plot, so it might not have simply been prurience for prurience’s sake. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a sort of intended side effect of the sexual overtones throughout the movie, especially since the sexually explicit discussion is in the opening scene, possibly as a sort of click-bait. [spoiler alert end] The tension of the sexual combined with the wholesome is a common theme throughout time, space, and cultures. I suspect it’s one reason why there’s this destructive erotic interest heterosexual men across the world since biblical times have had with the idea of having sex with a…

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Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers.  In general this election has thrown a wrench in the “demography is destiny” ideology (I say ideology because there was never a lot of evidence to the idea that immigration would cause permanent democratic majorities; of course I’m partial but the DNC could have, you know, actually spoken to a demographer at some point, maybe?)  Still, this is one example where we are beginning to see the inexorable outcomes of demographic fundamentals in another way. To briefly summarize, according to some reports the largely neutral Amish were shaken out of their previous political apathy after health officials raided some of their raw milk outlets: registering in large numbers and voting republican, giving Trump tens of thousands of votes in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania. This doesn’t mean that they will vote republican forever, or that the democrats can’t find an angle to make a play for their votes, but in an increasingly secular world it shows the paradoxical power of small, highly fertile religious groups. In a world where modernity inevitably decreases fertility, the only highly fertile societies left are either those that are too poor to be…

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A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking at the Church’s raw records, which, as anybody who has systematically gone through a non-Utah ward list can tell you, is primarily populated by people who were baptized earlier in life but now have virtually nothing to do with the Church. I went ahead and updated this analysis with numbers from the Cooperative Election Survey, and basically found the same thing: the majority of Church members in the US are indeed married.(At the outset it is worth noting that here I am only considering the US Church; I don’t have any data to make any kind of judgment on the demographics of the international Church). However, we have an interesting new wrinkle, the trend is clearly in the direction of most members not fitting the archetype of the married member. Specifically, while in the late 2000s about 70% of Church members were married, that number dropped a little over 10 percentage points over the next 15 years. In 2023 54% of members in the CES were married; however that was with a sample size of 259 members, 2022 with 62% married had a sample size…

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A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes.  I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and close-minded. The not-so-subtle subtext was that only those silly privileged white kids would hold conservative opinions on social issues, whereas minorities with their wisdom gained from a lifetime of discrimination would naturally gravitate to another perspective.  Like The Book of Mormon musical implying that Africans don’t worship God because of theodicy issues, these folk hypotheses don’t really hold up to even cursory examination as, for example, Ugandans actually tend to be quite religious, and plenty of African Americans hold the conservative social views the Black Menaces are mocking white BYU students for.  These are specific examples of the kinds of demographic morality plays you see that often take trends with a kernel of empirical truth and blow them into narratives based on demographics. For example, the gender gap in abortion is real but very small–61% of men versus 64% of women support abortion in all or most cases. Yet, these single-digit differences are then often spun into some grand demographic morality play: in one corner you have old, white men who think that women having sex is icky, and in the other you have liberated,…

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A few months ago I participated in a Traditional Latin Mass. More traditional-minded Catholics will genuflect when walking by or across the Host. As a non-Catholic I hadn’t considered what I should do until I found myself walking next to it and had to make a snap decision. On one hand as somebody who doesn’t believe that the Eucharist is God’s literal flesh, I thought it would be insincere for me to briefly kneel to it, and perhaps patronizing to those who do believe that; on the other hand it was very clear that that was the expectation, and it could possibly be offensive if I just casually strolled next to their Holy of Holies. I genuflected, but more out of a reflexive desire to not make things awkward than some coherent, well-thought out philosophy of interfaith engagement.  Interfaith activities where somebody of one faith participates in the rituals, ceremonies, or services of another faith are tricky. In principle they can be fruitful educational and diplomatic activities, and every year or so I try to take my children to another service. However, they have to be done gingerly, and I haven’t seen a really good systematic take on when it is okay or not okay to participate in the rituals, ceremonies, or services of other faiths, so here’s my attempt to outline one after taking some time to think it through.  The particular risks of any interfaith activity can basically…

