High up in the Spanish Pyrenese mountains near the French border is a tiny medieval town built on a mountainside that overlooks a picturesque valley. High above the town on an exposed hilltop sits the remains of a church built in the middle of the 10th century. My wife and I just returned from Spain where we hiked to this ancient house of worship. (more…)
Roy was the cashier at the cafeteria in our building (HHS Headquarters) while I worked there in 2004-2006. Being a cashier doesn’t really require any special talents but Roy was in a unique situation. He was blind. (more…)
On Tuesday the U.S. Senate voted against a bill that would have given the District of Columbia a representative in the House of Representatives. The same bill would have given Utah a fourth seat in the House as well. Many feel that the last census unfairly penalized Utah because so many of their citizens were out of the state serving missions for the Mormon Church and were not counted in the census. (more…)
Part of the Mormon blogging community has been picking over the Nicene Creed and all that stuff about homoousian, the created or uncreated nature of members of the Trinity, and other “heavy stuff” that you may or may not want to wade into. One big sticking point between us and traditional trinitarian Christianity seems to be whether God created Jesus or not. They don’t think He did. We do. The Mormon explanation of Christ’s divinity blurs the line between God and man quite a bit more than many traditional Christians are comfortable with. I assume it was these controversies that recently led one evangelical blogger to pointedly ask: How many Gods are there anyway? (more…)
And not just as grandparents.
There’s an old photograph of my grandpa with his buddies when he was young. It would’ve been taken sometime in the early 30s. They’re standing on a sidewalk. At first you think they’re a harmless bunch, even if they are slouching and smoking cigarettes. But then you notice the empty alcohol bottles strewn around their feet. And you think, these guys were up to no good.
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One of our employees came to me the other day and asked me how I know Erlene (my wife) was the one for me. (more…)
One of the great, classic sketches from Saturday Night Live involved a Chris Farley character, Bennett Brauer, talking to Kevin Nealon during the Weekend Update. In this discussion Bennett would use finger quotes and say stuff like, I have what some call a “weight problem.” or I pop my whiteheads with the protractor I used in “high school.” The reason this was so funny is because the act of finger quoting (or quoting at all) is to communicate that the thing quoted is in some way of questionable legitimacy, and in Bennett Brauer’s case, “weight problem” and “high school” were of questionable legitimacy. And that’s just funny.
Similarly, in discussions about art it’s extremely common for people to put the word art into quotes (this seems especially true in discussions of art among Mormons). (more…)
My wife and I just returned from the National Bridal Market in Las Vegas. There were booth after booth of Wedding gowns, bridesmaids dresses, prom dresses, veils etc. etc.
At each booth there was a bowl of candy. (more…)
Now that I’m home fulltime, I’m driving our kids to early-morning semetery, rather than relying on other people to get them there. That means getting up at 5:15, if I want to get dressed before getting in the car. But I don’t, so I get up at 5:30 and walk blindly into the dark morning, figuring no one human is up at that hour, so who cares if I’m in my pajamas?
My daughter is a morning person. No one else in our family is. She can get up at 5am and be happy. It’s like she’s an alien, or something.
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Please bear with me through these opening paragraphs as I explain how I came upon the subject of my post. I work in downtown Washington DC and I live in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. Interstate 395 starts at the southwest corner of the Capital beltway and transverses from Northern Virginia northeast into Washington. I395 includes some High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes (HOV) that require each car to carry at least (3) passengers. My normal mode of transportation is to use what we call the Slug Line. (more…)
Last week my family and I went for a drive. The excuse was a doctor’s appointment. The doctor was in Boulder so we loaded up our three kids and set off on the 30 minute drive to “The People’s Republic.” (more…)
I admit to being happy about the abject failure of September Dawn, a film about Mountain Meadows Massacre, and by most accounts a ham-fisted, campy, anti-Mormon hatchet job. This is an opinion shared by critics across the ideological spectrum with no connection to the LDS church. Steven Hyden at the Onion AV Club put it pointedly:
With its complete lack of empathy for early Mormons and simplistic rendering of historical figures, September Dawn is that rare movie that actually deserves whatever condemnation might come from religious groups.
Just thought you’d like to know.
