February 17, 2012
by brandt
in Uncategorized
Reading has always been in my blood. I can distinctly remember being 9 years old, losing feeling in my arm, being propped up on my elbow while underneath the covers with a flashlight and a book, and quickly turning the light off and switching positions any time I heard my parents walking outside my bedroom door. I have vivid memories of blasting through the first 4 books of the Harry Potter series on vacation when I was 16 years old, a stack of John Grisham books when I was 17 (and on vacation), and countless others.
Reading is what also got me into a more intellectual/scholarly based look at religion, and Mormonism in general. I realized when I was on my mission that the correlated Deseret Book published books and materials just weren’t whetting my whistle. I wanted something with a bit more substance, a bit more meat, something to help me understand my religion a bit better. After I returned home, I took a break to decompress from my mission, but as I returned to college, I was excited to experience BYU-level religion classes. Little did I know that my classes would be glorified CES Institute classes, with the same milk-type lessons and stories I had heard from my youth.
As I explored the bloggernacle, I realized there were people out there looking for a similar dialogue. I found the main Mormon periodicals, and I started expanding my library aside from the “bestselling” Deseret Book items that left me wanting more. My time in the online Mormon world has shown me that I’m not the only one that feels this sense of yearning for what is considered to be a “good” book for Mormon research. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked through blogs or Google with the search string “Essential Mormon Books,” or something along those lines.
More
January 3, 2012
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
I have attended something like 450 testimony meetings in my life and four times as many sacrament meetings, not to mention countless hours of sunday school, primary, Relief Society, seminary, Institute, a mission, and home and visiting teachers. In all those hours one message loomed –
WE HAVE THE ANSWERS! ! ! ! We HAVE the answers. We have the ANSWERS. We have THE answers.
WE have THE answers!!!
But what answers, exactly, does the church have? Consider, for instance, the classic: How do I get to the Celestial Kingdom? More
December 21, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
Last week I was invited to a gathering of moms and kids from my husband’s ward. (They split the wards just after I quit attending so I don’t actually know many of the people my family attends church with. My daughter, however, spends every Sunday with these children [and their mothers - who chiefly seemed to be members of the Primary presidency] and so I thought I ought to go and get acquainted.) As we were sitting around the kitchen one mom raised her concerns about how to break it to her kids that Santa isn’t real. Image(s) courtesy VintageHolidayCrafts.com
She told us that when she was a girl her mother played up the Santa thing to the hilt. She would wake up Christmas morning not just to presents and some half-eaten cookies, but also sooty footprints in the living room and reindeer tracks in the yard. Her mom put enormous energy into making certain her kids believed in Santa (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc). But then — on their ninth birthday — she took them out for ice-cream and just gave it to them straight — “Santa isn’t real.”
Imagine the broken hearts. More
December 8, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
I was 9 or 10 that summer. I lived to swim, ride my bike, play with my dolls and cars, read and daydream. The future seemed far away and church was just something I went to. We were at a ward campout when the bishop pulled me aside to ask how I was doing. My dad was living in LA that year, going to school, and the rest of us had stayed behind. My mom was working crazy hours as a dance instructor and choreographer and I am sure the people around us worried about her, all alone with six kids under 11 years old, and about us. Bishop was my dad’s climbing buddy, an English professor at the local college and a great guy, the first bishop to stick in my brain. I remember the conversation. We sat on a couple of big rocks surrounded by pine trees, people from the ward coming and going around us and he told me I should always remember this advice: More
November 30, 2011
by Ed the Nephite
in Uncategorized
This is the accurate account of me, Ed, and my family. I am the previously unmentioned youngest son to my parents Lehi and Sariah, and have four older brothers, being called,(beginning at the eldest) Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi (goody two shoes). As you will notice, my account is much more precise than my windbag brother.
Dad said the Lord warned him to depart out of our home, the land of Jerusalem, because he proclaimed unto the people one too many times they better stop their wicked ways. Several groups threatened to kill father just to shut him up. Father made us pack up and take a three days’ journey into the wilderness. More
November 29, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
I am still scared to say it.
My secret name.
My name that belongs to every other woman who received her endowments on the day I received my endowments . . . my name that isn’t sacred or even, really, special . . . only . . .
Names are weird things.
