Month: May 2016

Linguistics, AI, and Garden Path Sentences

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Parsey Mcparseface

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a post on DR just for the sheer coolness factor, but there’s no way I couldn’t pass along the Washington Post’s article on Google’s natural language parser: Parsey McParseface. What the parser does is fairly easy to explain:

McParseface does what most students learn to do in elementary school. It takes a sentence and breaks it down, identifying nouns, verbs and so forth — and how all of these parts relate to one another. It can tell you, for instance, what the root verb of a sentence is; what is being done to whom and who is doing it.

Along the way, however, the article introduced me to the notion of garden path sentences. These are sentences which, although they are perfectly correct, are incredibly hard for human brains (and AI language parsers) to figure out. Here are two of my favorite examples (from the article):

  1. The horse raced past the barn fell.
  2. The old man the boat.
  3. The coach smiled at the player tossed the frisbee.

Yes, those are all really real sentence. The funny thing is that, now that I’ve wrapped my head around them, it’s hard for me not to understand them effortlessly when I read them. But I remember that the first time I tried to figure them out, it was like a gear in my brain was stuck. They’re called garden path sentences because they are deliberately constructed to make your brain think a word is being used in a certain way when, to understand the sentence, you have to let go of the initial impression and reinterpret a word to make sense of the sentence. So, for example, “the old man” is a phrase that naturally makes you think of the word “man” being used a noun. But, in order to understand that sentence, you have to discard your first impression and realize that it’s being used as a verb in this case: The old [people are the ones who man] the boat.

While I was reading, I couldn’t help but remembering a book I read a couple of years ago called Lexicon.[ref]I wrote a Goodreads review at the time.[/ref] The central conceit of the book is that if you can master language at a truly fundamental level–beneath the level of conscious human understanding–you can use the constituent sounds and their implications to effectively mind-control people. It’s an incredibly cool blend of fantasy magic and technology in a way I’ve never quite seen anywhere else, and feeling your brain struggle to wrap itself around those garden path words is definitely the closest real-life experience you can get to the fantastic mind-powers discussed in the book.

Creatures of Habit

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

There tends to be a large gap between how I think about Mormonism and how I experience it. I find Mormon theology to be innovative, imaginative, and exciting. I find Mormonism in practice…rather dull. Take the “primary answer” for every question: go to church, read your scriptures, pray. Three hours of church isn’t exactly my definition of excitement. I love studying the scriptures, but only when it includes commentaries and such. Merely reading them in their archaic King James English doesn’t exactly get the blood flowing. Prayer makes me feel silly and unproductive. But we can extend this to other activities as well. The temple is a snooze fest. I hated Family Home Evening growing up and hoped that my parents would forget or be too busy. Home teaching strikes me as largely a waste of everyone’s time.

Having confessed all that, my appreciation for these monotonous and seemingly pointless activities have slowly grown over the last couple years. It’s been especially heightened over the last week as I’ve been reading through James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Smith argues against the modern idea that we are simply “brains on a stick” and that Christian life is achieved by downloading the right spiritual data into our heads. We are not so much thinking creatures as we are lovers, i.e. creatures of desire and habit. He points out the gap between what we think and what we actually want. More disturbingly, he notes that we may not actually love what we think. Our wants are often shaped by what he calls “secular liturgies”: repetitive practices and rituals that orient our desires and shape our habits. Take for example (as Smith does) the mall: the mall doesn’t tell you what to think. It doesn’t hand out a tract with a list of propositions that the mall believes. Instead, it shapes your consumerist desires as it assaults your senses with sights, smells, comforts, etc. This is why Christian liturgy is important and necessary. Christianity is not just a rival worldview, but a rival set of desires. And those desires are shaped through repetition.

Harvard business professor and fellow Mormon Clayton Christensen has touched on how one practices Christianity within the Mormon Church:

What I appreciate about the Mormon Church as an infrastructure for Christian living is that it puts me in touch with people I can help. I told a friend once, “If you truly want to live your life as Christ taught, then start coming to the Mormon Church. You don’t even have to believe what we believe. But if you want to practice Christianity, this is where the state-of-the-art is practiced.” This is why I choose to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the October 1972 Conference, Franklin D. Richards quotes from Joseph Smith’s infamous letter to Nancy Rigdon: “Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” Despite the controversial context, the line rings true: this is a path of repetition as we continually reorient our hearts toward God. “There is tremendous power in focusing upon an ideal,” says Richards. “People are inclined to become like those whom they admire. As we increase our knowledge and love of the Savior and indicate our willingness to do his will, we necessarily become more perfect and like him.” As we take what Smith calls a “liturgical audit,” we’ll begin to “realize that temptation isn’t just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it’s often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices. And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves.”[ref]Smith, You Are What You Love, 54.[/ref] According to Richards, as we continuously seek to have a “Thy will be done” mentality “we will know God’s will and have the desire and courage to conform. This doctrine or philosophy requires one to deeply love the Lord and have great faith in his judgment.”

