Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background.

There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service. Well, not really—I had hoped to be there 30-45 minutes early and was only 20 minutes early, so I was later than I meant to be, but I wasn’t late late. The point that I want to make here still stands, though: I was later to the service than I had planned to be largely because I was coming from a family outing.

Jana Riess is one of my favorite Mormons, and Melissa was another. This is a great combination of the two.

I’m no longer a practicing Latter-day Saint, but having grown up near Cincinnati, this is still something I’ll be paying attention to! Jana’s take is (unsurprisingly) a thoughtful and good one.

A great column from Jana. It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years—or that I’ve changed so much in my own Mormonism over that time.

This is one of the most amazing things I’ve read on generative AI.

Some neat data analysis here—both in terms of methods and in findings. Hat tip to Jana Riess for bringing my attention to this in today’s column.

Appreciate Jana’s perspective on this horrible story.

One of the highlights of the summer has been getting an article accepted in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This article takes as a starting point Cragun and Nielsen’s argument (also published in Dialogue) that:

what is really at play in the debate over the use of “Mormon” is legitimacy.

Cragun and Nielsen are writing in 2009, at a time when Big Love is on the air and the April 2008 FLDS Temple raid is (or was recently) on the news. The resurgence of Mormon fundamentalism into the American shared consciouness has led The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reclaim the word “Mormon,” which stands in contrast to its efforts since the 1990s to downplay that nickname and emphasize its full name. Indeed, it’s not long after this that the I’m a Mormon campaign is launched and that mormon.org gets a major corresponding redesign. However, if this leaning into the word “Mormon” stands in contrast with Latter-day Saint leaders’ previous efforts to distance themselves from the name, Russell Nelson’s August 2018 decision to abruptly reverse course and go further than any previous Latter-day Saint leader in distancing the church from the word “Mormon” felt downright jarring.

I suspect that there is nothing as damning in Mormon history as Mormons’ failure to own up to that history, and Jana’s writing here captures that nicely.