I can’t remember why I had a version of this post bouncing around my head several months ago—maybe a Times and Seasons post? probably a message from an acquaintance at BYU who isn’t up to date on my religious situation?—but I never got around to writing it. With Clark Gilbert’s call to the Latter-day Saint Quorum of the Twelve Apostles today, it felt like a good moment to actually get those thoughts out of my head and into a text file.

One of my political science professors in undergrad studied Chavista populism in Venezuela and, with the rise of figures like Sarah Palin, was considering pivoting to populism in the US when I TAed for him. Anyway, wondering what’s going through his head this morning.

A brief, entirely-unrelated-to-this-post conversation on Mastodon this afternoon got me thinking about an art exhibit that I saw in college and still think about every once in a while. The exhibit was on something along the lines of pop culture and politics, and one of the only two things that I remember from the exhibit (the other being D&D character sheets for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) was a statue depicting an action figure-y Captain America brandishing the severed head of Saddam Hussein. (Picture here—it’s relatively cartoony, but just gruesome enough to not post on the blog).

I… did not realize that there were BYU connections to Project 2025.

In some ways, I can’t at all relate to Dumbing of Age because my college experience was so wildly different. Yet, it’s funny how I can relate so much to parts of it now, well after my college years. I don’t know that I would have wanted to have this freshman year (especially not the melodramatic bits or superhero fights), but I do wish I could have learned some of the lessons in the story earlier in life. Anyway, it’s a great comic.

To be honest, the collections are starting to blur together some, so I don’t exactly remember where the dividing line is between this one and the last. The series continues to be good and fun, though, so it gets this rating nonetheless!

I think one reason I like DoA so much is because it’s so different than my own college freshman experience. Some of that is clearly because it’s a work of fiction, but it’s also because BYU is a very different place than other universities, so it’s still interesting to consider different experiences.

I’ve never really gotten any practical use out of my political science minor from college (understandable, since it was mostly a way to recoup classes after changing majors), but I appreciate how it makes me look smart to my spouse when we watch politically-themed media.

There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.

Wondering how long it will be until implicit praise of her family values gets taken down from the LDS and BYU websites.

Remembering my sister’s BYU roommate who called ketchup and mustard “toppings” because she was deeply uncomfortable pronouncing the first two syllables of the word “condiment.”

This is an excellent, thorough book on the purity system of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the excommunications of the “September Six” and many others for their violations of that purity system. I bought the book out of personal interest, but I think it will be professionally valuable as well. I knew much of what was in the book, but what I didn’t know was important, and I am grateful for the volume and hope that many will read it to learn about this important period in Mormon history. As Patterson notes, though, it’s not just history; her conclusion reflecting on how these episodes have their echoes in the present is especially good.

When I took a job at the University of Kentucky, a former professor (and boss) of mine at BYU told me to look up a specific French professor on campus, whom she’d also taught (and supervised) some time earlier. I ran into him several months later at a stake conference (this was, obviously, when I was still attending Latter-day Saint meetings), and we bonded over what it was like to work under our boss. Because Mormons tend to assume that there’s no way to learn a language without speaking that language on your mission (this is partly true for me, but I also got my French to a damn respectable level through coursework before I ever put on the tag, so I still resent the assumption), we wound up talking about missions, and so we ended up bonding even more about our shared experience serving in the now-defunct Switzerland Geneva Mission.

Visiting Utah for work this weekend has me thinking about how I’ve never really felt like I understand this state—and that despite attending college here and all four of my grandparents being born here. I feel like it should be more familiar to me than it is.

I think academia undervalues teaching and that teaching-focused faculty deserve more status, recognition, and compensation. Yet, I’m still suspicious of the new BYU-Idaho president’s comments on the need for “a faculty free of the obligations of research.”

Very happy to see this op-ed emerge—especially from a BYU student. Fidesz is not a party Latter-day Saints should praise or look up to.

