I write a lot about Mormonism on this blog, and even though I’m not shy about being critical, I think I’ve also made clear that in relative terms, I’m on pretty good terms with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not on such good terms that I’m still an active member of that church, of course, but I still feel a lot of fondness for it, and I don’t think I’ll ever consider myself an “ex-Mormon”—the great thing about the word “Mormon” no longer being officially approved is that it makes it all the more appropriate for describing my own religious identity.

One of the lectionary readings for tomorrow’s service is Ezekiel 37:1-14, which I read in Robert Alter’s beautiful translation. In this passage, Ezekiel famously prophesies:

“O dry bones, listen to the word of the LORD, Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the dry bones: I am about to bring breath into you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews over you and bring up flesh over you and stretch over you skin. And I will put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”

I’ve never been a fan of policing student behavior in my classes. I don’t take attendance, I’m pretty generous when it comes to late work and making up assignments, and I try to make participation in class something that’s organic rather than something structured and forced. In recent years, this hasn’t necessarily gone well. For example, the undergrad class I’m currently teaching has lousy attendance, and I struggle to get anyone except the 3-4 same voices to contribute to class discussions. Last semester, my attempts to “ungrade” one of my other undergrad classes have just not provoked the organic excitement and intrinsic motivation that I was hoping would come out of the experiment. As much as I believe in not policing my students, I’ve had to think about walking back some of my idealism and doing a little bit more policing to make sure that my students are engaged.

If life were fair, I’d be out on a morning run right now, but life isn’t, so I’m not. The immediate unfairness getting in my way is a flaring up of my retrolisthesis; in short, there’s a vertebra in my lower back that isn’t inclined to stay in place, and my core muscles aren’t always successful in convincing it to. Things aren’t as bad today as they were a week ago, when my lower back was experiencing so much stiffness (and, to a lesser extent, pain) that I couldn’t even bend at the waist, but despite my improvement over the past seven days, I woke up stiff enough this morning that I knew going for a run would probably make things worse.

Tous les matins, l’Université du Kentucky envoie un courriel à tous ses employés avec des annonces et informations diverses. Ce matin, la fin du courriel affirme qu’il est aujourd’hui le jour de la langue française (c’est vrai en plus!) et nous rappelle que notre université offre plein de cours en langue française et en études francophones.

Vu ma passion évidente pour tout ce qui est francophone, je savais déjà depuis longtemps qu’ils existaient déjà, ces cours. En fait, ça fait plusieurs années que j’ai envie de poursuivre un master en français. Je n’en ai pas besoin—j’ai déjà un doctorat, je n’ai pas forcément besoin de parler français pour mon travail, et je pourrai très bien continuer mon apprentissage du français et de la francophonie sans m’inscrire dans des cours. Par contre, comme employé de l’Université du Kentucky, j’ai le droit de suivre des cours sans (trop) payer, et je sais que poursuivre un master me permettrait d’apprendre un tas de choses que je n’apprendrais pas autrement. Pourquoi ne pas le poursuivre?

I grew up in a faith tradition that put a huge amount of emphasis on the King James Version of the Bible. It was only four years ago (in the early phases of my faith transition), that I deliberately picked up another translation to read instead. Even then, I picked a relatively “safe” transition to venture into: Thomas Wayment’s The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints. Since it was co-published by Deseret Book and BYU, it had some tacit approval from Latter-day Saint institutions, even if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself still identifies the KJV as its official English language text.

At the beginning of my senior year of high school, Tyler and I were neck and neck in class rankings—if memory serves, he was slightly ahead. This never got in the way of our friendship. We had spent too much time playing the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Roleplaying Game together, and a few years earlier, we’d even spent one memorable night with our mutual friend Chris hiking repeatedly back and forth between Tyler’s house and mine so that we could find the right hardware for hooking up someone’s GameCube to my family’s venerable TV so that we could play TimeSplitters 2. When a local news station wanted to take photos of local high school valedictorians, our school didn’t know how things would shake out, so they sent us both, and we were both comfortable enough with things going either way that we drove up to Cincinnati together, in the BMW that Tyler had bought with earnings from several springs and summers of a successful local yard business he’d started with his older brother.

