A member of my Community of Christ congregation recently asked if I would lead the Disciples’ Generous Response portion of tomorrow’s worship service (where donations and tithes are collected). I’ve done this for previous services, but more than any other way I’ve contributed to a Community of Christ service, this is the one that takes the most practice. In Latter-day Saint services, there’s never this kind of collection, and this was honestly one of the hardest things to get used to as I began regularly attending Community of Christ services. That said, much of this is due to the intense pressure for Latter-day Saints to tithe; even if Community of Christ services always include an invitation to donate, there’s none of the same pressure that there is in Latter-day Saint circles, so I’ve come to see this as an acceptable tradeoff.

Steven Peck’s “A Short Stay in Hell” gets better each time I read it.

I’ve mentioned before that I support the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast on Patreon, one of the perks of which is that I get access to the Tribune’s Mormon coverage without having to subscribe to the whole paper (which would be a lot of money for someone who doesn’t care about Jazz coverage or Utah politics).

Thanks to this Patreon perk, I read a lot of news about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and between that and over three decades that I spent as an active member of that church, you’d think that nothing would surprise me anymore. Yet, I was still taken aback by an article that showed up in my email inbox last night: Latter-day Saints alter a Nativity painting to make Mary more modest.

I’ve been trying to put words to an idea in my head for a few weeks, and I think I finally have it: A secular Christmas is still definitely Christian in the same way that Homer Simpson is still definitely a white dude.

What a weird week it has been in Twitterland.

Skipping my congregation’s candelight service today. Can’t go in person because of family sickness, and they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to make huge efforts to make it Zoom accessible. Bummed to miss it, but playing Mario Party with kiddo instead is pretty fun.

I was really hoping to make something special of Advent this year, but the past three weeks have just kind of sucked, and I don’t know if the next one will be any better. I don’t know that I have a takeaway from this, except that maybe it’s okay to have a sucky Advent.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any worse. Will be really interested to see if Dorsey gets banned.

I’ve posted a bunch of articles about this already, but Masnick’s take is super helpful.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

I’ve been trying to avoid dire predictions for Twitter since Musk took over, but this seems more and more like a turning point in the identity and reputation of the platform.

I mean, I’m willing to wait a bit and see what Twitter and Musk have to say about this, but this sure doesn’t seem like the approach that a free speech absolutist would take.

Musk is getting pettier and more self-centered.

Well, this is terrifying.

Streisand Effect must be real, because I’ve never cared this much about a single plane in my whole life.

How does such an already bad story get so much worse over the course of a single day?

Twitter left up other flight tracking accounts but took down Musk’s?

This is petty and concerning.

I think this headline captures one of the worst parts of all of this: Musk isn’t just dismissing concerns about behavior, he’s fueling that behavior.

I haven’t been following Ken White as much as I used to, but this reminds me why I appreciate his perspective. This is someone who knows what free speech is and advocates for it, not someone who uses it as a buzzword justification for reprehensible behavior, à la Musk.

Oh please no.

If I could pick one story to demonstrate that Musk’s Twitter tenure has been blundering and inconsistent…

I have deliberately not been following the Twitter Files stuff, but I did read this and found it helpful.

Good thing engineers really anticipated and considered these consequences before developing this software, right?

A helpful and thoughtful critique of how people are doing AI text generation.