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.

Jana Riess is one of my favorite Mormons, and Melissa was another. This is a great combination of the two. link to “The best way to honor Melissa Inouye’s memory is to be a kind and persistent badass”

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. link to “LDS leaders announce new Mormon temple for Cincinnati”

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. link to ‘The ‘Mormon Moment’ 10 years later: Why Joanna Brooks and Mitch Mayne left the public eye’

This is one of the most amazing things I’ve read on generative AI. link to ‘Bing has a testimony of the Book of Mormon! And other adventures with AI chatbots.’

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. link to ‘Talking about the church president over the pulpit | LDS Data Analysis’

Appreciate Jana’s perspective on this horrible story. link to ‘How Mormons are addressing sex abuse: Too little, too late’

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.

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. link to ‘‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ raises the question: Are Mormons dangerous?’