P.S. Please Don't Stigmatize Medicine

I recently wrote a response to the central message of Ian Williams' NYT op-ed--that Mormons are hopelessly out of touch with the real, messy world.

But in my response, I didn't respond to one line that bothered me for reasons that go beyond Mormonism.

While ragging on his perspective of restrictive Mormon morality, Williams said "the L.D.S. worldview would positively smother most Americans. It might be smothering most Mormons; Utah's antidepressant use makes it one of the most-medicated states in the country."

Now, this is pretty shaky evidence for condemning a culture. While it's possible that aspects of Mormonism are causing or compounding depression, there are plenty of alternate explanations for why Utah (which is not actually all Mormon, but let's ignore that for a moment) might have a high medication rate. One possibility is that Utah actually does have high depression rates--but because of another factor such as weather or high levels of some recessive Scandinavian depression-related gene. But since medication rates are not the same as depression rates, it's also possible that Utahns are not actually more depressed than any one else, only better medicated. It's possible, for example, that because of Mormon influence, Utahns are more likely to go to doctors for medication than to self-medicate through substance abuse. Or else that Mormons are more likely to find voices that decrease the stigma of mental health treatment, either in official church publications or just through brothers and sisters who are informed about or experienced in dealing with medical depression.

Which brings me to my big problem with Williams' critique: using Utah anti-depression medication rates as evidence of Mormon sinisterness doesn't just stigmatize Mormons. It also further stigmatizes medication for people struggling with depression.

And since there are a lot of people in this country who don't get their very real depression treated because they don't want to show "weakness" or disappoint others' expectations, more stigmatization is about the last thing we need.

I've known and loved many people, Mormons and others, who have been quite happy with their lives and struggled with depression at the same time. Personally, I consider it a great blessing whenever someone dealing with any mental illness can find a medication that works reasonably well for them.

So, Mr. Williams, if you're reading this--next time, could you look up Utah's chocolate consumption rate and use it as evidence that we need some vice instead? ;)

Whose world is "realer"?

Dear Ian Williams,

I've calmed down now. When I first read your letter, I was very upset--not because of any specific dig at my faith as because I felt like you'd built up a fantasy world and exiled me to it. You gave yourself a "messy, colorful" America and stuck me into an Edward Scissorhands world, where the shallow sameness is suffocating and anything unusual is kooky ("don't buy the underwear yet!" ha ha) rather than unique and worthy of the respect you might otherwise offer to Difference.

I've heard all that before, of course--I wasn't baptized yesterday--and, on honest reflection, I can understand where people like you are probably coming from. We Mormons persist in valuing an optimism and earnestness that can easily come across as naive. Our commercial art competes with Bollywood film for sentimentality. And we do like knowing our physical neighbors, which is beginning to seem so twentieth century, right on the border between quaint and antiquated.

Yes, we must seem like vestigial Jimmy Stewart fans in the era of Robert Downey Jr. For a screenwriter like you, I'd imagine the mismatch is particularly disconcerting. You've tried to talk with us, but we get even the rhythms of the dialogue all wrong. You've been to church meetings, but you can't get over the decades-old memo about white shirts and suit jackets being passe our wardrobe department obviously missed. And then, of course, there's the disaster of the casting: all those women with all their babies--sometimes five to a family!--so many that you wonder whether their mothers will ever get to have normal, productive lives doing important things, like writing op eds or restaurant reviews and otherwise contributing to adult society.

I get it, Ian. Your world is not my world. Fine. Your world is cooler than my world. OK. I'm not bothered by that.

But you seem to think that your world is the real world, and that the real world is something I'm impossibly distanced from. You say that missionaries, in particular, are immune to reality. "Mormons see the world," you say, "but they don't get it."

And that's when I get mad.

Because, Ian Williams, I don't think you get the world either. Where I come from, we believe there's a beam in every human eye. And it's my strong personal belief that there's a whole skyscraper worth of beams in eyes that look through ultra-specialized, demographically segmented late capitalist culture.

I am going to make some assumptions about you now. They are assumptions based on patterns that are largely true of Americans, but feel free to correct me when I'm wrong. First assumption: I'm betting that your job matters to you and that, like most Americans, many of the people you know best are people you know through work. Second: I'm betting that you went to college, and that in college, the people you spent your free time with were almost all college students. Shall we go on? I'm also betting that most of the people you break bread with are somewhat similar to you in terms of educational and income levels, political views, and favorite TV shows. Am I at least close to the truth so far?

