A few weeks from now I will turn 40. It's made me a little reflective lately. I've been thinking about birthdays and the important part they play in organizing the life process. Up until now birthdays have organized my life according to a series of very momentous rights of passage. They have marked out a […]
Archive for the ‘Religion’ category
That Fresh RM Smell
Several nights ago I got a phone call from my mom. She said that my youngest brother was going to be stopping briefly in Los Angeles on his way home from his Mormon mission to Australia. This morning he borrowed a phone from a fellow traveler and called to let me know where I could […]
The morality of faith
In an article in the Guardian the other day I read the following from novelist Ian McEwan, who, it turns out, sheltered Salman Rushdie after the fatwa came out: Faith is at best morally neutral and at worst a vile mental distortion. This strikes me as exactly right. Clearly, based on my posting history here, […]
Canadian Gothic
Hugh lived on an enormous wheat and ranching farm in Alberta, Canada, and I lived in Great Falls, Montana. Three hours of wheat-edged and windswept asphalt separated us, with a glowing ember of a border crossing in the middle. Hugh is my cousin, and we were best friends. Each summer either I would head north […]
The latest in multipurpose religion, courtesy of the mailbox
I got a letter in the mail. Not unusual; it’s from a group of churches based in Tulsa, OK, though the address is printed on tiny font on the back of the envelope at the bottom. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable and several small, irrational fears pop up. Since when did churches have […]
I thought I was done with this
Well, I guess without people getting emotionally ambushed by blog posts, the Internet would pretty much shut down, wouldn’t it? Ben Wolfson, of all people, has stepped up the political blogging over at Unfogged recently. On Sunday he posted about California’s Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that would revoke the newly recognized right to contract […]
Eyes wide open
As I was re-reading David Foster Wallace online, I received a forwarded email. It was from an aunt whose emails usually contain blinking/singing American flags and/or truisms that would have been cross-stitched on a pillow a generation ago. DFW would have loved her. The emails implicitly assume that I voted for Bush in both cycles […]
Papa don’t preach
More interesting than whether or not little Bristol Palin is pregnant or whether or not she is in fact baby Trig’s mother is the question of whether or not the Palin family’s “private” affairs should be on or off limits in the nation’s ongoing presidential debate. I say that the private lives of the entire […]
Thursday favorites: Polygamist houses
The polygamist house has always fascinated me. It somehow has to hold multiple wives, a large number of children, and the husband that organizes them all. A few weeks ago, a friend and I spent a day in the polygamist community of Colorado City, Arizona taking pictures of houses. We had some pretty unreal experiences […]
Announcing the first Great Whatsit book club
When I was a kid, I got the greatest pleasure from doing what other people expected of me. Still, there were glitches. My friend L—‘s dad taught our Deacon’s Quorum class in church (Sunday School for 12 and 13-year-old boys) a few times and seemed to be annoyed with me when I didn’t like his […]