Next month, I’m flying to Salt Lake City to attend the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present some of my work about social media, religion, and the far right. I’ll be presenting on three different projects at SSSR—this was biting off more than I could chew, but since two of them connect with Mormonism, Salt Lake suggested the possibility of a larger-than-usual audience for that work, so there you go. Of the three projects, one that I’m particularly interested in is some analysis I’m doing of Mormon groups on the far-right social media platform Gab. This has turned into an interesting exploration of what boundaries are firm and what boundaries are porous in Mormon (social and religious) spaces. For example, many of the posts in these Mormon groups are unobjectionable on their own, simply sharing Mormon humor or memes; yet, what’s most interesting about these posts is the implicit compatibility betwteen Mormon groups and the undeniably far-right nature of the overall Gab platform. Even if they don’t say it out loud, these folks clearly see no objection or tension between being a faithful Latter-day Saint and participating in a social media platform that has no interest in policing its users when it “establish[es] LGBTQ+ individuals as abonimations” and otherwise leans hard into the contemporary far right. In contrast, there’s also activity in these groups implicitly criticizing Latter-day Saint leaders (who are traditionally revered as “prophets, seers, and revelators”) for encouraging Latter-day Saints to wear masks and get vaccinated against COVID-19. So, prosocial pandemic behavior crosses a firm line, but spending time on Gab does not.

Look, I don’t know much about Hungarian politics, but it seems to me that it would take a hell of a lot of self-confidence to brag about an ally of Viktor Orbán visiting BYU. This feels like wading into the culture wars in a way that the LDS Church usually tries to avoid.

I’m pretty sure I remember exactly where I was when I realized that Esther 100% slept with the king before he chose her as his queen. I was sitting in a top-floor office in one of two villas on Chemin William Barbey in Chambésy, Switzerland. I lived on the bottom floor of the villa with some other office staff of the Switzerland Geneva Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and this office was where I did my religious studies every morning before heading out into a larger office where I helped with legal, vehicle, and other assorted logistical issues for the mission. I don’t know exactly why I was reading Esther that morning—I think I’d been trying to make my way through the whole Hebrew Bible—but I do know that as I read the story, I picked up on one detail that I had never noticed before. It was pretty clear even in the dated language of the King James Version, but here’s how clear it is in the NRSV for Esther 2:

Pete and Sarah were mainstays of my Mormon experience growing up. Their oldest—a famously rowdy boy with several rowdy younger brothers—was present on the Sunday when I was introduced in children’s classes as a newcomer to the congregation. When I outgrew children’s classes and made my way to youth Sunday School, Pete was our teacher for a while—the kind of teacher who tried to suppress a giggle (and usually unsuccessfully) whenever the word “ass” (especially “dumb ass”) appeared in the KJV. Somewhere in there, he served in congregational leadership; somewhere in there, they might have moved away before returning to Kentucky (my memories are fuzzy).

This is an admittedly fuzzy memory, but I was thinking today about the time some unit at BYU brought in a French thinker to speak on the importance of “the family,” but instead of the conservative religious arguments I was expecting, the guy’s talk had monarchist vibes.

I was disappointed this morning to see this article in the Salt Lake Tribune. The article reports that BYU professor Sarah Coyne “became the target of online bullying and hostile emails” after discussing “her child’s years of wrestling with gender dysphoria, including suicidal thoughts and agonizing mental health issues” in a class she was teaching. According to the article, this is something that she has done for several semesters, but this time, her action “made it into a critical article in a conservative off-campus newspaper… which was retweeted by Utah Sen[ator] Mike Lee on his personal Twitter account.”

I grew up in a faith tradition that put a huge amount of emphasis on the King James Version of the Bible. It was only four years ago (in the early phases of my faith transition), that I deliberately picked up another translation to read instead. Even then, I picked a relatively “safe” transition to venture into: Thomas Wayment’s The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints. Since it was co-published by Deseret Book and BYU, it had some tacit approval from Latter-day Saint institutions, even if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself still identifies the KJV as its official English language text.

On January 24, 2023, Elder Kevin S. Hamilton of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave a speech at BYU where he made the following comments:

As I visit with members across the Church, I sometimes hear things like “I don’t support the Church’s policy on (you fill in the blank).” Or “I don’t agree with the way the Church does (this or that).”

Could I suggest an alternative approach? Substitute the word Savior or Lord or Jesus Christ in place of “the Church”—as in “I don’t support the Savior’s policy on (again, you fill in the blank)” or “I don’t agree with the way Jesus Christ does (this or that).”

Tonight, I suddenly remembered my sister’s BYU roommate who insisted on calling ketchup and mustard “toppings” because saying “condiment” would require her to say “condom” along the way.

When I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I took a job as a student instructor for FREN 102, the second half of a two-course sequence in first-year French. I had a lot of weird experiences as an undergraduate student teaching and grading other undergraduate students, but the one that I remember this morning is the time that I held a student’s scholarship in my hand. I don’t remember the student’s name or much about her, except a vague recollection of her face and a couple of conversations with her.