As far as I can remember, EVERY situation in which I’ve experienced multiple “Spencers” in a group and we’ve had to distinguish ourselves from each other has been in a Mormon-adjacent context. (“Greenhalgh” is also a disproportionately Mormon name, but that has fewer practical consequences.)

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take. That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies. I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.

Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service.

I love having a co-author who can provide the theoretical framing to turn my weird data from a dark corner of the internet into an interesting argument.

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.

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

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. With Siblings in a Sibling-Only Chat Separate from the One with Parents and Partners We process the news together (I’m not the one to start the conversation but glad for the sibling who did). It’s not a deep processing, but I’m not sure we would have done this much even a few years ago. We plan to send flowers to the widow, decide who’s going to write the note, and settle up over Venmo.

I’m bookmarking this episode for later because it does a better job than I’ve ever heard of talking about how messy and complex and difficult it can be to have Mormon roots in Community of Christ—and it doesn’t even get into some of the “outside Utah” vs. “in Utah” dynamics that I personally think get overlooked.

I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.

This article speaks to a deep tension in Mormon theology: You can pray to God to tell you what is right, but you shouldn’t expect it to tell you something different than what church leaders say. To what extent, then, does prayer become subordinated to obedience?

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.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).

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.

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).

Way back in August 2019, I copied into my journaling app a post by Katie Harmon-McLaughlin on the Community of Christ website. I’m glad I did so, because a recent website redesign has deleted this post and a lot of other old content! At the time, I was slowly but thoroughly exploring Community of Christ, trying to figure out if it was the place for me in the context of my changing faith.

Over the weekend, Nancy Ross published an interview with Kerry Pray about her new book The Book of Queer Mormon Joy on the Exponent II blog. One thing that stood out to me about the interview is the way that Pray’s feelings about the word “Mormon” echo my own: “Ex-Mormon” never felt quite right because you don’t actually stop feeling Mormon when you have been one your entire life! It’s your culture and your heritage and where you come from.

I’ve written a few posts recently trying (somewhat awkwardly) to express an idea that’s been on my mind a lot over the past few years: That I want to respect someone’s right to hold a particular belief while being more skeptical about their right to insist that others hold that belief. A few days ago, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature, I found to my delight that I had written something to this extent a few years ago and then forgotten about it since.

An excellent history. I’ve read enough Mormon history that I don’t know if there was anything new for me in here, but Park does an excellent job of capturing 200 years in a constrained space and in accessible language, too. I highly recommend this to folks who want to learn more about Mormonism.

Just over a month ago, I found and blogged about a Thomas Römer quote that I had been trying to hunt down for quite some time. I’m continuing to listen to Römer’s lectures, and in the one I’m currently listening to, he revisits the idea from before. As before, I don’t want to miss the chance to write it down for future reference, and I figure a blog post is as good an opportunity as any to do so.

Bookmarking for future research. What a fascinating (if frustrating) interplay of social media platforms and religious authority.

I’ve been (very slowly) digitizing old journals, letters, and other text-based keepsakes over the past few years. This involves both scanning the original documents but also typing them up to enter into my Day One journaling app (and make them searchable). Because a solid majority of the letters and keepsakes that I had were related to my time as a Mormon missionary, I’m still chipping away at that era of my life.

For as quickly as I felt like I came to peace with the sale of the Kirtland Temple, I’ve had conversations and encounters since yesterday’s post that make it clear that I still have a lot of work to do processing all of this in the weeks, months, and years ahead. I’ve heard from a lot of people in pain: people who have been to Kirtland dozens of times but never want to go again, ordained women in Community of Christ who are angry that the new owners of the temple can’t respect their ordination, and yet more.

About a week ago, I felt like I was going through an audio drought—I wasn’t listening to any audiobooks, my podcast consumption has continued to go down in recent months, and I just wasn’t listening to anything while doing the dishes or whatever. This wasn’t necessarily a problem (it’s been good in terms of mindfulness, for example), but it had gone on long enough that I decided that I wanted something to listen to.

I bought this book with a gift card and to thumb my nose at an obnoxious visiting authority at a Latter-day Saint stake conference from over four years ago. This guy spent the Saturday evening session of the conference complaining about young adults who supported gay marriage and parents who pushed back against school discipline instead of giving their kids a whuppin’ (his words, not mine) and then still had the gall to talk about how great Mormonism is because it doesn’t believe in a fire and brimstone angry God.

Mormon theology doesn’t really do incarnation. Latter-day Saints believe in an embodied God and that (nearly) all humans will be resurrected to perfect bodies after this life and inevitable death. Latter-day Saints are also not Trinitarian and see Jesus and God the Father as more distinct than most Christian traditions do. Between those two beliefs, Jesus’s taking on a mortal body is not really a big deal—it’s kind of par for the course for any human, whether or not they are the Savior of the world.

I didn’t learn to swear until I was in my 30s, so I have a lingering suspicion that I wind up sounding like Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV.

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.”

I’ve read a LOT of Doctorow in 2023—including Walkaway twice, Red Team Blues twice, and relistening to Little Brother—so I can’t help but place this hopeful solarpunk novel in the context of these others. Even though The Lost Cause touches on some of the same themes as Walkaway, I like the latter book a lot better, though perhaps because it feels less “real” than a book about paramilitary Maga Clubs and impending climate catastrophe.

Rereading this book after a few years, and it continues to be great! The organization could be more clear, and it sometimes feels repetitive, but it provides important historical detail that allows the reader to understand Latter Day Saint priesthood in new ways.

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.

Maybe not clicking with Utah is because so many of my interactions with Utah and Utahns involved being defensive about or emphasizing my being from somewhere else. Even in my Mormonism, I was a Kentucky Mormon, and I filtered a lot through that perspective.

One paper that I read and reread as I was starting to get into Twitter research was Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev’s “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” published in a 2011 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. I thought of this paper again yesterday; more specifically, I thought about the anecdote that the article begins with: Barry and Beverly Wellman moved to Toronto more than 40 years ago. Not being able to get a public school job at first, Beverly went to teach English-language subjects at a Jewish day school.

Last Sunday, I attended a Latter-day Saint Elders Quorum meeting for the first time since March of 2020, when I taught Elders Quorum on the last Sunday before Latter-day Saint services shut down because of COVID. I had enjoyed most of the sacrament meeting (I took issue with some parts of some talks, but I have to admit that I miss the size, songs, and sense of community of Latter-day Saint services), but Elders Quorum turned out to be kind of a disappointment.

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.”