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  An amicus brief is a document submitted to courts by groups or people who have some interest in the outcome of the case. For landmark Supreme Court cases a lot of professional organizations, for example, will take a position and outline their reasons. My understanding is that the justices and their clerks don’t actually have to read these, but if it’s a brief from a person or organization that is important I assume they do, and occasionally the judge will cite an amicus brief in their decision-making. I went through the Supreme Court docket and identified all the recent cases where the Church submitted an official amicus brief as an interested party in some precedent-setting, landmark case before the Supreme Court. I then used AI to summarize it. So if you want to see the Church’s official position on, say, people not baking cakes for same-sex couples for religious reasons, it’s all there. As seen, the Church’s messaging to the Supreme Court (unsurprisingly) deals with religious liberties issues; matter of fact, it appears they have had something to say about virtually every major religious liberty case that has come before the Supreme Court. The Church appears to be helping build safeguards around religious liberty issues even if they do not immediately affect its operations. On one hand the Church tends to officially stay out of fights it doesn’t need to be involved in. For example, it doesn’t have the…

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The quotes around Latter-day Saint are not for Romney, but Brooks, as explained below. Also, none of this should suggest that I’m on Team Democrat, and I don’t want this to devolve into some brute-force democrat versus republican fight in the comments, but on the issue of, you know, not overthrowing the republic I think reasonable people can come together.  Like many I have been often disappointed by the paucity of republicans willing to stand-up to Trump, and I’m saddened that the one Senate republican who has a track record of putting his power where his mouth is will be retiring. However, in his recently published book, Bob Woodward reports that Trump wanted Mo Brooks, the Congressman from Alabama, to call for a special election to reinstate him as President 6 months into President Biden’s term. Evidently at this point Congressman Brooks (who admittedly had supported Trump’s earlier shenanigans with the 2020 election) had reached his limits, and he refused to do so. Predictably, President Trump’s feelings got a boo boo, he withdrew his support from Brooks, and Brooks lost his primary. Congressman Brooks is rather unique in that he was a Latter-day Saint convert in the deep, deep South who still won political office. In contrast to some Utah politicians whose Mormonism is an asset to play up in time for an election, one can’t help but see Brooks’ Mormonism as sincere given that it was undoubtedly a liability…

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Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment.  Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population.  How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change.  The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We’re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that’s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care for their aged old people without living children to care for them will literally be dying in the streets).  When I was going to graduate school the five-alarm fire, “lowest low” fertility was around 1.3 children per woman. For a…

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“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today.  With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me.   There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school  was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church.  And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of the “goodie good” kids have left. These were the ones who were into seminary council (when that was a thing), drama, and The Beatles (in kind of a faux rebelliousness borrowed from their parents), and who actually read the book…

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Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from speaking to a real human being, up to and including detecting sarcasm, humor, and the like. I have been using it to brush up on my very rusty mission Spanish, and now any pre-missionary who wants to go above and beyond and practice, say, giving a first discussion in French with a personalized tutor that will correct their grammar doesn’t have to wait until they enter the MTC. They have put some safeguards in place so that it can’t just clone your voice, but the day when anybody can clone anybody’s voice and automate a thousand bots to call everybody in your phone is coming, so once again please be aware and discuss with your old and sometimes not so old-relatives that a phone call from somebody that sounds just like you asking for money isn’t necessarily you.   Google is still very much playing catch up in the AI wars (and no matter how good they get, their AI will probably always invoke images of Black Nazis). Notebook LM has a fun new functionality that automatically generates a podcast-type back and forth based off…

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A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase “burn like a red hot iron.” Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren’t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven’t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron’s Darkness Visible or Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon.)  In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for reasons outside their control. I still think God speaks to them, but it’s trickier to suss out the still small voice from all the other voices in the case of some mental health disorders One facet of Latter-day Saint soteriology…

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As a TBM there are a surprising number of issues dealing with religion where I have some agreement with Richard Dawkins, and one of them is that the King James Version is the best version of the Bible.  When I say “best,” I don’t mean “most accurately conveys the oldest documents.” I know there are older arguments that try to argue something along these lines (J. Reuben Clark wrote a booklet about it, but when I was in Stephen Robinson’s class at BYU he didn’t seem to think his arguments held much water), but I have no reason to doubt the idea that newer translations rely on older texts and have less mistranslations.   Still, when choosing a translation that is not the only criteria. The creation of the King James Version really was lightning in a bottle that will probably never be repeated. The most learned people in the land coming together as the English language was coming into its own and at its most lyrical. (It’s been a while, but the book Fire in the Bones: William Tyndale, Martyr, Father of the English Bible by BYU Religion Professor Michael Wilcox does an excellent job describing all of this).  The English language predecessors they relied on such as Tyndale had enough of a handle on the cadence of the English language to really make it sing, while having enough authority in their own right that they could simply create their…