Sterling W. Sill seems to support the need for repeated action in shaping our character and achieving happiness/the good life (what he calls “the most abundant lives”):

The religion of Christ is not just an idea; it is an activity. It is not just something for us to think about; it is something for us to do. These words also constitute the world’s most powerful success formula. The best way to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher is to be a good man. These three words [“keep the commandments”] serve as the shortest, the most pleasant, the most direct, and the only road to the celestial kingdom.

I’ve written multiple times about the common Conference theme of the gospel and “the good life.” It’s a nice reminder that the sacred is not often found in earth-shattering theophanies (though there is obviously a place for those), but in the mundane. It’s found in worship (altar), home life (tent), and work (well). It’s not found necessarily in intricate theologies or philosophies (though there is obvious a place and need for those as well), but in the daily, repetitious, habit-shaping liturgies we participate in.

Maybe I should go do my home teaching…

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

All Things Work for Good, Even Detours

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Detour

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

There were some very good talks during the Saturday afternoon session of the October 1972 General Conference. Elder Boyd K. Packer had a lot of important things to say about sticking to the basic (in general) and home teaching (in particular) in The Saints Securely Dwell. He taught, for example, that sometimes the most important things are also the easiest to overlook. “No one pays much thought to the beating of the heart,” he said, “until there is the threat that it may be interrupted or stopped.” He also hit on another theme that is starting to quietly emerge across the many talks that I’ve read thus far: the Church serves the family. In this case, “the object of priesthood home teaching is to strengthen the home.”

Another great talk was Elder Loren C. Dunn’s How to Gain a Testimony. It was notable to me for combining the statement “there is one thing to which he is entitled, and that is a testimony of its truthfulness” with the observation that “is no sin to admit to yourself that you do not know if, in fact, you don’t know.” There has been—and continues to be—an awful lot of talk about faith crises. I guess I like the idea of faith construction that Elder Dunn’s talk suggests to me instead. We are not all where we need to be. But there is a way to get there. That is true of so many things in general, and not just of testimonies.

But there is one story—and one paragraph within that story—that sticks out to me from all the several talks we read for this session, and it comes from Paul H. Dunn’s talk “Strengthen thy Brethren.” He writes about dropping off his little girl at a new school when she was afraid to go. She cried and clung to his leg and said “Dad, if you really love me—if you really love me—don’t send me in there.” He replied that “it’s because I do love you that I am taking you in there.”

But then a friend, his daughter’s age, came and cheerfully helped her get over her fears. Here is how he described it:

And before Kellie knew it, she had let go of my leg and got about ten paces away, then realized what she had done. I will never forget her expression and the sermon she taught as she looked back. “Oh,” she said, “Dad, you can go now; I don’t need you anymore.”

It’s an achingly poignant thing for a child to say. As parents, we strive to prepare our children to say it, but we can’t deny that pain that comes when—in one small matter after another—they are really able to say it.

There’s another layer to this talk, however. As I wrote about before, Elder Paul H. Dunn was consumed with scandal in the 1980s (about 10 years after this talk was given) for falsifying many of the stories that he told. Eventually, in 1991, he published an open letter in the Deseret News confessing to fabrications in his stories and to having “indulged in other activities inconsistent with the high and sacred office which I have held.” He also stated that the General Authorities had “censured me and placed a heavy penalty upon me.”[ref] Wikipedia[/ref]

There are those who like to pick at the scabs of the mistakes and imperfections of some of the Church’s leaders, but that’s not why I picked Elder Paul Dunn’s talk. I picked it because, as I said, it struck me so forcefully. It was only after I’d already written half of this post that I remembered who he was. I had every intention of writing this post purely about that story and what it meant to me. [ref]I had the title picked out and everything. It was going to be: “Dad, You Can Go.”[/ref] Then, when I remembered who I was talking about, I had a tough choice. Rewrite the post and make it about something else? Ignore the fact that the story was, quite possibly, embellished beyond truthfulness?[ref]Several of the details do not make sense, once you reread the story with a skeptical eye.[/ref]

