As an observant Mormon, I am obviously not the most qualified person to talk about beer or any other alcoholic beverage. I think I tasted alcohol once when I bought home made “ginger ale” out of the back of a pickup truck in the mountainous woods of western Virginia (that would explain the snickers as I purchased my bottle), but I didn’t drink enough of the strange-tasting liquid to get a buzz or anything. And that is about the extent of my experience with alcohol.
Not that I have anything against them. My interpretation of the Mormon prohibition on alcohol is that it is:
1. Partially a mistake. (The original scripture appears to have referred only to liquor, with a specific exemption for beer)
2. An attempt to build solidarity within the community.
A Thoughtful Faith has started a blog, and I’m one of their initial crop of bloggers. Last night they posted my first piece: Reconstruction as a Way of Life.
I asked them to post this image to go with the blog because I’m trying to convey a spirit of patience and calm endurance when it comes to dealing with faith issues. Read the post if that makes you curious. :-)
I’ve seen this story on my Facebook news feed for the last day or two, but I just watched it. It was fantastic.
I can’t really describe it without spoiling it, so I won’t try. But I like what it says about beauty. I think our conversations on the topic are often pinned between two extremes: either the pursuit of a very particular and artificial kind of beauty or a rebellion against thinking that beauty should even matter at all, especially for women.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is voices. No one seems to think that it’s shallow or superficial to recognize beauty in a human voice, and yet it’s just as much a product of random genetics and superficial body structure as visual beauty. Why is that? I think partially it’s because we know that a beautiful voice is a combination of what you’re lucky enough to be born with, but also of training and effort you take to improving it. We also recognize intuitively that there are wide variety of voices that are all beautiful in their own ways.
But there’s something even deeper. When you see a video or a photo of someone and try to assess whether or not they are beautiful, you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of what I think makes up visual beauty. You’re not seeing motion (not in real 3d, with depth and context), and you’re not seeing live interaction. When you hear a song, however, you’re actually getting a lot of the experience of audio beauty. So our concept of audio beauty is actually pretty robust, but our concept of visual beauty is weirdly warped.
The emphasis on photos and videos as the standard of beauty means that we’re asking men and especially women to conform to a standard that absolutely doesn’t exist. I mean, this is before we even get to the topic of weight and body-image: trying to live “up” to the beauty of a photo or video means trying to be a beautiful picture instead of a beautiful person. It’s impossible, wasteful, and tragic.
Much like my most recent Sunday School lesson, this blog post seemed much more profound in my head then it did when I actually put it out there. It took me hours to write and rewrite, but it’s not even 1,000 words. Probably one of my lowest words-per-minute posts of all time. Still, since the topic of the post is how I’ve failed at virtually every goal I’ve ever set for myself (and what to do about that), that seems fitting.
It might be a bit premature to declare victory, but this piece from The Spectator on the New New Athiests (or Newer Atheists) is still exciting. In it, Theo Hobson first provides a succinct and compelling explanation for the rise of the New Atheist after 9/11 and then sketches out their demise. In a nutshell: the New Atheism was a silly attempt to pretend that religions is neither compelling nor complex, and the moment is over because most people now realize that was a bit silly all long.
I expect it will take time (months, years) for this awareness to trickle down to the level of my Facebook experience, but I’m looking forward to not having to deal with immature arguments about how religion is the root of all evil and fundamentally irrational. Some diehards will never give up, of course, but I’ll be quite happy if it becomes not longer a legitimate topic of discussion, as it never should have been.
My friend Mahonri finally got my mum Fiona to finish her answers to his interview questions, and he’s got the whole response at his website. The questions are mostly about the book she wrote with my dad (The God Who Weeps), and you should definitely check it out!
This post is from a blog I’d never read before, so I’m not sure why Rachel Held Evans (the author) gets hate mail, but apparently she does. She decided to turn the hate mail into origami in order to make something beautiful out of something hateful (what an excellent concept!), and, as she says:
It felt a little awkward at first, but as I moved my fingers across those painful words, folding them into one another to make wings, then a neck, then a crooked little beak, healing tears fell, and I let my fingers pray.
I love the concept, and the whole piece is very touching. What sticks with me most, however, is the idea of fingers praying. I suppose prayer originates in the heart, and there’s no reason that it could not be expressed through actions other than speech. It’s a beautiful thought, and something for me to meditate over.
I have been ridiculously busy today. (I have also learned that females in my family are much tougher than males measured by tears-to-vomit ratio.) My weekly post for Times and Seasons is late, but it is there. And that counts for something right?
This is another post that is particularly Mormon, but I think the margon (Mormon jargon) is not as bad as in some previous posts.
Looking through his older posts, Russ Hill doesn’t blog very much. Only a couple of times a year. But when he gets to posting he doesn’t mess around. In this most recent entry, Confessions of a Mormon Bishop, he gathers the most important lessons he’s learned from his service:
I have learned that we believe it is a strength to conceal weakness.
I have learned that most of us bare scars from the failure, disappointment, and fear in our lives. And, we prefer to wear long sleeves.
I have learned that the strongest among us are those with the cleanest mirrors.
He also explains, along the way, what being a Mormon bishop is about to folks who might not be familiar with the Mormon Church:
I did not ask for this opportunity. I never considered I might someday have an office in a church. I have no professional training for this position. I am not a scriptural scholar. I have not walked through vineyards with robe-wearing monks. And, if you’re wondering about vows of celibacy let me introduce you to my four kids. All I did was answer a phone call. Show up for a meeting. And nod when asked if I would serve.
Unlike Russ, I have considered that I might someday be a bishop. I sort of assume that I will for one simple reason: when you’ve got a lay clergy everyone who sticks around for a long enough time gets picked eventually. I plan on sticking around, so I’ll probably get picked. I’m a little apprehensive about that, but only a little. Some things are so far out of your league that worrying doesn’t seem appropriate to the scale of the problem. I’ve known bishops, my dad was a bishop, and it’s the hardest job in the world. So, when and if it comes, I hope God helps me out for the sake of anyone who might come to me looking for wisdom, like they go to Russ and like I’ve gone to my bishops over the years.
There’s no way I could ever do it on my own. I don’t think anyone could.
