What a crappy future we are heading toward.

Long read but a good read.

Only thing better than a critique of utilitarianism is a critique of utilitarianism in the form of a comic.

I have to admit I was skeptical of the title, but this is a very interesting reading, and I’ll never read 4th Nephi the same again.

I’m about to set up a Graceland University login because I’m registering for (non-credit-bearing) courses at Community of Christ Seminary. I know I’m not the first person in history to enroll at both BYU and Graceland during my lifetime, but it still tickles me to think about.

I have written council representatives about this more than anything else, and yet I suspect that it will go through again without a fuss. This isn’t the worst form of surveillance, but it is still surveillance, pure and simple.

This is such a frustrating story. I never wanted to work at a BYU, but as a Mormon earning a PhD, I often told myself I couldn’t afford to rule it out. This adds to the pile of reasons that I’m glad there weren’t jobs open for me to apply to.

This book took me far too long to read. I picked it up at a used book sale at the library because it looked really interesting. While it was a good, informative read, I had more trouble than expected getting into it, so I did a lot of stopping and starting and restarting and coming back to, etc…

I felt like the book didn’t deliver on its promise of demonstrating the historical Jesus in the way I had hoped. I felt that the author was overconfident in some of the arguments he made and that he didn’t take the time to lay out the evidence for those arguments in the way I would have hoped.

In recent years, my faith has become less literal, my marriage has become mixed-faith, and we’ve both committed to letting kiddo choose her own future as she gets older. This has meant revisiting family ritual and tradition for end of year holidays, but it’s kind of fun!

Infertility sucks, and stories like this make me even more upset about Musk’s callous and chaotic Twitter takeover.

I’m glad I began reading Techdirt before this whole mess started… Masnick’s persective has been a helpful guide.

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This seems petty, immature, and misguided.

Hearing Black Friday commercials on French radio reminds me that I’m totally fine with the secularization of religious holidays and that the real problem is the commercialization of our holidays, whether always secular or originally religious.

What a load of garbage.

Growing up, I was taught to graze at religious texts, focusing on anecdotes that supported what we already believed. One of the great pleasures of my adulthood has been learning to read them more critically: wrestling with their problems and learning deeper lessons.

I sometimes wonder how I’d react if I were put through a ‘Peggy Sue loop’: made to repeat an earlier part of my life with all my knowledge of how things turned out. I have major disagreements with my past self, but I also owe him a lot, so there would be difficult decisions.

I didn’t expect 1,200 resignations!

Oh good, so on top of the unexpected chaos, the expected chaos is also still happening.

I’m a teetotaler, so some of my microbrewing grad school friends once declared that I would make a good “beer eunuch”—I could be trusted to hold onto a barrel (or whatever—I don’t know how this stuff works) without abusing that trust.

The midterms could have been a lot worse, but this is a reminder that there’s still real danger lurking out there.

Helpful summary of the current state of QAnon.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. So much of the current Twitter chaos is predictable.

Is to adopt a new religious identity necessarily to leave the old one behind? Many—justifiably and understandably—use that language, but it’s never quite fit my own experience. I feel like I’m nitpicking when I try to explain it, though.

What an absolute mess this whole thing has been.