After an 18-episode absence from the Podcast, I teamed up with Glenn Ostlund to interview with fellow interfaith marriage masochist Jana Riess concerning her controversial blog post from last week, “Five Reasons Why Mormon Church Meetings Are the Dullest You’ll Find Anywhere.”

Episode 73: Why Mormon Church Meetings Are So Dull

As usual, if you want to comment, please comment at MormonExpression.com.

I guess it’s probably time to plug for my Sunstone 2010 presentation. I’ll be presenting on Friday, August 6 from 3:30 – 4:30 PM. From the current program:

MORE PRECIOUS THINGS: EVIDENCE FOR WOMEN’S PRIESTHOOD IN THE EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY

Abstract: Mormon feminists have centered their arguments for women’s priesthood on data from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, contending that the Church’s founding leaders granted women a form of priesthood that was subsequently
choked out. Through an exploration of texts, inscriptions, and frescoes from the earliest Christianity, the author reaches back even farther
into history to show that women once served as apostles, elders, deacons, and bishops in addition to performing baptisms and administering the Eucharist.

Respondent: MAXINE HANKS, feminist theologian; gnostic clergy; scholar women’s studies in religion; fellow, Harvard Divinity School; editor, Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism

Chair: JANEANNE PETERSON

If you’re wondering how Maxine Hanks came to be my respondent, apparently she offered to participate as a respondent this year, looked through the program, and liked the sound of responding to my presentation best. I’m thrilled and humbled to have her.

Then from 4:45 – 6:15 PM the same day, I’ll be doing the following panel:

EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY IN THE MORMON COMMUNITY

Abstract: The work of political economist Albert Hirschman suggests a nuanced approach to public dissatisfaction with an organization. Dissatisfied members of an organization, business, or nation have a variety of choices available, including both exit (simply leaving) and voice (discussing their dissatisfaction). As Hirschman notes, greater loyalty to the organization can correspond to greater use of voice. Contradicting traditional Mormon views, dissent may actually be an indicator of greater loyalty to the organization than silent acquiescence.

Panelists will discuss loyalty, voice, exit, and dissent from a variety of angles, ultimately suggesting that the Mormon community’s understanding of public disagreement may be underdeveloped, and sketching ways in which legitimate dissent could take on a broader role in the community.

Moderator Panelist: KAIMIPONO WENGER, JD, assistant professor, Thomas Jefferson Law School, San Diego

Panelists: KRISTINE HAGLUND, editor, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; JOHN DEHLIN, PhD student, clinical/counselingpsychology, Utah State University, founder, Mormon Stories podcast, STAYLDS.COM; yours truly

I haven’t done an academic symposium since the 2004 BYU Humanities Symposium, and I’ve never claimed any talent for public speaking, so I can’t promise a good show or anything. Looking at that line-up makes me feel like an ant among giants.

But, if you think listening to me is something you’d like to do, you’re welcome to come.

This month’s Ensign contained an article by Elder M. Russell Ballard entitled “Sharing the Gospel With Confidence,” remarks originally delivered as part of a commencement address at Brigham Young University on August 13, 2009. In the article, Elder Ballard had this to say about discussing polygamy:

Our Church members have often allowed others to set the conversational agenda. An example is plural marriage. This ended in the Church as an official practice in 1890. It’s now 2010. Why are we still talking about it? It was a practice. It ended. We moved on. If people ask you about polygamy, just acknowledge that it was once a practice but not now and that people shouldn’t confuse any polygamists with our church. In ordinary conversations, don’t waste time trying to justify the practice of polygamy during Old Testament times or speculating as to why it was practiced for a time in the 19th century. Those may be legitimate topics for historians and scholars, but I think we simply reinforce the stereotypes when we make it a primary topic of conversations about the Church.

Rob Bowman has already done a post listing some of the reasons why polygamy is still fair game, most of which I would agree with. However, I would say that the number one reason I still feel polygamy is worth mentioning is because the church hasn’t stopped practicing it. According to current church policy, a living man can be sealed to more than one woman (living or dead) on account of death of or divorce from earlier wives.¹ A famous example of this is apostle Dallin H. Oaks, whose first wife passed away in 1998. He re-married in 2000 and has referred to his second wife as an “eternal companion,” indicating a sealing to her as well. It seems reasonable to assume that Elder Oaks expects to be married to both women in the next life.

Continue reading But polygamy hasn’t ended

The other day, my daughter (who just turned 4 last week) picked up a glass china mug, pretended to drink from it, then shouted, “Mmm, COFFEE!”

I blinked at her in disbelief. You’ll recall that neither of us drinks coffee, so we don’t have it in the house, therefore I don’t know where she familiarized herself with it enough to pretend that she’s drinking it. Maybe at my church?

In any case, it’s a sign. She’s going to be Protestant.

