So much going on here. I think Boxer’s comments are some of the most important.

A lot of what I was looking for in this book is already available in other sources, and while I appreciated the normalizing of Latter-day Saint temples for a lay audience, it would also smack of apologetics if Stapley weren’t also so unflinching in addressing controversy and taboo. It’s a wonderful resource, and it’s accounting for important events of the last decade made it an invaluable read.

Anyone following this blog for a while—even from a distance—will have noticed how frequently I reference Jacques Ellul, and anyone paying attention to what I’m reading these days will note that there’s been an uptick in the Mormon Studies books I’m reading recently. Without giving too much away, the idea for a book I mentioned a month ago brings these two ideas together. As evidenced by my recent presentation at the International Jacques Ellul Society, I think that Ellul’s writing is helpful for understanding Mormonism’s relationship with technology and media, and I expect to be writing more about this in the years to come.

I have been meaning to read this book for years and finally got to it. On one hand, it’s excellent, and I’m kicking myself for not having read it before. On the other, it’s so well-suited to a current project that I’m not sure I would have appreciated it earlier.

Such a helpful collection of data, and I’m pleased by how many echoes of Ellul are in there, as I move forward with trying to apply his thought to Mormonism.

Finally got my July 4th print edition of The Onion, and I don’t know if this fake ad is regular Onion absurdism or an under-the-radar Mormon-adjacent joke.

I’ve mentioned a few times recently across my different subblogs that importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app has been interesting for my ability to go back into my past in ways that I wasn’t able to before. Yesterday, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature turned up a tweet from five years earlier that stood out to me:

Also, this started as a silly idea while biking to campus one morning, but I increasingly want to write something on Mormonism, technology, and authority that a) discusses interplay between “tools” and “systems” (both as tech) and b) uses Hiram Page and seer stones as an example.

This CFP has been up on the journal website for a while now, but with our second “rolling deadline” of September 1st coming up soon, I thought it was time to start sharing it a little more personally. In short, I’m thrilled to joining Spencer Stewart and Rosemary Avance in editing a special issue of the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association on Platformed Mormonism. Here’s a quick blurb on the issue, and please check out the link above for more details:

Later this week, I’ll be presenting for the first time at the International Jacques Ellul Society. My paper is called Image and Word in Mormonism’s Foundational Media Events, and I’ll be using Ellul’s image and word framework in The Humiliation of the Word as an explanatory framework for how the founding events of Mormonism can be understood by scholars and believers as either the sure-and-certain image or the ambiguous and fleeting word. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints and their leaders tend to prefer the image over the word, and I think Ellul’s writing helps understand why this is (beyond the obvious reasons)

I haven’t been preaching for Community of Christ for very long, but by virtue of different demographics and traditions than the denomination I grew up in (in short, I preach more often for Community of Christ than I would have continuing in Latter-day Saint congregations), I suspect that I may be soon approaching the number of “talks” that I’d given in my past religious life. Maybe not this year, but that might happen in the next couple of years if I keep up the schedule that I’m on. Anyway, I bring that up because in my short time preaching for Community of Christ, I’ve never struggled with a sermon as much as I have with this one, and I’m trying to remember if that’s also true of my contributions to Latter-day Saint worship services over the years.

Mormon Stories has never been my thing, and the more I learn about Dehlin, the less sure I am about him—but I couldn’t agree with him more here.

Discourse in the modern American right often understands free speech as protecting the right to say objectionable things but not the ability to criticize people who say objectionable things. While a “one true church” mentality is less problematic than racial slurs or transphobic language (though there’s also some of the latter in Oaks’s full remarks, according to the Church Newsroom release), this excerpt strikes me as embodying a similarly selective view of religious freedom:

My parents recently moved (are in the process of moving? are only temporarily moving? it’s a bit complicated and in a way that connects to the title of this post, but I don’t feel like going into the details), and so I recently came into possession of a few boxes of scrapbooks from my childhood and adolescence. I understand that my siblings were all happy to have theirs thrown away, but I am a committed journal-er, and if my dumb Facebook and Twitter archives were worth importing into the Day One app I use, I figured I should put the effort into digitizing the good stuff out of these boxes before throwing out all of the physical artifacts. I’ve only put an hour or two of effort into this yet (and much of that into a Siri Shortcut workflow that I hope will make the process go more smoothly than previous digitization efforts), but it’s been worth the effort so far. It’s neat to have some documentation to go along with bits of personal and family history that I’m only vaguely aware of, like the year of German kindergarten (equivalent to U.S. preschool) that I attended.

Had no idea this book was going viral, and I was just gushing about it last week. One of my favorite pieces of fiction ever, and it deserves all the accolades.

Look, I enjoy that I get to study the weirdness of online Mormonism in all its breadth, but I was still not expecting a genAI Ghibli rendition of the Short Creek raid as a thumbnail for a Warren Jeffs recording on a fundamentalist Rumble channel.

Reviewing reference works that I largely skimmed always feels silly, but it’s my website, and no one can stop me.

I’m not a historian, but this historical context was really useful for me for a paper I’m writing on Ellulian perspectives on “media events” in early Mormon history. I appreciated having easy access to documents related to events I was writing about, and as I eventually expand the paper, I expect that I will come back to this volume.

I backed this book on Kickstarter, intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel that documents and collects difficult experiences on Mormon missions.

When it arrived, I knew that actually reading it would be either healing or triggering for me, and I was happy to find that it was the former. There are a few improvements that could be made, but it met my hopes of being something that captured the Mormon mission experience as I know it (though there were a lot of COVID-19 stories, and how are these RMs so young!) but also spoke to the complex feelings that I and so many others have about those experiences.

As I’ve noted a few times before, I’m a de facto Trinitarian, but I can’t say that I’m tremendously invested in the Trinity as an orthodox doctrine of Christianity. I know that some of this has to do with my Mormonism—growing up in a non-Trinitarian tradition has surely shaped my thinking about this—but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. Yes, I’m often sympathetic to the beliefs of the tradition I spent so much time in, but I’m also a non-theist who tends to see God as more of a metaphor for humans’ fleeting experiences with the ultimate than as someone whose nature and consubstantiality can (and must) be understood in distinct terms.

Beautiful interview with some enraging stories along the way.

LDS press releases occasionally get published early, and while it gets fixed quick, an orphaned reference will show up in my RSS reader. This one sounds interesting…

I think this is dumb, I feel strongly that “Mormonism” is larger than LDS institutions, and I’m pleased that the EFF has weighed in on this.

I have been meaning to read this book for months and was happy to have an uninterrupted couple of hours on a flight so that I could finally get to it.

It covers familiar ground but without feeling repetitive. I expect to cite it frequently in the future—in fact, I ought to work it into some slides I’m presenting tomorrow!

I backed this Kickstarter project several years ago, when a comic about Mormonism felt like it was right in the center of the Venn diagram of my interests. That’s still not far from the truth, but my relationship with Mormonism—and my experience as a Latter-day Saint missionary—is a lot more complicated than it was then.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about rereading this for ages but have bounced off of it a few times. I have big theological disagreements with some comics in the anthology, and I’m not a huge fan of the implicit queerphobia in at least two comics.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?