There are lots of different ways that people can process the contradiction between the truths of the Gospel and the Church and the falsehoods—in stories, in behavior, or in character—of the men and women who serve. One response is to reject both: if the leaders tell lies over the pulpit at General Conference, what can we trust? Another response is to embrace post-modern ideas of truth. Does it really matter if Elder Paul Dunn had this exact conversation with his daughter? Surely what matters is the impact that the story has, or the principles that it teaches, right?[ref]You can see echoes of the idea that Book of Mormon historicity doesn’t matter, as long as it teaches moral truths.[/ref]

The move God’s Army deals with these issues, and there’s one scene that has stayed with me. It’s 1 hour, 6 minutes into this YouTube version of the film, so if the right spot doesn’t load up, you can scroll forward to that point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1VPIADCAXM&feature=youtu.be&t=1h6m1s

At the end of the scene, the senior companions says, “People let you down. At least your real father’s there for you.” The greenie response, “I haven’t seen him in thirteen years.” And the senior companion says, of course, “I was talking about your real father.”

People do let you down. And you’ll take your turn letting other people down, sometimes yourself and sometimes people who depend on you.

We live in a world without apparent guardrails. If they’re there, we can’t see them. Sometimes prayers are answered, sometimes they are not. Sometimes leaders are great. Sometimes leaders are failures. I’m not sure that it has to be that way by some kind of logical necessity, but I do believe that even these failures can be turned to good.

Paul said that “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God”[ref]Romans 8:28[/ref] and this sentiment was repeated again and again in the Doctrine and Covenants:

  • “all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one with another.”[ref]D&C 90:24[/ref]
  • “all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory, saith the Lord.”[ref]D&C 98:3[/ref]
  • “let your hearts be comforted; for all things shall work together for good to them that walk uprightly, and to the sanctification of the church.”[ref]D&C 100:15[/ref]

I can’t deny frustration and anger at what Elder Paul Dunn’s mistakes mean for the rest of us. They mean that we have to confront the fallibility of our leaders even in General Conference talks. This seems like a desecration and a horrible loss, as though a sacred space we all depend upon had been tainted.

But then, isn’t that the story of the whole Earth? Don’t we live in a Fallen world, a world brought about by the decisions of Adam and Eve? This is the whole pattern, is it not? I wrote, last week, about how home is Heaven’s construction site. I had to say that home was the “construction site” for the simple reason that, of course, our homes are imperfect. Spouses fight. Parents lose patience. Children lose their way. Home should be heaven, but it isn’t. We all inherit sacred spaces, and we all pollute them. Elder Paul Dunn is not a singular exception. He is all of use. I have no excuse to feel animosity towards a fellow sinner.

More importantly, his sins—and therefore our sins—are not irredeemable. One of my favorite songs of all time is a conversion song by Thrice called “The Artist in the Ambulance,” and it includes the simple line in the chorus, “I hope that I will never let you down.”

Of course, we will let God down. But we can still hope anyway, because Christ’s Atonement can swallow our failures. We can hope never to let God down, not because of our own abilities, but because of His Son’s. The hope is real, but the interpretation needs to be fixed.

God’s promise—through Paul and again through Joseph Smith—goes beyond just repair, however. The promise is that all things—not just some of the things—can work for our good. How can Elder Paul Dunn’s sins work for our good? How can all of our sins work for good?

Maybe, just as happens in the scene in God’s Army, when everyone else lets us down we can learn to rely on the ones who never have and never will. This doesn’t excuse anyone. “it must needs be that offences come,” said Jesus, “but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”[ref]Matt 18:7[/ref] It just means that there is a way for even the dark to be harnessed for the greater light.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Religion of a Different Color: A Lecture by W. Paul Reeve

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

As I’ve shared before, a few years ago my manager came up to me and asked, “Walker, you’re Mormon, right?” Living in Texas, this always sets off an alarm inside my head. I had never told him I was Mormon, so he had obviously heard it elsewhere. “Yes…,” I replied. Then, the sledgehammer: “Do Mormons have a problem with black people?” It’s important to note that my manager is African-American. He explained that we had gotten along so well and that he was surprised to hear some of the things said about Mormons and blacks and to learn that I was a Mormon. He couldn’t square the supposed racist ideology of Mormonism with his personal interactions with me. This led to a 15-20 minute discussion about the history of the priesthood ban. I ended with my personal view: “The priesthood ban was a mistake, the result of racist folklore, which was allowed to continue for an excruciatingly long time. Thankfully, that policy no longer exists today.” My manager enjoyed the conversation and seemed to understand the complexities surrounding the issue.