I keep a journal using the Day One app for macOS/iOS, and while I have some lingering concerns about platformizing (and even digitizing) my journaling, there are also some pretty neat aspects to using an app like this. First, it’s very easy to copy text from other electronic sources into the app, and that really helps me capture things that made an impression on me from day to day. Second, it’s also easy to search for, read, and even be reminded of old entries. If I have time in the morning, I like to bring up the “On This Day” feature of the app and see what I wrote in years past.

On January 24, 2023, Elder Kevin S. Hamilton of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave a speech at BYU where he made the following comments:

As I visit with members across the Church, I sometimes hear things like “I don’t support the Church’s policy on (you fill in the blank).” Or “I don’t agree with the way the Church does (this or that).”

Could I suggest an alternative approach? Substitute the word Savior or Lord or Jesus Christ in place of “the Church”—as in “I don’t support the Savior’s policy on (again, you fill in the blank)” or “I don’t agree with the way Jesus Christ does (this or that).”

[Mit einem Glasdach überdachter Vorplatz des Staßburger Bahnhofs, by Dr.-Ing. S.Wetzel, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0]

I don’t remember exactly where we were, but I’m pretty sure it was near the Strasbourg train station. Maybe we were in the station, or maybe we were somewhere nearby. We must have come to Strasbourg from Colmar, where we spent most of our time. It was a shop of some kind: Were we buying breakfast? Day passes for local public transit? I can’t remember for sure.

Earlier today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a statement announcing that:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its affiliated investment manager, Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc., have settled a matter with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Unsuprisingly, the Salt Lake Tribune describes the context surrounding the settlement in more detail:

In a settlement announced Tuesday with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Utah-based faith and its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, have agreed to pay $5 million in penalties for failing to properly disclose past stock holdings and going to “great lengths” to deliberately “obscure” the church’s investment portfolio.

A few weeks ago, while walking through Julietta Market at Lexington’s Greyline Station, I stopped for a few minutes at a used bookstore at one of the stalls and walked away with a copy of Thomas Merton: Passion for Peace. I haven’t gotten far into it yet—later that week, a book by a French theologian that I’d ordered arrived in the mail, and that’s taken up most of my reading attention since. However, I did manage to explore the introduction to the book the same day that I purchased it, and I was impressed by this passage:

As I’ve written elsewhere, I am currently giving Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway another try after bouncing off of it a while ago. Because I bounced off of it so hard the last time, I’m surprised by how much it’s resonating off of me as I give it another go. This past week, I’ve been listening to a lot of Walkaway on top of doing a lot of religious reading: assignments for the Ministry of the Disciple class I’m taking through the Community of Christ Seminary’s Center for Innovation in Ministry and Missino, Gérard Siegwalt’s Reinventing God’s name [La réinvention du nom de Dieu], and various scriptures for today’s liturgical readings.

After bouncing off of it a year or so ago, I recently decided to restart Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway (which led NPR reporter Jason Sheehan to describe Doctorow as “Super-weird in the best possible way”). The audiobook is excellent, and since I started a couple of days ago, it’s displaced my podcast listening and given me another chance to wrestle with Doctorow’s ideas here.

There is way too much going on (and I’m not far enough into the book) for me to engage with the underlying message of the novel (or even to be sure of what it is yet), but one passage stood out to me so much this morning that I have to write it down now. Walkaway is too delightfully weird to be able to give an easy explanation of the context here, but the following passage comes from an argument between (one of the many) protagonist(s) Limpopo and antagonist Jackstraw. Jackstraw believes that their “walkaway” community needs to be gamified and leaderboarded to be made more efficient. Limpopo is firmly against that:

This week, Discord announced that it has acquired the Gas social media app popular among secondary students. Presumably in response, Alyson Klein ran an explainer today at EducationWeek on the subject of the app. In doing this, she re-ran a quote that I provided to her for a December article that she also wrote:

“It feels a little exploitative to me,” said Spencer Greenhalgh, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s school of information sciences. “They know teenagers are insecure and they want to know what their friends think about them.”

As I’ve blogged about a couple of times recently, I’m currently reading R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic novel adaptation of the 2015 iTunes Terms and Conditions document, which no one ever reads.