We were advised by a lawyer-type person from a tenant rights agency that, according to Illinois landlord-tenant law, our case counts as “constructive eviction” and our lease is immediately void. He seemed very confident that ours should be an easy lease to break and advised us to send written notice to our landlords and vacate any remaining possessions from the apartment as soon as possible.

On top of that, our landlords have not been communicating with us very well. I called them on Wednesday morning and left them a message saying that we’d been offered a TEDS apartment and we needed to hear back from them by Friday morning on how they felt about us moving out permanently. They have yet to return the call.

So, we are moving into Trinity Evangelical Divinity School on-campus housing on Friday, July 2. I’m pretty excited about the move. It means walking to work and to all of my classes and it means being able to walk to the library for research whenever I feel like it, which will come in handy as I complete my thesis research and writing this next year. There are also great on-campus resources and networks for families with children. The one downside is that it means Harley will be switching school districts in the fall, though we may be able to keep her at her old school for the summer. Hopefully the Bannockburn program will be just as good as the Vernon Hills program.

I need movers to help us unload our storage unit and bring it to our new apartment on Saturday, July 3 in the evening, and sometime next week during the day I will need a few people to help me clean my old apartment (what isn’t being remodeled, which may not be much). If you live near me and are interested in helping with either, e-mail me.

Thanks again everyone who has hosted us, offered to host us, or helped us clean, pack and move while we’ve been homeless. We’re especially grateful to both of our faith communities, the LDS church and the Covenant church. This disaster showed me that times like this are actually a great time to be an interfaith family. Having two religious communities to turn to for support is certainly better than one.

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled ClobberBlog programming.

So, here’s some news on our living situation.

People from our respective faith communities have really stepped up to help us. On the night that our apartment started leaking, the first counselor in Paul’s bishopric immediately opened his home to us and we stayed with him for three nights. The counselor and his family were really wonderful about helping us pack up our old apartment and helping me run some errands for sorting out this mess. We also had 10-12 people from Paul’s ward show up on Saturday evening with no prior notice to help us pack up our belongings and move them to storage, including both counselors in the bishopric, the elders quorum president, and the sister missionaries who live right behind us.

My church has been really wonderful as well. My pastor mentioned our plight in her sermon on Sunday and two families approached us after church with offers to stay with them. Right now we’re staying at the home of one of our leadership team members, as guests and as off-and-on house sitters while they travel. We’ll probably stay with them until July 11 and then make a switch to the other family.

Trinity has also offered to let us stay in the residence halls for a good price with a flexible, pro-rated contract to meet our needs, as they have very few single students living on campus during the summer.

What it’s all come down to is that we have two options:

Option 1 – We stay in temporary housing (guests of friends from church, Trinity dorms, etc.) for 30-60 days until our apartment is repaired, then move back in and renew our lease as originally planned. Harley was in a really wonderful special education pre-school program, so I’d like to keep her in it if possible.

Option 2 – Our lease was set to end on 8/31/2010, 74 days after the accident happened. We had planned to renew it, but obviously being evicted by mother nature so close to the end of the lease complicates that. We’ve applied for TEDS on-campus housing. There are four two-bedroom apartments becoming available; we’re fifth on the waiting list. If one family ahead of us turns down an offer, we’ll be offered an apartment. Living on campus would be extremely convenient for us since I work there and go to school there, so we’d like to take this option if it comes.

I called my landlord today to let her know that these are our options. I told her that I understand that this is a stressful time for them and we’d like to be sensitive to their needs as well as our own. She said she’d discuss it with her husband and get back to us.

I feel pretty good about it all, and I feel good that we’re giving our stressed-out landlords the opportunity to have some say in our decision. Thanks everyone for keeping us in prayer.

In the meantime, Harley has a four-bedroom fully furnished house to play in, and a guest bedroom all to herself, and she loves it.

A windstorm ripped off part of the roof of our apartment building yesterday. The ceiling in the living room and in our daughter’s bedroom is caving in and the fire department has declared the building uninhabitable.

So, it looks like we’re out of a home and looking for a new apartment.

We’re about to spend the rest of the day packing our belongings into a U-Haul and moving them to a storage unit. We’ll (hopefully) be staying with friends for the next week or two while we hunt for a new place to live.

Everyone is safe and we have not suffered any serious property damage. One of the ceiling cave-ins happened right over my desktop, but we moved it before any water came through.

Don’t know how much you’ll see me online for the next few weeks. My cell phone still works just fine if you need to contact us, and I’ll have at least occasional access to e-mail depending on host home.

UPDATE: Here are some photographs of the damage.

What a cheery sign the fire department put up on our building!

Continue reading Mother Nature’s Eviction Notice

[Hanks, Maxine, ed. Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. Salt Lake City, Ut.: Signature Books, 1992.]