The history of Mormonism and race is both sad and fascinating. W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness is the book for understanding the history of the priesthood ban. Yet, it is much more than that. It is also an illuminating tale of race relations and the very concept of race in 19th-century America. Despite being predominantly white Yankees or Northern Europeans, Mormons were seen as racially degenerate. Not only did they supposedly associate with blacks and reds (Native Americans), but they also practiced the degrading, foreign barbarism of polygamy. The Mormon response to reclaim this seemingly withheld status of “whiteness” was to eventually distance themselves from non-whites, finally leading to the barring of blacks from both the priesthood and the temple.

An important and needed book in Mormon history. You can see a presentation by Reeve at Benchmark Books below:

The Ethics of Voting: A Lecture by Jason Brennan

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

My cynicism toward voting began a few years ago. After standing in line a mere 10 minutes at early voting back in 2012, I impatiently mentioned to my wife that we could leave and the state would still remain Red (as it has since 1980). While this Republican coloring may not always be the case due to the increasing Latino population (though they would have to increase their voter turnout), it was the case that time around. Why the sudden surge in pessimism? Boredom, for one, but also the growing realization that we do not live in a swing state (not that my vote’s instrumental value would increase much even in a swing state). The Romney/Ryan ticket was going to carry Texas despite my vote, not because of it. After teasing my mother via text about this unavoidable fact (she was a bit more zealous about her Republican vote than I was), I finally made it to the voting booth. I sat there for a minute, staring at the names of the presidential candidates. I suddenly felt the urge to vote for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former Republican Governor of New Mexico and founder of Big J Enterprises (one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico when he sold it in 1999). This made sense considering I am more libertarian in my views than Romney and that my vote would not really change the outcome of my state (The Onion got it right). Nonetheless, having prepped myself to vote for Romney ever since he gained the Republican nomination, I followed through. However, I remained extremely skeptical of my so-called “duty to vote.”

Philosopher Jason Brennan’s Princeton-published The Ethics of Voting tackles the folk theory that says we have a duty to vote. Not only is the instrumental value of a single vote vanishingly small, but most voters are ignorant when it comes to politics: both of the candidates’ policy positions and the social science behind those policies. And this ignorance means most people should not vote. One may not have a duty to vote, but if one does vote, then that person has a duty to vote well.

You can see some of these ideas discussed in Brennan’s lecture below:

 

The Feeling of Awe

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“Awe, ” writes psychologist Dacher Keltner,

is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world. Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings, like the spirits that Greek families believed were guarding over their fates.

In 1757, a revolution in our understanding of awe began thanks to Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke detailed how we feel the sublime (awe) not just during religious ritual or in communion with God, but in everyday perceptual experiences: hearing thunder, being moved by music, seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark. Awe was to be found in daily life.

Studies indicate that the experience of awe inspires cooperation and “embeds the individual self in a social identity.” It provokes kindness and a diminished sense of entitlement and self-importance. But why did we develop a sense of awe? Keltner answers,

In the course of our evolution, we became a most social species. We defended ourselves, hunted, reproduced, raised vulnerable offspring, slept, fought, and played in social collectives. This shift to more collective living required a new balancing act between the gratification of self-interest and an orientation toward supporting the welfare of others. Experiencing awe might have helped us make this shift. Brief experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective and orient our actions toward the interests of others.

A second answer to the question of “Why awe?” is of the proximal kind: What does awe do for you in the present moment? And here, the science is proving to be clear: Momentary experiences of awe stimulate wonder and curiosity.

Yet, as psychologist Michelle Lani Shiota notes,

Most positive emotions are arousing, engaging the “fight-flight” sympathetic nervous system to help us actively pursue our goals. Awe has the opposite effect, reducing sympathetic influence on the heart and keeping us still—which suggests that awe’s function does not center on moving toward the material objects or people we desire.

So far, the clues suggest that awe’s function may lie in how it makes us think. Awe involves a sense of uncertainty that we are compelled to try to resolve. Studies from my lab, conducted in collaboration with Vladas Griskevicius and Samantha Neufeld, suggest that we deal with that uncertainty through careful, detail-oriented processing of information from the environment.