None of this, of course, is inherently bad or would make you unusual, but all of it suggests a degree of separation from that big, diverse, messy world you don't think Mormons are a part of. You may read about poverty and have great ideas about it, but you probably don't spend a lot of time around poor people. You may have positive attitudes about immigrants, and I commend you for them, but you probably aren't having dinner with families whose legal status is complicated. You almost certainly think Nazism is terrible, but you've probably never sat in the living room of a former Nazi as she tells you what those times felt like.

You know the world, I would guess, far better from how it looks on paper than from how it looks up close.

Because of my church, I've seen it up close. I've helped struggling people in two continents move out of apartments due to all sorts of crises, from crooked landlords to persistent gunshots at night to serious vandalism by drug-addicted friends. I've eaten in homes where the first language has been Spanish, Navajo, Telegu. Where it's been German, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian, Marathi, Farsi, French.

And no, I wasn't following the news when I was a missionary in the former East Germany, and I never went out clubbing or whatever people do in your world to get to know the locals on a European trip. But I've sat in an old woman's apartment and listened to her struggle to make sense of what she remembers feeling when she saw Hitler at a rally in her youth. "He was like a god to us then," she said, "like a god." And I've been cooked meals by women who served in that war, and who can never forget the hunger they felt as the war dragged on and ended with near chaos in its wake, some of whom walked for hundreds of miles from confiscated homes toward uncertain futures. I've learned by experience how to recognize someone who won't feel right unless you eat every last scrap on the plate. And learned deep respect for the endurance of the old.

A man who was imprisoned by the communist government for non-cooperation once showed me the model train set he works on to find peace. A woman who'd believed and participated in the same government told me how her sense of betrayal when the wall came down and the secrets started coming out was so acute she had to be hospitalized.

I've had people tell me, holding little back, just which scars on their hearts they blame a God they don't believe in for. And I've felt a part of the pain in their old wounds come up fresh through their eyes.

I've heard people who swore they were staunch "materialist" atheists tell me why they believe in guardian angels. What happened in their lives they couldn't explain any other way.

I've talked to people about homes back in Africa they long to return to. To others about forsaken homes in authoritarian countries they've given up the hope of seeing again. And to one man, who'd been a trucker in the old days and taken long hauls across Siberia, about how at home he'd felt in the villages where everyone would come out to welcome him, where they'd give the space nearest the fire to the rare visitor from so far west.

There's a town near Leipzig called Eilenburg. About 17,000 people live there. As a missionary, I walked down every street in that town. Rang almost every doorbell. Met the variety of people who live in a real town in a real world, who never in their lifetimes will all meet each other. When I got home from my mission, I started to think about how even a mission in your home city would seem foreign. About how through the church, I'd been to parts of Columbus where no one from my suburb of Upper Arlington normally thought about or went. I still think about how many amazing people are always just beyond the edges of our awareness, and about how we find a piece of the divine whenever we really get to know someone.

I helped a woman move one time from the west side of Columbus to the east, this was a woman who'd only recently fled from a failed marriage with a bad man in a county known for strip mining to the concrete and cracked asphalt of the big city's low-rent areas. She tended her plants so carefully. Just little things in pots she could keep by run-down apartment windows. She said she'd seen another woman grow potatoes out of a boot above a sink and intended to grow her that stubbornly. I still think about her, too. And about the Mormons in the east side of Columbus who took time out of their weekends to welcome her to their side of town.

Just a few months ago in Utah, I held a man who was bone-thin, dying with two kinds of cancer, just held his body in place as gently as I could while his wife washed him. She wanted to do that while a church brother was there instead of a church sister, she said, to protect what she could of his privacy. She told me, "We come into this world without much dignity and that's how it is again all too often as we leave it." But I swear, no one else has ever looked so much to me like Jesus Christ as that man did just a week before he died.

We're kind, Ian Williams, but we're not blind. We know that life can ache, that people struggle and suffer as often as they find transcendence or joy. We believe in guidelines--or confines, call them what you will--not because we're running from the messiness of life, but because we know that life can be messy enough on its own and doesn't need our help to get there.

And because we want to be ready to find God in the faces of his children. Every day of the week, yes, and twice on Sunday.

