I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.

Some powerful stuff in here.

The only good thing I got out of reading a blog post arguing that ChatGPT leaves open the door for young earth creationism just now was a reminder to reread Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie ».

Sure looks like someone finally got fed up with the majority of Harris signs in our cul-de-sac and decided to swipe them all overnight.

Rank hypocrisy. I don’t necessarily think Musk should have been deported way back when, but I think he should be called out on this.

This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween.

I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.

As I continue to digitize old journals and documents by copying them into Day One (which is a great app, though I wish it hadn’t been acquired by Automattic, given all the drama currently happening there), I am regularly confronted with tensions between past-Spencer and present-Spencer. Maybe “confronted” and “tensions” aren’t the right words, because it’s good and natural for people to change, and I get some benefit out of making these observations, but there are ways that noticing these things can be difficult.

I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today? Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.

There are countless GOP politicians and voters who believe Harris is unqualified for the job for lesser (and often exaggerated or fabricated controversies), and yet none of this seems to bother them. gift link

Fascinating look at a controversial element in Mormon history. I wish more of the data here were firm rather than anecdotal—I think this topic is enough that it could be its own book if there were enough data (made) available.

McConnell comes so close to having a conscience and then seems to always bail when it becomes inconvenient to him. That makes him more of a disappointment than if he showed no moral awareness at all.

Like so many other things, this alone should disqualify him. Gift link.

When I was ordained an elder a couple of months ago, my congregation gave me the gift of a full set of the 1976 History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I genuinely love this gift and am excited to one day make my way through all eight volumes! Yet, it’s also gotten me thinking a lot about what I want my service in this denomination—now, of course, named Community of Christ—to look like.

I have made so many sneering comparisons between sports fandom and blind nationalism as someone who doesn’t really care about sports, but now that I’ve got a team (my kid’s) to be super invested in… yeah, I actually feel the comparison more, just with more self awareness.

This is terrifying—but needs more attention.

I don’t understand why anyone would stay on Twitter at this point, unless they’re staying for the nonsense. gift link

A good, informing read.

Masnick is excellent at balancing “Musk has a right to do this” with “the hypocrisy is shameful.”

This article was a one-two punch for me. I hoped that the death of a Michigander might draw more attention to victims of the conflict, but his daughter’s comment that “The fact that he was an American citizen should not make his story more important than others” quickly called me to task. Gift Link

I appreciate Bible scholar Thomas Römer in an academic sense, but I also sometimes remember that I first discovered him through a French comics podcast where he showed up to say that he thought R. Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis could have been more imaginative, and that’s what really sold me on him.

This makes a bad story even worse. What a joke.

Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.” As I wrote in my journal at that time: She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.

This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook. It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up.

Worth reading (and bookmarking). I’ve been hesitant to make the “no, actually, Big Tech is biased against liberals” argument, but this seems a compelling datum for that conclusion…

How is this guy a legitimate candidate?

This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.

A number of years ago, I read this blog post, which linked to this podcast episode about intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. The post and episode both focus on the work of Nick Frederick, a BYU professor who argues that: If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry.

I have recently been (slowly) getting back into my exploration of what a modernized Book of Mormon might look like, which has meant spending some time in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon and some commentaries on that chapter. One of the most interesting things about I Nephi 1 (by the original and Community of Christ chapter breaks—LDS editions split this into 1 Nephi 1-5) is that the reader is almost immediately forced to deal with a tension between our protagonist and narrator Nephi’s insistence that he is a good guy of whom God approves and Nephi’s willingness to murder a passed-out drunk to steal his clothes and con his way into taking control of some of his property.

Posting this as a bookmark. It’s mindboggling how overtly racist this is—and how much work the GOP will do to dismiss it as nothing. I want to be able to return back to this in the weeks and months to come, to remind myself and others just how bad things are. gift link

I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me. This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are.

What a wild story.

Compelling metaphor.

It’s now been over six months since the transfer of the Kirtland Temple from Community of Christ to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and there’s still a lot to process for folks on the Community of Christ side of things. I remain committed to what I first said after hearing the news: that I have no interest in telling people how to feel about things, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t be on solid ground doing so.

Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!

After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it.