…We still have a great deal to learn about awe, and only a few clues, but these and other studies support a tentative theory of its function. More than any other species on Earth, humans are profoundly dependent on knowledge. We have a unique ability to store vast amounts of information, in the form of elaborate conceptual networks that allow us to map our environment, remember the past, and predict the outcomes of future actions, all within the scope of human imagination. The emotion we call awe—our capacity for deep pleasure in facing the incredible and trying to take it all in—may reflect a basic need to understand the world in which we live. Of course, this theory generates lots of new questions, as any good theory should.

So, want one way to increase your well-being? Try to increase your daily dose of awe.

A Reason For Faith: A Lecture by Laura Harris Hales and Others

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

A few weeks ago, I received an unexpected but most welcome Facebook message from Laura Harris Hales asking if I still blogged at Times & Seasons. After a brief exchange, a copy of her newly published A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History was on its way to my house for reviewing. You can read my entire review (which was quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune) at Times & Seasons, but my view of the book overall is that

it must be recognized how huge all of this truly is: a book published through a Church imprint is talking about Freemasonry, Deutero-Isaiah, etc. It should be considered a welcome addition to the growing list of Mormon pastoral works. Heavy readers of Mormon Studies may not find anything new or surprising in its pages, but they are not the book’s intended audience. It is meant as a primer; a springboard for those unacquainted with this type of information. It’s meant for the 18 or 19-year-old who just put in his/her papers. It’s meant as a tool for Family Home Evening. As Hales explains in the introduction, the purpose of the book is

to create a safe environment for exploration within a faithful framework. Even so, these discussions may generate thoughts and questions that might be surprising or even bothersome as existing beliefs are stretched. In fact, readers may grieve at the loss of perceptions held dear. Yet they can be consoled by the realization that their expanded understanding is based upon accurate teachings. The information in these essays can begin an exciting process of discovery for readers…When gospel questions arise, the antidote for uncertainty is more knowledge and more contemplation, which takes time–“even by study and also by faith.” It is the continual search for truth, both secular and spiritual, that will give us a reason for faith (pgs. xiii-xiv).

Given this mission, I think the book is a success.

You can see Laura joined by several of the book’s contributors below in their presentation at Benchmark Books:

Modesty is more than just clothes

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do-what-i-wantWhile reading through a Facebook argument on modesty (my time could have been better spent, I know), I realized that for those who hate modesty, their arguments are equivalent to those who hate political correctness (that’s not the right phrase, anymore, right? I can’t keep up.) The argument is pretty much summed up by “What I do isn’t about you and doesn’t affect you, and if it does affect you, fix yourself, not me.” It’s a very come-together, selfless, flower-and-rainbows kind of argument, amirite?

Often I see the same people who argue against modesty also argue for an end to offensive speech, and vice versa. But really both groups of people have picked their preferred form of modesty, will accept no less, and think your form of modesty is oppressive, wrong, and maybe even evil.

The truth is modesty covers both dress and speech because it covers appearance and behavior. And, like it or not, modesty is intertwined with respect. Because what we do and say affects who we are and also affects the way people perceive us. (Clearly our dress is only a small part of what we do.) We aren’t just inanimate blobs floating around that no one can see or hear (and therefore never be offended by us). To say our speech or our dress doesn’t matter because “I’ll do what I want” is not going to engender a polite society.

This is not to say you should be assaulted for what you wear! (I know this is a particular pet peeve of the anti-modesty crowd.) And, similarly, you should not be assaulted for what you say. [ref]I’m pretty sure assault does not fall under the umbrella of modesty.[/ref] But respect goes both ways, and certain places and people require an amount of appropriateness in both dress and speech. [ref]I love my friends “do not use your underwear as an accessory” version of modesty. I haven’t come across a good, simple saying for speech yet.[/ref] I think you should be modest for nice people not for the scum of society.

I also don’t think we should spend much time policing one another (this is my hope that the internet shuts up, I know, very likely). There are always lines to be drawn. But if you really cling to wear whatever you want/say whatever you want or cover every inch/zip your lip, you’re probably being too inflexible and should chill a bit. puritan Nicely dressed meteorologists don’t need to put a sweater on, but we don’t need to see celebrities naked (or even nearly-naked) selfies (sorry, no link). College graduates don’t need protection from Secretaries of States from politically different administrations, but women should not be harassed online for doing their jobs.

Overall, if you spend any time on the internet, you should realize that many aspects of our society could benefit from a little modesty. But that doesn’t mean we all need to become Puritans.