The Priesthood, Cooperative Culture, and Why Mormon Women Don't Need Liberals to Save Them from Me

Sally Denton's NYT critique of Mormonism is only 335 words long. But it will probably still be helpful to sum up the core argument so we don't get bogged down in the snide remarks, scare quotes, and disorienting description of church president Thomas S. Monson, who can't finish a talk without getting the audience to laugh at least three times, as "stern."

Denton's thesis seems to be this:
"Mormonism is a valid issue of concern not as a religious test for office, but for its most distinctive characteristic — male authoritarianism."
Translation: It's wrong to vote against someone because of their religion--unless their religion has a male priesthood.

And her "so-what" clause is this:
"Given that Mitt Romney is a high church official and not just a member, voters are right to be circumspect."
Translation: the piece's thesis doesn't apply to JFK and the six sitting Supreme Court Justices who are Catholic, because they just go to their church, whereas Romney actively participates in his.

This argument is not entirely crazy. She's probably correct that Americans should be concerned IF the following two implicit assumptions are true:
1) Mormon male Priesthood leads to the marginalization and oppression of women.
2) Romney's government leadership style will be the same as a Priesthood leadership style.

Fortunately, as I will now attempt to show, Americans can rest easy because both of those assumptions are wrong.

My thesis will be this: Because Mormon church culture is a cooperative culture rather than a competitive culture, male priesthood is actually a good thing for women. And because American government is based on a competitive culture, Romney's religious leadership style is unlikely to successfully transfer in any case.

Sally Denton's Fishbowl

What do I mean by "competitive culture"? I mean a culture that highly values individuality and success and structures itself around those values.

Think of your experience in school. You were probably taught, starting at age five, to stay in your own seat, do your own work, and not to even touch people around you without getting express permission from them and the teacher. Within a few years, you were earning grades which were designed to measure your individual quality (of intelligence or hard work or competence or something--it may never have been clear exactly what, but there was certainly success, mediocrity, or failure expressed in a grade that was yours and yours alone). By high school, you were probably even getting a class rank that told you exactly where in the pecking order of personal achievement you stood--you got to find out exactly how many people were ahead of and behind you. You were supposed to feel good when you saw how many people were behind you and ambitious when you saw how many people were ahead.

I think it's safe to assume that Sally Denton's educational experience was like this. It's probably also safe to assume her work experience is like this: the rewards change from grades and certificates to promotions and bonuses, but the principle is the same. Compete. If you can outperform the people around you, you will be given status, attention, and power. That's how America works, and for goals like increasing productivity, it works really well.

It does not work well, though, for showing you how Mormons think about their church lives. You see, since Ms. Denton lives in a fishbowl of competitive culture, she assumes that's how everyone lives all the time. To her, the church is a "multibillion-dollar business empire." A corporate empire which keeps women from getting on even the first rung of the corporate ladder. (No wonder she thinks our leaders are a bunch of power-hungry old male #^%$%s!)

What Ms. Denton doesn't know is that you cannot build a corporate ladder to heaven. Competitive culture and Mormon religious organization have almost nothing in common.

A Crash Course in Cooperative Culture

Remember Ms. Denton's stirring final line: "Given that Mitt Romney is a high church official and not just a member, voters are right to be circumspect"?

To anyone who really knows Mormon organization, it's almost laughably absurd. For us, one of the distinctive traits of Mormonism isn't "male authoritarianism" it's the absence of a permanent distinct between clergy and regular members. "Not just a member" means almost nothing to Mormons, because every member--male and female--is supposed to have some sort of formal church position/assignment--which we refer to as a "calling"--at any given time. It's not shepherds and sheep: we, like sheep, all go astray, and so we all chip in to the work of shepherding: in different ways at different times throughout our lives.

Calling Romney a "high church official" is equally laughable, because his current callings are probably just "home teacher," meaning he's supposed to visit three or four families once a month to share an inspirational message and see if they're OK, and possibly something low-pressure like "assistant family history consultant," which would primarily involve helping kids work with their grandparents to do genealogy on a computer.

Behold the menace of Romney's crushing male authority.

Yes, Mitt Romney's calling was "stake president" in the late 1980s and early '90s, before he was even a registered Republican. That means he "presided over" several individual "wards." Now, usually the press refers to "wards" as "congregations," but since most Protestants only have "congregations," the press likes to use the Catholic term "diocese" (as opposed to "parish") to explain what a stake is. Which makes them compare Romney to a Catholic bishop or cardinal--you know, the kind of person who gets to wear a fancy ceremonial hat. And they often mistakenly assume that if you're the kind of guy who's at hat-level, you don't just become fourth Sunday organ player the next day. Because in a competitive culture, where promotions are a reward for an individual job well done, moving someone from the "top" to the "bottom" would be a terrible insult.

