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.

A lot of Mormons¹ have a persecution complex that isn’t really well founded, but it is true that a lot of people don’t really get Mormons. One of my favorite stories from my time as a Latter-day Saint missionary is when a well-meaning friend of ours told us to get rid of our distinctive nametags, because they made us look too much like Jehovah’s Witnesses (the joke here is that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t wear nametags—it’s Latter-day Saint missionaries who do that). I’ve really enjoyed the first two entries in Cory Doctorow’s Martin Hench trilogy, but I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about the third volume, which will feature a Utah-based computer scam involving a Latter-day Saint bishop. I’m not concerned about negative portrayals of Mormons, but it takes some real familiarity going beyond superficial cultural understandings to write Mormons correctly, and it will bug me if he gets the details wrong (that said, Doctorow’s casual reference to White Horse Prophecy Doomsdayers” in a recent book of his has given me reason to hope that Doctorow’s done his research).

I’m a fan of Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel—he posts a lot there (nearly everything is a repost from TikTok), and I watch most of what he posts. Yesterday, he posted an interesting video on the “Lucifer” name and character in the Bible, describing how traditional Christian ideas about the figure are all post-biblical innovations that don’t neceessarily line up with the text. In particular, the name “Lucifer” is an artifact of the Vulgate, and even in the Vulgate, the name itself is a reference to a Babylonian king, not to a fallen angel who became the devil. Here’s the video in its entirety:

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post about an important part of RLDS history that I mostly love but also get slightly annoyed by. In short, Wallace Smith, who was then prophet-president of the RLDS Church, was put on the spot by a local seminary professor, who asked the following question:

If our mutual studies of Christianity and the RLDS Church were to discovere that there was a discrepancy between what Jesus taught and what Joseph Smith taught, which would you accept?

Great point made by someone whose voice I’ve grown to appreciate over the past several months.