They can give you power — I used to think about this when I was a missionary. No-one got to know my name, but I always jumped right in to calling everyone else by their first name: “What is your name? Sue, (You don’t mind if we call you Sue, do you? Great!) Sue, what do you know about God? . . .” An investigator, who was just out of rehab, insisted that we go by our first names with her. ”That’s what we do in group and I like it better,” she’d say. But it was so uncomfortable. Suddenly we were on a level playing field with her. There is a reason why they call our missionaries, “Elder.” They may not be old and wise, but they’ve got the name! More
November 27, 2011
by Mike Tannehill
in Uncategorized
There has been a great deal of talk lately regarding whether or not Mormons are Christians. This is not a new argument, it is actually as old as the church itself. When the Church was first founded many thought the nickname of “Mormon” was somehow a reference to Mohammed and that the church was in fact an Islamic faith. In the here and now though the argument is made popular again because of a Mormon Presidential candidate. The press would like to know how Americans feel about having a president who comes from what some see as an unusual faith perspective. More
November 27, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
So every once in a while someone suggests I ought to try reading the Book of Mormon, “just once more.” Most of these suggestions come from people I really love and so I am occasionally inclined to humor them. I pick up the book and start reading . . . “I Nephi . . . blah, blah, blah . . .” I never get far before I give up, but every read increases my dislike, my utter loathing . . . not of the book itself, but of that one character — Nephi.
Can I just say how very much I loath Nephi?! Have for ages. Actually (and this really happened), I once shocked a Sunday School teacher and class when I made the suggestion that, if I had been Nephi’s sister, I’d probably have wanted to kill him too. Who wouldn’t? The man is pompous, self-absorbed and not at all hesitant to share his deep self-love with anyone who will listen. If the Book of Mormon were true and Nephi were a real man and a prophet, and if you had the misfortune to actually know the guy . . More
November 20, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
There are a few things in my fairly recent apostasy that I still find a little uncomfortable. Drinking. Shopping on “the Sabbath”. Swearing. After 37 years as a Mormon, who could blame me for having to push through a little internal resistance against being “bad”? After all, being an apostate isn’t my natural state.
Except –
There is one thing I do not have a difficult time doing at all: I simply Do Not Believe.
Sometimes I just stop and marvel at how incredibly easy it is to not believe. I don’t have to work at it at all. I don’t spend nights worrying about how to believe less. I don’t pray desperate prayers begging some unseen force to make me believe less. I don’t hope that things aren’t true. They just aren’t. More
November 14, 2011
by Fred W. Anson
in Uncategorized
Introduction
With the “I’m A Mormon” ad campaign recently hitting the shores of Australia, frequent Mormon Expression board commenter Martin Jacobs was prompted to consider it’s message in light of trends he sees emerging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I found his analysis intriguing enough to merit stepping aside and letting him mount my soap box as a guest blogger. I hope that you find his insights as fresh, challenging, and thought provoking as I did when I heard them for the first time.
Hi, I’m Zelph and I’m a Modernist
by Martin Jacobs
The tag line “I’m [insert name here], and I’m a Mormon” superbly clinches the current advertising campaign by the Mormons. However, I suggest that the message that it projects is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s not even the gospel of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith; it’s modernism. More
November 12, 2011
by Eric
in Uncategorized
As I mentioned before, I recently got some wonderful news. Without Facebook accounts (gasp!), my wife and I don’t have the convenience of info-bombing all of our friends and relatives at once, so we’re sharing the news the old fashioned way: calling people up, meeting people in grocery aisles, work cubicles, walking down the street, etc. (It’s actually kind of fun to retell the tale for the umpteenth time, but perhaps this means we’re vain, attention-hogs, you know?) Last week, during the upteenth-and-one rehashing, an acquaintance interrupted, smiling, and said, “You know, we’ve been keeping you in our prayers this whole year, just hoping things would work out for you.” More
November 8, 2011
by Tierza
in Uncategorized
The first cracks began in a discussion about tithing. I’m a stay-at-home mom, but I always think of “his” paycheck as “ours” and so I asked if maybe we could divide the tithing money, let me choose what we do with a portion of it (specifically, I wanted to use the money to give offerings at the church I was attending or donate it to some charity or another). But it quickly became apparent that it is too important to him to pay a full (on his gross) tithe for him to make any adjustment. He’s a good man (as a peace offering, he offered to give me (give up) his monthly “mad money” for use as my “tithes” instead) and I think I understand why he feels the way he does about the tithing, so I let the idea drop. The issue ‘died’ after that one discussion, and we went back to our normal, peaceful, happy relationship . . . More
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