But, my dear brothers and sisters of the press, Jesus was famously tricky on the subject of "top" and "bottom." He said you're really only a big deal if you know how to be as small as a little kid. He said that in the kingdom of God, first is last and last comes first. He said that in the temple, a widow's $290 weekly paycheck is worth more than $20 million. And Mormonism has fully embraced that particular aspect of Jesus' strangeness. My grandfather was a stake president for several years--and then one day, he was thanked for his service and asked to accept a new assignment working with a handful of 11-year-old scouts. But it didn't bother him, and similar changes don't bother most Mormons, because we genuinely believe that all the work matters to God. How "high" or "low" a church assignment is doesn't matter--what matters is putting your heart, mind, and soul into it.

We have, you could say, a "cooperative culture"--one that values community and relationships over individual excellence. We are motivated more by the altruistic high of service and the intangible wealth of our deepening bonds with each other than by the egoistic satisfaction of getting to call the shots. You can criticize a cooperative culture--or let Nietzsche do so for you--but you should criticize it for being cooperative, not for slights it would have committed were it structured according to a totally different value system. You can say that Mormons are still living with an almost tribal mindset at the dawn of the 21st century, but you can't complain about a glass ceiling in a system that doesn't involve any "up" and "down" when it comes to job shifts.

Power and the Priesthood

As I've mentioned, millions of women have callings in the church. They preach, they teach, they sit on administrative councils, they entirely make up the presidencies of at least three church organizations. But women cannot be ordained to the earthly priesthood. On the most basic level, this means that women do not baptize, do not bless the bread and water that remind us of Jesus' sacrifice, do not serve as bishops (leaders of wards) or stake presidents. Women cannot be called as apostles or as the presiding prophet of the church. Not having the priesthood also means that women can pray for the sick, but don't anoint them with consecrated oil and bless them. And it means that for one of the three hours of our Sunday church meetings, men meet in one place as members of priesthood organizations, while women meet in another place as members of the worldwide, all-female Relief Society.

From the lens of a competitive culture, where independence, personal competence, and prestigious positions are highly valued, a list of things you can't do or positions you can't hold based on gender seems horribly restrictive. But according to the Pew Research Center poll the NYT debate is ostensibly responding to, only 8% of U.S. Mormon women say they think women should have the priesthood, a number significantly lower than the 13% of U.S. Mormon men who say women should be ordained to the priesthood.

Maybe Sally Denton did read those numbers and just assumed that Mormon women are either stupid or masochistic and need someone outside the culture to fight their battles for them. Which is actually what makes me (stern male dominator that I supposedly am) a far better Mormon feminist than Ms. Denton--you see, I actually respect and listen to Mormon women. I try to figure out what matters to them.

The impression I get from my listening is this: Mormon women already feel like they have a lot to do. And because Mormonism is a collective culture, they take no particular pride in doing everything on their own. Many of them may have wondered what it would be like to bless the sacrament bread or give a priesthood blessing to a sick child, but they would far rather have good men around them to help do those things than the power and obligation to do them on their own.

I saw this recently while reading through fiction submissions for the Mormon Lit Blitz Contest. In one story, a husband gets up at a testimony meeting to tell the whole ward how perfect his wife is. And she sits in her seat, seething, because she feels like he consistently puts her on a pedestal as a way of transferring responsibility for the spiritual life of their home entirely to her. If she's so good and righteous, he doesn't have to do anything. In the story, she tries and fails to express this to him in various ways until she finally resorts to buying a coffee maker and brewing coffee in the home as a way to shock him out of thinking she should manage everything on her own and into sharing a little more of the responsibility for their religious life.

Though the story is fiction, I think it captures a common attitude about real life. Mormon women love the male priesthood partly because it commits men to take an active role in family and church. Most Mormon women are capable of being extremely independent when necessary, but they would rather be harmoniously interdependent whenever possible. And they don't see priesthood power as a threat to their own power, because in cooperative cultures, power is not a zero-sum game.

I've heard Mormons make the argument that men's and women's roles are different, but equally important, and I've heard non-Mormons respond that it sounds like the old segregationist "separate but equal" talk. The truth about Mormon men and women is that we're not separate at all: the differences between Priesthood and Relief Society help draw us together when we might otherwise drift apart.