 

Home is Heaven’s Construction Site

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Isaac_a_Lover_of_Peace

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

The Saturday morning session of the October 1972 General Conference was another one of those sessions where there was one talk that stood out to me in a singular way. This time the talk was Altar, Tent, Well by Elder M. Theodore Tuttle.

Elder Tuttle begins by quoting from Genesis 26:25: “And Isaac builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the Lord, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac’s servants digged a well.”

Then Elder Tuttle notes contrasts Isaac with is father (Abraham) and his son (Jacob):

[Isaac] did not reach the heights of Abraham… nor was he as impressive as his son Israel… yet Isaac is loved and revered. He worshiped God, cared for his home, and pursued his work. He is remembered simply as a man of peace. The eloquent simplicity of his life and his unique ability to lend importance to the commonplace made him great.

Isaac’s life, Elder Tuttle says, can be a template for our lives. His day to day concerns are our day to day concerns: altar, tent, and well: worship, home, and work. Elder Tuttle notes, “These basic things of life signified his relationship to God, his family, and his fellowmen. Every person on earth is touched by these three.”

In just a couple of short paragraphs, Elder Tuttle has captured the essence of Mormonism as a practical experience. This, to a great extent, is what it means to live as a Mormon: we seek holiness through the mundane by work and by relationships. Mormons do not try to escape the world to seek our destiny. We realize that many aspects of the world enable us to find that destiny right here and right now.

And so there is nothing poetic about Elder Tuttle’s statement that “To Latter-day Saints, the home is a holy place.” That’s not a metaphor an exaggeration. It’s our theology. The home is “patterned after the celestial home whence we came.” We affirm that God is our Father. We believe that we also have a Mother. We believe our parents want us to become like them. Home is the place where that happens. Home is not heaven quite yet—none of our families are perfect—but home is heaven’s construction site.

This work is mundane. The task of building heaven is not a task of great deeds or dramatic confrontations. It is a chore of practicing kind responses when we’re stressed and tired. It’s the discipline of constantly having to reconsider our priorities. It’s the labor of wrestling our recalcitrant personalities into congruence with love in countless small, unnoticed battles day in and day out. It is learning and growth as imperceptible and, when God blesses our lives, as relentless as a tree taking root in the soil and spreading branches towards the sun and the stars.

The work is relational. Of all the virtues we seek after, none is higher than love. And love is a virtue that only exists in the context of relationships. You can be honest with a stranger. You can deal generously with a stranger. But you cannot love a stranger, because love is friendship. Mormon congregations are determined by geography, and this means we can’t shop for a congregation we like. We don’t pick the people we set next to in the pews, and we don’t pick the bishop we like the most either. But this is just a shadow of the blood bonds that make up a family. Not being able to choose your fellow congregationalists is nothing like not being able to choose your parents, your siblings, or your children. The aim of all our mundane work, the objective to which our daily discipline is directed, is nothing but the cultivation of these relationships so that we may, with God’s grace, bring ourselves into harmony with each other.

One consequence of all this emphasis on the family is that, for Mormons, the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to serve the family and not the other way around. “The Church… is a family church,” says Tuttle, and “we may say that a prime purpose of this church is to perfect and exalt the family.”

Elder Tuttle concludes his talk:

How little things have changed since Isaac’s day—the things that really matter. There is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same family roles to fill, the same need to work. Altar, tent, and well: these things are essential. Placed in proper perspective by God’s revealed word, they provide at once our greatest challenge and achievement.

Altar, tent, and well. These are why we are here.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Family Factors and Crime

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“Figuring out what causes crime could be the key to reducing it,” says a recent post over at the Institute for Family Studies blog. However, the question of crime causality

has still proven tricky to answer. Some blame culture; others blame poverty or inequality; still others blame a lack of good government. A new study looks at the question through a different lens: Maybe crime is one manifestation of a “fast life-history strategy”—a bundle of traits, unified by a wide-ranging evolutionary theory, that also includes adolescent fertility and low paternal investment. The results suggest that, indeed, nations with young mothers and absent fathers also tend to have high crime, even after other potential causes have been accounted for.

While there are nuances and caveats to be made, it is interesting that “the strongest correlation is between crime and paternal presence, which I was able to chart because the authors kindly provided me their dataset”:

 

The study’s findings are, of course, far more complicated, but the paper nonetheless “buttresses the argument for stable marriages and delayed childbearing, and it suggests that policymakers should familiarize themselves with the details of life-history strategies so that they might think about how to change them.”

Check out the full post.