I was struck (if not surprised) by something stated explicitly in the document, which appears on p. 59 of Sikoryak’s volume:

The software products made available through the Mac App Store and App Store (collectively, the “App Store Products”) are licensed, not sold, to you.

My sister-in-law recently gifted me a copy of R. Sikoryak’s weird but wonderful comic Terms and Conditions, which “adapts” the 2015 iTunes terms and conditions into a comic format. I was as delighted by the gift, which I’m sure only contributed to her bewilderment (she knew I wanted the book, but I can’t blame anyone for not understanding why I wanted it).

One of the gags of the comic is, obviously, the idea that a comic adaptation would get you to actually read through the whole document instead of just pretending that you have. The other gag—and one that breaks up the monotony of reading through the document—is that each page is an homage to a famous work of comic art, but with Steve Jobs inserted in the place of one of the characters. My favorite is one that I’ve shared in a previous post about the book, a shout-out to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns:

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article.

I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:

I grew up in a faith tradition that—with the exception of major holidays like Christmas and Easter—didn’t follow the Christian liturgical calendar. So, shortly after I began attending Community of Christ regularly (and, given the circumstances, virtually) in 2020, I decided I was going to learn more all of the seasons and holidays that I wasn’t familiar with. A few months earlier, I’d heard an interview with the Swiss abbot Urban Federer on the Babel podcast by Radio Télévision Suisse. During the interview, Federer talked about a book of his that had recently been translated into French from his native German: Sources of friendship with God [Aux sources de l’amitié de Dieu]. I honestly don’t remember much about the interview, but it stood out to me enough for me to write down the title of the book—perhaps because I knew that its chapters followed the liturgical calendar. So, that summer, I ordered that book (and two others) from a French bookseller, and when November 2020 rolled around, I began using it as a guide to my first liturgical year.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick. That uptick has meant that it’s been difficult to avoid them crossing my feed, and so even without trying, I’ve had a few thoughts about “quote toots” that I think might be worth sharing.

A member of my Community of Christ congregation recently asked if I would lead the Disciples’ Generous Response portion of tomorrow’s worship service (where donations and tithes are collected). I’ve done this for previous services, but more than any other way I’ve contributed to a Community of Christ service, this is the one that takes the most practice. In Latter-day Saint services, there’s never this kind of collection, and this was honestly one of the hardest things to get used to as I began regularly attending Community of Christ services. That said, much of this is due to the intense pressure for Latter-day Saints to tithe; even if Community of Christ services always include an invitation to donate, there’s none of the same pressure that there is in Latter-day Saint circles, so I’ve come to see this as an acceptable tradeoff.

I’ve mentioned before that I support the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast on Patreon, one of the perks of which is that I get access to the Tribune’s Mormon coverage without having to subscribe to the whole paper (which would be a lot of money for someone who doesn’t care about Jazz coverage or Utah politics).

Thanks to this Patreon perk, I read a lot of news about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and between that and over three decades that I spent as an active member of that church, you’d think that nothing would surprise me anymore. Yet, I was still taken aback by an article that showed up in my email inbox last night: Latter-day Saints alter a Nativity painting to make Mary more modest.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

When I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I took a job as a student instructor for FREN 102, the second half of a two-course sequence in first-year French. I had a lot of weird experiences as an undergraduate student teaching and grading other undergraduate students, but the one that I remember this morning is the time that I held a student’s scholarship in my hand. I don’t remember the student’s name or much about her, except a vague recollection of her face and a couple of conversations with her.

C’est drôle comme de touts petits souvenirs peuvent peser lourds dans sa mémoire. J’ai déjà écrit plusieurs posts à ce sujet, mais cet après-midi, j’ai envie d’en écrire davantage. Je suis en train de faire des corrections pour mon travail comme prof de techologies de l’information et de la communication. J’aime bien ce travail, mais je n’aime pas du tout faire des corrections, et j’ai donc l’habitude de mettre une vidéo « en cabine » pendant que je fais le travail. Comme ça, je peux imaginer que je suis ailleurs au lieu d’être à mon bureau en train de faire des corrections.