And since the possibility of men and women drifting apart from each other has hardly disappeared with the dawning of the twenty-first century, we still aim for gender relations that are close and complementary.

So how would this affect Romney as hypothetical U.S. President?

To review: if you understand that Mitt Romney comes from a cooperative church culture, you shouldn't view the maleness of our Priesthood or his time as a stake president as ominous warning signs of deep-rooted sexism. In fact, you should know that he's probably disproportionately likely to have a good marriage even against the temptations and pressures that come with packed schedules and prestigious positions--because even as U.S. President, he'd have a priesthood obligation to be an emotional presence in the home and support to his wife.

But a cooperative church and home culture doesn't mean he'll suddenly be changing the administrative culture of the executive branch.

Look: I'm Mormon, and I even work at a church-owned university. But it's still a modern university, so all the cooperative culture of my religious life gets pushed behind the competitive procedures of the school. I would never dream of giving grades at church, and would be scandalized if I heard of a teacher in priesthood meeting trying to motivate class members that way. But that doesn't stop me from giving grades at school, which is something I get paid to do-- and also use a stick and carrot to defend my assignments from Facebook and other teachers' homework. I also get "grades" in the form of student ratings. At church, I'd be most concerned with what the average performance is as a measure of how we can do better collectively, but at work I barely pay attention to where the average is--I'm just happy whenever I'm above it. I'm happy to be an independent individual and pursue individual excellence and compete with other people in my profession.

So I very much doubt a hypothetical Mormon President would even bother to try reorganizing his or her administration around cooperative values. Any attempt to do so would be doomed by the inertia of competitive values: they shape far too many goals and procedures.

Which means that you should neither vote against Romney because you dislike his church's organizational culture nor vote for Romney because you like his church's organizational culture.

In the end, politics has its own gravity. And in the black hole of the White House, the values of politics will almost certainly trump the Jesus-strange mindsets and traditions of our religion.

Cleaning Up After the New York Times...

On Monday, the New York Times published five short articles in their "Room for Debate" feature on whether it's a good idea to vote for a Mormon for President.

To call the five articles a "debate" is a bit generous of the Times: the three "con" pieces ("A Male-Dominated World," "It May Look Good on Paper," and "There Is a Dark Side to Mormonism") open with brief acknowledgments that Mormons have a nice attribute or two, then use charged language to give the faith an absolute pounding for various alleged transgressions of liberal values. The two "pro" pieces ("Can a Candidate Be Too Perfect?" and "Mormonism's Double Legacy") spend most of their time explaining why evangelicals hate us and comparing us to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Read them, my friends, and weep.

Then ponder. To be fair, it's nice to be harassed in print instead of tarred and feathered in person. And, unlike so many newspaper editorialists of the 1830s-1850s, no one on the Times panel actually called for or praised anti-Mormon violence (well...violence against living Mormons at least. Sally Denton did make a comment which seemed to endorse the 1857 federal expedition sent to crush a nonexistent Mormon rebellion). I probably should be thankful. I probably shouldn't whine about the combination of low levels of research and empathy with high levels of stereotyping, or ask why these article made it into a paper that feels as strongly about its civilizing mission as the New York Times.

But then again, according to an anonymous commenter on my other blog, I should also "go back to India" and consider the treatment of the dalits before I dare to criticize the morality of Newt Gingrich.

And so, New York Times, I am going to complain about your treatment of my faith. And then I'm going to do my best to explain why I think so many people are getting so much wrong.

As a favor to people with short attention spans, though, I'll split my discussion into three posts, which will appear over the next week or so. And as a favor to people whose attention spans are not yet exhausted, I'll give working titles and summaries for each in advance:

1: "The Priesthood, Cooperative Culture, and Why Mormon Women Don't Need Liberals to Save Them from Me"
Most white Americans grow up and live primarily in what I would call a "competitive culture." That makes it hard for them to understand how people think in the "cooperative culture" that is dominant in the church. Which makes it hard, in turn, for them to understand our concept of Priesthood--and why support for keeping the Priesthood male-only is even higher among Mormon women than it is among Mormon men.

2: "Dear Ian Williams: Next Time, Can You Please Keep Your Self-Righteousness to Yourself?"
What I learned about the world on my mission, whether it's fair to suggest that Mormons are all racists, and why criticizing anti-depressant use is probably a bad idea.