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A few days ago OpenAI released its much-rumored “Strawberry” system titled Chat-GPT4o1. While previous LLMs can provide an impressive writing at, say, the undergraduate level (especially if prompted well), the new system can “think” and plan better for technical concepts, and it can now answer scientific, technical questions more accurately than a PhD in that field. If Chat-GPT4 is undergraduate level, Chat-GPT4o1 is graduate level.  Of particular utility is explaining difficult concepts. For example, I’ve never had anybody explain to me, at a very high level, Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; it’s the kind of thing where people who are smart enough to understand don’t have the kind of smarts necessary to dumb it down for us mortals, but I asked the new system to explain it in a way that a high schooler can understand and it led me by the hand, step-by-step, until I kind of understood it, again at a high level. So everybody has a really good graduate school-level tutor now.  So, how this is related to the Church? Its ability to tie concepts together and *think* in less formulaic ways means that every Mormon Studies person has a graduate student-level research assistant–that you still need to check, since hallucination is still kind of a problem, but this will especially take off when you can, say, feed thousands of pages of primary source materials and have it produce rather sophisticated, less boiler-plate essays. (Also, anybody…

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  This morning this headline was prominently displayed at the top of the page of CNN (on the mobile version, the Internet version was much more tame to their credit). The version I snapshotted above is newer, the original version had “Mormon” prominently displayed in both the title and the subheading. (It originally said something like “Small town Mormon doctor is accused of abuse…More than 100 former patients say Mormon doctor abused them.”) Of course, if the doctor was a stake president and systematically used his position to abuse most of his victims, then such a headline would have been completely appropriate. However, it is clear when reading the article that he was a sexual abuser that happened to be Mormon. Yes, some of the abuse leveraged Church connections, but I somehow doubt that if there was a Jewish doctor, among whom some of his 100+ victims were some that he knew from his synagogue, that they would prominently display the word “Jewish” two times in the heading and subheading. Of course it would have been appropriate to discuss the synagogue connection to his victims in the body of the article, but prominently displaying it as the main identifier twice is clearly the editor either trying to get clicks by piling onto a not-cool religious groups, or outright malice.  To be clear, I don’t have much to complain about with the body of the article. Out of 128 victims it’s…

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  Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better than most/almost all).  Now that I’ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity, we are treading water in terms of membership in the United States.  Of course, this is still very much back-of-the-envelope, but I think I’m in the ballpark.    For any group in the developed world to replace itself they need to have 2.1 children.   According to the last solid estimate, we retain about 64% of our children in the faith.    Therefore, in order to have enough children to offset the children lost to religious switching, we would need to have an average of 3.28 children.    Latter-day Saints in the US have about three children on average.    Therefore, we appear to be slowly declining from generation to generation without taking into account conversions. At that rate each generation is 91% of the size of the previous one.    It is worth noting that this is probably conservative,…

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A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing.  Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ not found elsewhere (The Synoptic Gospels and Acts). In other words, I want to see which sources are closest to the “historical Jesus.” On one hand I think most historical Jesus research and thought processes get a little carried away about their narrow false negative confidence intervals, but at the same time the premise that the manuscripts closer to Christ could tell us more about Him is valid for most purposes. In order to show the data in year-by-year and to scale the size of the block proportional to the size of the book I created a graph that could not fit onto one page (and I don’t know how to embed it into WordPress), but you can see the a version that you can scroll through here. (Claude now has an “artifacts” feature where you can share the results…

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Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains. Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended). Raised in a formal, upper-class home, he came to envy the street children who were able to play outside, and the rest of his life was spent trying to free children from the unreasonable strictures of adults and to grant them some measure of respect and dignity as individuals. But it was not his writing or child-raising theories that granted him immortality. He was the headmaster of an orphanage of Jewish children during the time that the Jews were being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an open-aired, barbed-wire prison. As the Nazis squeezed them tighter and tighter the streets became cluttered with the bodies of frozen and starved refugees and children. While dead adults are obviously tragic, there is.a particular twisted horror and injustice that accompanies the corpses of innocent children (or as Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov, “[adults] ate…

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