Let’s get caught up today with Chapter 6, “Mormon Women as ‘Natural’ Seers: An Enduring Legacy” by Ian G. Barber.

“And the king said that a seer is greater than a prophet. And Ammon said that a seer is a revelator and a prophet also; and a gift which is greater can no man have, except he should possess the power of God, which no man can; yet a man may have great power given him from God.” ~ Mosiah 8:15-16

Barber’s essay covers the following points:

• Women commonly functioned as seers in the nineteenth century and in the early LDS church, often through use of a peep stone. These seers were charismatic and their gifts came through non-hierarchical channels.
• The gift of seeing was often found in those who were denied formal access to power by the culture of the nineteenth century. See Alan Taylor, “A black skin, female gender, and adolescent age were all marks of powerlessness in the early Republic and one or some combination of the three often characterized seers.” (175)
• LDS leaders came to see these unofficial seers as challengers to their authority and began to discourage their flocks from giving heed to such figures. I had to chuckle at the irony of this situation, given that Protestants more or less reject Joseph Smith for the exact same reason: he challenged our authority with non-hierarchical revelation that he received (in part) through a peep stone and did not bring his message to the Christian world through the proper channels.
• In spite of this, the idea of women as natural seers dovetails quite nicely with the common LDS wisdom that women are more spiritual than men and men need priesthood to compensate for their lack of spirituality. If Mormons really wish to maintain that gender paradigm, they should encourage the tradition of women as natural seers.

Throughout this chapter, I kept on thinking: sure, lots of nineteenth century women claimed to see visions in rocks. But how many were actually doing so, and how many were the nineteenth century equivalent of teenagers screwing around with Ouija boards and “Bloody Mary” slumber party rituals? I certainly believe that women can be seers, and I believe that they should seek to develop these gifts to help compensate for the limited role that the LDS church offers them. Problem is, so long as women’s organizations are subordinated to the male LDS hierarchy, the potential scope and authority of their visions is going to be on a leash.

Next week will be a treat with Chapter 7: “Non-Hierarchical Revelation” by one of my favorite Mormon historians, Todd Compton. This also represents the last week of 2006-2007 fMh summaries as the chapter discussions didn’t pick up again after that.

Continue reading W&A: Notes on Chapter 6

[Hanks, Maxine, ed. Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. Salt Lake City, Ut.: Signature Books, 1992.]

Yup, late again, but here’s Chapter 5, “An Expanded Definition of Priesthood?: Some Present and Future Consequences” by Meg Wheatley.

For starters, the tone of this chapter is markedly more gentle than that of some of the previous chapters. Not that Wheatley’s insights don’t still cut into some lazy LDS aphorisms on gender (”[B]usyness is not the issue. What is key is the value publicly assigned to the task, the status and recognition it commands,” p. 156), but the chapter contains less rhetoric depicting male leaders as the bad guys and her ultimate call to action is less dramatic. If you’re a Latter-day Saint who does not share all of the issues with the system expressed by Mormon feminists, and you’ve been reading these updates and thinking, “Man, I really don’t want to wade through all this feminist anger,” this chapter is probably a good place to start.

Continue reading W&A: Notes on Chapter 5

Interfaith marriages are rising fast, but they’re failing fast too by Naomi Schaefer Riley

(I know, what a diligent blogger I am, blogging about this two days after it was published.)

Here is the excerpt where I was interviewed:

Bridget Jack Meyers, an evangelical Christian who lives outside Chicago, married her husband, Paul, a Mormon, only after a lot of counseling and a lot of research. Meyers, a student at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, jokes that there aren’t a lot of books on evangelical-Mormon marriages. So she looked at ones on Christian-Jewish relationships. “A lot of the advice was to pick a religion and raise [the kids] in one. But neither one of us wanted to give up ours,” she said. So the couple agreed to raise their children in both faiths, letting them choose their own path at some point.

Shortly before their first anniversary, her husband walked out. Meyers, who writes about her interfaith family at ClobberBlog.com, explained in one posting: “He claimed that I had been a perfect wife and he had no complaints about me, but he was having second thoughts about a lifetime of interfaith marriage. He had decided that he wanted to get married in the temple and have his children be sealed to him, and he wanted to raise his children in the church, so he thought it would be best if we went our separate ways before any children entered into the union.”

The two reconciled and, according to Meyers, religion wasn’t the only issue. Still, it’s clear to her that these questions are lurking. “We didn’t account for all the ways that the different religions will affect our children,” she told me. Mormons typically baptize children around age 8. But Meyers believes that is too young. Since her daughter is only 3, she says, “I’m not getting worked up over it yet.” But she worries that if they wait too long, her child will be ostracized in the Mormon church.

As for the long term, she tries not to “religiously manipulate” her daughter. But Meyers knows she will be disappointed if her daughter chooses her husband’s church.

Thanks to Ms. Riley, who did a great job on the article.