3: "Been There. Done That. Will It Happen Again?"
Why praising the invasion of Utah by Johnston's Army still hurts my feelings after all these years, and what an 1857 military stalemate has to do with the ERA and Prop 8. Plus, a brief rant about this recurring idea that stripping the LDS Church of its non-profit status would somehow strengthen the separation of church and state.

If you've made it this far, I hope you'll come back for the full posts. I will do my best to make it worth your while.

Wikipedia Features Plural Marriage

Happened to glance over the main page of Wikipedia last night and found this gem in the "On This Day" section:

1843 – Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, allegedly received a revelation wherein Christ proclaimed that anyone who rejects plural marriage will suffer damnation.

A part of me was a bit surprised. I know anyone can edit Wikipedia, but I expected the main page to have a little more class than, say, the kids in my seventh grade classes. A part of me was not at all surprised: Mormonism is in a blind spot as far as most people's sensitivity sensors are concerned. Most Americans can easily recognize that saying "1750 BCE -- Abraham purportedly received a revelation wherein the god El ordered the mutilation of all male genitalia" is both inaccurate and offensive, but won't blink about language involving Mormonism no matter how sensationalized or biased.

Since anyone can weigh in on Wikipedia, though, I decided not to let it just stand. I have no idea how to edit the main page directly, but there a "discussion" tab behind every page, and discussing is one of the things I do best. As it turns out, there's a section of the Main Page's discussion page specifically to errors in the "On This Day" page.

Using a neutral tone, I pointed out three problems with headline:
1) The use of "allegedly" is not consistent with Wikipedia's religious reporting on other areas (I referenced the Ten Commandments article as evidence: no "Moses allegedly received" phrasing there).
2) The phrase "anyone who rejects" is not consistent with the revelation (see D&C 132:3), which clearly limits any warnings to those who have "this law revealed unto them": i.e. people who have a direct experience with God on the subject, not just "anyone."
3) Hyperlinking "damnation" to the Wikipedia article of the same name is misleading, since Joseph Smith's views on damnation by 1843 were far different than the generic Christian, Muslim, and Jewish views given in that article.

I recommended a rephrasing that would get rid of the "allegedly" and the sensationalizing "damnation" bit altogether. I figured that letting someone neutral make the actual change would have the added benefit of avoiding a direct confrontation with whatever editor--probably far more experienced than me in working with Wikipedia--who had made the initial headline.

I went to bed.

When I woke up, the new headline was this:

1843 – Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, proclaimed a revelation recommending polygamy.

From a historical perspective, there's still a bit of a problem: "proclaimed" is hardly what happened in 1843. And the verb "recommending" could probably be improved on. But it's pretty much impossible to capture an event (actions in context) through a headline (words out of context) no matter what the subject, so I'm willing to cut the writer a lot of slack. The overt bias is gone, and that's good enough. I don't expect anyone to get everything right; I'll settle for some basic politeness.

An interesting side note--one of the responses on the discussion page to my criticism of the initial line was this:

"I think you make a couple of good points there. However, rewording the hook as you suggest to avoid them makes it very bland, and hardly worth having on the front page. I'm tempted to swap the hook for one of the other eligible unused ones (e.g. the 1862 Medal of Honor hook, and that's an FA) - any other thoughts?"

I had to smile when I read that. If you take out the sensationalism, the revelation on plural marriage seems hardly worth featuring for a broad internet audience. Since plural marriage is not practiced by something like 99.6% of people today who believe in Joseph Smith as a prophet, I don't think it would have been a bad call to swap it out for something else. But I'm also OK with the final form it took on the "On This Day" page.

Besides which, it was fun to see my influence on the front page of Wikipedia.

Tweeting Religiously

The internet is not really built for reverent contemplation, but during my two weeks on Twitter, I've put up a few religious tweets:

10 Feb
Went down to the river to preach, but he knew / the Jordan must flow to the sea

18 Feb
Want to feed the hungry? Don't waste their grain on alcohol. Want to save the rainforest? Stop eating beef.

Mormons: help protect the environment by keeping the Word of Wisdom.

19 Feb
My daughter calls cemeteries "dictionaries." My grandfather agrees: he finds meaning by looking up the names of the dead. #familyhistory

Update

Almost all of my writing time has been devoted to working on a book, so I've chosen to let my blogs go until I'm done (probably in April).

Yesterday, though, I decided to start writing a tweet most days: I'll post scripture-related ones on this blog periodically.