We call one of our bedrooms the Noah’s Ark Room because there’s a mural of Noah’s Ark on the wall. It was painted by our house’s previous owner for his son Noah, who lived in this bedroom from his birth until we purchased the townhouse in 2001 and he and his parents moved to a home nearby.
Mater Abscondita
Gordon’s post has prompted, not surprisingly, a torrent of discussion, which now seems to have veered off into a rather different streambed. I want to paddle up to a stream of the conversation that branched off a while back, taking another look at the presumptions behind the “absent mother.”
Understanding our violent past
I watched the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’ last night. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it is a chilling and accurate account of heroism in the face of the genocide that ravaged the country in 1994, resulting in an inconceivable number of deaths. For me, the most impressive aspect of this movie was that the movie effectively conveyed the horror, the despair, and the terror of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, but didn’t focus on grisly scenes of Rwandans being tortured and hacked to death by the side of the roads (putting aside the question of whether we should have had to watch people being hacked to death by the side of the roads, since this is what actually happened, while the world looked the other way). On a much smaller scale, Mormons share a violent past replete with massacres and martyrs. A Primary lesson I taught a few weeks ago made this violence more real to me than ever before, and left me wondering how I should understand and teach the violent stories found in the scriptures and in the lesson manuals.
Baptism by Fire
I have a pretty simple understanding of the Gospel, and I rarely come across scriptures that can’t be accommodated to my existing world view (or dismissed as scrivener’s errors!). Recently, however, I read a verse in the Book of Mormon that stopped me in my tracks.
Sunday School Lesson 20
Lesson 20: Doctrine and Covenants 76; 131:1-4; 132:19-24; 137 These are longer than usual.
The Vanishing Mothers
In the wake of all of these feel-good posts about mothers and motherhood (or parenthood), I thought someone should write something deflating. Happy to oblige.
Blossoms of Blue
I don’t have a Mother’s Day post to contribute, really. Not a real one, anyway, and certainly nothing like the stories that three mothers have already posted here. But I do have a post that is tangentially Mother’s-Day-related. It’s mostly about a little girl.
The Sea All Water
(Note: We seem to have something of a glut of Mother’s Day posts. By all means, read Julie’s and Kristine’s before mine.) Motherhood rose around me like a tide in the weeks after my daughter’s birth. Each night advanced toward me, implacable as a wave, my panic and dread rising like froth up a beach until the moment of submersion, when, wondrously, I found I could float. Few things in life have come to me as arduously as motherhood came, and nothing else has revealed itself as suddenly.
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.
The Cheerio Incident
Seven years ago, when my oldest son was just a baby, I decided that I would use his naptimes to work on a book. I planned on turning my thesis into something relevant for an LDS audience and writing additional chapters about the other women’s stories in Mark’s Gospel. So each day, after putting down the baby for his nap, I’d drag out all of my books and papers and notes and try to focus. And it seemed that every day, just as soon as I got into the groove of what I was doing, I’d hear “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” and it would be time to dash up the stairs, grab the baby, and put aside my work for another day.
Pictures of You
The current issue of BYU Magazine, organ of the Alumni Association and tireless fundraising vehicle, is in mailboxes now–or, if your dining room table looks like mine, buried under gleaming drifts of your husband’s voluminous correspondence with the American Medical Association.
Your Teenager’s Journal … Online
This is a question from a friend who is looking for advice. He noticed that his teenage daughter had been spending a lot of time on a site called LiveJournal.com. When he checked the internet browser’s history, he discovered that she keeps an online journal. Should he read it?
The Breakfast Club Redux
As my 15-year high school reunion looms dangerously close on the horizon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic 80’s movie of teenage sturm und drang: ‘The Breakfast Club’. For those of you who may have missed one of the 157 airings of the TBS ‘Dinner and a Movie’ versions of ‘The Breakfast Club’ (‘Twister’ is this weekend!), the story is about five teenagers all from very different backgrounds, forced to spend the day together in the school library one Saturday as punishment for various indiscretions or acts of violence perpetrated upon unsuspecting freshmen.
Sharing the Gospel Rewards Program
Rewards programs are all around us. Use your credit card, get frequent flier miles. Stay at a hotel, earn travel points. Buy 10 pizzas, get the next one free. If we want more converts, why not create a rewards program for sharing the Gospel? Not just eternal or psychic rewards, but immediate, tangible, worldly rewards. 10 converts = Trip to the Polynesian Cultural Center 50 converts = Dinner with President Hinckley It would work, wouldn’t it?
Why I Love My Ward
Sitting in Fast and Testimony meeting last Sunday, I started thinking about why I enjoy my ward so much, and it came down to the people in it.
Happy Ascension!
We don’t usually pay much attention to the Ascension. In some other religions, such as Catholicism, the Ascension has particular theological significance. For us, it’s sort of a theological afterthought. Part of this probably stems from the difference in focus — we don’t really discuss how or why he ascended, focusing instead on Jesus’s Atonement in Gethsemane and His Resurrection. And part may stem from our belief that He ascended and descended numerous times over this period, visiting the Nephites in America. But whether or not it has much theological significance, the Ascension is an undeniably wonderful event, with the great image of the two angels, asking the apostles why they are gazing into heaven. As we read in Acts: And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. Happy ascension day, everyone!
Comparing the evolution of two church policies: birth control and women working outside the home
For most of the years I lived with my parents, my mother and I didn’t make much headway in establishing a healthy relationship with each other. But, now that I’ve moved out of the house, and as far away from Utah as I possibly could while remaining in the same country, I have gradually come to the realization that I was a pretty much an ungrateful wretch from the age of ten on. My behavior contributed to a lot of bad feelings and family drama that sometimes made life miserable for all of us. I love you, Mom. Sorry I was so hard to get along with. I’m looking forward to being friends again.
A Theorist Amongst the Stories
I studied philosophy in college. I enjoyed law school. I work when I can as an appellate lawyer. I read few novels but a lot of philosophy and legal theory. I enjoy the clean, crisp flow of well-honed arguments and get a kind of goofy joy at watching the interplay of concepts and abstraction. By temperament, I am a theorist, but I, alas, live in world where as often as not stories hold sway.
Cartoon Christian Rock
I still remember the first time I heard Christian rock music in the early 1980s. I thought it was awful and vaguely sacrilegious. Of course, since that time, many Christian rock groups have crossed over into the mainstream market and became straightforwardly sacrilegious (tic, sort of). Now prepare yourselves for the arrival of Christian rock’s answer to The Archies.
Admin Note
At the request of a father, we have taken down the two other posts that were here earlier today so that his daughter can be the center of attention on her birthday. The posts will be back up tomorrow.
Sunday School Lesson 19
Lesson 19: Doctrine and Covenants 19:16-19; 76:40-42, 96-112; 88:14-16; 138:55-56
Anticipating Mother’s Day
I have been thinking about Mother’s Day for weeks. This is not normal for me, but for some reason I have felt the urge to make this year something special. But what to do? Finally, today, inspiration came.
Slight template changes
are being made.
A Happy Ending
In most of the ways that matter, I grew up in a fairly typical Salt Lake City Mormon home. What this means is that I went through most of the various Mormon rites of passage right on schedule in an environment that looked very much like an photograph from the Ensign: baptism in the basement of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, priesthood ordinations by a faithful father surrounded by family, and all the rest. Coming home from my mission, however, was slightly different.